The Vienna Melody (63 page)

“Perhaps a little,” answered the girl. “But it doesn't matter, Herr Alt. What you are dictating is so interesting.”

“Really?” he said. “I thought it was dry as dust.” As she made no reply but busied herself with her notebook, he went on, “America has, so to speak, written Europe off as an asset and put it on the debit side of the ledger. Let us, as Europeans striking a balance, establish the just fact that this happened after they were saturated with Europe and had absorbed all that was desirable. No European can deny that our continent today is not an asset or anything like it, but a bankrupt estate being criminally managed. What the managers Hitler and Mussolini do they do against the credit of Europe. But they and the desperadoes who conduct the business for them, as well as the dupes who put their faith in such business methods, will all be bankrupt in the instant when the spell of gain is broken and the net loss becomes apparent. After them and despite them Europe will recover her mind, pathologically clouded for a few seconds of world history. It will then possess that for which America for the time being has no use, but which one day it will need as much as a body needs a heart.

“Our epoch, in addition to other destructive devices, has produced two nullifying things bound up but indirectly with politics and systems of power: it has taught men to forget how to marvel and it has taken the word ‘impossible' out of their vocabulary. Everything is possible and nothing is marvelous. The blame for this is primarily to be laid on the progress deriving from cities, which has put machines in the place of men and has robbed the man who serves the machine—for the machine has for long not been the servant of man but the man the slave of the machine—of the last shred of faith remaining to the cities in anything supernatural. It was for the sake of the machine that human life assumed importance, rather than the other way round. And it is a bitter piece of irony on the part of fate that the machine, an invention of the middle class, should be the first instrument to strike a mortal blow at its inventors through the aggravation of social questions it has brought about. The engineer hoist with his own petard.

“‘Miracle' and ‘to marvel' mean the same. The world which no longer believes in supernatural miracles because it strives to make them natural by the machine; the petrified world of cities, which with every aeroplane usurps God's handiwork, in return for which God's revenge on them is the aeroplane—that world no longer marvels. It believes in superman, but not in the force superior to man. A phenomenon like Hitler is the logical consequence of it, for he asks of man's inability to marvel the unbelievable, thereby making it possible to achieve it.

“It is because the rootless, self-seeking spirit of the city predominates much more deeply over that of the soil in America than in Europe that the danger from the machine is increased a thousandfold. What distinguishes a village from New York is not its size but its spirit. The spirit of the city is the intellect, even the sterile intellect. The spirit of the village is the soul, it is cosmic, hence ever fertile. The country of America, and this to me is the most beautiful and moving part about it, has by nature the spirit of the village, although everything you read or hear about it would lead you to expect the opposite. But the spirit of the city is dictatorship, whereas the spirit of the village is freedom.

“A village is free even if Hitler and Mussolini dominate it; but the American city is eternally unfree, for its dictators are the machine and money.

“It is this dictatorial spirit of the city, which together with the word ‘impossible' eliminated man's power to marvel, having undermined respect and humility by means of a false—because it is mechanical—concept of equality: it is this spirit which America underestimates. At the same time it so grossly overestimates the achievement of the city—looking upon it as the ocean and the land behind it merely as tribute-bearing rivers—that it has drained dry the springs of inner growth. Thereby it exhausts its last possibility of warding off the coming Stone Age, which is bound to be an era of inner turning to stone if no help comes.

