Extinction (12 page)

columned courtyard
where as a child I used to keep deer in winter! In winter my brother Johannes and I used to keep two deer, one each, in the courtyard. These were deer that had been slightly injured, I explained. We used to feed them, talk to them, and nurse them back to health, and in the spring we set them loose. They wintered there and survived. My brother and I invented names for them, names like
Sarabande
and
Locarnell
. When we set them loose in the spring they had naturally become used to us and didn’t want to leave. We would then go through the woods and collect all the dead deer that hadn’t survived the winter and bury them, helped
by the foresters. I always got along best with the foresters. They were my best friends, whom I loved more than anyone. I knew all their names, and they used to joke with me; I used to ask them to tell me about themselves, and they did so readily. I was always attracted to simple people, I told Gambetti. I felt good when I was with them, and only when I was with them. I was entirely at one with them. They always talked quietly and never too much. They had a simple, unaffected way of talking. They didn’t pretend, unlike other people, who are always pretending. There’s no doubt, I told Gambetti, that at one time, in my early childhood and for a long time while I was at school, Wolfsegg was paradise. And I knew that it was paradise. But this paradise soon darkened and turned gradually into limbo, and ultimately into hell. I wanted to get out of this hell, I wanted to leave it as quickly as possible. I couldn’t wait to go to boarding school and finally to Vienna, though I had no idea what was to become of me, what I could make of myself, where I ought to start in order to progress in the right direction. I loved the books I had read and those I still had to read, the infinite number of books in which I imagined more or less everything had been written. I can honestly say that even as a child I loved the life of the mind more than anything else, but I had no idea what I should do in order to be able to take part in it, to have a share in the life of the mind, which attracted me so much, and to lead such a life myself. I had no one to advise me until Uncle Georg got to see my grades and gave me the first hint on how I should proceed. In the first place you must free yourself entirely from your family, he said. You must make yourself completely independent, first inwardly and then outwardly. And I followed his advice: I made myself free, first inwardly, then outwardly. And of course you must get away from Wolfsegg, he said. You must ignore the views and opinions of your family at Wolfsegg and leave Wolfsegg despite them; you mustn’t follow their advice, which would be tantamount to chaining yourself to Wolfsegg for life, sacrificing yourself to Wolfsegg. You must do the precise opposite of what they advise; you must never share their views, because their views are contrary to yours and therefore harmful to your development. Their advice is no good, their opinion is no good, he told me. Of course they always say they want what is best for you, as you know, but they’re against you. They’ll do everything to chain you to themselves,
and if you don’t let yourself be chained they’ll do everything they can to destroy you. It will require the greatest effort, a supreme effort, to escape from them, to pit your implacability against theirs. You’re capable of asserting yourself against them and making yourself independent, Uncle Georg said, but I must tell you that you’ll pay the very highest price. You must pay this price. I paid a very high price to become independent of Wolfsegg, it seems to me. Uncle Georg was right. I pitted my implacability against theirs, and it proved the stronger, because it was the more uncompromising. What it cost me to escape to Vienna, that
useless city
, as they called it! What it cost me to go to England and finally to Paris! What it cost me to gain my inner freedom, which was the prerequisite for my outward freedom! I owe my independence to my uncle Georg, I told Gambetti on the Pincio as I handed over Kafka’s
Trial
, which had excited me even more on a second reading than it had on the first. There are some writers, I told Gambetti, who excite the reader much more the second time he reads them than they did the first time. With me this always happens when I read Kafka. I remember Kafka as a great writer, I told Gambetti, but when I reread him I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve read an even greater writer. Not many writers become more important, more impressive, on a second reading. Most of them, on a second reading, make us feel ashamed of having read them even once. This is an experience we have with hundreds of writers, but not with Kafka, not with the great Russians—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Lermontov—and not with Proust, Flaubert, and Sartre, whom I rate among the very greatest. It’s not at all a bad method, I think, to reread the writers who impressed us when we first read them, as we then discover that they’re either far greater than we thought, far more significant, or else not worth talking about. In this way we avoid having to carry around an enormous literary ballast in our minds all our lives, a ballast that ultimately makes us sick, mortally sick, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Uncle Georg taught me more or less everything that’s been important to me in later life. He was my teacher, no one else. It was he who brought me up, no one else. My parents didn’t
bring
me up, they
dragged
me up, until the age of eight or nine, and Uncle Georg had to step in and gradually undo the almost total havoc they had wrought. He went to immense pains, I told Gambetti, to turn my totally chaotic mind into one that was
