Burning Abyss by Franz Fuhmann

 

 

Over the white pond

The wild birds have taken flight.

In the evening an icy wind blows from our

      stars.

 

Over our graves

The night bends its broken brow.

Under oak trees we sway on a silver barge.

The city’s white walls ring for ever.

Under vaults of thorns

O my brother we blind clock-hands climb

       towards midnight.

 

That was early May 1945; It was not much longer before I grasped his very delusion of ours as the essence of blindness and realized, shuddering, that we blind clock-hands had indeed climbed with desperate strength towards midnight. But what disturbed me still more, much later: the poet himself saw the clock-hand, and saw midnight, and saw himself, and yet, self-seeing, could see himself as blind? - Was it the blindness of the eye within the eye, or the blindness of the old seers, the blindness of Tiresias?- It took a long time to realize that what Trakl invoked was a blindness incapable of looking past its own time; the blindness of all the gifted ones who have eyes to behold themselves and whose boldest gaze sees : blind clock-hands. – Here we shall stop.

The street was silent when I left the house; wan darkness, no stars; from the doorway where my parents waved the hall light, mocking blackout regulations, welled cloudy in the mild air. – To this day I hear my father saying as we hugged goodbye and afterwards, as I went down the front steps typical of mountain homes, that next time he’d tell me much, much more about George, it was all coming back to him, such odd and droll things; he’d fill me in after the war was won – I never saw my father again: he died a few days later, reportedly of blood poisoning, though I suspect he resorted to one of his vials; at any rate that was our last conversation. He left behind no writings and doubtless wouldn’t have thought it worth the effort to note down memories of is crazy bunkmate. Though he had told me more about Georgie that night, I can vouch only for what I related above and for one other detail which I believe my father shared, though I later found it recorded in another source, in Albert Ehrenstein’s remembrances: leaning out of the window at dusk, Trakl loved to toss a glowing cigarette stub on the street and watch it fade. – The same movement is found in some of his poems, the quiet passing of a small tranquillity amid all the indifferent forces that are like the night vanquishing the evening – Fled is the gold of the days, | The evening’s brown and blue shades:| The shepherd’s flutes have died away| And evening’s blue and brown shades| Fled is the gold of the days -  and a consciousness that preserves this fading.

I turned off into total darkness; water rushed far below the street. – Was I thinking of Trakl? I hurried to the station, where the trains were still running, it was a long way, an hour at least, and I was still hobbling on a stick. I was probably humming one of the idiotic verses that you use to drum yourself into the trance of automized marching, a mercenary’s verse, a mercenary’s tune,’ all I recall is my hounded haste in the warm, dark night. But I know that premonition and madness and lurking fear were already solidifying into the figure of an angel, often invoked in those days, regularly by my father. Michael, the angel of the Germans, would cleave the heavens with his sword and descend to save his people, clad in flaming armor, at the final hour when night is darkest. – I had never seen Michael as a guardian angel; even before that May he was the Angel of the Apocalypse, the angel of the sixth trumpet and the falling fire who proclaims in all the tongues of the Earth: Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen; all nations have drunk the wine of the wrath of her fornication! – I’d grown terribly familiar with this angel now that fire had fallen from the sky, an envoy with pinions of snow and temples of scarlet; the angel of my heart was gentle and pure but now his wings were stained with faeces and worms dripped from his lids; in this shape, I took Trakl with me – and I still carried in my knapsack the large grey book with the broken lyre on the cover, for five or six days more, then tossed it away along with my knapsack, coat, blanket and tinned meat in the hope of making it more quickly to the Americans who were said to have halted at the Elbe.

