From top: Statue of Salzburg-born Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, located in the Burggarten in Vienna. In the background the Austrian flag flies above the Austrian National Library; David Langwallner
To My Daughter Lara.
“In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the livings had been extinguished another did not at once take his place to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of his gap. When fire had eaten away a house from the row of others in a street, the burnt-out space remained long empty. Masons worked slowly and cautiously. Close neighbours and casual passers-by alike, when they saw the empty space, remembered the aspect and walls of the vanished house. That was how things were then. Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
“There still exists – even today – a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness – or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ – had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe.”
– Also, Joseph Roth, On the End of the World
I am, of course, half-Austrian and love going to Austria at Christmas, if I can or could and, since now everyone is restricted in movement, the only visit can be a mental one and a feat of remembrance and imagination as the Roth quote from one of the great Austrian novels indicates and presages our awful times of casual forgetfulness and recrudescent chauvinism.
We are all now traveling in our minds and memories, not unlike Mr Proust. Remembering things past.
And I am coming to grips with that aspect of me that has always made me an outsider in Ireland and elsewhere, my Austrian mind; my left foot, in Irish terms.
So, this is obviously, at one level, a personal exploration. Like Lampedusa the Leopard (1959), the established work of Italian literature on times past, the passing of time and that which was lost in a new age. But now a feudal order is asserted quite different to that book which was, at one level, about the transition of Italy to democracy but also the abandonment of tradition.
Well, tradition and civility are now, yet again, being abandoned in a new dark age.
My childhood in Ireland, not unlike that of Hugo Hamilton in his narrative The Speckled People, something I have written hitherto about for Village magazine, involved casual racism and bullying.
My family, that I am close to, are from Salzburg, home of The Fespiele, and Mozart was, of course, born in Salzburg and a little museum in Salzburg glorifies his brief tenure on Earth. Bach aside, Mozart’s music combing lyricism, frivolity, dexterity, and profundity in equal parts is a useful starting point. But what does it say about the human condition is not just chocolate-box fripperies or the texture of lightness that is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik but an understanding of darkness. Darkness threads through the Austrian mind juxtaposed with light.
Thus, of the great operas Cosi Fan Tutti and The Marriage of Figaro are the intrigues and mishaps of sexual dalliances and the rites of spring. A ray of light and an understanding of human frailty. But there are darker themes in a mind of native ambivalence to quote Harold Bloom on Shakespeare and indeed FR Leavis.
Thus, Don Giovanni is about the destructive powers of rakish satanism, also evident in Zweig’s best book beautifully filmed by Max Ophuls’ Letters from an Unknown Women, where a seduced woman writes a letter to a man who has casually forgotten her. So, there is a level of moralism and condemnation in Austrian letters. A good thing and a sense of honour.
In Mozart is the incomparable Magic Flute splendidly rendered in a film by Bergman which, in effect, is about, at one level, the dubious justification of freemasonry which Mozart was but also, at a deeper level and a context of the time, a crier de coeur and assertion of a form of enlightened and tolerant monarchism against the vectors of state and, in particular, church authoritarianisms. Now needed again. The assertion of moderation against extremism. Including though against Freemasons. Indeed, our world is run that way. Corporate freemasons.
The Austrians, in fact, have not universally acclaimed the Catholic Church and a visit to an Austrian church for Sunday service is to experience splendid isolation and admire the architecture. The only good reasons for visiting a church, it might be said. But not necessarily by me.
The great enfant terrible of Austrian letters and its greatest post-war writer Thomas Bernhard was gloriously insulting about religion, though in words I partially endorse.
The Catholic Church is the world poisoner, the world destroyer, the world annihilator, which is the truth.And the Austrians believe in the truth and take it seriously, unlike the gradual decline in that in Ireland. The national psyche of Ireland is a society committed to post-truth, lies and propaganda and willing to accept anything that suits their agenda and to comply.
It must be said that Bernhard had such an ‘against everything’ quality that even the tolerant Austrian homeland banned, censored, or neglected, as well as lauded, him. His masterpiece Woodcutters is about a man in a chair at a party sipping Champagne, letting fly at bourgeoise hypocrisy and is one of the great Austrian books
A flavour of the Bernhard-like attack is the following:
“Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretence, never genuine, never real.”
In his will, he ordered none of his works be performed in Austria. This has been deliberately avoided. All cultures have their tropes.
In terms of Salzburgian culture, The Merry Widow an exemplar of light operetta, like a jaded ritual, is still performed in The Lehrer Theatre in Bad Ischl and elsewhere. The last nostalgic remnants of modernist European civilisation. But always kitsch and certainly ritualised. And the Austrians do have an ambivalent relationship with kitsch. The Blue Danube is not unlike a classic Britpop song.
Even the great Herman Broch was fascinated by kitsch in a negative way, linking it to a decline in values.
“The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.”
In fact, in some respects the values vacuum, and the triumph of kitsch paves the way for Nazism as Broch and indeed Robert Musil both identified. Radical evil and kitsch is our age, so they were mystical to see it coming. Camp Fascism as Susan Sontag also identified. Varadkar to Gallagher and back again.
Welcome to Coronavirus Panopticon, you can checkout, but never leave; in fact the over-celebrated Klimt, a disturbed, dependent human being, is kitsch. A kind of postcard and coffee table art for a fundamentally illiterate generation, then and now, so let us not extol Austrian culture universally.
Beethoven was a German but, of course, lived and died in Vienna, raging at a storm it is said so I claim him falsely as an Austrian or at least a Viennese, though the two concepts must be kept separate. His darkness is a counterpart to Mozart. His deafness influences the isolated pessimism of the later atonal dark sonatas and are close to the finality of expression in musical terms that Beckett created in language.
His final string quartet is integral to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, where the satanic composer modelled on Heidegger sells his Faustian soul to the devil.
I have found that it must not be. The good and the noble, what they call the human, even though it is good and noble, what men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and in their moment of fulfilment, have jubilant proclaimed it is not to be. It is not to be, it will be taken back. I will take it back.
Mann, the great German conservative, had the moral integrity to decamp to Switzerland when such ideas took hold, then and now. So, a crucial point to appreciate conservatism is not all bad if it conserves the good and the ethical. Mann is juxtaposed in this respect with Heidegger, also a potential, if not actual, inspiration for Dr Faustus.
The rise of Nazism is anticipated brilliantly in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers one of the great novels of Austrian heritage.
In the character of Hugenau, a man solely motivated by profit and homo economicus, to use the terms of the law and economics movement, we have a real sense in 1918 of a generation so brutal that the seeds of fascism were already there. The book culminates with murder of a journalist and the rape of his wife.
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