Hotel Wandl, where his group was accommodated. He had spent half an hour in front of the Landscape in Suffolk without giving his group a moment's thought, this was the first time he had been in central Europe and the first time he had seen an original Gainsborough. That Gainsborough was the high spot of his trip, he said, in surprisingly good German, before turning and leaving the museum. I had offered to help him find the Hotel Wandl but he had declined. A young painter, of about thirty, travels with a group to Vienna and looks at the Landscape in Suffolk and says that seeing the Landscape in Suffolk has been the high spot of his trip. This fact made me reflective the whole ensuing afternoon and well into the evening. How does that man paint in Tbilisi? I had asked myself all that time before eventually dismissing the thought as nonsensical. Lately there have been more Italians than Frenchmen, more Englishmen than Americans visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Italians with their innate understanding of art always act as if they were initiated from birth. The French tend to walk through the museum rather bored, the English act as if they knew and had seen everything. The Russians are full of admiration. The Poles regard everything with arrogance. The Germans at the Kunsthistorisches Museum look at their catalogue all the time while they go through the rooms, and scarcely at the originals hanging on the walls, they follow the catalogue and, as they walk through the museum, crawl deeper and deeper into the catalogue until, having reached the last page of the catalogue, they have therefore reached the exit from the museum. Austrians, especially Viennese, rarely go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum if one disregards the thousands of school classes which pay their duty visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every year. The school classes are guided through the museum by their teachers, men or women, which has a devastating effect on the pupils because, during these visits to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the teachers by their schoolmasterly narrow-mindedness stifle any perceptivity which these pupils may have for paintings and the men who created them. Dull-witted as they generally are, they very quickly kill in the pupils in their charge any feeling not only for painting, and the visit to the museum through which they lead their, so to speak, innocent victims as a rule, by their dull-wittedness and consequential dull-witted garrulousness, thus becomes the last visit to a museum by any of these individual pupils. Having once visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum with their teachers, these pupils never enter it again as long as they live. The first visit of all these young people is simultaneously their last. On these visits the teachers destroy for good the interest in art of the pupils in their charge, that is a fact. The teachers ruin the pupils, that is the truth, that is a century-old fact, and Austrian teachers in particular ruin in their pupils any taste for art from the start; at first all young people are receptive to everything, hence also to art, but the teachers thoroughly drive the art out of them; the predominantly dull-witted heads of Austrian teachers to this day proceed ruthlessly against their pupils' longing for art and generally for anything artistic by which all young people are initially fascinated and delighted in the most natural way. The teachers, however, are through and through petit-bourgeois and instinctively act against their pupils' fascination by art and enthusiasm for art by reducing art and generally anything artistic to their own depressing stupid dilettantism and by turning art and generally anything artistic at school into their repulsive recorder playing and an equally repulsive and incompetent choral singing, which is bound to repel the pupils. Thus the teachers from the very outset block their pupils from access to art. The teachers do not know what art is, and therefore cannot explain to their pupils or teach them what art is, and they lead them not towards art but push them away from art into their revolting, sentimental vocal and instrumental applied art, which is bound to repel their pupils. There is no cheaper artistic taste than that of teachers. Right from primary school, teachers ruin the pupils' artistic taste, they drive all art out of their pupils from the start, instead of elucidating art, and especially music, to them and making it a lifelong joy. But then the teachers are preventers and destroyers not only in matters of art, the teachers have always, all in all, been the preventers of life and existence, instead of teaching young people how to live, of deciphering life for them, of making life for them into a truly inexhaustible wealth of their nature, they kill it in them, they do everything to kill it in them. Most of our teachers are miserable creatures whose mission in life seems to consist of barricading life to the young people and eventually and finally making it into a terrible disillusionment. After all, it is only the sentimental and perverse small minds from the lower middle class which push their way into the teaching profession. The teachers are the henchmen of the state, and seeing that this Austrian state today is a spiritually and morally totally crippled state, one which teaches nothing but brutalization and corruption and dangerous chaos, the teachers, quite naturally, are also spiritually and morally deformed and brutalized and corrupt and chaotic. This Catholic state has no understanding of art and hence the teachers of this state have none, or are supposed to have none, that is what is so depressing. These teachers teach what this Catholic state is and instructs them to teach: narrowmindedness and brutality, vileness and meanness, depravity and chaos. There is nothing the pupils can expect from these teachers other than the mendacity of the Catholic state and of the Catholic state's power, I reflected while observing Reger and simultaneously, through Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, gazing into my childhood. I myself had these dreadful unscrupulous teachers, first rural teachers then urban teachers, and again, in turn, urban teachers and rural teachers, and I was ruined by them well into mid-life; they ruined me for decades to come, did my teachers, I reflected. They gave me and my generation nothing but the hideousness of the state and of a world spoilt and destroyed by that state. They gave me and my generation nothing but the repulsiveness of the state and of a world marked by that state. They gave me, just as the young people of today, nothing but their unreason, their incompetence, their dull-wittedness, their brainlessness. My teachers have given me nothing but their incompetence, I consider. They have taught me nothing other than chaos. For decades ahead they have, with the utmost ruthlessness, destroyed in me everything that had originally been in me to be developed, with all the potential of my intelligence, for the sake of my world. I myself had these appalling, narrow-minded, degraded teachers who have a thoroughly low opinion of human beings and of the human world, the lowest opinion decreed by the state, namely that nature must always and regardlessly be suppressed in the new young people and eventually killed for the purposes of the state. I too had those teachers with their perverse recorder playing and their perverse guitar strumming, who forced me to learn a sixteen-stanza Schiller poem by heart, which I always felt to be one of the most terrible punishments. I too had those teachers with their secret contempt of humanity as a method vis-à-vis their powerless pupils, those sentimentally grandiloquent henchmen of the state with their raised forefinger. I too had those feeble-minded mediators of the state, who several times a week caned my fingers with their hazel switch until they were swollen and pulled my head up by my ears so that I never overcame my secret fits of crying. Today the teachers no longer pull ears nor do they cane pupils' fingers with hazel switches, but their sick mentality has remained the same, I see nothing changed when I watch the teachers marching past the so-called old masters with their pupils, they are the same people, I reflect, as I had, the same who ruined me for life and destroyed me for life. This is how it has to be, this is how it is, the teachers say and they do not tolerate the least opposition because the Catholic state does not tolerate the least opposition and they leave their pupils nothing, absolutely nothing, of their own. These pupils are simply force-fed with state refuse, no differently from the way geese are force-fed with maize, and the state refuse is forced into their heads until these heads are chocked. The state believes that