All the people hastening through Bohemian forests strove to reach the Americans; the war was over; no angels appeared; beneath the oaks and the spruce, the SS marauded and the henchmen of a southward-fleeing field marshal court-martialled and hanged the northward fleeing soldiers; and tens of thousands of POWs trotted eastward, steps dragging, heads hanging, to meet an inconceivable fate. Since that fate was not the instant execution we had anticipated, it could only mean that young and old would spend the rest of their lives in the Siberian lead mines, -it was the end of Nazism, and we did not doubt the downfall of the thing we called Germany; it was what we were experiencing. -The war was lost; no angels appeared; the way to the Elbe was blocked by a victor whose wells we had choked with dirt, whose apple trees we had felled, whose mines we had flooded, whose cities we had burnt down – he would take his revenge now, no doubt about it. At this hour each saw a dark omen – mine was an icy cattle car filled with singing Ukrainian women, rolling off into the grey of a February dawn- and we tore the insignia from our uniform shirts, the officers shed their epaulettes, the military police their glittering gorgets, and here and there the SS with glowing iron expunged their sigils from their own flesh. -What was left was a void; it expanded.-Hastening westward through the woods to the Elbe, I hoped to join some foreign legion; I was twenty-three and had my A levels, taken early due to the war, but all I could do was operate a machine gun, obey and carry out orders; some colonial service might be able to use me, that was my final hope, now that Germany was a hope no longer. But on all the roads to the Elbe and surrounding the woods soldiers stood in long, earth-brown coats with long bayonets on their guns; their watch fires smoked, they drank and laughed, bells peeled, now and then a machine gun stuttered, and hanged men swayed from the oaks.- A suicide attempt in the brush by a field and my last escape had failed, and I trotted with the ten thousand eastward for seventeen days, sun stabbing, cherry trees blooming; we ate their sap and ate the grass where we bivouacked and swam in streams and ponds and ate water and ate dirt and heard the bells from the Moravian steeples and stared into the alien, yet already unbelievably familiar, faces of the young Kirghiz soldiers who escorted us and it was May. – In those days I thought nothing; it was a sense of perfect lightness, of floating in an empty space. - No longer here, not yet there. – After swimming we lay naked in the sun, animal torpor beyond hunger and despair, perhaps, for a few days, the bliss of nothingness. I owned only what I carried on my person, and that was little: belt and boots still, coat no longer, no watch, no lighter, no pen, no knife and no book; that lay somewhere on the side of the road, a knapsack filled with tinned meat and Trakl’s poems. I didn’t even wonder whether someone would find and read it, I thought nothing.

And yet I carried these poems with me as a wan glow against which I now aw the world. Just as you see a landscape at sunset, in murky November, when fog and red glow mingle in a smouldering dusk where trees and houses loom blocked in black, nearly nothing but black, faraway things indistinguishable: a fading into the realm of shadows, yet an unreal light prevailing in the consciousness of nearing night. – Twilight and decay; it was May, the cherry trees were blooming and we trotted, grey with hunger and dread, towards the east, towards a reception camp near Brno where we were interrogated and shorn and received; in place of the confiscated pay-book, the abbreviations for voyennoplenny in yellow oil paint on the back of our uniform jackets and on our trouser legs and on our caps; this was our new home, and there was food for the first time and I crouched in the mud outside the overfilled barracks and dunked dry bread in the millet soup and heard the silent din of the lines:

There is a light, extinguished by the wind.

There is a field of stubble, where a black rain

      falls.
There is a vineyard, burnt and black with

      holes full of spiders’

There is a road towards downfall.

These were Trakl’s verses, mingled with lines of my own, relentless droning litany of a fading consciousness seeking self-pity as its sole crutch. – So I took Trakl into captivity and my brooding and despair wore his colors: shadows embracing in front of a mirror gone blind, former lives slipping past on silver soles. – This was Trakl’s  ‘Psalm’, which I learnt by heart back then; for a long time I kept it in my memory, and had I been asked in the summer 1945, in the convoy from the Brno transit camp to the labor camp at Neftegorsk in the Caucasus, what the seminal event of my last few years had been, I would have replied without hesitation: The discovery of George Trakl’s poem.                                                                             

 

Vienna Before Hitler by Stefan Zweig

 

And never 

Adapting themselves to the milieu of the people or country where they live is not only an external protective measure for Jews, but a deep internal desire. Their longing for a homeland, for rest, for security, for friendliness, urges them to attach themselves passionately to the culture of the world around them. And never was such an attachment more effective- except in Spain in the fifteenth century- or happier and more fruitful than in Austria. Having resided for more than two hundred years in the Imperial city, the Jews encountered there an easygoing people, inclined to conciliation and under whose apparent laxity of form lay buried the identical deep instinct for cultural and aesthetic values which were so important to the Jews themselves.

 

And they met with more in Vienna: they found there a personal task. In the last century the pursuit of art in Austria had lost its old traditional defenders and protectors, the Imperial house and the aristocracy. Whereas in the eighteenth century Maria Teresa had Gluck instruct her daughters in music, Josef II ably discussed his operas with Mozart, and Leopold III himself composed music, the later emperors,  Franz II and Ferdinand, had no interests whatever in artistic things; and our Emperor Franz Josef, who in his eighty years never read a book other than the Army Register, or even taken one in his hand, evidenced moreover a definite antipathy to music. 

