My Prizes: An Accounting (8 page)

I received the Büchner Prize in 1970, when the so-called Student Revolution of 1968, having subsided as a merely romantic and thus totally unsuccessful dilettantish revolt, had already entered history as an unfit attempt at a revolution, alas. The frivolousness of this protest had finally led to a result that was the opposite of what was intended and thus an intellectual catastrophe and a sad awakening. The people pushing this movement with one eye on the French did not, as they intended, bring back to Germany the good, the best, the spirit that feared no consequences, they only drove it out for a long time with their dilettantism which had nothing revolutionary about it but was merely a fashion stolen from the
French, as we can now see. The general attitudes now reigning in Germany are obviously more depressing than they were before the events of 1968. It was no movement in the sense of Büchner’s and his gang’s movement, only a perverse game with the intellectual boredom that has been a tradition in Germany for hundreds of years. The Büchner Prize is linked with a name I had conjured only with the deepest respect for decades. For my work in directing, at the end of my studies at the Mozarteum I chose, without needing much reflection, alongside Kleist’s
The Broken Pitcher
and Thomas Wolfe’s
Mannerhouse
, Büchner’s
Leonce and Lena
. But because I’ve never been able to be very articulate about any of the things I’ve loved most in my life, I’ve also almost never said anything about Büchner. The speech that the Germany Academy required of me for being awarded the Büchner Prize had to go against this inarticulacy and so it never took shape. On the contrary, I was certain that I had no right to express myself in any way about Büchner on the podium in Darmstadt, indeed, I was certain that the name Büchner should not even cross my lips if possible, and in this I was successful, for I only said a few sentences in Darmstadt and these had nothing to do with Büchner. We are not allowed to keep talking
endlessly about those we consider great and to hitch our own pitiful existence and inadequacies to these great ones with all our efforts and our clamor. It is customary that people when they get a Kant plaque or a Dürer Prize give long speeches about Kant or Dürer, spinning dull threads that extend from the great ones to themselves and squeezing their brains over the audience. This way of proceeding doesn’t appeal to me. And so I only said a few sentences in Darmstadt which had nothing to do with Büchner, though everything to do with me. Finally I had no need to explain Büchner, who needs no explaining, at most I needed to make a short statement about myself and my relationship to my surrounding world, from the center of my own world which is also, of course, for as long as I live, the center of the world itself for me, and must be so, if what I say is going to be true. I’m not reciting a prayer, I thought, I’m taking a standpoint which can only be
my
standpoint, when I speak. In short, I spoke few sentences. The listeners thought that what I said was an introduction to my speech, but it was the whole thing. I gave a short bow and saw that my audience wasn’t pleased with me. But I hadn’t come to Darmstadt to make people happy, but only to collect the prize, which came with ten thousand marks
and with which Büchner had nothing to do, since he knew nothing about it himself, having died so many decades before there was any idea of funding a Büchner Prize. The so-called German Academy of Language and Poetry had everything to do with the Büchner Prize, while Georg Büchner himself had nothing. And I thanked the German Academy of Language and Poetry for the prize, but in truth I was only thanking them for the prize money, for when I went to Darmstadt I no longer had any relationship to the so-called honor that such a prize was supposed to signify, this honor and all other honors had already become suspect to me. But I had no cause to share my views with the Academy, I packed my bag and went to Darmstadt with my aunt because I wanted to spoil myself and my aunt with a beautiful trip through Germany after a long barren period at home in the country. The gentlemen of the Academy couldn’t have been friendlier and I had several pleasant conversations with them which contained nothing dangerous, for I didn’t want anything to disrupt my trip through Germany. I had to take the prize ceremony upon myself as a curiosity and Werner Heisenberg, who was being honored in the same ceremony with a prize for scientific writing, had also said to me more than once how curious the
ceremony was, what the famous critic from the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, Joachim Kaiser, who was also getting a prize then, thought, I can’t say, he was inscrutable. After the distribution of the prizes, when I said to Joachim Kaiser, who was sitting next to me in the front row, that my prize certificate was a third larger and thus also heavier than his, embodying the different relevant weights of the prizes, he made a face. But I have to say that afterward in a nearby cellar restaurant he impressed me with his knowledge of musicology, in the face of such astonishingly concentrated richness I had nothing to contribute. The city of Darmstadt gave me a lunch, to which some of my friends also came, I was allowed to provide names and they were all invited. During lunch when my aunt told her neighbor at the table, Minister Storz, that it wasn’t only Büchner who had his birthday that day, it was hers too, she was seventy-six, one of the gentlemen of the city got to his feet and went out. Somewhat later he returned carrying a bouquet of seventy-six roses. Here I have to say that the main reason I went to Darmstadt was to make a beautiful birthday for my aunt, for she was born, like Georg Büchner, on October eighteenth. Of course it wasn’t the only reason but it was the main reason. At the end of the meal
my aunt and I signed our names in the Golden Book of Darmstadt. The newspapers covered the tripartite prize, albeit from different perspectives and with wildly different resources, in ways that pretty much matched my own opinions. The articles are there to be read. The jury of the German Academy, from which I have since resigned, because they elected me a member without my knowledge, and I couldn’t defend this, is answerable for my being voted the winner of the Büchner Prize, not me.

Honored Guests,

I cannot follow the fairy tale of your town musicians; I don’t want to tell a story; I don’t want to sing; I don’t want to preach; but it’s true: fairy tales are over, the fairy tales about cities and states and all the scientific fairy tales, and all the philosophical ones; there is no more
world of the spirit;
Europe, the most beautiful, is dead; this is the truth and the reality. Reality, like truth, is no fairy tale and truth has never been a fairy tale.

