Extinction (10 page)

engaged in destroying everything that means anything. Fanatical destroyers are at work, ruthless exploiters who have donned the mantle of socialism. The government operates a monstrous demolition plant that functions nonstop, destroying everything I hold dear. Our towns and cities have become unrecognizable, I said. Great tracts of our countryside have been despoiled. The most beautiful regions have fallen victim to the greed and power-lust of the new barbarians. Wherever there’s a beautiful tree it’s cut down, wherever there’s a fine old house it’s demolished, wherever a delightful brook runs down a hillside it’s ruined. Everything beautiful is trampled under foot. And all in the name of socialism, with the most appalling hypocrisy one can imagine. Anything even remotely connected with culture is suspect, called into question, and obliterated. The obliterators are at work—the killers. We’re up against obliterators and killers, who go about their murderous business everywhere. The obliterators and killers are killing and obliterating the towns, killing and obliterating the landscape. Sitting on their fat arses in thousands and hundreds of thousands of offices in every corner of the state, they think of nothing but obliteration and killing, of how to kill and obliterate everything between the Neusiedlersee and Lake Constance. Vienna has been almost done to death, and Salzburg—all these fine cities, Gambetti, which you don’t know but which are actually among the most beautiful in the world. The landscape we see as we drive through Austria from Vienna has been almost totally killed and obliterated. One eyesore succeeds another, one monstrosity after another forces itself on our eyes. It’s become a perverse lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country. The truth is that the country was destroyed long ago, deliberately devastated and disfigured as a result of perfidious business deals, so that one is hard put to find a single unspoiled spot. It’s a lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country, because the truth is that the country has been murdered. Was it necessary in this century, I asked Gambetti, for humanity to lay violent hands on this most beautiful of all worlds, to kill and obliterate it? The villages, Gambetti, are unrecognizable when we revisit them after a number of years, and so are the inhabitants. What were these people like just a few years ago, and what are they like now? A chronic lack of character has taken hold of them like a deadly disease—greed, ruthlessness, depravity, mendacity, hypocrisy,
baseness. They’ll do anything to achieve their base ends, and they employ the utmost ruthlessness in pursuing them. You enter these villages, delighted at the prospect of seeing them again, but you soon turn your back on them, repelled by so much baseness. You visit these once beautiful towns and cities, but by the time you leave them you’re depressed by the crushing certainty that all these towns and cities are lost—disfigured and destroyed by the new barbarism. In order to find them you have to consult old books and engravings, for they have long since been obliterated by the reality of today. All those splendid houses in Upper Austria, in Salzburg, for instance, as well as in Lower Austria, have lost their faces. Their handsome, centuries-old faces have been disfigured by today’s insane fashions. Everything beautiful has been ripped out, so that now, utterly mutilated, they stare scornfully at the horrified visitor who remembers them as they once were. Nothing but ruined facades, I told Gambetti. It’s as if all these towns and cities had been visited by a hideous plague, a deadly disease unknown in earlier times. What’s more, I told Gambetti, whole sections of the towns have been eviscerated and mutilated. The surface of the earth has been disfigured by architects, egged on and abetted by cynical politicians. At first it seemed as though our towns and our countryside had been ravaged by war, but they have suffered far greater ravages during the perverse peace that followed, thanks to the unscrupulous deals done by our rulers and the activities of their henchmen, the architects, who were given unlimited license. And what havoc the architects have wrought in these decades! The destruction we suffered in the war is mild by comparison, I told Gambetti. And in no country has the work of destruction been carried out with such horrendous efficiency as in Austria. Or so unscrupulously. The nation has been hoodwinked; the country and its cities have been mutilated and virtually obliterated, I said. For decades the utmost tastelessness has been preached and propagated. Among our rulers we have had so many unscrupulous profiteers, so many obliterators of our state, and hence of our country, that it doesn’t bear thinking about; they all held on to their cabinet seats long enough to promote and carry through the destruction and annihilation of our landscape and our cities. But in a country where vulgarity and tastelessness prevail it’s no wonder that the results are so ubiquitously shattering. For while these people were in power, destroying, despoiling,
