Despite certain references made by my father, I had, in those days, only very nebulous ideas about Nietzsche, Bismarck’s founding of the Reich and his antiliberal tendencies, and the repugnance felt by ultramontane Old Austrians toward German nationalists. Still, I realized there was an odd to-and-fro of pros and cons here, a bizarre exchangeability of contrasting attitudes and positions, with the hostilities becoming sharpest whenever one side took over dogmas from the other. Old Goldmann must have experienced this too closely for comfort. He had sent his son, Wolf’s father, to Vienna and Prague to study what he himself had been unable to study thoroughly: the humanities, which, in his opinion, led to the spiritual liberation of a man and thereby to the freedom of all mankind. This son, so favored by destiny, had come back a dry-as-dust physician. The only other thing he had brought home from those old and venerable universities was a hate-filled distaste for his father’s gushy Teutomania. He proclaimed himself a Zionist, a stubborn advocate of a Jewish national state in the Promised Land; and, to support this enthusiasm, he began to collect documents about the persecutions of Jews. All this to the bitter sorrow of old Goldmann, who had ardently striven all his life for the complete assimilation of the Jews in an enlightened world of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the name of humanity, therefore, he wanted them to withdraw from all political, national, or religious fanaticism. This withdrawal, he felt, must be the goal of those especially who for two thousand years had been the victims of such fanaticism.
Stiassny became so animated that he completely dropped his usual disgusting servility, showing the best traits of his character. His face aglow with beauty, he proceeded with his explanation of the progressive views which old Goldmann, repelled by the iron-devouring nationalism of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich, had wanted to bring into this heartland of ethnic and religious diversity. Goldmann had hoped to find fertile soil for his civilizing gospel here, in the atmosphere of an old imperial administration whose aim and goal should have been to keep a variety of creeds, languages, national characters, and ethnological habits in peaceful togetherness. But when Stiassny added that one might in fact try to understand the Bismarckian romanticism of Goldmann’s mansion in these terms, he relapsed into his ironical “But-who-am-I.” With faded eyes and the smile of a man who has eaten ashes, he explained that Goldmann’s house could not be regarded purely and simply as an expression of Jewish presumption, the insolence of a go-getter who had grown rich much too quickly and by devious means. It was not the arrogance of a Jewish upstart, he insisted, using newly acquired wealth to don the robes of patrician respectability. No, indeed; those turrets and balconies, those pennons and weathercocks, actually expressed a yearning for universal chivalrous justice, which the people who might have passed it on from generation to generation had long since traded in for flat-footed bourgeois philistinism.
In his freshly ventilated good mood, Uncle Hubert was immune to this jibe too. Modest by nature, he never put himself forward in conversation even if he had something to say; on the contrary, he had to be prodded by Aunt Sophie with a “Well, Hubi, why don’t you tell us what you think!” But once he began to talk, he did so with a dry humor that testified to his acute powers of observation and was far more effective than Stiassny’s curling, abstract arabesques. And this time too, Uncle Hubert’s sense of humor had its effect.
In a few terse sentences, he evoked the celebration that had taken place in the village in 1893, on the occasion of the forty-fifth anniversary of Kaiser Franz Josef’s accession to the throne; he described the comical events that were bound to occur in a popular festival officially arranged in an East European Gotham: the confusion during the parade of the volunteer firemen, with the token Jew, his helmet sliding down over his crooked nose and his trousers over his knees; the dreadfully off key band; the mindless speech given by the sweaty mayor in a borderland German that distorted everything; the Alliance of Maidens dressed in white, eliciting ribald remarks from the boys; and so on and so forth. Uncle Hubi’s father, being, as it were, the local deputy of His Apostolic Majesty, was showered with tributes, and, imbued with the responsible dignity of this vicariate, he likewise doled out honors. Having just accomplished the chore of bestowing a medal, he was about to betake himself to the town hall, followed by the clergy and the notabilities, past school classes and associations — when old Goldmann blocked his path. I pictured the scene in which Wolf Goldmann had blocked my path the day I had ventured out on my abortive excursion in fraternity gear: I imagined the same fiery ram-face and the same unimpeachable self-confidence. He was no longer brand-new in the village, old Goldmann. His bepennoned red-brick castello had been adorning the townscape for some time now. He himself, however, because of his eccentric Weltanschauung, had not even made contact with the Jewish community, much less any of the other religious, ethnic, or social grouplets. Now, he felt, the moment had come for him to break out of this isolation. After all, they were celebrating the forty-five-year reign of a patriarch of nations, under whose broad-minded fatherliness any race, nation, and religion, of any spirit and character, had found protection.
Uncle Hubi could not stifle a titter when recollecting this historic encounter. “Well, I can still see Papa peering at the Jew with his fat woman behind him, and the Jew sticking out his hand and saying, ‘Excuse me, Herr Baron, but may I introduce myself on this solemn occasion: Goldmann’s the name, Saul Goldmann. The Herr Baron may perhaps not have overlooked the fact that I settled here some years ago, and here in this community, to which I desire to belong in every way, I have erected my house….’ Now he yiddled a bit — not a lot, mind you, but just enough, something you can’t get rid of altogether if you come from darkest Galicia. And when he said ‘house,’ it sounded like ‘trousers,’ and Papa, well, he turned around to the mayor and asked him, ‘What did he erect in his trousers?’ And then on he went, leaving the Jew standing there with his woman and his dumb face and his hat on his chest and his crooked legs and the pointed, turned-up clodhoppers …”
As usual, Aunt Sophie confirmed this tableau: “Well, that’s very true, he was no beauty, really, old Goldmann, with his carroty hair, even if he’d made millions like Rothschild. Yes, Hubi’s quite right. His wife wasn’t much better either, and at least twice as fat.”