V
Successes tasted bitter to him, almost like failures. Of course, Austria had its connived-at failures, its failures in spe, a sort of parallel to pre-censorship. Displeasure at court, not even spontaneous displeasure, but a factitious displeasure bred by snoops and tell-tales, fed by intrigue, slander, malice, could hinder even a failure, and took from the writer the possibility of hearing the voice of an audience. To be taken off the programme, to be scorned, rejected, whistled at by an audience, all that spells an honest, so to speak, earned failure. But to “meet with disfavour” before the writer is even allowed to throw down his challenge, to suffer a fate that is itself a challenge and that is too powerful for you to measure yourself against, is a difficult lot, an Austrian curse. It’s like being imprisoned without charge. Under these conditions success, honour even, could not bring satisfaction, much less pleasure. And so success and failure tasted equally bitter to him. It was even possible that success brought pain, and failure only a long-awaited, almost yearned-for melancholy. One may feel at home in misery, gradually begin to love it like a dear friend. There is a condition in which one fears joyful surprises, Christmas at the wrong time, presents that are like assaults, and at the sight of which one is even forced to smile. Success can be a torment.
He saw through hope, came to like doubt, but didn’t lose his faith. It’s not possible to lose faith: after all, it’s faith in God. Scepticism doesn’t hurt such faith: on the contrary, it accompanies it, sometimes even supports it. The unreliability of the world is a consequence of its inadequacy. You don’t oppose its pressure, its mood, its despotism, by open revolt, which can have no other outcome than catastrophic inadequacy, in other words: disorder, the greatest of all dangers to a human, but by a retreat into the depth, into the cave of the self. An association, impossible to dismiss, with the image of the gloomy Spanish monarch burying himself alive.** He doesn’t live off to the side, but in the depths. From below he sees more accurately, with a juster bitterness and a moral bitterness, the facility, the poverty of the high-ups, and more clearly the summit of heaven; by day the stars that populate it (even by day). The dead on all sides are nearer to him than the living can be above him. He hears their breathing, the silent sleep of the time-conquerors. They have conquered this era that is so antagonistic and so wrong. It is made up of darkness and a false dawn, hailed by clueless, optimistic, noble, revolutionary bowler hats, feared by bitter men of our sort, who are not colour blind and understand exactly how much human blood is needed to brew that “dawn’s fiery glow”. It is soaked full of the blood of the great revolution, of the wars of Napoleon, when for the first time the cry rang out: “Nations, awaken!” The response of our dour species is: “From humanity through nationality to bestiality.”
Oh, those times! The hierarchical institutions are still intact, but the men in charge of them are slothful, thoughtless, unprincipled. They embody the randomness and disorder they have been called in to oppose. They are not called, they are hired. They have the perplexing ability — the curse, more — of oppressing and retreating at one and the same time. The astringency of the ancestors and forefathers, put to the service of an implacable idea, is as different from the facile, illegitimate desire to press, the tyranny of the ruler, as dark is from black. Anarchy wears the mask of legitimacy. Meanwhile, a second anarchy, following on the heels of the first, makes ready to fight it. Lonely and timorous on the surface, protected in the depths. Charles V went to the grave alive; he felt the end was nigh, he too had no confederates.
VI
The end of the great but perceptibly shrinking empire still has one noble aspect, for all its inner cracks, flaws, pettinesses and rottennesses. A noble death. The victorious troops have something of the classic élan of Lipizzaner greys, the courtliest beasts in Europe, who have the symbolic nobility of heraldic animals. Austrian troops go to battle in snow-white tunics. Their victories are the classic successes of an outlived tradition. Their defeats carry symbolic weight. It’s the last hurrah of the old knightliness, losing out to plebeian technology; the unprotected advance of massed ranks against small, mobile, camouflaged units in broken field; the highly visible snow white, a noble target, against a blue that was invisible in fog (and called “Prussian blue” ever since); the cavalry charge against fortified artillery positions. It’s the end of feudalism: dying in the old armour, fighting a parvenu who is about to put on the false crown, a legal figment of an emperor. Seen from a higher angle, the Junker becomes an ignorant beneficiary of the great Revolution and the only genial arriviste of history: Napoleon.
Such is the catastrophe billowing around Grillparzer. His contemporaries — even the most significant of them — are not able to stand up to it. They are too small for such a comprehensive defeat, which confirms the decline of Charles V, and anticipates that of Karl in 1918. They take refuge in the treasury of home, in Austria, which is still capacious and various enough and has enough breath, but is now only “folklore” not “world”. Its orientation has changed, too: now it is Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Tehran, Constantinople; no more towards Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Milan, Rome, Hanover — and the fraternal enemy Berlin. The great and important in Austria acquire the peripheral character of specialities — dialect dyes them all, even the cosmopolitan Viennese, not just the provincial “folk poets” and “local characters”. Only Grillparzer kept the world in view, because he was the only one who suffered the pain of the lost, great, dry world. But Calderon and the Spanish antecedents of the Habsburgs became ever more remote, that is: his moral and intellectual origins are still less present than his material home, Switzerland. Twenty years ago the past was still there, instinct with life. Now it’s shrouded in dimness and fog. Grillparzer alone remains, a monument, buried alive, a living monument, already crumbling. His face is like weathered stone, yellow-hued, as though there was something like stone parchment. His body, too, lean, knotty and stooped, is reminiscent of wood, root, rock. His statue is less stony than he is. His heart shines in his large eyes, loyal grey mirrors to a sunken world, large, bright lights that listened to the future, and picked up the terror of the final end. When he shut them for ever, not prematurely, not at the right moment, if anything too late, because death can sometimes be as cruel as life — Charon delayed — people only knew that a “classic”, one of the “greats”, “a Burgtheater dramatist”, an Austrian pendant to the Académie Française-member, a retired senior civil servant, had gone on. And one knows still less today than then about how widely spanned his life’s arc was, all the way from Alcázar to Königgrätz; from grandezza and ceremonial to vulgarity and the Prussians; from the Habsburgs to the Hohenzollerns: from humanity through nationality to bestiality.
Austria has no Pantheon, only its cemeteries and a Kapuzinergruft, and rightly so. They are all under the sward: Beethoven, Bruckner, Stifter, Raimund, Nestroy, Grillparzer. To represent Austria means to be misunderstood and maltreated in your lifetime; unappreciated after your death; and periodically, by the agency of anniversary celebrations, to be returned to obscurity.
Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 4 December 1937
*Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer (1791–1872), Austrian dramatist and moralist.