He lost none of his bright nature. Of his dead daughter he spoke without a trace of sentimentality and with a loving cheerfulness, as if she were still alive and he were merely reporting an engaging example of her graceful charm. Once he did this quite extensively. He had come back to the Bukovina on the matter of his unlawfully premature retirement from the Religious Fund. The dispute between my mother and Philip concerning the Odaya finally had resulted in my usurping the property, so that now I considered myself the proprietor of this forsaken piece of no-man’s-land. I found it amusing to invite my father to my shooting grounds for a change, though I didn’t have much to offer: a few ducks and hares in the wetlands of the Prut. But I knew that he would be pleased to see again the house in which my sister had been born and in which she had spent her first four years more under his own loving care than that of her repeatedly absent mother. We both were aware of my sister’s ambivalence about the Odaya, oscillating between mute and bitter resentment of the essentially Eastern, only marginally European nature of the Bukovina and, on the other hand, her love, repressed into a mythic past, for the land of her childhood: the grove of firs, beeches, birches and willow trees that lay behind the manor house like an oasis in the desolate landscape. A small pond and two or three benches on its winding paths, laid out God knows when, gave it the appearance of a park, even though this pretty stand of trees soon diminished into bordering scrub, lost in the wide spaces of maize fields and the Prut River marshes. Jays, magpies, rollers and songbirds took refuge in the crowns of those trees, and from their mystery-laden dusk could be heard the crepuscular hooting of wood owls and the ringing song of nightingales; woodpeckers, their wings stretched or retracted, flitted to an fro in whirring flights and accompanied their rising or descending loops with the corresponding scales of their laughter. Hedgehogs rustled in the leafage under the brushes; frogs croaked in the reed banks around the pond, in which an old rowboat with a seat made of curlicued cast iron lay rotting. My sister, conscious of my mother’s complicated feelings about the Odaya, balked at spending time there; she preferred to dream of the lost past while reading the fairy tales of Brentano and Fouquet’s Undine. But for a child who had been taken in hand by a loving father, to whom every chirping bird and every scurrying mouse, each crocus blossom sprouting from the spring-moist soil, and each hazelnut breaking free from the heart-shaped leaves of its stem had been shown, explained and given, a child who then had had abruptly to leave all this munificent glory — the place was bound to remain in the soul as a lifelong and lovingly preserved dreamland.
On a blue-golden autumn day in the year 1937 I strolled with my father through those river marshes. We had shot a few ducks; my father, to his joy, also a late longbill. The dogs were working diligently with their tails straight up in the air when a hare abruptly jumped from the undergrowth and crossed my sight. I fired a shot after it — it was one of those shots whose success has something of the divinely ordained: the hare rolled over perfectly and lay stock-still, dead already when the next dog reached him for its recovery… and in an instant of illumination I knew: this is a final point, the full stop at the end of an era. Never again would there be for us a repetition of such a day in this country.
I took the hare from the dog, looked at my father and knew that he felt the same. He gave me a brief nod, we stopped our hunt and went home. My father continued to show signs of unrest. He declined the dinner I had ordered prepared for us and insisted on being brought back to town. During the drive, he spoke of my sister. Among the anecdotes that showed her in the ideal transfiguration into which his loving memory transposed her, the one that amused him the most was the following: It was shortly before the onset of her disease; she had started working for the International Danube River Control Commission in Galatz, whence she sent him the following telegram: “Important discovery: Teskovina [a rough Romanian brandy] with soda almost as good as whiskey!” She could have given him no better proof that she was his true daughter. But for the first time he said this as of someone dead. It was the end of an epoch. Indeed, it was the last time we were to see each other.
With the year 1938, political events began to overturn each other in frantic succession. In Vienna I experienced the annexation of Austria by what now had become the Greater German Third Reich, and was surprised when my father commented on it in rather restrained terms in a letter. Wasn’t this the final realization of his youthful political dreams? A German hunting companion who spent those March days in Hermannstadt told me of a rather strange occurrence: everyone of consequence had assembled around the radio in the house of Colonel von Spiess to listen to the news from Vienna. After the triumphal announcement of the consummation of the Ostmark’s “homecoming” to the Reich, the German national anthem was intoned — as is well known, the megalomaniac text by Hofmann von Fallersleben, “Germany, Germany Above All,” that was phonily adapted to Haydn’s melody for the Austrian anthem “God Save Our Emperor.” At the first of these notes, now no longer played in solemnly imperial cadences but blared in marching rhythms, my father made a rejecting gesture and shortly thereafter stood up to take his leave, nervously impatient. He went home. There was no need for an explanation in the house of a former Austrian imperial colonel.
Soon there was hardly any need to explain away my father’s growing skepticism of the Third Reich by his all too well-known affinity for paradox. The invasion of Czechoslovakia occasioned a letter in which he expounded for my benefit on the catastrophic consequences that always ensued whenever the storms of history engulfed Bohemia. It may well be that his unconscious association with Sadowa had incensed his Old Austrian feelings against the obvious Prussianization of the Greater Germany idea, about which he commented in his letters in increasingly testy tones.
Father always considered Prussians as not Germans at all but, rather, Wends and thus Slavs, an unpleasantly assertive minority in the German-speaking world. “Prussia,” he used to say, “is a typical upstart nation: one of the colonies of the Reich that seceded from the mother country and managed to rise to prominence. Similar developments caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. Frederick II of Prussia dealt the death blow to the Holy Roman Empire of Germanic Nations, whose imperial crown legitimately had been worn for six hundred years by Habsburgs. Later Hohenzollerns, foremost William II, extended the damage to catastrophic proportions. A former colony preserves the spirit in which it was founded and administered. The Prussian concept of the state, according to which each citizen is primarily a soldier, should never have impinged on the old dominions of the Reich. But it isn’t merely the calamitous Wilhelminian militarism that is Prussia’s legacy…” and so on.