acceptable and receptive. My parents believed that they were bringing me up, but they actually destroyed me, just as they destroyed my brother and my sisters. Instead of talking about bringing me up, they should have talked about bringing me down. Thanks to their upbringing, which was purely and simply a process of destruction, as I have said, everything in my mind was mutilated beyond recognition, to borrow a phrase that is normally used in a different context. In their brutal Catholic National Socialist way they had stirred things around in my young mind and created total confusion, so that it took Uncle Georg just as long to raise order out of my mental chaos as it had taken them to create the chaos. Instead of educating us, our parents actually mutilated our minds. Being Catholics first and foremost, I told Gambetti, they ruined our minds with their appalling Catholic methods. The Catholic Church can do unimaginable harm to a child’s mind if the parents are Catholic and adhere more or less automatically to the Catholic religion. To say that we had a Catholic upbringing amounts to saying that we were utterly destroyed, Gambetti. Catholicism is the supreme annihilator of the child’s soul, the supreme inspirer of terror, the supreme destroyer of character. That’s the truth. Untold millions owe it to the Catholic Church that they have been utterly destroyed, that their lives have been ruined, their nature denaturized. The Catholic Church has the destruction of the human personality on its conscience—that’s the truth. For the Catholic Church won’t tolerate any human being other than the Catholic human being. Its unswerving aim is to turn human beings into Catholics, mindless creatures who’ve forgotten how to think for themselves and betrayed independence of thought to the Catholic religion—that’s the truth, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. We country children always delighted in Catholic ritual, which at first seemed like a fairy tale, Gambetti, undoubtedly the most beautiful we knew. And for the grown-ups it was a lifelong spectacle, the only one they knew. But the fairy tale and the spectacle have between them perverted and destroyed all that’s natural in human beings. Using the fairy tale for children and the spectacle for adults, the Catholic Church pursues a single aim, the total seduction of all who fall into its clutches. It uses the fairy tale and the spectacle to bend them to its will, to extinguish them as human beings, to turn them into unthinking Catholics who have no will of their
own and whom it insolently calls
the faithful
. The Catholic faith, like all faiths, is a perversion of nature, a sickness to which millions succumb quite deliberately because it’s their only salvation, the salvation of the weak, who are quite incapable of independent thought and, having no minds of their own, need a higher mind to think for them. Catholics allow the Church to think for them and consequently act for them, because this makes their lives easier and they’re convinced they can’t do otherwise. And the Catholic mind of the Catholic Church has a terrible way of thinking, I told Gambetti, wholly self-serving and inimical to human nature, conducive only to its own ends and its own glory. No other state in Europe calls itself a Catholic state, I told Gambetti, or allows the Catholic mind to do its thinking, and the results are plain to see. In Austria there are only Catholics, no human beings with free and independent minds. In Austria the Catholic mind does all the thinking. Nothing has been changed by the various political turnarounds of recent years: in Austria even the socialists allow the Catholic mind to do their thinking for them, as they haven’t developed a socialist mind. Everywhere we’re confronted by the Catholic spirit, which has admittedly given us hundreds and thousands of Catholic works of art but destroyed the spirit of freedom and independence, the only natural spirit. What use are these works of art, these Catholic churches and palaces, when for centuries we’ve had no minds of our own? I asked Gambetti. Our nation suffers from chronic mental debility, I told Gambetti, which the Church has exploited more than in any other European country, even more than in Germany, where a degree of intellectual freedom and self-sufficiency still survives. In our country the Catholic Church has never had any difficulty in bringing the necessary pressure to bear and forcing the Austrian people, and hence the Austrian state, into total submission. Only in recent decades have there been hints of emancipation from Catholic dominion, from the monstrous pressure of the Church, from the age-old stranglehold of Catholicism. Only recently has it become possible to discern, here and there, the tentative emergence of a kind of thinking and philosophizing that owes nothing to Catholicism, I told Gambetti. Only in recent decades have a few Austrian minds begun to think independently, to use their Austrian heads, not just their Catholic heads. Catholicism is to blame for the fact that for so many centuries Austria
had no philosophers, no philosophical thought, no philosophy. It’s fair to say that in the last thousand years all thought has been ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church. And the nation has made life easy for itself under the aegis of the Catholic mind, which has always done its thinking for it, on a proxy basis and
in its own way
, I told Gambetti. In the last thousand years Catholicism and the Habsburgs have had a devastating effect, a lethal effect, on the nation’s spirit, as all the evidence shows. In these thousand years, one can say, Catholicism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of music. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Austria became the land of music. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, I told Gambetti, we are now a thoroughly musical people. Having been driven out of our minds by Catholicism, we have allowed music to flourish. True, this has given us Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, I said, yet I can’t applaud the fact that we have Mozart but have lost our minds, that we have Haydn but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Schubert but have become more or less brainless. No other country, I told Gambetti, has allowed the Catholic Church to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by Catholicism. We have no Montaigne, no Descartes, no Voltaire, I told Gambetti, only monkish and aristocratic poetasters with their Catholic inanities. In recent years, I told Gambetti, we’ve seen the beginnings of a change, but it’ll take centuries, not just decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of Catholicism. If they
can
be repaired. Our nation has allowed itself to be exploited more than any other by the Catholic Church. For nearly a thousand years! It will be hard put to break free from the Catholic stranglehold, from the talons of the Church. Superficial and amateurish revolutions won’t do any good, I told Gambetti, as we see from the experience of other European countries. We can be saved only by a fundamental and radical revolution, starting with the total destruction and demolition of everything,
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