OPTIMIST Will you not at least do justice to him as a chivalrous monarch and as a friend of young people?
GRUMBLER No, for the scene when, for the first time, he has to tolerate Franz Ferdinand’s wife sitting beside him at the imperial table, and turns his back on her; and then, having been urged by his daughter for the sake of appearances to turn occasionally to his left, he makes it all too obvious by the abruptness of this gesture — that scene doesn’t appear in the drama. Nor does the scene in Weissenbach, near his holiday resort of Bad Ischl, where he listens to a dear little four-year-old nipper saying his piece in greeting, and then—
OPTIMIST —in best grandfatherly fashion, but with a spring in his step, goes over to the little chappy and fondly gives his cheek a gentle pinch?
GRUMBLER —er, no, he salutes, yes really, salutes, and does an about-turn: this scene is missing, too. There’s only the satirical song. But let me reassure you. If he had been a private citizen with the most demonstrably unpleasant characteristics, perhaps one whose wife had been driven to hysteria by the lifelong cross of the conjugal bond she had to bear — then death would settle all scores and the rest would be silence. But in world history there is no statute of limitations, and so even the kindest of kindly old gentlemen, even after his death, must appear in the form to which he was condemned by the curse on his house. It’s not Franz Joseph in person that I put on stage, but the embodiment of the Habsburg demon. A spectre appears to us, and it appears to him too in his sleep. Seventy years sing their Funeral Dirge, and that includes all his predecessors, each “villainous Franz”—like Schiller’s Franz Moor, or the jailer of Spielberg fortress at Brno — right back through the gallery of ancestral portraits as far as their original castle, from which the whole clan should never have been allowed to enter Austria.
OPTIMIST When will your drama appear?
GRUMBLER When the enemy has been defeated.
OPTIMIST What?! So you do believe that—
GRUMBLER —Austria will no longer exist a year from now! I had taken the manuscript to the ancestral land of the Habsburgs, Switzerland—
OPTIMIST To keep it safe?
GRUMBLER No, to put the finishing touches to it. I brought it back again, for I’m not afraid of the enemy. So careless has he become in the management of his bloody affairs that I’ve already brought the manuscript over the border and back — twice. Still, publication is impossible right now. That would certainly cost the author his freedom, and if the army big shots develop a taste for dictatorship before they ring down the curtain, even his head, which he has managed to keep through all the offensives, wave after idiotic wave, in four years of war. It will be published when this techno-romantic adventure, launched as a power play against mankind, has been suppressed by a superior power. When the glorified devilry, which, as we speak, is turning thousands of living bodies into corpses or cripples — and all for nothing! — comes to an end and we are liberated from the infantilizing surveillance of the military censorship. In short, when Alice Schalek has said the last word.
OPTIMIST What have you against Frau Schalek?
GRUMBLER Only that the World War has forced me to overrate her. That’s why I can only think of her as the most singular phenomenon of this apocalypse. But when the tragic carnival lurches to a befuddled halt, and I run into her back home as it sobers up from the communal hangover, then I shall acknowledge her as a woman.
OPTIMIST You really do have an incorrigible knack of taking the smallest detail—
GRUMBLER Yes, I really do.
OPTIMIST And that must be the source of this whole drama. Your unfortunate tendency to link trivial phenomena to major events.
GRUMBLER In exactly the same way our infernal fate led from trivial events to the major phenomena of the actual tragedy. My tragic drama synchronizes our sufferings with the forms and sounds of a world bent on destruction. You surely won’t fail to ask me what I have against Benedikt?
OPTIMIST Nor will you fail to answer.
GRUMBLER He is merely the leader writer responsible for the World War. He is only a newspaper publisher, yet he triumphs over our intellectual and moral honour. He has called the tune that claimed more victims than the war it provoked and enflamed. The shrill tones of a man banking on victory, threatening both our pockets and our throats, provide the ground bass accompanying the bloodshed. Even readers remote in time and space will feel that in Vienna we have suffered special torments. In my play a veteran subscriber to the Neue Freie Presse succumbs to its lethal language — a language that convulsively expresses the ancient Jewish significance of the modern German scenario. That language overwhelms life until inflammation of the brain brings merciful release.
OPTIMIST To understand that, I’ll have to wait until your tragedy is published. So it will appear—
GRUMBLER —when this one is over. It can’t be done any sooner. It isn’t finished anyhow, and after all, I need to keep my head in order to complete it.
OPTIMIST I think only your freedom would be threatened.
GRUMBLER As long as Vienna lies in the hinterland. But what about high treason, crimes against the military establishment, insulting the royal family, defaming dried vegetable speculators and other big cheeses who can only be aggrieved victims, never criminal perpetrators, and who in pursuance of their profiteering are protected by the law governing respect of person — don’t forget, the highest majesty of all in Austria is the gallows! Nor is this just a fixture of Spanish ceremonial, it is also an integral part of the design of my play. Remember, under the command of Archduke Friedrich alone — someone I see as a spectre with more potential than Frau Schalek—11,400 or, according to another version, 36,000, gallows were erected. Someone who couldn’t count up to three! That Archduke is a warrior whose exploits make Napoleon seem a mere defeatist, a man in the same martial and erotic mould as his ally, the monstrous and barbaric German Kaiser, emperor of the intellectual potato people, who couldn’t keep his fingers off any flesh and blood, while slapping his own thigh and emitting his raucous wolfish laugh: the laugh of the Fenris wolf in the saga when the world went up in flames. Amidst his beloved archeological collection of Assyrian bricks and the maps of his General Staff, torturing an entourage obliged to stand for hours, he flaunts his pseudo-science, constantly making obscene jokes about people’s physical appearance. Revelling in the embarrassment of any companion when out hunting or at some official function, he surprises him with a slap on the bottom, a kick in the leg, or a question about his sexual preferences. Those were our blue-blooded lords and masters. The one who started it, as devoid of intelligence as the global slaughter he caused; the other, splashing about with mindless relish in a sea of blood. Our Austrian hero, who would shout “Kerbang!” in the cinema when he saw soldiers shot down, this honorary Doctor of Philosophy, this cretin was the marshal of our doom. However different, they were still bosom friends, greeting each other with knowing smiles like gourmets swapping impressions, and when it came to the shapely figures of Germania and Austria, sharing a sigh about the changes wrought by time. There’s no mistaking the way such wartime fashions promptly rub off on our whole culture, the sheer scale of our current joys and sorrows; our consciousness of being governed by such nonentities is a constant torture, and we are complicit in our awareness of the low life of those living it up in high places, making a mockery of suffering humanity. Madames and mistresses would certainly have tales to tell of their influence on people’s private lives: when defenceless manhood found itself dragged towards despair, when the consecrated union of pure hearts was bloodily reft asunder, and when innocent men facing the gallows desperately searched for a sign of clemency. Do you know what it is we’re now paying for? It’s the respect such figures exacted from us!