Wolf did tell me that extraordinarily valuable collector’s items could be found in these piles. His grandfather’s library, he said, had contained many first editions with personal dedications by the authors, some of which were now hard to come by. And his father had a priceless collection of documents on Jewish persecutions from the early Middle Ages to the most recent times. If anyone had the courage to take up this theme and write about it, said Wolf, he would find an inexhaustible and scientifically pure source here.
I did not like Dr. Goldmann. He had the same freckled flame-lit ram-head as his son, he was curt with me, and I was a bit afraid of his tremendous hands, which were spotted like salamander bellies and covered with lion-red hair. As for the memory of Grandfather Goldmann, I was biased. Uncle Hubi’s gentle irony had had its effect.
It was owing to Stiassny that the grandfather had been mentioned at all. One day, I was surprised to run into Stiassny at the home of my friend Wolf Goldmann. Strangely enough, he acted as though he did not notice me. We — that is, Wolf and I — were about to cross the room leading to Dr. Goldmann’s office. Since the doctor had usually been in the house when I was there, I had not yet viewed the skeleton that Wolf Goldmann had bragged to me about. We were going to see whether we could inspect it while Dr. Goldmann was out paying house calls. Stiassny stood in the room that led to the office. The room was a kind of library, if one could use that word in a house where every room was bursting with books. Stiassny was leaning over a couple of volumes on a table. He held a pencil in his teeth, his beautifully curved red lips curling into a smile I had never seen on him before — an utterly relaxed, slightly reflective, blissful smile. For the first time, I saw his face undisguised, and even his eyes did not have that veil of feigned blindness or at least sightlessness which they normally assumed when he lapsed into his repulsive role of “Who-am-I.” And he really did not appear to see us now. He was totally absorbed in what he was reading and what he thought about it — or rather, was thinking — for his lips moved slightly as though repeating or framing a sentence; then he leaned again over the works on the table in front of him.
We automatically wheeled around and tiptoed out. “Is he here a lot?” I asked. He had been coming regularly for many years; he was practically more at home in Dr. Goldmann’s than in my relatives’ house. But I was certain that Aunt Sophie and Uncle Hubi scarcely knew about this or would not admit it. I did not expect that he would mention our encounter, especially since he had scarcely been aware of it.
I was all the more surprised when at the next meal he quite demonstratively turned to me and said, again with the old blind gaze and ashen smile, “The development of our heir apparent is taking a delightful turn. One is abandoning one’s defiant isolation. One is becoming sociable. Nay, even more: one is spanning bridges across social chasms, reestablishing relationships that were broken off or, regrettably, never taken up in the first place. This will not win applause in circles whose Weltanschauung and national sensibilities are shaped by the Kyffhäuser Association. Indeed, people sharing the convictions of the Schönerers and Wolffs might view it as an outright betrayal of the sacred cause of Aryan thinking. But then, who am I to point out that one thereby evinces all the more agreement with the ideas of Fichte and Jahn and other Church Fathers of the student fraternity movement: the ideas of the Scheidlers, Riemanns, Horns, and whatever their names may be, all the Armins and Germans, whose goal, in the mighty blaze of nationalism after the Wars of Liberation, was simply freedom and thus, needless to say, the emancipation of the Jews as well! Why, they too would have found it unendurable to have a Heine or Mendelssohn or Rachel Varnhagen in the ghetto, nicht wahr? …”
Aunt Sophie, who may have noticed Stiassny’s unveiled malice against Uncle Hubi, came to her husband’s aid as usual by employing the intellectual method of indirect allusion — or, to put it in artillery terms, an auxiliary target. “I don’t think it’s right of you to confuse the boy with things he can’t possibly know,” she said resolutely. “He’s like us. He shouldn’t have so much muddled stuff in his head, like you. The boy should keep acting on his unspoiled feelings; then everything will be all right.”
The last sentence was both an encouragement for me and a tender admonition for Uncle Hubi not to let the sentimental remnants of his nationalistically inspired past move him to object to my friendship with young Goldmann, which, needless to say, was by now common knowledge in the house. But Uncle Hubi, accustomed to far heftier allusions to the extravagances of his formative years, would not be jolted so easily out of his bright-eyed, bushy-tailed good mood, especially since, after all, most of his mockers ultimately agreed with him when it came to anti-Semitism. He gleefully said, “Oh, if old Goldmann had lived to see this — too funny, really too funny!”
This launched a conversation to which everyone at the table had something to contribute because the topic was local events and the old local gossip, a conversation that explained my relatives’ aloofness from Wolf’s family but that also quite extraordinarily complicated my image of Germanhood.
“Old Goldmann,” grandfather of my friend Wolf and father of the physician Dr. Bear Goldmann, came from Galicia, in what had once been Russia. Tradition had it that he was the black sheep among the offspring of one of the erudite and extremely God-fearing rebbes who had their courts there. “Administrators of justice in all moral and religious issues,” said Stiassny, “akin to the Holy Sheikh of Sufism, who, incomprehensibly, is studied by so many religious scholars and blue-stockinged countesses seeking the experience of God — indeed studied far more intensively than these troubadours of God, who are much closer to us and more germane to our own thinking and feeling.”
Old Goldmann did not seem to have mustered the proper esteem for the rebbes’ faithful ardor and visionary rapture. He had not observed the ancient custom of following in the footsteps of his father, who stood in the odor of sanctity; instead, he rebelliously declared himself a freethinker and moved to Germany, where, highly musical himself, he had been entranced to the point of ecstasy by Richard Wagner’s music. On the side, he made a fortune (piquantly enough, in slaughterhouses), with which fortune (“Like many of his people — far more than anyone would care to presume or willingly admit,” said Stiassny) he had helped to subsidize Bismarck’s founding of the Reich. “Being both self-sacrificing and profit-making, I dare say,” Uncle Hubi threw in, and he was seconded by Aunt Sophie: “Well, Hubi’s right in this point. If there’s one thing the Jews know how to do it’s make money!”
There was uncertainty about when old Goldmann had come to the village to settle down at cattle-dealing, in an agriculturally prosperous region, and to build his “ridiculous show-off villa.” Stiassny claimed he had come only when, in stormy allegiance to Nietzsche, he defected from Wagner; disillusioned by Bismarckian autocratism, he had turned his back on Germany. But this was contradicted by the flagrantly pro-German style of his house, a style which, appearing in a Habsburg crownland and introduced by a Jew, was bound to look rather curious. It was certain, in any event, that this had not met with the approval of Uncle Hubi’s father, an ultraconservative Old Austrian who was almost religiously faithful to Kaiser Franz Josef and who, in the aura of his monarch’s divine right, played the role of a patriarch here, outstripping Bismarck’s autocratism by many laps. A Jew carrying on like a German nationalist must have struck the Old Austrian as an absurd blend of two incompatible, albeit equally repulsive, antitheses, a monstrosity so provoking that it would be best to ignore it altogether, simply to deny it out of the world so as not to be challenged by it. “Poor Papa did have his grief with me over that,” Uncle Hubi had to confess, shamefacedly — although once again he got instant protective help from Aunt Sophie, who said, “But you were very young at that time, Hubi — just when was it?! Around 1889, 1890, or so, before we even met. You could hardly expect to do anything sensible at that time. Why, you’d just turned eighteen, since you’re going on fifty-eight today.”