and more or less obliterating the landscape and the cities, they were simultaneously destroying the nation’s soul, its whole mentality. The souls of my compatriots have been depraved, I said, their characters vulgarized and debased. A malign atmosphere prevails everywhere. Wherever you go you come up against this malign and depraved mentality. You think you’re talking to a decent person—which he might have been once—only to discover that he’s the lowest of the low. There’s been a universal character switch, the effect of which is that anyone who once was decent has been corrupted and reveals his depravity in every way, making no attempt to suppress it, but displaying it quite openly. You go into a village that you remember as friendly and welcoming, but you very soon discover that it has become malign and hostile and that you meet only with sullen suspicion. The whole of Austria has been turned into an unscrupulous commercial concern in which everything is bargained for and everyone is defrauded. You think you’re visiting a beautiful country, but in reality you’re visiting a monstrous business enterprise. You think you’re entering a land of culture, but you’re dismayed by the primitive mentality you encounter everywhere. From the very beginning you find yourself in a brainless atmosphere in which you can hardly breathe, I told Gambetti. It’s as though all the monuments, including those that were set up as recently as the last century, were dismayed too as they surveyed the indescribable chaos created by our present rulers. You can’t imagine how repulsive it’s all become, Gambetti, I said, how charmless. Nothing so repulsive and charmless would be possible in Italy, I said, or in Spain. In no other country have they taken the brainless slogans of progress as seriously as in Austria, I said, and thereby ruined everything. Everything brainless is taken seriously in Austria, I told Gambetti, in deadly earnest—and you know what that means. Until now I always thought socialism was a temporary nervous disorder that was basically harmless, I told Gambetti, but in reality it’s a deadly disease. I mean
the socialism that prevails today
, which is just a sham, Gambetti, a spurious socialism that relies on shameless pretense. Today we don’t have real socialism anywhere in the world, only the mendacious, simulated variety, as you should know. Today’s socialists are not real socialists but devious dissemblers. This century has succeeded in dragging the honored name of socialism in the dirt to such an extent that
you want to throw up. The inventors of true socialism, who actually believed in it and thought they’d established it for all time, would turn in their graves if they could see what their unspeakable successors have made of it. They’d turn in their graves if they could open their eyes again and see everything that’s peddled and purveyed to the peoples of the world under the honored name of socialism. They’d turn in their graves if they could see the dirty tricks that are played in Europe and the rest of the world under the cover of this honored name. They’d turn in their graves if they knew about this gigantic political misappropriation. They’d turn in their graves, turn in their graves, I repeated several times. I won’t go back to this country for a long time, not for a year at least, I had told Gambetti. And now I had to go back at once. In the photograph my brother has a rather depressed posture, almost cowering, I thought, although he makes quite an elegant impression. He’s a countryman, whereas I’m a townsman, a metropolitan, and always have been. He’s instantly recognizable as a countryman, however fashionably he’s dressed. Like his father, who usually wore city clothes but could at once be recognized as a countryman. From time to time, to please my mother, they go—or used to go—to Vienna, taking in an opera (at Easter it would be
Parsifal
) and having supper at the Sacher. After breakfast the three of them would go for a walk across the Graben and along the Kärntnerstrasse as far as the Ring. If they were feeling generous they would take my aunt Elisabeth with them. They wore city clothes but were immediately recognizable as country folk. They would visit the most famous shops, and my mother would choose the very best dresses, which were at the same time the most tasteless—Milan and Paris designs that she would then wear to the theater in Linz or to concerts in Salzburg, for which they had had subscriptions for years. My brother looks healthier in the picture than he really was. He harbored all his father’s ailments, but they had not yet manifested themselves, as they had in Father’s case; they were biding their time and had not yet broken out. Yet in the photo I could already discern them in his face and his generally pathetic posture. I once said to Gambetti, They all have pathetic physical attitudes, which match their pathetic mental attitudes. Everything about them is pathetic, outwardly and inwardly, and I explained to Gambetti what the word
