A similar recognition came my way only once again, many years later, and not from him. I was with friends in Transylvania in order to study the rugs that the Turks, on the occasion of their generally bloodless capture of the localities, had presented to the peace-loving town elders — rugs now kept in the fortress churches of the small market towns; you can see the dedicatory inscriptions on their so-called appendages (the unknotted endpieces of the underlying fabric). It was spring, at the time of the cherry blossoms. We had stopped at a little town with miniature gabled houses, and all around the snowy globes of cherry trees crowded up the slopes of the hill on the crest of which stood the fortified church. The surrounding fields shone with newly sprouting green, and pale foliage shimmered on the black-and-white-flecked birches. The baroque convolutions of a huge white cloud stood motionless in a sky of immaculate blue. We sat on the market square in an old pub — we should have been wearing wigs and buckled shoes in such a place — and drank the sweet heavy wine of the region; our mood became cheerful and animated, as the innkeeper proudly brought us ever more select vintages from his cellar. In a corner of the room sat an old Romanian cioban—a mountain shepherd — who watched our doings with a benign smile. He wore traditional garb — the garb of the old Dacians as it can be seen on the Trajan Column in Rome: a roughly woven linen shirt over close-fitting cotton trousers, girded by a red sash; a sleeveless sheepskin jacket, heavily embroidered in many colors; and high-laced buskins. On his hair, falling to his shoulders in straggly silver-gray strands, towered the cioban’s high black lambskin bonnet. His stubbly face shone with guileless sympathy. We invited him to join us for a glass. He accepted. Upon hearing that we had come from Bucharest, the capital, he nodded in acknowledgment, but then pointed at me and said, “But you, you’re from the woods. I can tell. You’re dressed like someone from the city, but that doesn’t deceive me. You grew up in the woods.” We all laughed and my friends said they had always known I had come straight down from the trees. But from him, the recognition had been like a patent of nobility. I bowed, grateful and proud, and thought that my father would have been pleased to hear it.
I know — I always knew, intuitively — what the woods meant to my father. He who seeks solitude is a solitary. And he was a solitary to the point of melancholia. Only his defiant contrariness, the innate rebellion in his nature, the stubborn persistence in any decisions or judgments once formulated forbade him to yield to spleen and, at the same time, lent him his air of eternal boyishness. Yet they mutually generated each other: defiance was born of melancholia and melancholia of defiance. At times it seemed incomprehensible that someone of such clearheaded intelligence could be so set in absurd prejudices and outlandish fixed ideas. His view of the world was that of a medieval woodcut. Humanity was divided into those to be taken at full value (huntsmen) and those he called perioecians: the multitude who lived marginally, a motley agglomeration from which he sometimes would pick the odd, queer specimen worthy of passing interest — apothecaries, for instance, because they knew how to mix poisons. He respected conventional painters such as Rudolf von Alt or the portraitist Ferdinand von Raissky and of course painters of animals (all presumed to be hunters) such as Ernst von Dombrowski, in addition to Rubens (because of all that alluring female flesh). He detested music, notwithstanding his zestful morning vocalizing — with the exception of Richard Wagner, ideologue of the Greater Germany movement. All this was proof of a disarming mediocrity in matters of taste. But his lack of cultural sophistication was compensated by a decisiveness in choice that was the mark of both his intelligence and his obsessions. Anything connected with the military was distasteful to him ever since he had lost his commission as reserve lieutenant. Though he rose to the rank of cavalry captain in the First World War, anything to do with soldiering was repugnant to him. Socially unacceptable were all those in trade, and totally despicable was anyone dealing in money.
This judgmental hierarchy — which, incidentally, did not assist him in his own handling of money — produced some deplorable effects. Before I was old enough to serve as his hunting apprentice and companion, he took a liking to a young man who, although the son of a former captain in the imperial medical corps — that is, an academic renegade who had deserted into the military — at least answered to the Germanic name Ingolf and, more important still, distinguished himself by a feverish passion for hunting. For a time he was my father’s favorite and accompanied him on all his shoots; he was, to my intense resentment, presented with the gift of some rifles and was praised to the skies. However, the young man also had to think of his future and therefore entered the service of a bank. From then on, my father no longer knew him and barely reciprocated his greeting when they met.
While such attitudes were already close to mental derangement, my father’s anti-Semitism was outright pathological. This aberration even crept into the articles he wrote for hunting magazines. What the chosen people can possibly have to do with the observation that longbills tend to skim along forest lanes and drift toward smoke remains totally unfathomable, but he managed to find the association — as, for instance, that no lure is of any use if one happens to encounter a Jew in the morning before the hunt, or that Jews nowadays even have the impudence to participate in snipe shoots. Such idiotic derogations were eagerly printed in German periodicals of the 1930s, though this did not mean that my father was a friend of National Socialism. Much as the nationalist element in the Greater Germany concept appealed to him, he was repelled by its socialist component, on sociological rather than ideological grounds. Together with Lord Russell he shared the view that one had to be a very great gentleman to be a good socialist. Who was not a gentleman had better keep out of politics if he did not wish to be placed under police supervision as a club-swinging anarchist. He showed me some illustrated magazines on whose title pages could be seen pictures of the new Führer of what soon was to become the Greater German Reich. “It’s all very fine and well,” my father commented, “Germany rises once more. But have a look at this fellow: I wouldn’t hire him as a stable boy!’’
He would not even concede to the new regime its hatred of Jews, which in his eyes was a privilege reserved to him and his peers. “To be sure,” he would say, “Jews are blood-suckers, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to steal from them.” That much worse was done to them he preferred to deny. “Admittedly, in Russia pogroms were possible — and might even happen in our day. But the Germans are a cultured nation.” (After all, they produced Nietzsche and Wagner.) When the followers of the Romanian anti-Semitic leader A. C. Cuza started to beat up Jews, he closed his eyes: it happened, he said, because the Jews in the countryside exploited the peasants. His moral condemnation was directed at anything having to do with or motivated by money; and as everyone knew, money was the main concern of the Jews.