Optimist and Grumbler in conversation.
OPTIMIST So, the harmless parodies of the most beautiful Romantic poems that are so much in vogue here and in Germany — their play on U-boats, and ours on vanilla kipfel — even they make you blow your top?
GRUMBLER They do. War poetry is something we can live with if we have to. The monsters of modernity cheerfully manipulate not only the machinery of death, but also the verse that glorifies it. Everything cobbled together in this most vacuous and soulless age would amount to some million tons of intellect sunk daily, for which one day the injured genius of mankind will need to be compensated. That includes not only the guilt of the many opportunist scribblers who have pinned their colours to this bestiality, but also the few real poets who got carried away by it. But let me tell you this: if nothing more were to be said in Germany’s favour than that there originated on its soil the most sublime lyrical ballads — with Goethe fully the equal of Wordsworth — then her true prestige, which is ultimately more important than those passing prejudices which wars are waged to reinforce, would emerge unscathed. There is only one fact the prosecutor might reveal that could endanger our case on Judgment Day. Namely the fact that this epoch — which should be exposed as toxic and simply erased from evolution in order to restore the German language to favour in God’s sight — that this epoch has not been content to produce literature influenced by the technology of death, it has even desecrated the sacred treasures of its defunct culture by parodying its crowning achievements, in order to celebrate the triumph of its inhumanity with a grotesquely derisive sneer. What haunt of humanity, whose mouth everywhere proclaims abhorrence of the barbarities its hand is committing, could possibly be so satanic as to take the most sacred poem of the nation and expose it to the vulgar herd! Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Night Song”, like Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, is a national jewel whose sublime six lines cry out for protection against the slightest whiff of life’s vulgarity. Who in the world would be capable of mustering so little reverence for a poet’s most profound and lingering cadences as to subvert it into an abominable mocking jingle? The wickedness of such a brainwave, marking the triumph of a trend that began with classical quotations reproduced on toilet paper, surpasses any other atrocity that those keeping the home fires burning have perpetrated during this war. To enlist our greatest poet! The time has come to turn a parody into an epitaph.
OPTIMIST Believe me, two meatless days a week are a greater pain, yet they, too, must be endured.
GRUMBLER Certainly. But seven mindless days — that I cannot endure! And I see no escape from this undernourishment. The dumbing down of mankind through war, the pressure which drives grown-ups back to the nursery, where, to their horror, they no longer find any children — these developments leave us no escape from this experimental laboratory for the end of the world!
OPTIMIST As long as the conflict lasts, all intellectual energies have to focus on the war effort.
GRUMBLER Which just about enables us to grasp such concepts as “human raw material”, “holding on to the bitter end”, “doing one’s bit”, “hoarding”, “medicals for recruits”, “reconscripted veterans”, “shirkers”, “compulsorily enlisted”—in short, the whole ABC of social and medical classifications in all its unfathomable profundity, without our being able to gauge the total futility of the activity to which we allowed ourselves to be condemned as cogs in the machine. But the cowardly white-collar assassins who betrayed our future to their primitive ideals—
OPTIMIST So you actually believe the World War was instigated by a handful of evil men?
GRUMBLER No, they were merely the tools of the demon that has led us to our ruin, and through us, Christian civilization. But we can only point to them, since we cannot grasp the demon that has left his mark on our brow.
OPTIMIST So what would we look like if we bear the mark of a demon?!
GRUMBLER Like a Schönpflug caricature.
OPTIMIST Very lacking in talent!
GRUMBLER Exactly. But his lack of talent has a deeper significance. We are left hanging in the air when we think we have our feet on the ground, and rooted to the spot when we think we are moving forward. The frivolity of the dashing, hail-fellow-well-met lifestyle, which is now as popular in Vienna as the figures drawn by that diabolical dauber; the fundamental inability to occupy one’s own space, which makes the lowest forms of both life and art perfectly coincide; the corpselike rigidity of what is alive — these turn our doomed lives into a simulacrum of that crassly colourful humour. I see a direct connection between a botched life, an evolutionary stage in which we are bombarded by the sounds of Lehár and the colours of Schönpflug, and an ultimatum by which the most abysmal cretinism invites the world to clean out the Austro-Augean stables, having launched a war to uphold their prestige. And I thirst for the hour when all shall be accomplished — even if the world conscience ranged against us should at the moment of victory wear the same grotesque mask of power as that of the deluded would-be victors who have destroyed our lives. It’s possible the crime perpetrated by Central Europe was so great that it corrupted the world that set out to punish it. Whatever happens — belonging to Habsburg Austria was intolerable!
OPTIMIST The Austro-Hungarian monarchy is a historical necessity.
GRUMBLER Perhaps, since the whole national mishmash that landed us in cultural disgrace and material misery has to be dumped in some godforsaken corner of the world. But all the revolutions and wars aimed at removing this necessity will weaken it, and if at first they don’t succeed, if the Austro-Hungarian Idea proves initially ineradicable, then there will be new wars. To preserve its prestige, the monarchy should have committed suicide long ago.
OPTIMIST If Emperor Franz Joseph had been granted a longer life, our unity would—
GRUMBLER My spirit shudders and my mind recoils from the implications of that idea, even before you’ve finished thinking it. But you overlook the fact that the gentleman has indeed been granted a long life, in spite of which—
OPTIMIST But the Emperor died last year—?
GRUMBLER How do you know?
OPTIMIST I don’t understand you — surely his life came to an end—
GRUMBLER How do you know?
OPTIMIST You’re perhaps alluding to those jokes the Allies like telling about there being a whole brood of emperors in Austria-Hungary, and since one looks like the other—
GRUMBLER There might be some truth in that. You know, even if I could persuade myself that Franz Joseph is dead, I could never believe he was ever truly alive.
OPTIMIST I’m sorry, but surely the last 70 years cannot be denied?
GRUMBLER Absolutely not. They are a nightmare, as if some harpy, not content with our life blood, had also sucked out all we have and hold dear, then shown her gratitude by turning us into complete idiots in our worship of the Emperor’s whiskers. Never before in the history of the world has such a formidable nonentity left his formal stamp on all things. That was what we saw behind every desperate situation, every obstacle that blocked our path, and running through all our misfortunes: the imperial whiskers. This nonperson embodied “muddling through”, the hereditary principle of his ancestors, having chosen not Justice, but “Just so as it suits us” as his ruling maxim, as he eked out the decades towards his still shrouded doom, like a chronic catarrh. A demon of mediocrity decided our fate. He alone insisted on creating global instability through our lethal national hassles, stemming from the chaos ordained by God under Habsburg’s sceptre, whose apparent mission is to hang over world peace like the sword of Damocles. He made this conglomeration possible, its budget forever provisional, its eternal ethnic conflicts only capable of resolution “according to protocol” by means of the arcane, exclusive argot of officialdom, and with mutual understanding attempted only in a linguistic mishmash, the like of which a sceptical epoch had never heard before and which it met with derision. Seventy years of softening of the brain and weakening of character was the price to be paid for unifying these peoples, though even that was not enough! Day after day, it was a reign marked by intellectual decline, casual neglect, and corruption of the noblest national characteristics, unparalleled in world history. Unparalleled, above all, in the mendacity with which the era’s only progressive development, new technologies of communication, endowed a nonentity with an aura and papered over the lethal void with the legend of relaxed conviviality. The fact that the signal for bloodshed was hoisted on both the accession and the demise of this merry monarch surely provides confirmation — as well as a radical critique — of a mind-set midway between the nursery rhyme and the press release!