In the evening, there’s the passeggiata of the lovely, chaste women. It’s the passeggiata of a small town. The beautiful women walk in twos and threes, like convent girls. The gentlemen are continually doffing their hats, people here know each other so well that I feel a threefold stranger. I might almost be watching a film, a historical costume drama, where the people don’t know each other, the scenes of their greetings have been left in the cutting room, I am a stranger among strangers, the auditorium is dark; only the bright, garish intervals frighten me. It might be good to read a newspaper, to discover something about the world I have left behind in order to see something of the world.
By ten o’clock everything is quiet, there’s the distant glimmer of a single late bar down a side street; it’s a family gathering. Across the river, on the Turkish side, the houses climb up in flat terraced trays, their lights dissolve in the fog, they remind me of the wide staircase to a lofty altar.
There is a theatre and opera, there is a museum, hospitals, a law court, police, everything a city could want. A city! As if Sarajevo were a city like any other! As though the war to end all wars hadn’t begun here in Sarajevo! All the monuments, all the mass graves, all the battlefields, all the poison gas, all the cripples, the war widows, the unknown soldiers: they all came from here. I don’t wish destruction upon this city, how could I? It has dear, good people, beautiful women, charming innocent children, animals that are grateful for their lives, butterflies on the stones in the Turkish cemetery. And yet the War began here, the world was destroyed, and Sarajevo has survived. It shouldn’t be a city, it should be a monument to the terrible memory.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 July 1927
26. The Opened Tomb
In cinema newsreel footage you can see the Russian czar and the Imperial family on one of their last outings in Petersburg, the czarina, the little czarevich, the whole court, the rigid Honour Guard. This sequence is followed by the recording of the May Day parade which was recently taken by Trotsky in Moscow. Through the distance between these two slices of history the audience begins to understand how much has happened.
It should have been reversed: first the scenes with the red multitudes, under the command of a man with no military education and whose orientation is primarily literary, and then the last czar with his family. Following the picture of the czar the screen should be left white, clear and white as a funeral shroud, and a rigid silence must overlay it, compared to which the silence of the Siberian taiga would be noisy commotion. For not even an ignorant and insentient screen can show the scenes of these ten by ten dead, and more-than-dead people without emotion; this vision of ghosts who were dead at the moment they were filmed fresh and frolicsome, and who when they were murdered were not murdered; what was extinguished in them was not life so much as an unreality which bore an uncanny resemblance to life. The last czar ruled, banished and executed; he permitted branding, looting and killing in his name. Yes, he was even wound up for the piece of film. But, as the film shows, he didn’t live. Even graves have a breath. This blew so deceptively through the bodies of the czar’s family that one supposed they were all alive, the Archduke, the Archduchess, the rigid Guard and the little czarevich.
In the van strides the czar. He is wearing a richly stitched and braided tunic, a kind of hussar’s uniform, and his face is mounted on a pointed little imperial beard screwed to the middle of his chin. His heavy eyelids are like lowered blinds. Their glassy regard is probably levelled at the camera. It’s like the stare down the barrels of rifles a few years later. The czar walks briskly, with the movements of a creature that is part puppet, part shadow. He vanishes half-right, there where the white screen bleeds into black background. Not for an instant do you think a piece of film has come to an end in the projector behind you. This is the invocation of an undead soul at a spiritist séance.
The czarina and all the court ladies are wearing the fashions of the pre-War age, the big hats with wide rims, bent down at the front and up at the back, secured to the lofty coiffures by means of pins to keep them from swaying. The hats are worn at an angle and shade one profile, in order to show the other quite unprotected. They look terribly bold; they have the false boldness of robber hats at mask balls, the futile coquetterie of a scent that would be alluring but is only musty. The dresses are long and closed at the top, whalebone rings the throat like a closely fitted garden fence, and the bosom, at once respectable and emphatic, arches under a great deal of impenetrable material. The hair is pulled painfully up behind the ears.
These ladies are even older and deader than the Hussars’ uniforms. They sashay past in a swift gaggle, and although they are all clad in white, they look like so many mourning veils.
It’s all over in three minutes. It’s no more than one of the numerous terrible moments of world history that show crowned heads at play. This one happened to have been caught by a camera and handed down to posterity. The film is a little worn, the pictures flicker, but one can’t say whether it is punctures made in it by the tooth of time, or molecules of natural dust that have shrouded these seemingly living subjects. It is the most terrible irreality that film has ever shown; a historical dance of death, an opened tomb that once looked like a throne…
Frankfurter Zeitung, 31 December 1925
27. His K. and K. Apostolic Majesty*
There was once an Emperor. A great part of my childhood and youth happened under the often merciless lustre of His Majesty, which I am entitled to write about today because I was so vehemently opposed to it then. Of the two of us, the Emperor and me, I came out on top — which isn’t to say that I should have done. He lies buried in the Kapuzinergruft, and under the ruins of his crown, while I, living, stumble about among them. Faced by the majesty of his death and its tragedy — not his — my political convictions are silent, and only memory is awake. No external occasion has wakened it. Perhaps just one of those hidden, inner, private things that sometimes cause a writer to raise his voice, without him caring whether there is anyone listening to him or not.
When he was buried, I stood, one of the many soldiers of his Viennese garrison, in my new field grey uniform that we were to go to war in a few weeks later, a link in the long chain that lined the streets. The shock that came from understanding that the day was an historic one encountered a complicated sadness about the passing of a fatherland that had raised its sons to opposition. Even as I was condemning it, I already began to mourn it. And while I bitterly measured the proximity of the death to which the dead Emperor was sending me, I was moved by the ceremony with which His Majesty (and this was Austria-Hungary) was being carried to the grave. I had a clear sense of the absurdity of the last years, but this absurdity was also part of my childhood. The chilly sun of the Habsburgs was being extinguished, but it had at least been a sun.
The evening we marched back to barracks in our double rows — parade march on the wider streets — I thought about the days a childish piety had led me to seek out the physical proximity of the Emperor, and I mourned the passing not of the piety but of those days. And because the death of the Emperor spelt the end of the country and of my childhood, I mourned Emperor and fatherland as my childhood. Since that evening I have often thought about the summer mornings when I would go out to Schönbrunn at six, to watch the Emperor’s annual departure for Bad Ischl. The war, the revolution and my radical politics could neither deface nor eclipse those summer mornings. I think those mornings were responsible for my susceptibility to ceremony, my capacity for reverence at religious occasions, and the parade on the 9 November in Red Square in the Kremlin, before every moment of human history whose beauty accords with its grandeur, and each tradition that at least confirms the existence of a past.