German woman, as she liked to call herself, throughout the whole of the Nazi period. On Hitler’s birthday they always ran up the Nazi flag at Wolfsegg, I said. It was most unedifying. Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg chiefly because he could not and would not put up with National Socialism, which was forcibly taking over. He went to Cannes, then for a time to Marseille, from where he worked against the Germans. That’s what my family found hardest to forgive. In the end my father was a Nazi not just by blackmail but by conviction, and my mother was a fanatical Nazi. It was the most abominable period that Wolfsegg has known, I told Gambetti, a deadly and degrading period that can’t be glossed over or hushed up, because it’s all true. It still makes my blood run cold when I tell you that my father invited all the important Nazis to Wolfsegg, just because my mother demanded it of him. The local storm troopers used to parade in the courtyard and shout Heil Hitler! My father undoubtedly profited from the Nazis. And when they’d gone he got off scot-free. In the postwar period he remained the lord of the manor. He put the Children’s Villa at the disposal of the Nazis for their meetings, quite voluntarily, as I know, without needing any encouragement from my mother. The Hitler Youth practiced its handicrafts in the villa and rehearsed its brainless Nazi songs. Year in, year out, the swastika flag flew outside the Children’s Villa, until, weather-worn and washed out, it was taken down by my mother a few hours before the Americans arrived. While taking it down she cricked her neck, I told Gambetti, and from then on suffered from chronic rheumatism in the neck. Moreover, the many swastika flags at Wolfsegg were used to make aprons for the gardeners and kitchen maids after my mother had personally dyed them dark blue. My father joined the Nazi party at my mother’s instigation, and it has to be added that he was not ashamed to wear his party badge quite openly on all occasions. Some of his jackets still have holes in them where the party badge was worn for years. On Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg there was a discussion about world affairs generally but mainly about the balanceof forces between the Russians and the Americans. At the end of it he reminded my father that he had once been a member of the Nazi party, and not just briefly. Whereupon my father leaped up, smashed his soup plate on the table, and stormed out of the room. My mother shouted Swine! at my uncle, then followed her husband out of the room. So Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg ended miserably. But his visits nearly always ended in unseemly quarrels about National Socialism. No sooner were the National Socialists gone than my family threw itself into the arms of the Americans and again reaped nothing but benefits from this distasteful association. They were always opportunists, and it’s fair to say that they were low characters, always trimming to the prevailing political wind and ready to resort to any available means to gain whatever advantage they could from any regime. They always supported the powers that be, and as true Austrians they were past masters in the art of opportunism. They never came to grief politically. It’s because of their low character, I’m bound to say, that Wolfsegg has so far been spared: I mean the buildings and the lands belonging to the estate. It’s never been bombed or burned down by enemies. The improbable truth is that during the Nazi period Wolfsegg was a bastion of both National Socialism and Catholicism. The archbishops and the Gauleiters took turns visiting Wolfsegg on weekends, ceding the door handle to one another, as it were. My mother ruled the roost at that time, along with the huntsmen, who are still Nazis to a man, just as my mother, at the bottom of her heart, remains a Nazi to this day, notwithstanding her Catholic hypocrisy. National Socialism was always her ideal, as it was the ideal of nine out often Austrian women, I told Gambetti. So the Huntsmen’s Lodge was always on my mother’s side. Father was never more than her executive organ, to borrow a Nazi phrase — a stupid man, she once said, who understood nothing about anything and had to do what she told him to do. Thinking of the Huntsmen’s Lodge was what set me off on this digression, I told Gambetti. The very words Huntsmen’s Lodge bring the Nazi period back to me. I could tell you other things about the Huntsmen’s Lodge, things that I found quite sinister as a child, for instance about murders that were connected with it and with National Socialism, but I don’t feel like doing so at present, in the present cheerful atmosphere. But one day, I said, I’ll set about recording all the things about Wolfsegg that obsess me and give me no peace. For decades Wolfsegg has given me no peace. It haunts me day and night. And since my family have neither the will nor the ability to describe Wolfsegg as it is and always has been, it’s clearly incumbent on me to do so. At least I’ll try to describe Wolfsegg as I see it, for everyone has to describe things as he sees them, as they appear to him. And if I had to admit to myself that I saw Wolfsegg as a terrible place inhabited by terrible people, I’d be obliged to state it. I’m sure this is roughly what Uncle Georg intended to do in his Anti-autobiography, but since that work no longer exists, it falls to me to take a dispassionate look at Wolfsegg and report what I see. If I don’t do it now, when else should I do it? I ought to do it now, when I’m in a position to do it, when I’m in the right frame of mind and have the detachment that comes from living in Rome, which can only be beneficial to such a project. Here, in my apartment on the Piazza Minerva, where I have quiet and am basically undisturbed, yet at the center of the modern world, I have the ideal circumstances for writing such an account. For years I’ve thought that I must write about the people at Wolfsegg and the conditions they live in, of their misery and baseness, their frailty and lack of character, about everything they’ve shown me of themselves, which, to be truthful, Gambetti, has given me sleepless nights all my life. I’ll try to portray my family as they are, even if the portrait corresponds only to the way I have seen them and still see them. Since nobody has so far written anything about them, except Uncle Georg, whose Anti-autobiography has been destroyed, it’s up to me to do so. Of course the problem is always how to begin such an account, how to hit upon the right opening sentence. The fact is, Gambetti, that I’ve often started work on it, only to be defeated by the first sentence. I’ve given up again and again, clapping my hand to my head and reflecting that it’s probably madness even to think of writing an account of Wolfsegg, because only a madman would do such a thing. I’ve always asked myself what use it will be and come to the conclusion that it can’t be of any use. Yet it’s always been clear to me, and it’s become even clearer to me recently, that it has to be written, that I can’t get out of writing it, and that one day I’ll have to write it, whatever misgivings I may have. My mind demands it of me. And my mind has become implacable, above all toward myself. Absolutely implacable. And you know I’ve precious little time left. If I don’t make a start it’ll be too late. I don’t know, I told Gambetti, but I feel I’m running out of time. And an account like this requires the writer to spend years over it, possibly not just one or two years but several, I said. It’s not enough simply to make a sketch, I said. The only thing I have fixed in my head is the title,