Fifty years ago Europe was a single fairy tale, the whole world a fairy-tale world. Today there are many who live in this fairy-tale world, but they’re living in a dead world and they themselves are dead.
He who isn’t dead lives, and
he doesn’t live in fairy tales; it’s no fairy tale
.

I myself am no fairy tale and I do not come from a world of fairy tales; I had to live through a long war and I saw hundreds of thousands die, and others who went on right over them; everyone went on, in reality; everything changed, in truth; in the five decades during which everything turned to revolt and everything changed, during which a thousand-year-old fairy tale gave way to
the
reality and
the
truth, I felt myself getting colder and colder while a new world and a new nature arose from the old.

It is harder to live without fairy tales, that is why it is so hard to live in the twentieth century; it’s more that we
exist
, we don’t live, no one lives anymore; but it is a fine thing to
exist
in the twentieth century, to
move
, but to
where?
I know I did not emerge from any fairy tale and I will not enter any fairy tale, this is already progress and thus already a difference between then and now.

We are standing on the most frightening territory in all of history. We are in fear,
in fear of this enormous material that is the new humanity
, and of a new knowledge of our nature and the
renewal
of our nature; together we have been only a single mass of
pain in the last half century; this pain today is
us;
this pain is now our spiritual condition.

We have a wholly new system, a wholly new way of seeing the world, and a wholly new, truly most outstanding view of the world’s own surroundings, and we have a new morality and we have new sciences and new arts. We feel dizzy and we feel cold. We believed that because we are human, we would lose our balance, but we haven’t lost our balance; we’ve also done everything to avoid freezing.

Everything has changed because it is we who have changed it, our external geography has changed as much as our internal one.

We make great demands now, we cannot make enough great demands; no era has made such great demands as ours; we are already megalomaniacal; because we know we
cannot
fall and we
cannot
freeze, we trust ourselves to do what we do.

Life is only science now. The science of the sciences. Now we are suddenly taken up with nature. We have become intimate with the elements.
We
have put reality to the test. Reality has put
us
to the test. We now know the laws of nature, the infinite High Laws of nature, and we can study them in reality and in truth. We no longer have to rely on assumptions. When we look into nature, we no
longer see ghosts. We have written the boldest chapter in the book of world history, every one of us has written it
for himself
in fright and deathly fear and none of us of our own free will, nor according to his own taste, but following the laws of nature, and we have written this chapter behind the backs of our blind fathers and our foolish teachers, behind our own backs; after so much that has been endlessly long and dull, the shortest and the most important.

We are frightened by the clarity
out of which our world suddenly is born
, our world of science; we freeze in this clarity; but we wanted this clarity, we evoked it, so we cannot complain now that the cold reigns and we’re freezing. The cold increases with the clarity. This clarity and this cold will now rule us. The science of nature will give us a greater clarity and will be far colder than we can imagine.

Everything will be clear, a clarity that increases and deepens unendingly, and everything will be cold, a coldness that intensifies ever more horribly. In the future we will have the impression of a day that is endlessly clear and endlessly cold.

I thank you for your attention. I thank you for the honor you have shown me today.

Honored Minister, honored guests,

There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about
death
.

We go through life impressed, unimpressed, we cross the scene, everything is interchangeable, we have been schooled more or less effectively in a state where everything is mere props: but it is all an error! We understand: a clueless people, a beautiful country—there are dead fathers or fathers conscientiously without conscience, straightforwardly despicable in the raw basics of their needs … it all makes for a past history that is philosophically significant and unendurable. Our era is feebleminded, the
demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.

We’re Austrian, we’re apathetic, our lives evince the basest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.

We have nothing to report except that we are pitiful, brought down by all the imaginative powers of an amalgam of philosophical, economic, and machine-driven monotony.

Means to an end when that end is destruction, creatures of agony, everything is explained to us and we understand nothing. We populate a trauma, we are frightened, we have the right to be frightened, we can already see in the background the dim shapes of the giants of fear.

What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear.

We don’t have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.

In my name and in the name of those here who have also been selected by this jury, I thank all of you.

Honored guests,

What we are speaking of here is unfathomable, we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical, we are cut down in our aspirations at the final, fatal conclusion of our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us; appearances are deadly and all the hundreds and thousands of hackneyed words we play with in our heads in our loneliness, the words that are recognizable to us in any language and within any context as the monstrous truth revealed in monstrous lies, or better, monstrous lies revealed within a monstrous truth, the words we say and write to one another and the ones
we dare to suppress, the words that come from nothing and go to nothing and serve nothing, as we know and keep secret, the words to which we cling because our impotence makes us insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything; by mouth and on paper they abuse by means of their abusers; the very character of words and their abusers is an outrage; the spiritual condition of words and their abusers is that of helplessness and catastrophic good cheer.

We say we’re putting on a performance in a theater that will last for all eternity … but the theater in which we’re prepared for everything and competent in nothing is, from the time we’re able to think, a theater of ever-increasing speed and lost shorthand … it is absolutely a theater of the body—and secondarily of spiritual angst and thus of the fear of death … we don’t know whether we’re dealing with tragedy or comedy, or comedy for the sake of tragedy … but all of it deals with the terrible, with misery, with mental imbalance … we think we should keep quiet: he who thinks destroys, annuls, metes out disaster, corrodes, demolishes, for thinking is consistent with the dissolution of all ideas … we are made up (and this is history and the spiritual condition of history) of anxieties, bodily anxiety,
spiritual anxiety, and the anxiety about death that drives creativity … what we reveal is not identical with what is, being shattered is something else, existence is something else, we are something else, the unendurable is something else, it isn’t illness, it isn’t death, those relationships are quite other, as are those circumstances …