Old Masters (4 page)

shows up
these mistakes. In this sense, moreover, Reger said, the always unthinkingly uttered dictum of
Seek and you shall find
is
found to be true. Anyone searching in this museum for mistakes in these hundreds of so-called masterpieces will also find them, Reger said. No work in this museum is free from mistakes, I say. You may smile at this, he said, it may alarm you, and it makes me happy. And there is of course a reason why I have, for over thirty years, been going
to the
Kunsthistorisches
Museum
and not
to the Science Museum
across the road. He was still sitting on the settee, with his black hat on his head, quite motionless, and it was obvious that for a long time now he had been contemplating not the
White-Bearded
Man
but something entirely different
behind
the
White-Bearded
Man,
not Tintoretto but something far outside the museum, while I myself was admittedly regarding Reger and the
White-Bearded
Man
and yet was seeing behind it the Reger who had explained the fugues to me the day before. I had heard him explain the fugues so often before that I did not feel like listening to him attentively yesterday, and although I followed what he was saying, and it was most interesting, for instance what he had to say about Schumann's attempts at the fugue, I had been quite elsewhere with my thoughts. I saw Reger sitting on the settee and beyond it the
White-Bearded
Man,
and I saw Reger once again, with even greater affection than before, trying to elucidate to me the art of the fugue, and I heard what Reger was saying and yet I was gazing into my childhood and heard the voices of my childhood, the voices of my brothers and sisters, the voice of my mother, the voices of my grandparents in the country. As a child I used to be quite happy in the country, but I was always happy back in town again, just as later and to this day I am far happier in the city than in the country. Just as I have always been far happier in art than in nature, nature has, all my life, been
uncanny
to me, while in art I have always felt
secure.
Even in my childhood, which I predominantly spent in the care of my maternal grandparents, and when, taken all in all, I was really happy, I have always felt secure and at home in the so-called world of the arts, not in nature, which I have always admired but always just as much feared, and this has not changed to this day, I do not feel at home for a moment in nature, but always so in the world of the arts, and the most secure of all in the world of music. As far as I can think back, I have loved nothing more in the world than music, I reflected, looking right through Reger, out of the museum and into my childhood. I always love these perspectives into my long-past childhood and I surrender to them totally and I exploit them in whatever way I can, may this perspective of my childhood never end, I always reflect. What kind of childhood did Reger have? I reflected, I do not know much about it, Reger is not communicative about his childhood. And Irrsigler? He does not like talking about it, nor does he like looking back to it. Towards noon more and more people come to the museum in groups, lately an extraordinary number from the East European countries, for several days running I saw groups from Soviet Georgia, driven through the gallery by Russian-speaking guides,
driven
is the right word, because these groups do not walk through the museum, they rush through it, hustled, and basically totally uninterested, totally exhausted by all the impressions which bombarded them on their journey to Vienna. Last week I observed a man from Tbilisi who had detached himself from one of the Caucasian groups and had tried to make his way through the museum on his own, a painter as it turned out, who asked me about Gainsborough; I was able to oblige him and tell him where to find Gainsborough. In the end his group had already left the museum when he approached me and asked me about the
Hotel
Wandl,
where his group was accommodated. He had spent half an hour in front of the
Landscape in
Suffolk
without giving his group a moment's thought, this was the first time he had been in central Europe and the first time he had seen an original Gainsborough. That Gainsborough was the high spot of his trip, he said, in surprisingly good German, before turning and leaving the museum. I had offered to help him find the
Hotel
Wandl
but he had declined. A young painter, of about thirty, travels with a group to Vienna and looks at the
Landscape in Suffolk
and says that seeing the
Landscape in Suffolk