pathetic
meant. It has no equivalent in Italian
and is not easy to translate. They went to the opera or the theater and were basically terribly bored, but at the end of the performance they always clapped enthusiastically and made no attempt to appear sophisticated, having paid so much money for their tickets. They always paid the standard price, which no Viennese would dream of doing. The Viennese never pay the full price for their tickets but at most pay half price, leaving the full price to foreigners and provincials, who always clap most because they’ve paid so much for their seats. We always had to stand with Mother in front of the famous shops, which were not always the best shops, and gaze at the window displays. She would then go in, head held high, and I never knew her to leave without having made a purchase. After visiting two or three shops we had to walk beside her, loaded with large parcels, and it was only when they became too heavy for us that she would relent and agree to take a rest at the Sacher or the Bristol, where we usually stayed. She would have loved to buy up everything and take it all home to Wolfsegg. What are you going to do with all these things? my father would ask. You won’t wear them. You can’t wear them at Wolfsegg because that would be ridiculous, and in Salzburg nobody will appreciate how expensive they are, or in Linz for that matter, let alone in Wels. They’ll all hang in the closet and go out of fashion, and then you’ll sell them or give them away. But Mother would have none of this. They always returned from Vienna with a dozen parcels, and at least half a dozen more would arrive subsequently, containing items that she had bought surreptitiously, without witnesses. Mother spent a fortune on clothes, but she never wore them, or wore them only two or three times, after which she would throw them away or hand them on. But heaven forbid that my sisters should ever fancy designer dresses like hers! They were not allowed to buy a single dress in Vienna, even when they were forty. Even at forty they had to make do with one or two dresses from the sales in Wels, since our Lambach dressmaker was still the chief purveyor of their wardrobe, which consisted, as I have said, of the revolting dirndls that their mother had made for them twice a year. They were not even allowed to choose the cloth, because Mother did not trust their taste, though she herself had no taste whatever. The dirndls always turned out either too large or too small, or the colors clashed, or the collars were too wide or too narrow, or the sleeves
too long or too short. The skirts were always at least eight inches too long, and the aprons never matched the dresses. Mother always dressed her daughters like dolls. She treated them as if they were dolls and never saw them as anything other than dolls. Like so many mothers, she regarded her daughters as dolls from the day each was born, and one could probably say without exaggeration that she gave birth to them not as human beings but as dolls. Even in adulthood she had to have one or more dolls to play with. Her daughters were never more than dolls and thus satisfied her passionate play instinct; as a result she would never let go of them. They always had to react like dolls. Every day she dressed them, fed them, and took them for walks like dolls, and at night she would put them to bed like dolls. Even at forty, it seems, these dolls, my sisters, are still subservient to my mother’s play instinct. And my brother was a puppet all his life—Punch, so to speak. She brought him up as a reserve puppet, in anticipation of the time when her premier puppet, her husband, would no longer be around. To my mother, with her craze for dolls, my sisters were actually talking dolls that could be made to laugh or cry when she wished and dressed and undressed when she wished, while her husband and son were puppets, whose strings she pulled whenever the mood took her. Mother was governed by a quite perverse play instinct. She turned Wolfsegg into a perfectly regimented dolls’ world in which everyone obeyed her orders to the letter. Wolfsegg was her dolls’ house, its surroundings her dolls’ world. Not wanting to be a doll in a dolls’ house, I soon removed myself from this dolls’ house and this dolls’ world, which seem even more oppressive and hideous when viewed from outside, from a distance. Wolfsegg is a dolls’ house, I told Gambetti, and its surroundings nothing more or less than a dolls’ world, ruled by my mother in the most ruthless and inhuman fashion. Gambetti laughed loudly, accusing me of monstrous overstatement and telling me that I was a typical Austrian pessimist with a grotesquely negative outlook. I replied that my