glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vienna "Within this "world-wide inanity of Austria is by far the most loathsome. Bernhard lashes out at Austria's unctuous burial of its thoroughly Nazi past; at the megalomaniacal provinciality of Viennese culture; at the morass of superstition, intolerance, avarice in which the Austrian peasant or mountain-dweller conducts his affairs. Bernhard anathematizes a country that has made a systematic practice of ignoring, humiliating, or banishing its greater spirits, be they Mozart or Schubert, Schoenberg or Webern; an academic establishment that refuses to honor Sigmund Freud, even posthumously; a literary-critical code that exiles Broch and Canetti and relegates Musil to near-starvation. There are numerous precincts of hell, traced by human stupidity, venality, and greed. Vienna and Salsburg are the worst. In the province of Salzburg alone, two thousand human beings, many of them young, attempt suicide annually. A European record, but hardly, if we are to believe Bernhard, adequate to the motives: "The inhabitants of the city are totally cold; meanness is their daily bread and squalid calculation their characteristic trait." In a very recent novel , 'Old Masters,' the palm of infamy is bestowed, beyond right of appeal, on the "stupidest," "most hypocritical" of all cities which is Vienna. The trouble with hatred is its shortness of breath. Where hatred generates truly classic inspiration-in Dante, in Swift, in Rimbaud-it does so in spurts, over short distances. Prolonged, it becomes a monotone, a blurred saw buzzing and scraping interminably. The obsessive, indiscriminate misanthropy in Bernhard, the around-the-clock philippics contra Austria threatens to defeat their own ends. He does not concede the fascination and genuine mystery of the case. The country, the society, that he so rightly chastises for its Nazism, for its religious bigotry, for its risible self-satisfaction happens also to be the cradle and setting for much of what is most fertile, more significant in all of modernity. The culture that spawned Hitler also bred Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Rilke, Kafka, Broch, Musil, the Jugendstil, and what matters most in modern music. Excise Austria-Hungry and interwar Austria from twentieth-century history and you will lack not only that which is most demonic, most destructive, in that history but also its great springs of intellectual and aesthetic energy. You will lack the very intensities, the self-lacerating violence of spirit, that produced a Kraus and a Bernhard. What was once central Europe became to Western civilization. There are so many obvious ways in which American urban culture today, and particularly American Jewish urban culture, is a coruscating epilogue to fin-de-siecle Vienna and to that dynamo of genius and neurosis defined by the Vienna-Prague-Budapest triangle. To that heartland, mere hatred is a one-eyed guide." George Steiner pg.126-127 'George Steiner At The New Yorker' Introduction By Robert Boyers 4:30 p.m. - 2022-08-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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