and more or less obliterating the landscape and the cities, they were simultaneously destroying the nation’s soul, its whole mentality. The souls of my compatriots have been depraved, I said, their characters vulgarized and debased. A malign atmosphere prevails everywhere. Wherever you go you come up against this malign and depraved mentality. You think you’re talking to a decent person — which he might have been once — only to discover that he’s the lowest of the low. There’s been a universal character switch, the effect of which is that anyone who once was decent has been corrupted and reveals his depravity in every way, making no attempt to suppress it, but displaying it quite openly. You go into a village that you remember as friendly and welcoming, but you very soon discover that it has become malign and hostile and that you meet only with sullen suspicion. The whole of Austria has been turned into an unscrupulous commercial concern in which everything is bargained for and everyone is defrauded. You think you’re visiting a beautiful country, but in reality you’re visiting a monstrous business enterprise. You think you’re entering a land of culture, but you’re dismayed by the primitive mentality you encounter everywhere. From the very beginning you find yourself in a brainless atmosphere in which you can hardly breathe, I told Gambetti. It’s as though all the monuments, including those that were set up as recently as the last century, were dismayed too as they surveyed the indescribable chaos created by our present rulers. You can’t imagine how repulsive it’s all become, Gambetti, I said, how charmless. Nothing so repulsive and charmless would be possible in Italy, I said, or in Spain. In no other country have they taken the brainless slogans of progress as seriously as in Austria, I said, and thereby ruined everything. Everything brainless is taken seriously in Austria, I told Gambetti, in deadly earnest — and you know what that means. Until now I always thought socialism was a temporary nervous disorder that was basically harmless, I told Gambetti, but in reality it’s a deadly disease. I mean
the socialism that prevails today, which is just a sham, Gambetti, a spurious socialism that relies on shameless pretense. Today we don’t have real socialism anywhere in the world, only the mendacious, simulated variety, as you should know. Today’s socialists are not real socialists but devious dissemblers. This century has succeeded in dragging the honored name of socialism in the dirt to such an extent that you want to throw up. The inventors of true socialism, who actually believed in it and thought they’d established it for all time, would turn in their graves if they could see what their unspeakable successors have made of it. They’d turn in their graves if they could open their eyes again and see everything that’s peddled and purveyed to the peoples of the world under the honored name of socialism. They’d turn in their graves if they could see the dirty tricks that are played in Europe and the rest of the world under the cover of this honored name. They’d turn in their graves if they knew about this gigantic political misappropriation. They’d turn in their graves, turn in their graves, I repeated several times. I won’t go back to this country for a long time, not for a year at least, I had told Gambetti. And now I had to go back at once. In the photograph my brother has a rather depressed posture, almost cowering, I thought, although he makes quite an elegant impression. He’s a countryman, whereas I’m a townsman, a metropolitan, and always have been. He’s instantly recognizable as a countryman, however fashionably he’s dressed. Like his father, who usually wore city clothes but could at once be recognized as a countryman. From time to time, to please my mother, they go — or used to go — to Vienna, taking in an opera (at Easter it would be Parsifal) and having supper at the Sacher. After breakfast the three of them would go for a walk across the Graben and along the Kärntnerstrasse as far as the Ring. If they were feeling generous they would take my aunt Elisabeth with them. They wore city clothes but were immediately recognizable as country folk. They would visit the most famous shops, and my mother would choose the very best dresses, which were at the same time the most tasteless — Milan and Paris designs that she would then wear to the theater in Linz or to concerts in Salzburg, for which they had had subscriptions for years. My brother looks healthier in the picture than he really was. He harbored all his father’s ailments, but they had not yet manifested themselves, as they had in Father’s case; they were biding their time and had not yet broken out. Yet in the photo I could already discern them in his face and his generally pathetic posture. I once said to Gambetti, They all have pathetic physical attitudes, which match their pathetic mental attitudes. Everything about them is pathetic, outwardly and inwardly, and I explained to Gambetti what the word