once ordered a martini at the local hotel they immediately said, He always orders an expensive martini. If I sent them a picture postcard from somewhere they immediately said, He’s only sent it to offend us. He can afford to travel to Cannes, Lisbon, Madrid, and Dubrovnik, but we can’t. So I soon stopped sending them postcards. But when the postcards stopped coming they said, He doesn’t send us postcards because he’s too cheap. For a whole five or six days they would be angry with me because I had opened the windows in my room during a very cold spell in winter in order not to suffocate. I was accused of squandering their money at a time when it was in short supply and wood was so dear. Without fresh air I cannot exist, let alone engage in any mental activity, but I am never forgiven for ventilating my room in winter. They would rather suffocate than show any consideration for my wish to air my room at Wolfsegg, where they have enough wood to heat the house for a thousand years. The first time I returned to Wolfsegg from Rome, expecting a cordial welcome, I happened to say, in the first few moments, how beautiful Rome was in February, when one could sit in the open air outside a café, quite lightly dressed, and drink coffee. They were immediately angered by the thought of my drinking coffee in Rome in the open air and constantly reproached me for sitting around drinking coffee, while they had to work hard, not just in February but all year round. Can you imagine how hard we have to work at Wolfsegg? they repeatedly asked me. We can’t afford anything, not a thing. You live in luxury while we work our fingers to the bone to keep Wolfsegg going! In the years since I left Wolfsegg my sisters have taken to addressing me in a disagreeably patronizing tone that I simply cannot endure. Do you have to fly when it costs only a third of the price by rail? my mother asked last time, and this piece of nonsense was immediately seconded by my sisters. Just as they used to gang up with my mother against me in their shrill, squeaky voices, they now do the same in their grating middle-aged voices, which set my teeth on edge whenever I have to listen to them. My mother would make some vicious remark, and my sisters would mindlessly echo it. I would never have dared to show Gambetti that dreadful place, and in all these years I have taken care not to invite him. What I have so far told him about Wolfsegg is, I think, perversely anodyne compared with the reality. It would have been quite wrong to allow Gambetti a glimpse of this snake pit. My sisters were not liked in the village. If I kept my ears open I heard only the most unpleasant remarks about them. My mother was not popular either. My father, however, was respected, and people were secretly sorry for him, having to live with such a wife and such daughters. As for my brother, Johannes, they had to work with him on the farm, in the forest, and in the mines. Whether they liked this I do not know. He was not wholly unapproachable, and he was not really as arrogant as he was said to be. True, he did not have an agreeable manner, and most of the time he gave the impression of arrogance, but this was a misleading impression, due to shyness rather than conceit. Unlike my mother and my sisters, but like my father and me, he was always on good terms with the local people and knew how to win them over. But it is fair to say that my sisters were unpopular with everyone. And they never tried to make themselves popular. The fact that even in later life they were always seen together was not just comic but offputting, not just grotesque but actually repellent, and so was their continued habit of dressing alike. Even now they are still their mother’s squeaky-voiced marionettes through and through. If they ever agreed to darn my socks, the stitching was so wide that the socks were unwearable, and the color of the darning wool seldom matched. They thought nothing of darning green socks with red wool and were profoundly hurt when, instead of thanking them, I threw their frightful handiwork in their faces. I found it particularly silly that they always went around in the atrocious local costume. Every year they had dirndls made for them by Mother’s dressmaker. I found these distasteful, and whenever I returned from Rome and they ran to meet me, dressed in their dirndls, I had to take a firm hold on myself lest I said something offensive. When they were little they wore pigtails, but later they put their hair up in buns. The blond buns have meanwhile grayed. I recall that even as small children they never let me sit in the garden and read a book. They would not leave me in peace but incessantly taunted me by calling me a failed genius, an expression borrowed from their mother’s vocabulary. I found it highly offensive, and they would shout it at me until I threw down my book, jumped up, and slunk off to my room. I wish I could think of something pleasant to say about my sisters, but nothing occurs to me. Given time, of course, I could tell a few stories that would show them in a better light, but so few, compared with the dreadful things that went on between us, that they would not be worth recounting. I must say that I am not afraid to record the truth about this pair, who throughout my life have done nothing but torment me and have begrudged me every breath I drew. I would be guilty of gross dishonesty if I forbore to mention the torments and indignities they inflicted on me. They deserve no such forbearance, and neither do I. Once or twice a year I cheer myself up by buying one of those Roman straw hats that are sold in Trastevere for next to nothing and, being lighter than other hats, afford the best protection against the Roman heat, which is at times unbearable. I once turned up at Wolfsegg, which I still thought of as home, wearing one of these cheap straw hats and was taken to task by my mother. Did I have to buy myself such an expensive straw hat, she asked, when there was such a catastrophic economic crisis and the upkeep of Wolfsegg had become almost impossible? This is just one instance of the awfulness of my family, to whom, when I come to think of it, the words shame, sensitivity, and consideration meant virtually nothing. And who never felt the slightest need to improve themselves, having stopped in their tracks decades ago and been content to stay put ever since. I have always been eager to