The nobility as well had relinquished its erstwhile protector’s role; gone were the glorious days when the Esterazys harbored a Haydn, the Lobkowitzes and the Kinsky’s and Waldsteins competed to have a premiere of  Beethoven in their palaces, where a Countess Thun threw herself on her knees before the great demigod, begging him not to withdraw Fidelio from the Opera. But now Wagner, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hugo Wolf had not received the slightest support from them. To maintain the Philharmonic on its accustomed level, to enable the painters and sculptors to make a living, it was necessary for the people to jump into the breech, and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to cooperate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture.

 

 They had always loved this city and had entered into its life wholeheartedly, but it was first of all by their love for Viennese art that they felt entitled to full citizenship, and that they had actually become true Viennese. In public life they exerted only a meager influence; the glory of the Imperial house overshadowed every private fortune, the leading positions in the administration of the State were held by inheritance, diplomacy was reserved for the aristocracy, the army and higher officialdom for the old families, and the Jews did not even attempt ambitiously to enter into these privileged circles.  They tactfully respected these traditional rights as being quite matter-of-course. I remember, for example, that throughout his entire life my father avoided dining at Sacher’s, and not for reasons of economy- the difference in price between it and the other large hotels was insignificant – but because of a natural feeling of difference: it would have been distressing or unbecoming to him to sit at a table next to a Prince Schwarzenberg or  a Lobkowitz It was only in regard to art that all felt an equal right, because love of art was a communal duty in Vienna, and immeasurable is the part in Viennese culture that Jewish bourgeoisie took, by their cooperation and promotion.  

 

They were the real audience, they filled the theaters and the concerts, they bought the books and the pictures, they visited the exhibitions, and with their more mobile understanding, little hampered by tradition, they were the exponents and champions of all that was new. Practically all the great art collections of the nineteenth century were formed by them, nearly all the artistic attempts were made possible only by them; without the ceaseless stimulating interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie, Vienna, thanks to the indolence of the court, the aristocracy, and the Christian millionaires, who preferred to maintain racing stables and hunts to fostering art, would have remained behind Berlin in the realm of art as Austria remained behind the German Reich in political matters. Whoever wished to put through something in Vienna, or came to Vienna as a guest from abroad and sought appreciation as well as an audience, was dependent of the Jewish bourgeoisie. When a single attempt was made in the Anti-Semitic period to create a so-called ‘national’ theater, neither authors, nor actors, nor a public was forthcoming; after a few months the ‘national’ theater collapsed miserably, and it was by this example that it became apparent for the first time that nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry.

 

For it was precisely in the last years- as it was in Spain before that equally tragic decline – that the Viennese Jews had become artistically productive although not in a specifically Jewish way; rather, through a miracle of understanding, they gave to what was Austrian, and Viennese, its most intensive expression. Goldmark, Gustav Mahler, and Schonberg became international figures in creative music, Oscar Strauss, Leo Fall and Kalman brought the tradition of the waltz and the operetta to a new flowering, Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer- Hofmann, and Peter Altenberg gave Viennese literature European standing such as it had not possessed under Grillparzer and Stifter; Sonnenthal and Max Reinaredt renewed the city’s universal fame as a home of the theater, Freud and others great in science drew attention to the long famous University-everywhere, as scholars, as virtuosi, as painters, as theatrical directors and architects, as journalists, they maintained unchallenged high positions in the intellectual life of Vienna. Because of their passionate for the city, through their desire for assimilation, they adapted themselves fully, and were happy to serve the glory of Vienna. They felt that their being Austrian was a mission to the world; and – for honesty’s sake it must be repeated – much, if not the most of all that Europe and America admire today as an expression of a new, rejuvenated Austrian culture, in literature, the theater, in the arts and crafts, was created by the Viennese Jews who, in turn, by this manifestation  achieved the highest artistic performance of their millennial spiritual activity. Centuries of intellectual energy joined here with a somewhat effete tradition and nurtured, revived, increased and renewed it with fresh strength and by tireless attention.

