Our forgotten pastures should have been a university – or rather, not a university as such, but what’s associated with it, what’s around it: independence, freedom, doing one’s own thing, and just idling and loafing. Some had relatives, some had friends, some had acquaintances who had already been at university for quite a while and yet still hadn’t passed any examination or had passed pitifully few. What is more, we knew that in going to university you could get through an examination even without opening a textbook, just by cribbing study notes. To talk and think about all this felt just like manna from heaven compared to the eternal cramming and tests at school. So we went to university safe in the knowledge that now the holiday would begin, now it would be relaxation, entertainment and pleasure, and now we would have everything that had allured us and yet been kept away from us. Our cup had been filled to the brim, and there was nothing left to do but lift it to our lips and drink as deeply as possible.
Many, very many feelings we had like that. So what is there to wonder at, if we pushed our way into the Korporationen when we entered university? They were said to be, since ancient times, a nest of youthful carefree fun of every kind. Why otherwise would all the sons of our Vons, our barons and counts have gone there? They were supposed to know the meaning of pleasure, which means a carefree, joyfully dissipated life. Relatives and friends had been telling us this since we were born. God, they thought, had piled all the troubles and pains onto His parishioners, while at the manor the endless feasting just had to go on. The parishioners lived in constant privation, even hunger, while at the manor there was endless abundance, wealth and style. But now there were no more manors, there were just the parishes and the parish householders. What happened to the pleasures and joys of the manors, theirs style and wealth, their dissipated life? It couldn’t just vanish from the world, as it had been admired and envied too long for that, and it was too tempting and alluring. Our fathers would talk with pride about the time they sold a steer to the manor stables to be fattened – and why wouldn’t it tickle them, when their sons and daughters were wearing the same sorts of coloured student caps, having now become the objects of special pride and the emblems of the anticipated life of revelry as it was once lived in the manors.
We had taken over the manors, and now we were hurrying to take over their way of life too, not only among the young students, but in the towns, villages and farmhouses. We wanted to feel like real landowners, lords of our demesne, and we didn’t know how to express that desire any better or clearer than by trying it ourselves and being pleased that our progeny were also trying to live like their former masters and their progeny. We did what we could to carry on the manorial traditions, manners, ways of life, outlook, the whole ethical and aesthetic attitude.
Most of our manors were burdened with debts, and we took this as a model too. Most of the young people from our manors left university without completing any courses, being satisfied with merely studying; but we couldn’t do anything else if we wanted to be the proper heirs to the manors’ heritage. The young manor folk lived only for wine, women and song – well, our generation also wanted to kick up their heels. And the wealthier the country pile, the richer the manor, the more they felt obliged or called upon to follow the customs of the inherited manor in every respect.
And when the hard times came – as come they must, living like that – and the bankruptcies started, the young people were blamed, and that’s where we are now. I’ve had first hand experience of all this. Once the spiritual baggage of the manorial class was being taken over, was there anyone anywhere among the younger or older ones who sounded a note of alarm or stood in their way? Even today a girl’s eyes light up when young men put on their coloured caps. Fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers still feel a little ashamed or humiliated when a son, daughter, sister or brother turns up at home without that coloured cap. Not a single living person has ever asked me what I was studying or whether I had studied at all, but everyone wants to know which Korporation I was in and what we got up to. The main thing is this: do we live as the landed gentry did? Do we have the same customs, the same songs? Nobody wants to know if I speak German, but everyone wants to know if we sing in German. Do we drink in German?
There’s another thing that I’ve never been asked: have I been in love in German? I’m quite amazed I haven’t been asked this. But perhaps that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t have answered anyway, or I would have answered with silence. For this is the subject I’ve been meaning to write about from the beginning, and am finally getting round to, while up till now I’ve been talking about vacuous psychology. Has it somehow plumbed so deep into my soul that no force on earth can make me talk about it? Even if I should one day marry out of a great love, which I don’t believe I will, I wouldn’t feel obliged to confess it, because actually nothing has happened or come of it, and the great majority of girls, especially if they have worn the cap for a few years, would regard me as a bit stupid if I wanted to confess it to them before marrying in my own so-called novel. “Oskar, you really are a little ridiculous,” my bride-to-be would say, “what’s the point in telling me such things as if I were some uneducated village girl. We don’t even pay much attention to such things these days, because we’re becoming cultured, even without university and a Korporation cap.”
Of course this is the case, I don’t deny it. But the real heart of the matter doesn’t lie there, but somewhere else, perhaps in the first pages I wrote. That essentially my novel took shape and came about for precisely the same reason that I and so many others rushed to join a Korporation: we were under the spell of the past. What was so terribly provocative was our long-humiliated and mutilated sense of ourselves as slaves when we tried, even outwardly, to be the masters of slaves, which we hid within ourselves. If the slave within us over the centuries had not continually pushed himself upwards, we would not have been able to put our masters’ caps on, when the chance came. What would have been the point? What kind of satisfaction would we have had, if we’d felt like real masters? But we were the sons and daughters of our own folk, their flesh and blood. The smattering of education we had acquired had only slightly affected our brains; our emotional life was completely untouched by it. Our ideal was inherited from the past, and included coarse bread and communal granaries.
My love must surely smell of coarse bread and a dusty granary, and that’s why it’s so precious to me. My reason tells me to defend the break-up of the manorial lands, but my emotions tell me to cling compulsively to them, as do all my contemporaries. It is hard to break with the past so suddenly. In our hearts we circle around the empty dwelling places of our former masters, as if our consciences are troubling us. It’s like murderers feeling sorry for their victims. But I don’t feel any pity when I think of my love.
I wrote that last sentence at one o’clock at night. It’s now six in the morning. For some reason sleep deserted me early today and I was up and dressed before I realised why I was doing it so abruptly. But reading the last sentence from yesterday, I feel that it simply isn’t true. When I think of my love, I do feel sorry for something, though I don’t know what. Why then did I write the opposite last night? Did I want to mislead, reassure or console someone? And if so, whom?