“In the continent of dictators, in this degenerate, outworn continent of Europe, those springs still rise unchecked. As the new continent in an earlier day drew its forces from the old, so it will again, if it is to evade its inevitable inner turning to stone and be regenerated. Here in Europe, not to say Vienna, for Vienna is the heart of Europe, lies the healing power which one day will be vitally needed in New York and in Chicago. There and in the other stony dictatorships material achievements, on which America bases its attitude of the outworn and superfluous quality of Europe, will have reached their full development: their machines will be incomparably better than ours; their chemicals, their serums, their precision instruments, their highways, their system of education, their newspapers, their cinemas. Nevertheless, they will never have a Mozart. Never a Schubert. Never anyone who can write: ‘Ober allen Gipfeln ist Ruh.' The gentle outline of enchantment with which the houses of Salzburg stand at the foot of the mountains, as though they were an integral part of them, is not theirs. Nor yet the charm of the Vienna Woods, which protect Vienna from turning to stone. It is not a matter of chance that Mozart was born in Salzburg and Schubert in Vienna. It is rather an organic expression of those cities which have not turned to stone but have remained part of a living landscape. One can live, you may say, without Mozart and Schubert. Yet one must needs have the symbol for which they stand and will ever stand for men to live and die by.

“This symbol is Europe and will remain that: the village, the land, the continent, the world of beauty which was not willfully produced but was created and grew. Not of relative beauty, whose purpose and conditions one must know in order to see it, but of absolute beauty, which convinces at first sight, and therefore is a measure and filter to separate the real from the apparent. The economists among you may prefer the expression ‘a clearing-house of standards,' although for my part I should be reluctant to define what I mean in such terms. For what I have in mind is God-given beauty, in which man does not share at all—or else only as its happy recipient. The beauty which has survived intact the despotisms of man, machines, and money. If the mechanized world has doomed itself to sterility then it is only the world of our lodge brother Mozart which can redeem it. That will be Europe's eternal mission, even if for the time being America looks upon it as nothing but the mass burial-ground of her sons. For Europe's spirit is Goethe and Mozart, not Napoleon and Hitler. And since power yields only to power, it will be the power of Goethe and Mozart that in the end will rob the power of the machine of its inhumanity.”

Hans stood still. “There. That's all,” he said.

“Too bad!” commented Fraulein Hübner. She realized she had overstepped the limits set a shorthand-typist, so she added, “One or two carbon copies, Herr Alt?”

“None. I shall need only this product of my volubility for tonight.”

Fraulein Hübner obviously would have liked to say “Too bad,” but she took her notebook and left.

“Thanks!” he called after her through the felt-covered door. Immediately afterwards the tapping of her typewriter rose above the persistent sound of the piano-tuning.When Hans, a few hours later, walked up the steps of the Futura Lodge at Number 5 Annagasse, which he had recently joined and where he was to make his apprentice speech, he could not rid himself of a certain sense of mystery. That might, it occurred to him, have been part of his theme. The lack of mystery in our time. It was another consequence of the spirit of the city, whose mechanized sport had unveiled the mystery of the sexes and whose sterile brain had disclosed the mystery of creation to all eyes and thereby done away with its aura. Then his thoughts turned to the mysterious power of which he was now a part. How was this power, which had for centuries given rise to fables among the laity, exercised? From his family history he knew that the founder of Number 10 was suspected of being a Freemason, one of those dangerous people who threatened Pope and Emperor and who formed secret cells which brought about or did away with revolutions.

Arriving at a door on the second floor, he gave, as the preparatory master had instructed him to do, two short knocks and one long one, and it was instantly opened to him. As this was his first regular ‘work' since his initiation, he was rather taken aback to see how his lodge brothers garbed themselves for the occasion. They fastened on leather aprons; for the apprentices they were white; for journeymen they had a blue border; for masters they were trimmed with blue circles. They also decorated themselves with medals, hung on blue silk ribbons around their necks. To the newcomer it was almost comic to see how these more or less portly gentlemen tied the little aprons around their middles with such lack of self-consciousness, and he could barely keep his face straight when later he saw their entrance into the so-called temple, two by two, during which, with their right hands on their throats, they marched, taking two short steps and one longer. An organ accompanied their progress.

