1
" «Non dico che Hitler non sia un acerrimo nemico» spiegò Peter. «Ma è un nemico ridicolo. Ridicolo d'aspetto; sbagliati sono sia lo sguardo studiato per affascinare, sia il suo modo ampolloso di parlare, sia il suo passo marziale. Ha scelto un baffetto ridicolo, probabilmente senza sapere che è identico a quello di un comico ebreo del cinema. Evita ogni parola straniera, e quando le pronuncia commette inevitabilmente un errore. A tutt'oggi è incapace di pronunciare il nome del partito da lui fondato. Gli abiti gli pendono di dosso come se li avesse presi in prestito. Quando riceve i diplomatici osserva quello che fanno per poi imitarli. Quando cena in compagnia guarda come mangiano gli altri per copiarli. In uniforme ha l'aspetto di un capostazione. Tutto questo è ridicolo. E comunque miserabile».
Il caposezione era soddisfatto della sua introduzione. Gli altri gli prestavano attenzione.
«Quell'uomo è l'esempio di una persona consapevole della propria ridicolezza, che quando il mondo lo prende sul serio si stupisce più del mondo stesso!» proseguì. «Quando quest'uomo cominciò, signori miei, non si peritò di ricorrere alla massima vigliaccheria alla quale possa giungere un uomo: è noto che quando la polizia reagì sparando al suo Putsch di Monaco, si riparò dietro ai bambini per non essere ferito! Dico bambini! In quattro anni di Guerra mondiale non è riuscito a superare il grado di caporale. Soltanto perché qualcuno l'ha preso sul serio, quest'uomo ridicolo, codardo, si è sentito incoraggiato a divenire sempre più imponente e marziale. Essendo lui un isterico schizofrenico e un giocatore d'azzardo, ciò è stato possibile. Per queste due ragioni tocca e si lancia nelle posizioni estreme. Poiché in campo intellettuale è al livello di un politicante da caffé, non desume la propria concezione del mondo dalla conoscenza ma dalla vendetta personale. Dato che un ebreo lo ha maltrattato al suo esame all'accademia, ora odia gli ebrei. Dato che Trotzkij ha detto di lui “Nessun bolscevico si lascerebbe neppure pulire le scarpe da lui”, è ostile al bolscevismo. Un uomo primitivo, questo dobbiamo ammetterlo. Questo primitivo è partito dall'infantile idea che dopo una guerra durata quattro anni nessuno voglia più combatterne altre. Da buon giocatore ha puntato tutto su quest'idea e ha avuto la fortuna di riuscire a bluffare il mondo, che ha preso sul serio le sue minacce. Ora viene il bello! Dopo che lui o il signor Röhm o chi altro ha appiccato il fuoco al Reichstag di Berlino e il mondo, invece di dire unanimemente “Hitler ha appicato l'incendio!” ha parlato e scritto, con la massima serietà, di “processo per l'incendio del Reichstag”; dopo che è stato accettato il voto della Saar non come una manovra di un certo signor Bürckel ma come un'elezione regolare, è accaduto un fatto mai avvenuto nella storia: una nullità che sapeva benissimo di essere - per citare il nostro festival - un Ognuno, un uomo qualunque, si è autovalutato un bilione. Anzi! Cifre astronomiche, più lo si prendeva sul serio. Signori miei! Ho udito parlare quest'uomo a Monaco. A me dà l'impressione di un clown. Tuttavia, invece di dargli l'unica risposta che si merita: una bella risata in faccia che riduca quella montatura alla nullità che è, continuiamo noi stessi a pomparla e mobilitiamo contro essa addirittura le cancellerie e la polizia!» "
― , The Vienna Melody
2
" Yet for Henriette, towards whom the curious and watchful looks of the family were directed on this occasion, as on every other in the twelve years of her life under their roof, the time of puzzles was past. Everything had become crystal clear. “The only mistake is life itself,” Rudolf had asserted. How right he had been! For when one understood life, as she believed she did, and knew it so well that she was no longer capable of any illusions, it was not worth living. Henriette could not forgive Franz. No matter if her reason told her a hundred times that he had had nothing at all to do with Rudolf's death, that his suicide on her wedding day had been a pure coincidence, still her feelings whispered to her a thousand times the opposite. In any case, he had murdered Count Traun out of hatred, out of jealousy for the tiny bit of happiness which at last had fallen to her lot. “Where the house, which thou inhabitest, knows no rejoicing except that which comes from duty, and no joy except that from grace,” the suffragan bishop had said in his first address. That much Christl could have had at Number 10 too. Number 10 Seilerstatte knew no rejoicing, and it murdered happiness.
As her eyes rested on the girl who had renounced happiness, she knew that there was a connection between them. Some took the veil; others married men like Franz. Christl, too, had felt herself betrayed and bartered, and why? Because she simply could not forgive her, Henriette, the happiness she had sensed in her at the time of her own distress, when Hans had brought her from the ball to the colonel's deathbed. “I was frivolous enough to be happy at the wrong time,” Henriette thought. And during the “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” it occurred to her, How remarkable is the love human beings bear to one another! If Christl's love for me had been really great then must she not have said to herself: “I do not begrudge her this bit of rejoicing?”
The tenderness she had felt for the novice since the Jarescu days was now submerged by her conviction that the ceremony before the high altar was nothing else than a demonstration against her. “I believed in you and you destroyed my faith in human beings!” the girl in her white veil kept crying to her. Oh, she heard it well! "
― , The Vienna Melody
5
" All of his conclusions in life had been reached through the things he had experienced, seen, or felt, before he could think them out. “Herr Hans Alt suffers from incurable empiricism,” had been another of Freud's sarcastic remarks. This tendency had reached an acute stage in the time of Hans's utter loneliness. To think that human beings should suffer the things he had suffered and seen others suffer; that the chalked-up inscription on troop trains, originally destined for cattle, “Ten Horses and Forty Men,” wiped out the difference between man and animal, he had had to see with his own eyes in order to draw his conclusions about it; that killing was not murder and a crime, as he had been brought up to believe, but heroism, he would not have thought credible had he himself not been required to aim and shoot at unknown men.
When he had the incontrovertible proof that all this was done not for his country but against it, he went through a crisis. His faith in authority, which had been hammered into his very marrow by school and home, had been shaken that morning in the violet meadow. Nevertheless, it remained. His school, his father, his Emperor still had right on their side. But now their unrighteousness cried aloud to heaven, so that his faith in authority was dumb. Every one had been shamelessly betrayed. The sons who came back as despised beggars or, worse still, didn't come back and became names on tiny churchyard crosses or numbers in prison camps. The mothers who had given those sons. The fathers who had given all their money for war loans. The last trace of regard for anything that might go by the name of respectability vanished. Everything was criminally false that had been said, taught, required by authority for ages past. "
― , The Vienna Melody
6
" Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome.
One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence.
Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar. They carried on their businesses, continued to go to their offices, went on receiving their pensions.Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome.
One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence.
Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar. "
― , The Vienna Melody