has been the high spot of his trip. This fact made me reflective the whole ensuing afternoon and well into the evening. How does that man paint in Tbilisi?, I had asked myself all that time before eventually dismissing the thought as nonsensical. Lately there have been more Italians than Frenchmen, more Englishmen than Americans visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Italians with their innate understanding of art always act as if they were initiated from birth. The French tend to walk through the museum rather bored, the English act as if they knew and had seen everything. The Russians are full of admiration. The Poles regard everything with arrogance. The Germans at the Kunsthistorisches Museum look at their catalogue all the time while they go through the rooms, and scarcely at the originals hanging on the walls, they follow the catalogue and, as they walk through the museum, crawl deeper and deeper into the catalogue until, having reached the last page of the catalogue, they have therefore reached the exit from the museum. Austrians, especially Viennese, rarely go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum if one disregards the thousands of school classes which pay their duty visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every year. The school classes are guided through the museum by their teachers, men or women, which has a devastating effect on the pupils because, during these visits to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the teachers by their schoolmasterly narrow-mindedness stifle any perceptivity which these pupils may have for paintings and the men who created them. Dull-witted as they generally are, they very quickly kill in the pupils in their charge any feeling not only for painting, and the visit to the museum through which they lead their, so to speak, innocent victims as a rule, by their dull-wittedness and consequential dull-witted garrulousness, thus becomes the last visit to a museum by any of these individual pupils. Having once visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum with their teachers, these pupils never enter it again as long as they live. The first visit of all these young people is simultaneously their last. On these visits the teachers destroy for good the interest in art of the pupils in their charge, that is a fact. The teachers ruin the pupils, that is the truth, that is a century-old fact, and Austrian teachers in particular ruin in their pupils any taste for art from the start; at first all young people are receptive to everything, hence also to art, but the teachers thoroughly drive the art out of them; the predominantly dull-witted heads of Austrian teachers to this day proceed ruthlessly against their pupils' longing for art and generally for anything artistic by which all young people are initially fascinated and delighted in the most natural way. The teachers, however, are through and through
petit-bourgeois
and instinctively act against their pupils' fascination by art and enthusiasm for art by reducing art and generally anything artistic to their own depressing stupid dilettantism and by turning art and generally anything artistic at school into their repulsive recorder playing and an equally repulsive and incompetent choral singing, which is bound to repel the pupils. Thus the teachers from the very outset block their pupils from access to art. The teachers do not know what art is, and therefore cannot explain to their pupils or teach them what art is, and they lead them not
towards
art but push them
away
from art into their revolting, sentimental vocal and instrumental
applied art,
which is bound to repel their pupils. There is no cheaper artistic taste than that of teachers. Right from primary school, teachers ruin the pupils' artistic taste, they drive all art out of their pupils from the start, instead of elucidating art, and especially music, to them and making it a lifelong joy. But then the teachers are preventers and destroyers not only in matters of art, the teachers have always, all in all, been the preventers of life and existence, instead of teaching young people how to live, of deciphering life for them, of making life for them into a truly inexhaustible wealth of their nature, they kill it in them, they do everything to kill it in them. Most of our teachers are miserable creatures whose mission in life seems to consist of barricading life to the young people and eventually and finally making it into a terrible disillusionment. After all, it is only the sentimental and perverse small minds from the lower middle class which push their way into the teaching profession. The teachers are the henchmen of the state, and seeing that this Austrian state today is a spiritually and morally totally crippled state, one which teaches nothing but brutalization and corruption and dangerous chaos, the teachers, quite naturally, are also spiritually and morally deformed and brutalized and corrupt and chaotic. This
Catholic
state has no understanding of art and hence the teachers of this state have none, or are supposed to have none, that is what is so depressing. These teachers teach what this Catholic state is and instructs them to teach: narrowmindedness and brutality, vileness and meanness, depravity and chaos. There is nothing the pupils can expect from these teachers other than the mendacity of the Catholic state and of the Catholic state's power, I reflected while observing Reger and simultaneously, through Tintoretto's
White-Bearded
Man,
