Great AustrianState Prize—to see them suddenly and quite unashamedly fawning upon this man and his acolytes, who have this prize — and the money that goes with it — in their gift. For decades these two women regarded this President of the Art Senate as an object of opprobrium, but now. Schreker embraces him in the so-called audience chamber of the Ministry of Culture, check in hand, and makes a fulsome speech of thanks. This Honorary President and former President of the Austrian Art Senate is now ninety years old, yet the decision as to who should be awarded the highest distinction the country has to offer and who should not still rests solely with this stupid, vulgar, arch-Catholic exploiter of the arts, who for decades, it seems to me, has been the greatest polluter of the country’s cultural environment, yet Schreker, with the prize at last in her hands, now even kisses him on the cheek — the thought of it still nauseates me. And it will not be long before Billroth and then Schreker’s companion march into the audience chamber at the Ministry of Culture to receive the Great Austrian State Prize from the hands of this revolting man, and nothing will stop them kissing his cheek and delivering a fulsome speech of thanks. But Billroth and Schreker (and her companion) are not the only people who make a point of cultivating the people who administer state moneys and state honors in this country: almost all Austrian artists go the same way when once they have reached years of discretion, as they say, recanting everything they professed and propagated with the utmost vehemence before the age of twenty-five or thirty as the minimal morality required of the artist, in order to ally themselves with those who dispense state moneys, state orders, and state pensions. All Austrian artists end up letting themselves be bought out by the state for its nefarious purposes, selling themselves to this vile, unprincipled, execrable state, and most of them start off that way. Their art consists solely in working hand in glove with the state — that is the truth. Schreker and her companion and Jeannie Billroth are just three examples of the so-called artistic world of Austria. To be an artist in Austria means for most people being compliant to the state, whatever its political complexion, and letting oneself be supported by it for the term of one’s natural life. Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honored grave in the Central Cemetery. Schreker, who is incapable of developing a simple idea and has for decades written nothing but drivel, passes for an intellectual writer in the same way as Billroth, who in my opinion is even stupider, I thought. This fact is characteristic not only of the degenerate intellectual life of Austria, but of intellectual life generally. But in Austria this catastrophic state of affairs seems even more catastrophic if, having just come from England, we observe it from a bird’s-eye view. The repellent has always been more repellent here, the tasteless always more tasteless, the ludicrous always more ludicrous. But what and where would we be, I wonder, if things were different? Schreker, her companion, and Jeannie, who for twenty years have been simulating rebelliousness, revolution, and advanced attitudes for the benefit of the young, while in reality expending all their energy running up and down the back stairs of the ministries that hand out the money, have always been intellectual birds of a feather; I have always been repelled by the skill they display in hoodwinking the young and blackmailing the benighted ministries. Anna Schreker is now sitting next to Jeannie Billroth, I thought, and I observed the two of them, these degenerate spiritual siblings. Schreker and Billroth and Schreker’s companion are today the embodiment of the kind of derivative pseudo-intellectual literary garbage that I’ve always detested, though it’s lapped up by fashion-crazed whiz-kid copy readers who’ve never outgrown their literary puberty, and eagerly subsidized by senile officials of the Ministry of Culture in the Minoritenplatz. This evening, for this artistic dinner, I thought, Schreker has come dressed all in black, as always. Now she was suddenly sitting in the background next to the one-armed painter Rehmden, a member of the so-called Second Viennese Surrealist School and naturally a professor at the art academy in the Schillerplatz, the nature engraver with the fineline. Auersberger, whom I once in all seriousness called a Novalisof sound, as I now recall to my horror, had long since become unaccountable for his actions and did no more than mumble the occasional incomprehensible remark. Earlier, no doubt in a final effort to attract everyone’s attention, he had suddenly removed his lower dental plate and held it in front of the actor’s face, remarking that life was short, man a frail creature, and death not far away. This had prompted the actor to utter the word tasteless several times, while Auersberger replaced the dental plate in his mouth. His wife naturally jumped up once more, intending to get him out of the music room and into the bedroom. Again she did not succeed; Auersberger threatened several times to kill her and pushed her away, so that she stumbled against the actor, who caught her in his arms, whereupon Auersberger exclaimed Ohhowtasteless!several times, then dozed off in his peasant jacket. Also present at this artistic dinner were two young men who spoke with a Styrian dialect; these hefty country louts were probably related to Auersberger, I thought, and had been dragged along, in the true sense of the phrase, to beefup the artistic dinner, as they say. For as long as I observed them they spoke to nobody but each other, just as I conversed with nobody but myself; having come to this artistic dinner, I remained more or less silent throughout the whole proceedings, it now occurs to me. In other words I behaved in much the same way as the two young men, who were said to be trainee engineers, except that they for some reason kept on standing up and sitting down again, whereas I remained seated nearly all the time, first in the anteroom and then at the dining table. Only on two occasions did I speak to anyone. On the first occasion it was to ask the actor whether, after four or five decades, he was not sick to the teeth, as they say, of constantly playing classical roles at the Burgtheater — Goethe or Shakespeare and Grillparzer, Goetheor Shakespeare twice a year and Grillparzer once every two or three years, but a role like Ekdal in The WildDuckonly every five or six years, or alternatively playing in some silly English society comedy like the one the Burgtheater was now rehearsing, but he did not answer me. The other occasion was when I told Auersberger, quite superfluously, that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth. I also told him several times that I found his peasant-style woolen jacket distasteful, and his peasant-style linen shirt equally so — that in fact I found everything about him distasteful. I attended this artistic dinner but, like the two Styrian louts, I took no part in it; I observed the proceedings without involving myself in them. There were one or two other people in the background whom I had been unable to identify even in the dining room, which was much more brightly lit than the music room, and then there were the two young writers, who made their presence felt by repeatedly bursting into peals of laughter, though the reason for their laughter escaped me. It had begun to get on my nerves even before the Burgtheater actor arrived on the scene: it was a completely hollow and mindless laughter, such as we often hear nowadays when we are with young people — hollow, inane and mindless. The two young writers had virtually nothing to say for themselves, I thought; they drank incessantly and ate everything that was set before them, and although they had been invited to this