improve myself, to take up and assimilate whatever I could, but they have not made the least effort in this direction. Just as most graduates, like many doctors of my acquaintance, believe that after completing their studies they have done all that is required of them and need no longer try to extend their knowledge, broaden their understanding, or develop their character, having already reached what they consider the high point of their existence, so my family, once they had left high school, made no further effort but stayed where they were for the rest of their lives. It is appalling that anyone should think it unnecessary to broaden his mind and regard any extension of his knowledge, in whatever sphere, as superfluous and any development of his character as a waste of time. My family very soon gave up extending their knowledge and developing their characters. Having left high school at age nineteen, they grossly overrated themselves and were so satisfied with what they had achieved that they stopped working on themselves. Whereas Uncle Georg spent his whole life endeavoring to extend his knowledge, develop his character, and realize his full potential, they had no time for any such endeavor when once they had reached the minimal acceptable level of attainment. At about age nineteen they stopped assimilating anything new, ceased to exert themselves, and shunned any effort at self-improvement. Yet it goes without saying that we should continue to extend our knowledge and strengthen our character as long as we live, and that anyone who fails to do so, who stops working on himself and exploiting his potential to the full, has simply stopped living. They all stopped living at age nineteen, and since then, I am bound to say, they have merely vegetated and become a burden to themselves. Every hundred years the family has produced an extraordinary character like Uncle Georg and then pursued this extraordinary character with hatred and animosity all his life. Looking at these pictures of my family, I am inclined to think that they could have made something of themselves — and perhaps even achieved something great — yet they made nothing of themselves, because they settled for indolence and were content with the daily round, which demanded nothing more of them than the traditional stolidity they were born with. They staked nothing, risked nothing, and chose to take it easy, as they say, when they were still young. They never exploited the potential that they undoubtedly had, that everyone has. And if one of them did exploit this potential, as Uncle Georg did — I do not wish to dwell on my own case — he was punished with incomprehension and disfavor. My sisters stopped in their tracks as soon as they had graduated from high school. They left it with their heads held high, clutching their graduation diplomas, which they regarded as lifelong guarantees of something extraordinary, when all they guaranteed was extraordinary mediocrity. They stopped in their tracks, and now, at about forty, they are still where they were at nineteen. Everything about them is little short of ludicrous, and at their age, of course, not pitiable but pathetic. Father too came to a stop early in life. Having qualified at the forestry school in Wiener Neustadt, he thought he had reached the culmination of his existence and began to ease up. After coming to a halt at twenty-two, he became increasingly rigid, and atrophy set in. And my brother, Johannes, ceased to develop after graduating from the forestry school at Gmunden. Like ninety percent of humanity he believed that, with good final grades on his certificate from the last school he had attended, his life had reached its apogee. This is what most people think. It is enough to drive one up the wall. They collapse in upon themselves, one might say. And anyone who fails to exert himself is bound to be a disagreeable person whom we can view only with distaste. At first he depresses us, then distresses us, and finally infuriates us. No action we take against him is of any avail. Human beings, it seems, exert themselves only for as long as they can look forward to idiotic diplomas that they can boast about in public. Having gained enough of these idiotic diplomas they take it easy. For the most part their sole aim in life is to obtain diplomas and titles, and when they think they have collected enough of them, they lie back and relax, featherbedded by their diplomas and titles, and appear to have no further ambition in life, no interest in an independent existence or indeed anything but these diplomas and titles, under which mankind has for centuries been in danger of suffocating. They do not strive for independence and self-sufficiency or for the natural development of their personalities; they are utterly obsessed by these diplomas and titles and would gladly give their lives for them if they were conferred unconditionally. This is the depressing truth. They set so little store by life itself that they see only these diplomas and titles, which they proceed to hang on their walls. These diplomas and titles hang on the walls of butchers and philosophers, of scullions, attorneys, and judges, all of whom spend their lives staring at them with greedy eyes, eyes made greedy by their constant staring. When they speak of themselves, they do not say, I am this or that person; they say, I am this or that title, this or that diploma. They associate not with this or that person, but with this or that diploma, this or that title. Taking mankind as a whole, then, we may say that most associations take place not between human beings, but between diplomas or titles. To put it baldly, human beings count for nothing: only titles and diplomas count. One does not meet Mr. Huber at the coffeehouse: one meets the doctorate of that name. One has lunch not with Mr. Maier but with the engineering diploma of that name. Human beings, it seems, have not really arrived until they have ceased to be mere human beings and become holders of engineering diplomas; when they are no longer merely Mrs. Müller but the counselor’s wife. And in their offices they engage not Miss So-and-So but her first-class diploma. This addiction to titles and diplomas is of course endemic throughout Europe, but there is no doubt that in Germany, and to an even greater extent in Austria, it has developed a monstrous, grotesque, and quite staggering virulence.