reading tours, travelling in one way and another through the whole of Germany and through the whole of Austria and through the whole of Switzerland and they do not miss out even the most dull-witted backwoods dump for reading their rubbish and getting themselves fêted and they allow their pockets to be stuffed full of marks and of schillings and of francs, Reger said. There is nothing more distasteful than a so-called poet's reading, Reger said, there is hardly anything I detest more, but none of these people see anything wrong in reading their rubbish everywhere. Not a single person is basically interested in what these people have scavenged on their literary marauding expeditions, but they read it all the same, they get up on the stage and read it and they bow to every half-witted town councillor and to every dull-witted village mayor and to every jackanapes of a professor of German, Reger said. They read their rubbish from Flensburg down to Bolzano and let themselves be kept in the most brazen manner. There is nothing more intolerable for me than a so-called poet's reading, Reger said, it is repulsive to sit down and read one's own rubbish, because that is all those people do read — just rubbish. While they are still fairly young you can stretch a point, but once they are older, once they are in their fifties and beyond, it is just nauseating. But it is mainly these older writers, Reger said, who read everywhere and who climb up on every platform and who sit down at every table in order to present their poetic rubbish or their dull-witted senile prose, Reger said. Even if their dentures can no longer retain any of their mendacious words in their oral cavity, they still mount the platform of never mind what municipal hall and read their charlatanist nonsense, Reger said. A singer singing songs is insufferable enough, but a writer reciting his own products is a lot more insufferable still, Reger said. A writer stepping on to a public platform in order to read his opportunist rubbish, even if it is in Saint Paul's Church in Frankfurt, is a pitiful fairground ham, Reger said. Germany and Austria are swarming with such opportunist fairground hams, Reger said. Oh yes, he said, the logical conclusion would invariably be total despair about everything. But I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail, Reger said. In this world and inthis age, he said, where anything is possible nothing will soon be possible. Irrsigler appeared and Reger nodded to him as if to say, you are better off than I am, and Irrsigler turned and disappeared again. Reger was supporting himself on his stick locked between his knees when he said: just reflect, Atzbacher, what it means to have the ambition to compose the longestplaying symphony in the history of music. No one else would have conceived such a nonsensical idea except Mahler. Some people say Mahler was the last great Austrian composer, that is ridiculous. A man who, in full control of his mind, has fifty strings fiddling away only to outdo Wagner is ridiculous. Austrian music reached its absolute low with Mahler, Reger said. Purest kitsch, generating mass hysteria, just as Klimt, he said. Schiele is the more important painter. Nowadays even a poor Klimt kitsch painting costs several million pounds, Reger said, that is distasteful. Schiele is not kitsch, but of course Schiele is not a really great painter either. In this century there have been several Austrian painters of Schiele's quality, but, with the exception of Kokoschka, not a single really important one, a really great one, as it were. On the other hand, we have to admit that we cannot know what really great painting is. After all, here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, we have instances of so-called great painting by the hundred, Reger said, but as time goes on they no longer seem to us to be great, no longer so important, because we have studied them too thoroughly. Anything we study thoroughly loses value for us, Reger said. We should therefore avoid studying anything thoroughly. But we cannot help studying everything thoroughly, that is our misfortune, by doing so we dissolve everything and ruin everything for us, indeed we have very nearly ruined everything for us already. A line of Goethe, Reger said; it is studied for so long by us that in the end it no longer seems quite as magnificent as at first, it gradually loses its value for us and what initially may have seemed to us the most magnificent line altogether ends up as an elemental disappointment. Anything we study thoroughly ultimately disappoints us. A mechanism of dissection and disintegration, Reger said, that is a habit I acquired in my early years, without realizing that this was my misfortune. Even Shakespeare crumbles totally if we concern ourselves with him and study him for any length of time, his sentences get on your nerves, his characters disintegrate before the drama and ruin everything for us, he said. In the end we no longer take any pleasure in art, any more than in life, no matter how natural this may be, as progressively we have lost our naiveté and with it our stupidity. Yet in exchange we have only gained unhappiness. By now it has become absolutely impossible for me to read Goethe, Reger said, to listen to Mozart, to look at Leonardo or Giotto, I no longer have any prerequisites for that. Next week I shall again take Irrsigler to lunch at the Astoria, Reger said, while my wife was alive I used to go to the Astoria for lunch with her and with Irrsigler at least three times a year, I owe it to Irrsigler to continue those Astoria lunches, he said. We should not only use people like Irrsigler, we should also show them a kindness now and again. And the best way is for me to take Irrsigler to the Astoria for lunch. Of course I could take his family to the Prater from time to time, but I do not feel up to that, the Irrsigler children hang on to me like burrs and well-nigh tear the clothes off me with their effusiveness, he said. And the Prater is so distasteful to me, you know, the sight of all those drunken men and women cracking their cheap jokes in front of the shooting galleries and giving free rein to their horrid primitiveness, I feel soiled all over whenever I have gone to the Prater. But then the Prater today is no longer the Prater as it was in my childhood, the turbulent amusement park; the Prater today is a distasteful assembly of vulgar people, an assembly of criminal types. The whole Prater reeks of beer and crime and we encounter in it nothing but the brutality and the brazen feeble-mindedness of vulgar snotty Viennesedom. Not a day passes without a murder in the Prater being in the papers, every day at least one, usually several, rapes in the Prater. In my childhood the Prater always was a joyous day out and in spring there really was a perfume of lilac and chestnuts there. Today proletarian perversity stinks to high heaven. The Prater, this most charming of all inventions for amusement, is now nothing but a common fairground of vulgarity. Ah, if the Prater were still as it was in my childhood, Reger said, I would go there with the Irrsigler family, but as it is I do not go there, I cannot afford to; if I went to the Prater with the Irrsigler family I should be wrecked for weeks to come. My mother was still driven to the Prater with her parents in the carriage and would run along the Prater Avenue in a floating silk dress. Such pictures are history, Reger said, all that is long past. Today you are lucky if you are not shot in the back in the Prater, Reger said, or stabbed in the heart, or at the least have your wallet lifted from your jacket. The present age is an utterly brutalized age. Taking the Irrsigler children to the Prater is something I have done only once, never again. They hung on me like burrs and tore the clothes off me and demanded every other moment that I took them on the ghost train or on the automatic merry-go-round. It made me feel quite sick, Reger said. Needless to say, I have nothing against the Irrsigler children, Reger said, but they are too much for me. Irrsigler on his own is all right, but the whole Irrsigler family, that is impossible. With Irrsigler at the Astoria, at my corner table looking out at the deserted Maysedergasse, that is all right, but with the Irrsigler family to the Prater, that is impossible. Each time I invent a new excuse in order not to have to go to the Prater with the Irrsigler family. A visit to the Prater with the Irrsigler family seems to me like a visit to hell. I also cannot bear the voice of Frau Irrsigler, Reger said, I cannot bear that voice. The Irrsigler children also have basically frightful voices, it does not bear thinking about those voices growing up, he said. Such a quiet pleasant person as Irrsigler and such a loud-voiced woman as the Irrsigler woman and such loud-voiced children as the Irrsigler children. On one occasion Irrsigler suggested that I should make a trip into the countryside with him and his family. That, too, I declined and I have been writhing for years to escape just such a