gazing into my childhood. I myself had these dreadful unscrupulous teachers, first rural teachers then urban teachers, and again, in turn, urban teachers and rural teachers, and I was ruined by them well into mid-life; they ruined me for decades to come, did my teachers, I reflected. They gave me and my generation nothing but the hideousness of the state and of a world spoilt and destroyed by that state. They gave me and my generation nothing but the repulsiveness of the state and of a world marked by that state. They gave me, just as the young people of today, nothing but their unreason, their incompetence, their dull-wittedness, their brainlessness. My teachers have given me nothing but their incompetence, I consider. They have taught me nothing other than chaos. For decades ahead they have, with the utmost ruthlessness, destroyed in me everything that had originally been in me to be developed, with all the potential of my intelligence, for the sake of my world. I myself had these appalling, narrow-minded, degraded teachers who have a thoroughly low opinion of human beings and of the human world, the lowest opinion decreed by the state, namely that nature must always and regardlessly be suppressed in the new young people and eventually killed for the purposes of the state. I too had those teachers with their perverse recorder playing and their perverse guitar strumming, who forced me to learn a sixteen-stanza Schiller poem by heart, which I always felt to be one of the most terrible punishments. I too had those teachers with their secret contempt of humanity as a method
vis-à-vis
their powerless pupils, those sentimentally grandiloquent henchmen of the state with their raised forefinger. I too had those feeble-minded mediators of the state, who several times a week caned my fingers with their hazel switch until they were swollen and pulled my head up by my ears so that I never overcame my secret fits of crying. Today the teachers no longer pull ears nor do they cane pupils' fingers with hazel switches, but their sick mentality has remained the same, I see nothing changed when I watch the teachers marching past the so-called old masters with their pupils, they are the same people, I reflect, as I had, the same who ruined me for life and destroyed me for life. This is how it has to be, this is how it is, the teachers say and they do not tolerate the least opposition because the Catholic state does not tolerate the least opposition and they leave their pupils nothing, absolutely nothing, of their own. These pupils are simply force-fed with state refuse, no differently from the way geese are force-fed with maize, and the state refuse is forced into their heads until these heads are chocked. The state believes that
the children are the children of the state
and it acts accordingly and has, over the centuries, produced its devastating effect.
The state
in fact gives birth to the children,
only state children are being born
, that is the truth. There is no free child, there is only the state child, with whom the state can do what it pleases, it is the state that brings the children into this world, their mothers are merely made to believe that they bring their children into the world, but
it is the state's belly from which the children come
, that is the truth. Hundreds of thousands come out of that state belly each year, as state children, that is the truth. The state children come into the world from the state belly and they go to the state school, where they are worked on by the state teachers. The state gives birth to its children into the state, that is the truth, and it retains its hold over them. Wherever we look we see only state children, state pupils, state workers, state officials, state pensioners, state dead, that is the truth. The state produces and permits only state people, that is the truth. Natural man no longer exists, there is only state man, and where natural man still exists he is persecuted and chased to death and/or turned into state man. My childhood was to the same extent a beautiful as it was a cruel and horrid childhood, I now reflect, when, being with my grandparents, I was allowed to be a natural person, whereas at school I had to be a state person, at home with my grandparents I was a natural person, at school I was a state person, half a day I was the natural person and half a day the state person, half a day, in the afternoon, I was a natural and hence a happy person, and half a day, in the morning, I was a state person and hence unhappy. In the afternoon I was the happiest, and in the morning the unhappiest person imaginable. For many years, in the afternoons, I was the happiest person that can be, and in the mornings the unhappiest, I now reflect. With my grandparents at home I was a natural happy person, down there at school, in the provincial town, I was an unnatural unhappy person. Walking down into the provincial town I was walking into (the state's!) unhappiness, walking home towards the mountain, home to my grandparents, I was walking into happiness. Walking up the mountain to my grandparents I was walking into nature and into happiness, walking downhill into the provincial town and to school I was walking into un-nature and unhappiness. In the morning I went straight into unhappiness and at noon or in the early afternoon I returned to happiness. School is the state school, where young people are turned into state persons and thus into nothing other than henchmen of the state. Walking to school I was walking into the state and, since the state destroys people, into the institution for the destruction of people. For many years