“yes, but” is it worth the price of a destroyed civilization? I don’t give a damn for the future! Fuck the future! I live for today and will not live long enough to see those liberated rats produce a civilization of what they think to be social justice …
and that’s why the man in the half-ruined house in the icy Munich of winter 1947 does not give a fuck whether his wife (whom he has married the year before, whom he has promised to take in his arms and carry from the misery of postwar Germany into the dream world of Argentina or some such place of sparkling, starlit nights, of whispering palm trees, of mild air pulsating with cha-cha-cha and tango rhythms) slowly but steadily starves herself to death while her blue frozen fingers stuff a pipe with tobacco extracted from butts of cigarettes already made of cigarette butts, while he, her husband, just lies there on their bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep: isn’t that a shameful, cowardly, self-pitying attitude from someone brought up to be a good knight? … “yes, but” even the very best knight has moments of despair, think of Perceval or Tristan the fool; you are likely to lose faith in yourself and in mankind when you see the survivors of the cataclysm trying to build up a new world by building into it all the same structures that have led to the decomposition of the old; he, at least, would have no part in it, he was not guilty of helping bourgeois capitalism to revive and find its most fertile soil in bomb-cratered Germany; his hands were clean: his son — had he survived, the poor little thing — could nowadays consider papa a pioneer, an evangelist of dropouts, long before the idea of criticising the consumer society was dreamed of …
anyhow, what counts is not the moments, the days, perhaps the weeks and months when you are downhearted or defeated and want to give in for good (those moments of cowardice that did count for his first, East Prussian wife, that so shattered her confidence in him that he could never, never regain it); what really counts is what you salvage from your defeats ….
What, indeed? the career of a screenwriter for the most mediocre directors on the tattiest productions of Cinecittà? … “yes, but” a writer who dreams himself a genius of motion pictures, someone who would use images as the greatest writers use words — for words are no longer adequate for today’s reality, words are for awe, for beauty and veneration, for noble and refined feelings, for precise and differentiated thought, for minds sensitive like seismographs, for ears used to silence; today’s barbarians can’t cope with words, in their mouths words seem too big, they choke on them with too many pretentions; yet on the other hand they are too small, too narrow to hold the rapidly increasing, hybrid growth of their meaning: try to put the horror of a discothèque into words — a glimpse of a rock’n’roll-drunk teenager’s face does it; try to describe a concentration camp — how many thousand words would you need? — the photograph of a man hanging electrocuted in the barbed wire needs no comment; or try to explain the possibility of the various metamorphoses of a man’s character, the changes of his beliefs, convictions, points of view the while he feels no loss of identity — well, take his pictures as a boy, a young man, a grownup, a man shortly before and shortly after his midlife crises and have a close look at them, you’ll see it all there clear enough to give you goose bumps ….
in short, with all his yes, buts, he told himself, he did not lie to himself more than anyone else. Parallel to the way he was dreaming himself ran his feeling of guilt — and that was what made him feel I through all the changes. It was no personal guilt but a sort of collective guilt, a guilt shared by everyone belonging to so-called Western Civilization, a guilt that was immanent in the epoch, in this civilization’s present, particular state and shape. To be conscious of it, as if it were a personal guilt, was his dark privilege. I could not possibly act in a way other than to become guilty by it — yet I was responsible for it. That was his heavy keel. With that it didn’t matter what sails he set to what winds. The others believed in being strong characters, formed once and forever. Their identities (assuming they believed they had them) had, at best, grown over their faces like iron masks. He shed his own identity at will, studied it, put it away, put on another one, in which he studied himself again, as watchful as ever, always finding himself guilty in one way or other. His identities were forged not from the iron of a steadfast lifetime but from extremely light, virtually experimental and interchangeable materials, and they had not become second nature to him; although they were merely hypothetical, like molecular models scientists construct, he would find himself in each of them. Every one was undeniably I to him. In other words, with all his yes, buts, he knew he was lying to himself. But he also knew why he was lying to himself. And by knowing it, the better he knew it, he lied to himself no more.
Nor did he lie to others. He had indifferently left it up to his (present, third, Italian) wife to fathom why he regularly visited her almost ninety-four-year-old Russian great-aunt every Wednesday afternoon. It was not pure pleasure. For years now, she had been bedridden, surrounded by dusty, tattered, worn-out junk. She was shapelessly, inordinately fat, with a tiny turban on her bald head — the ephemeral crown on a pear-shaped face with enormous jowls, the eyes of a bloodhound puppy and the thin white mustache of an old Mandarin. And he did not care to picture what was wobbling under the ruff of her nightgown, what was running riot and to seed. Ninety-four-year-olds have a more indisputable commitment to their bodies than younger oldsters, whose decay often seems almost unethical; beyond the biblical age the body becomes sovereign — after all, we are then dealing with a corpse that has been virtually whisked away from death, with all the paraphernalia, the fermenting, flatulence, wetness, degeneracy; a corpse is an object of reverence even in its putrefaction … nevertheless, her corpse still very clearly put forward the demands of living matter: there was something mystical about the greed with which she grabbed the box of marrons glacés, tore open the wrapping, snatched out the kidney-shaped, sugar-frosted balls, stuffing one after another into the munching mouth under the Chinese mustache, claiming while she munched that she had never had much of a sweet tooth — something mystical, the feeding of a primordial toad. Then, she usually drowsed off. Less and less often did she tell him about St. Petersburg and Tiflis or Paris and London before the turn of the century. But this did occur now and again, and that was the reason he visited her: she too had lived half a dozen lives, some of them in grand brilliance — as a girl, at the court of the tsar; as the wife of a diplomat at posts in the capitals of the picture-book-happy world before the Great War; as an impoverished émigré in Paris of the twenties; as an ironical observer of Roman society before and after Mussolini. She presented him with the colorful plunder of her memories, with which he could then garnish his own memories more vividly, like someone adding an imaginative touch to his home with objects purchased at the flea market.
Thus the memory of his childhood, his adolescence in Rumania, his isolation in Berlin, his misery in the ice-rubble cities after 1945, gained new dimensions. His biography gained historical perspective. Each phase of his metamorphoses was enriched by anecdotes, descriptions, observations, ways of thinking, and turns of expression which this model White Russian bequeathed him. Thanks to her, his own life story became more complete, livelier, more credible, more true — the biography of a model White European, so to say: moth-eaten survivor of a bygone splendid world.