In the long, rectangular room where the masters occupied the back rows on the long side, the journeymen sat on chairs in front of them, and the apprentices sat out in front, he recognized many faces he had overlooked during his initiation ceremony. The master beside the speaker's table was the pharmacist from Karntnerring; beside him sat an optician. There was also present among the masters the stationer from Number 10, with whom Hans had never discussed anything except exercise books and pens, and later, when he was no longer a schoolboy, the cold in Number 10. He also recognized an opera singer of the third magnitude and, of course, Ebeseder, who had overcome his instinctive opposition and brought him here. “A man like you belongs to us at this particular time,” he had patiently explained to him. “We can make use of you and you of us.” During the long-drawn-out procession he could not help thinking what Selma would have thought of it. It really was not easy to keep a solemn expression on one's face at the sight of these costumed opticians and stationers gravely treading a strange dance step as they entered the room. But Ebeseder gave the new apprentice a pregnant look admonishing him to please postpone his judgment until later. Besides, the tablet with the roster of lodge members happened to be directly in front of his eyes. Member number 7 was “Wolfgang Am. Mozart, musician from Salzburg.” On the other hand, no one by the name of Alt, except himself, appeared on the framed tablet under glass, from 1759 to the present. They suspected my great-grandfather without grounds, thought the great-grandson. Above the tablet hung a portrait of the musician from Salzburg. In a white wig, a long chestnut-colored coat, black satin knee-breeches, pumps, his Mason's apron fastened in front, he stood at an open window through which the fortress of Hohen-Salzburg could be glimpsed. In the middle of the wall, and covering almost all of it, was the portrait of Emperor Joseph. He too wore the apron of a Mason.

After the customary ceremonies had been completed the Apprentice Brother Alt was asked to give his address.

Hans went over to the speaker's desk. Saluting the master in the way he had been taught to do (with a rectangular movement of the right hand beginning from the left shoulder and then stretching the right arm stiffly downward), he felt the embarrassment that overcame him in any kind of exhibition; it was the reason why it had been so difficult to reconcile himself to Selma's decision to become an actress; “Brother Masters! My beloved brothers!” The word “beloved” was hard for him. But then he read what he had dictated, concentrating exclusively on that, adding to it what thoughts had come to him in the meantime. His subject carried him away. When he looked up he caught Ebeseder's encouraging look.

“I thank you, dear Brother,” said the master when the apprentice had finished, and Hans went back to his chair. “Very nice,” commented the brother next to him, whom he did not know. Behind him too he heard, “Yes indeed. Nicely done.”

Other subjects were discussed. Two hundred and seventy shillings were needed for the home for the blind in Dobling. Brothers Jellinek, Schmidt, and Anton Singer had not paid their monthly dues and were requested please to see the Brother Treasurer. On the following Saturday there would be a Sisters' Evening. Brother artists were asked to get in touch concerning the musical program for it with the Brother Preparatory Master. After the fifteenth of the month the Wednesday meetings would no longer be held in Café Fetzer but in Café Siller. On the seventeenth Sister Freundlich, wife of our beloved Brother Freundlich of the Lessing Lodge, was to sing at the Volksoper. All beloved brothers were urged to attend the appearance of Sister Freundlich, tickets at reduced prices to be obtained from Brother Second Overseer.

When the ‘work' was concluded with a collection for the ‘widow's sack' and some organ music, the brothers laid aside their aprons and lodge insignia and gathered together on the first floor at the “Weisse Tafel.”

Here they enjoyed their
gulyas
, Linz cakes, and lager beer. There was gossip to the effect that Brother Mandl and Sister Zerkowitz had again been seen together. Brother Slezak had produced a wonderful witticism. Iron shares were to be avoided; if one were going into the market public utilities were favored. After they had eaten they discussed the lecture of Brother Alt.

The lodge brother who bore the title Brother Speaker characterized it as a very worthwhile maiden speech. The Brother Lecturer had perhaps offered them too many personal reflections and too little data. What are the population statistics of American cities? What the birth rate? How do they compare with the European figures? It might also have been instructive to hear something about an industry which one might call a purely American one, the films. What did the Brother Lecturer think on that subject? Might one look upon them as trail-blazing, or did they incline to devote themselves too one-sidedly to optical rather than educational effects?