SEMMERING REGULAR (as he leaves) Let him sleep, he’s worried about his scrap metal deliveries.
CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD (sleeping, with a gesture of sudden inspiration) Melt down! (He wakes up.)
(Change of scene.)
Scene 10
Optimist and Grumbler in conversation.
OPTIMIST One thing I can say with conviction and a clear conscience: since war was declared, I haven’t met a single young person still in Vienna, and any still here will be feverishly impatient to be up and away.
GRUMBLER I get out so little. But I do have a shared telephone line. Even when it was peacetime, it was child’s play to listen in to all the conversations of the neighbourhood even without banging on the button: people planning a game of poker, a business speculation or hoped-for copulation. My only connections with the outside world are wrong numbers. Since the World War broke out and utterly failed to bring any improvement to the nation’s telephone service, conversations revolve around a new problem. Day in, day out, every time I’m called to the telephone to hear other people talking to each other — so, at least 10 times a day — here’s what I hear them say: “Gustl went up and wangled it.” “How’s Rudi doing?” “Rudi went up and wangled it, too.” “And Pepi? Hasn’t he finally gone to the front?” “Pepi’s got lumbago, but as soon as he’s back on his feet he’ll go up and wangle it.”
OPTIMIST Be careful what you say.
GRUMBLER Why? I could prove it. There are still judges in Austria.
OPTIMIST Given your view of things, I’d have thought you’d welcome every dispensation.
GRUMBLER Indeed I do, every one. I stand by my standpoint. But my country does not stand by my standpoint, and those who want to be exempted take my country’s standpoint and not mine. While I think it a disgrace that one is forcibly obliged to die, I think pulling strings to avoid death aggravates that disgrace, so much so that, in this country, you would need to be suicidal to continue living. And that’s the ultimate right of free men faced with obligatory conscription.
OPTIMIST But surely there must be exceptions. Take literature. The country not only needs soldiers—
GRUMBLER —but also poets, to instil in soldiers the courage poets don’t themselves possess.
OPTIMIST But writers have certainly risen to meet the challenge of the noble cause. You surely can’t deny that the war has put them on their mettle.
GRUMBLER In most cases it has mobilized their mercenary instincts, or in those few with character, only their stupidity.
OPTIMIST Someone like Richard Dehmel, someone who joined up voluntarily after all, set an example—
GRUMBLER —which he debased with his war poems. He called the sound of machine guns “the music of the spheres” and said animals were capable of patriotism. He enlisted “the German horse” in a disastrous cause — a creature even more defenceless than man against compulsory military service.
OPTIMIST Well yes, in times like these all poets get carried away—
GRUMBLER —to celebrate in words the deeds of those who are desecrating creation.
OPTIMIST Take Kernstock—
GRUMBLER I’d rather not.
OPTIMIST A poet, gentle as a lamb, what’s more a man of God by calling.
GRUMBLER Yes, his mettle has certainly hardened with a vengeance, I grant you. I’m thinking especially of those lines where he calls on his young Styrian boyos to crush the fruits of Italian manhood into blood-red wine.
OPTIMIST Or think of Brother Willram—
GRUMBLER Sad to say, there my memory doesn’t fail me. Isn’t he the Christian poet who thinks blood blooms red and dreams bloody dreams of spring? Perhaps you are alluding to the injunction of this saviour of souls, and I quote: “To slay the dragon you must lure it on to your bayonet, then skewer it.” Or: “Take pleasure in that high-pitched whine as you riddle with bullets the enemy line.”
OPTIMIST No, I meant his proclamation: “The craven coward, that Italian villain, is fair game now, so ripe for killing.” Or the verse where his steed, snorting nobly with courage sublime, crossed o’er rivers of blood and through the red flood smashed the enemy line.
GRUMBLER But wasn’t the cavalry already out of action? Even a one-horse carriage home from a late-night bar costs a fortune.
OPTIMIST Don’t underestimate the power of poetic illusion, especially that poem where he begs the Good Lord to bestow such a benediction on the enemy that even the Devil is horror-struck as we wade in the bloodbath.
GRUMBLER The Devil? He’s all the more horror-struck, the less horror-struck the priest is.
OPTIMIST Or take Dörmann.
GRUMBLER He’s no priest.
OPTIMIST But he is a poet! Remember how we were entranced by his words: “I love those languid beauties—”! Twenty-five years on he’s got over that anaemic taste — as have we all, thank goodness — and embraced a more full-blooded conception—
GRUMBLER You forget that those languid beauties already had blood-red mouths.
OPTIMIST So what! How does that compare with those verses of his which are now all the rage: “Serbs and Russians, who’s that shot ya? All together now, we gotcha!” See how the decadent poet of yore has grown resolute and invigorating! Has he not summoned up the blood?! How tremendous the impact of this moment in time — to have so transformed the amorous darling of the Graces and made him capable of such relentless feeling, such a dynamic pursuit of perfection!
GRUMBLER It just came over him.
OPTIMIST Can you deny that the adaptation of literary production to the needs of the country has benefitted, not just the country, but not least the individual artist? Moreover, at a time when everyone is doing his duty to his country, his country also has the opportunity to recall its duty towards its foremost sons. I’m thinking especially of a man like Lehár. It’s obvious that the composer of the Nechledil March should be exempted from all military service.
GRUMBLER Beethoven would have been certified unfit on account of his deafness, so confined to piano-playing for bashes in the officers’ mess. What representatives of painting and literature would you say deserved similar consideration?
OPTIMIST I’d say Schönpflug, for all his drawings of comic military types, and Hans Müller for his sunny articles — so heartening and uplifting, they really help us to hold out until the end.
GRUMBLER I, too, would be most surprised if a poet received by Wilhelm II in Vienna’s Imperial residence — a scandal which, incidentally, hasn’t yet led to its closure — should not one day be exempted from gruelling service in the Austro-Hungarian War Archives.