literally everything. But at present we’re too feeble to mount such a fundamental and radical revolution. We’re not ready for it and daren’t even contemplate it. We Austrians are so enfeebled, so witless, that anything fundamental and radical is impossible. We Austrians have been utterly enfeebled for well over a century. My parents naturally didn’t think of giving me anything but a Catholic upbringing; they couldn’t have imagined any other, I told Gambetti. From time immemorial every generation at Wolfsegg has had a Catholic upbringing. Until Uncle Georg appeared on the scene. He was against Catholicism, and this meant that he was against everything. Uncle Georg prepared the way for me, pointing me first to the idea, then to the way to realize it, the alternative way, I told Gambetti. Just imagine, I said: in our libraries the secular books, as one might call them, were kept under lock and key, unlike the Catholic books. The bookcases containing the secular books had been locked for decades, if not for centuries. Only the Catholic books were accessible, while the secular books were locked up, inaccessible, not to be read. It was as if they’d locked up the free spirit in the bookcases reserved for non-Catholic books, for Voltaire and Montaigne but not for the hundreds and thousands of leather-bound volumes containing the collected inanities of numerous monks and counts. Voltaire, Montaigne, Descartes, and the like were to be sealed up in these bookcases in perpetuity — just imagine! These bookcases had never been opened, until one day Uncle Georg insisted on it. To my family it seemed as if he had opened a canister that had been sealed for centuries and would emit a dire poison as soon as it was opened, a poison from which they instantly fled, believing it to be lethal. They never forgave Uncle Georg for opening this canister and releasing the spiritual poison. They always thought that Uncle Georg had poisoned Wolfsegg by breaking the ancient seal imposed on the spirit and opening the bookcases that had been locked tight for centuries. Wolfsegg suddenly caught a whiff of the free spirit, not just the odor of Catholic imbecility; Descartes and Voltaire were now in the air, not just Catholicism and National Socialism. My family never forgave Uncle Georg. They believed they had confined the evil spirit in these locked bookcases, and Uncle Georg had released it. But it was not long before they reconfined it, when Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg, turning his back on them and settling in Cannes. Just imagine; on the Riviera, the coast inhabited by the devil and equated by my family with hell. The moment Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg with his two suitcases, their most pressing concern was to recapture the evil spirit that polluted Wolfsegg and confine it once more in their bookcases, which this time were not just double-locked but treble-locked. They obdurately refused to let me reopen them, and as I now recall, I was too scared to insist. Even at the age of over twenty I wasn’t allowed to open them. In the end I gave up trying because I dreaded the recurrent quarrels. In Vienna I began to assemble a library of my own, I told Gambetti, which would contain everything that Uncle Georg had identified as essential reading for a so-called intellectual. Before long I had spent almost all my disposable funds on collecting the most important books and assembling my own library of the evil spirit, as it were, and naturally I started with Montaigne and Descartes, Voltaire and Kant. Finally I had assembled what Uncle Georg called the essential nutriment of the mind, and of course the centerpiece was none other than Schopenhauer. I had acquired what I called a portable library of the most important works of the evil spirit, which I could easily take with me wherever I went, so that I need never be without these important works. My first acquisitions were the philosophers I had been denied at Wolfsegg, the deadly poison, in other words, to which I gradually added the works of our most important writers. In all this I followed a plan outlined by Uncle Georg. The first book I bought was Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The next, as I clearly recall, was Johann Peter Hebel’s Calendar Stories. It was a long way from these to Kropotkin and Bakunin, I told Gambetti, to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Lermontov, whom I prize above all other writers. My first task, I now told myself, is to release the evil spirit that my parents condemned to life imprisonment at Wolfsegg. Not only will I never lock the bookcases — I’ll leave them open forever. I’ll throw the keys down the well shaft so that nobody can ever lock them again. My sole reason for going to Wolfsegg will be to open the windows one after another and let in the fresh air. Just imagine, I once said to Gambetti, many of the windows at Wolfsegg haven’t been opened for decades. It’s appalling. Then I’ll come back to Rome and be able to say to Gambetti, Gambetti, I’ve opened all the windows at Wolfsegg and let in the fresh air. I’ll open all the windows and doors, I told myself. As I looked at the photo of my parents at Victoria Station, I told myself that in their foolish Catholic way they had tried to gag me all my life. Just as they wanted to confine the evil spirit in the bookcases, so they wanted to confine me, an equally evil spirit, at Wolfsegg. To confine the contradictor, the recusant. The deserter. I do not remember my parents ever leaving me in peace to pursue my own interests or ever praising me for doing something I enjoyed. I would not have ignored their praise, but it was never forthcoming. When I was a small child, I think, they already regarded me with grave distrust, even in my earliest years, when they had to bend down almost to the ground to see me lying in my cot or taking my first steps. Even then they found everything about me suspicious and disquieting, as though they might have produced a child that would one day outgrow them and call them to account, and then even destroy and annihilate them. In my earliest years they treated me with the suspicion that has dogged me all my life, perhaps even with a subliminal hatred that later came into the open. At first I did not know why it should be directed at me, for what purpose, to what end. Was it directed against some innate depravity or wickedness that I harbored? To my brother, Johannes, they were always well disposed, but to me they were only ever ill disposed. It’s time to spell out the truth, I told myself as I looked at the photo. My father begot me, and my mother gave birth to me, but right from the start she didn’t want me; had it been possible, she’d have gladly stuffed me back into her belly, I told myself. At first we always tell ourselves that our parents naturally love us, but suddenly we realize that, equally naturally, they hate us for some reason — that is to say, if we appear to them as I appeared to mine, as a child that didn’t conform with their notion of what a child should be, a child that had gone wrong. They had not reckoned with my eyes, which probably saw everything I was not meant to see when I first opened them. First I looked at them in disbelief, as they say, then I stared at them, and finally, one day, I saw through them, and they never forgave me, could not forgive me. I had seen through them and formed an honest assessment that could not possibly be to their liking. To put it baldly: by bringing me into the world they had landed themselves with someone who would dissect them and take them apart. I have to say that I was implacably opposed to them from the first moment. Once, on a fine, mild day in the fall, I tried to describe Wolfsegg to Gambetti. We had returned from Rocca di Papa to the Piazza del Popolo, which was virtually our home, and were sitting on the terrace in front of the café. It was well after nine in the evening, and the sun still radiated a pleasant warmth. I’ll try to give you a precise description of Wolfsegg, I said to Gambetti. In Rocca that day I had made what now strike me as some quite inept comments on Nietzsche’s