Only the coming decades will show the crime that Hitler perpetrated against Vienna when he sought to nationalize and provincialize  this city whose meaning and culture were founded in the meeting of the most heterogeneous elements, and in her spiritual supernationality.

 For the genius of Vienna- a specifically musical one- was always that it harmonized all the national and lingual contrasts. Its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Whoever lived there and worked there felt himself free of all confinement and prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that to a great extent I must thank this city, which already in the time of Marcus Aurelius defended the Roman- the universal- spirit, that at an early age I learned to love the idea of comradeship as the highest of my heart.

 

One lived well and easily and without cares in that old Vienna, and the Germans in the North looked with some annoyance and scorn upon their neighbors on the Danube who, instead of being ‘proficient’ and maintaining rigid order, permitted themselves to enjoy life, ate well, took pleasure in feasts and theaters and, besides, made excellent music. Instead of German ‘proficiency,’ which after all has embittered and disturbed the existence of all other peoples, and the forward chase and greedy desire to get ahead of all others, in Vienna one loved to chat, cultivated a harmonious association, and light-heartedly and perhaps with lax conciliation permitted each one his share without envy. ‘Live and let live’ was a famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives . .  .                                                           

 

The Crucial Epoch in Schopehauer's Life by R. J. Hollingdale

 

Schopenhauer’s schooling was sporadic but in 1797, aged nine, he was taken off to Paris and then Le Havre, where he stayed for two years with a French family. In 1799 he came back, not to Danzig but to Hamburg, and for three years attended a private school for ‘the sons of the wealthier classes.’ During these years the maternal component of his make-up began to become active and he developed a strong inclination towards literature which at length dominated him and led him to declare his intention of following a literary career when he grew up. It is clear that neither he nor his father had any precise notion of what this meant, but his father did know that at any rate it did not sound compatible with the running of the house of Schopenhauer as it ought to be run. He therefore offered the boy an alternative: he could either persist in wanting a ‘literary career’, in which case he would have to begin regular studies in Hamburg of literature, Latin and other dull subjects; or he could agree to settle down to a mercantile career, in which case he could leave immediately on a long tour of France and England so as to see something of the world first.

 

 Arthur was 15 and he chose the latter alternative. Presumably his father knew he would. They all left for a trip that was to last two years (1803-5), and when they returned to Hamburg in January 18054, Arthur was put into the office of a merchant named Jenisch, as a clerk.

This is now the crucial epoch of his life. In April his father dies; the death leaves him feeling more rather than less bound to fulfill his promise to become merchant. But the house of Schopenhauer is sold up, his mother and sister leave for Weimar, and he is left in the office of Jensch. And now despair begins to enter his soul. He hates the work of clerk, and has now come to hate the whole mercantile world; at the same time his very modest education has fitted him for little else. When he is 21 he will get his share of the paternal fortune, assuming his mother has not spent it by then – but as yet he is only 17, and at 17 four years are an unimaginable eternity. In short, Jenisch’s office becomes Schopenhauer’s blacking factory – with this difference, that Dicken’s experience was that of a little boy unable to analyze his situation and was now fortunately rare, while Schopenhauer’s is so ordinary as to be called as perhaps the common lot of middle-class youth. The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business. And especially with those of clerking. What young man is by nature diligent, sober and regular in his habits?  Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth? Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring? One in ten thousand, perhaps. But for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time, one will be allowed to get on with living. This situation is the most commonplace in the world. I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard as the ‘social order’: they know that short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires. This familiar feeling was what now overcame Schopenhauer: the feeling which appears when life, hitherto apparently capable of granting anything is suddenly revealed as a deception, when the color is drained from it and the whole future seems a single grey. The essence is in the question: Is this all? Is this life? The intensity with which the question is asked must of course vary; but when we consider that Schopenhauer was in fact a man of genius, we shall not be surprised to discover that in him its intensity was very great. He himself tells us that, when in the spring of 1807 his mother wrote to him from Weimar that now two years had elapsed he could if he wished regard his promise to his late father as fulfilled and change his mode of life, he ‘burst into tars of joy and left Jenisch’s office at once. And my contention is that the attitude towards life produced by these two years and more of office misery became, as did everything he felt, a permanent and irremovable part of his make-up; became, in fact, his permanent attitude towards life. What he as yet is a mode of expressing it, but as soon as he is introduced to a suitable mode he seizes it instantly and employs it to the limit of its capacity.