Often, I would stand motionless in one of the tower rooms for hours at a time, listening into the silence. If I had claimed to be working, they would probably have interpreted my answer as insolent and rebuked me. But it was true: I was working my way into a man’s existence. I did it instinctively, in the fashion of mystics — by trying to become as one with the things around me; after all, these objects contained the spirit of virile existence and thus had to have something of its substance.
This was not difficult to do among the temperas that showed mounted skirmishes between Uhlans and Cossacks in Galicia during the early years of the Great War. Exciting events could be relived effortlessly. But how could one penetrate the mystery of what it was that made a piece of furniture — for instance, a full-length mirror, a so-called psyché—quite unmistakably masculine, while a similar piece in Aunt Sophie’s bedroom, made in the same severe Empire neoclassic style, was just as unmistakably feminine? Piercing to the essence, the entity, of this maleness demanded such intense spiritual activity, such subtle mobilizing of the senses, that I was often virtually numbed and so oddly frightened that I had to flee from myself, out into the open.
Something was now surprisingly revealed to me, namely Uncle Hubi’s bachelor days. These opened up to me as a new dimension not just of Uncle Hubi but of the whole world. What gave me most food for thought was the realization that this adolescence and early manhood of my uncle-by-marriage, this period whose mementos had found refuge here, was absolutely masculine, yet masculine in a girlishly sentimental and poetic way that did not fundamentally contradict the rough-tough tone of the “last heroes and warriors.” The symbol of that period was two student rapiers crisscrossed and entwined by a divided apple-green and peach-red ribbon. Above the point of intersection hung a “little keg,” a brimless cap of the same colors as the ribbon, with a fraternity cipher embroidered on it in gold; emphatically terminated by an exclamation point, the cipher contained the initials of the fraternity name as well as those of the motto Vivat, crescat, floreat! The letters twisted into an arabesque: the musical key signature for the atmospheric motif of the reality to which these objects bore symbolic witness.
I realized now the meaning of certain hints in the teasing, mocking tone that made the relationship between Uncle Hubi and his friends and kinfolk cozily amusing, allusions I had never especially heeded and of course never understood. As a former Austrian, Uncle Hubi openly hated Prussia and despised the states of the old Austro-Hungarian empire that had gone so far as to form a new and hybrid empire under the crown of the Hohenzollerns. Nonetheless, my uncle had attended the University of Tübingen, taking active part in a dueling fraternity there, and (presumably in concordance with his brothers, but counter to the prohibition of political activity among corpsmen) he had committed himself, in fraternal enthusiasm, to the notion of a Greater Germany — an anti-Semite and a Wagnerian, as well as an ardent disciple of his political idol Georg von Schönerer. The latter, having forced his way into the editorial office of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt (in March 1888, this “Jew gazette” had incorrectly spread the news of Kaiser Wilhelm I’s death), had received a prison sentence and forfeited his title of nobility. I had heard about the incident at home. My father never failed to remind Uncle Hubi of it in his occasional fits of caustic humor, which invariably hit the target: Uncle Hubi was still able to wax indignant about a harshness that had almost brought him to the barricades as a young man — and usually Aunt Sophie seconded him: “If there’s one thing Hubi just can’t bear, it’s injustice. You just have to understand!”
What I now understood — or rather re-created — was Uncle Hubi’s youth. I almost physically grasped the burning passion that a blast of the Zeitgeist had kindled in him, so fiery that it devoured everything to which he had been reared and educated — his highly civilized Old Austrian skepticism, its loathing of exuberance and impetuousness, the love of tradition and the respectful loyalty to the state — and devoured all this as thoroughly as it had the other elements that were in his blood, as it were, derived from the land where he had been born and bred: Balkan cunning and its all-defusing sense of humor, Oriental mellowness and its phlegm. I tried to track down the tinder of this passion, and I found it in a book with a simple — but no less demanding — title: The Bible. Needless to say, this was not the Holy Writ of the Old and the New Testaments. It was a “drinking book” for the student fraternities, a collection of lyrics from which, along with the spirit of the German nineteenth century, everything else leaped out at me: everything that was regarded as truly and essentially German by myself — and presumably by any other German-speaking person who was descended, like me and my family, from colonial settlers of the old empire and was living in a remote area of Eastern Europe. It all leaped out at me like a fiery wind.
The spring was at its height when I came to Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie; melted water shot through the ditches, making the brooks overflow into the meadows; and it seems to me that I must have carried on in an equally effusive way. The title page of the “Bible” sported a colored emblem: a group of merry students boating down the Rhein, wearing a costume that corps members don even today on festive occasions — a braid-trimmed, black-velvet jacket, snug white trousers, and high boots, plus the “little keg,” the fraternity cap. One student lies stretched out in the stern; a second one stands in the bow, crooning; the others ply the oars. The hills on the opposite bank are crowned with the ruins of castles. I was so moved by this little picture and its gaily romantic mood that I yearned for nothing so much as to run around in that outfit myself. Aunt Sophie had always had a maternal sympathy for my childhood extravagances. A few years before, she had given me an unforgettably beautiful Christmas present: a lushly fringed Indian outfit, with moccasins imaginatively embroidered by her own hand. And now, kind Aunt Sophie rummaged through all the plunder boxes in the attic, looking for something similar enough to the braided velvet jacket to pass for a fraternity costume after a few alterations. Fortunately, Geib, the old butler, remembered that a deceased brother of his brother-in-law (the blacksmith at the brewery) had been a foreman in a manganese mine on the Bistriţa River, and perhaps the widow still had his miner’s jacket.
I was on good terms with this blacksmith, whose name was Haller. I liked hanging around his smithy, especially to melt out the lead core from old rifle bullets. I cast the lead into pellets for my slingshot and used the copper shells as tips for my arrows. Envious and admiring, I would watch Haller remove the white-hot bullets from the fire with his tongs, letting the lead run out and quickly rolling the empty shells over the horny calluses of his hand without getting burned. I tried to imitate him once, and wound up with some bad blisters. In any case, Haller liked me, and he spoke to his brother’s widow: the jacket became mine. It reeked of camphor and was much too large; but Aunt Sophie, who always had a couple of seamstresses working in a back room, had them take in the jacket at the seams so that it more or less fitted. It barely differed from the student getup and even had small epaulets in the bargain.
So far, so good. But it was harder to rig up the lower part of the gear: the snug white trousers and the black boots reaching way past the knees. I staunchly refused to pull on some cotton hunting drawers of Uncle Hubi’s; but — only after some inner reluctance — I did accept a silk leotard that Aunt Sophie had worn under her costume at some masquerade in long-past days of slender youthfulness. A pair of black rubber boots, forgotten by some hunting guest, only went up to my calves, spaciously wobbling around them. But to compensate, good Aunt Sophie dug up a black-velvet biretta, crowning it all by twisting a genuine red foxbrush around it, just like on the proud headgear of the “fox major,” who oversees the first-year pledges in a dueling corps. When, all tackled up at last, I faced the looking glass in Aunt Sophie’s boudoir (the psyché in Empire style), the Rumanian chambermaid Florica, who had helped my aunt and the old housekeeper Katharina with the preparations, was overcome by such a convulsive fit of the giggles that she had to be sent from the room.