Matutinal Meditation on Politics [1]
Meditation: the orientation of one’s thoughts
towards a given subject
Meyers Konverationslexicon [2]
If I now deign to lower
myself from the thought that I am thinking, from the rope that I am so
expert in climbing, down into the arena of quotidian existence in order to
state my opinion of one among several national visions of the Austrian
fatherland (my fatherland is world history), if I now delve from
the inhumane heights of speculative ideas and ideational speculation into the
cartography of my fellow countrymen and countrywomen and into their corporeal
and spiritual shiftlessness (in order to tell the truth and nothing but the
truth), if I precipitately hurl myself from the heights that, let it be said,
you abominate, down into your maws, as though I had suddenly lost all power to
resist you, I shall do so in the belief that the following sentences, composed
as concisely as decisively as possible, will probably be taken to task for
their criminal arrogance, for their treasonous attitude to our country and our
people, not to mention their blindness and ridiculousness; some readers them
will feel that I am a criminal and belong in a prison (but which prison?),
others that I am insane and belong in a mental institution (but which mental
institution?). But such considerations
do not perturb me in the least. To the
contrary, they compel me to make the humblest obeisance to the virtue of
frankness, in other words to my own self-consciousness.
I have been asked what I
think about (Austrian) culture, obliquely summoned to expatiate on the level it
has attained as of this very instant, and basically arrested for the sake of
supplying (from my head!) information on that culture, of explaining what sort
of influence (Austrian) politics has on (Austrian) culture. The knowledge, which we may take as a given,
that culture has from time immemorial been to all inward and outward
appearances the mirror of the politics and politics the mirror of the culture
of individual minds, groups of people, and half and whole worlds, licenses me
to lean more heavily on the word politics and less heavily on the word culture
for the purposes of this explanation that I am now essaying. For the history of our Austrian politics is,
as I know for a fact, more present to [today’s] Austrians[--]in contrast to the
Austrians of earlier ages, the Austrians of the monarchy, of the empire[--]than
the history of Austrian culture, and the word “politics” has become less of a
foreign word than the word “culture” to today’s Austrians—but to the Austrians
of today even the word politics, and hence politics in general, and Austrian
politics in particular, is not as present in the unique, indulgent, responsible
way we that we once took for granted (and whose restoration has since not
ceased for an instant to be desirable and needful); from what resplendent
heights, heights from which it showered light and warmth upon the entire globe,
has it plummeted in the course of a single half-century to its present nullity;
an infinitely deplorable casualty, as far as its stratospheric flights are
concerned, of a decidedly devastating and annihilating stage in the development
of humankind, the global proletarian revolution. Today, a half-century after the dissolution
of the empire, its inheritance is spent, the heirs themselves are
bankrupt. (This state of affairs applies
today to all countries and nations in the world that have been reconstituted by
the proletarian revolution [as well as to those that have yet to be reconstituted
by it].) Over the wasteland that is the
republic, under the most appalling and perfidious intellectual conditions,
baseness and stupidity preside in alternation.
In sprouting among us the seed of revolution has proved our ruin, we
(grave-robbers that we are) shall go down in history as the genius-less
generation. A spectral symmetry of
inferiority and intractability and of intractability growing out of inferiority
has become our constitution. Our nation is
a nation without vision, without inspiration, without character. Intelligence, imagination, are non-existent
concepts for it. In its alpine exclusive
feeble-mindedness, it continues at every given moment to prove itself a nation of
petty goods-traffickers and dilettantes.
On the miniature mock-up of a territory it has been left with (a mélange
of insane asylums and open-air museums for mid-market globetrotters) it works itself
up into superlatively horrifying spasms of the mimicry that it has come to
regard as an end in itself. The lowest
common denominator is never transcended and the politicians (we are, after all,
talking about politicians) and the artists (we are, after all, talking
about artists)—science is a unanimous exodus!—are[--]as I, along with
everybody else, can observe, my eyes filled with barely conceivable terror[--]
the bottom line-driven fabricators of a world conceived with a view to pressing
us ever deeper into the slough of disastrousness and ridiculousness. Meanwhile our downhill march into absolute
intellectual (and hence artistic) and hence fundamental (and hence national-governmental)
nullity has reached the level of the bond-slave to the most horrifying of all
possible visions, driven by nostalgia for his country of origin[;] the trajectory
of the perverse emotional hypertrophy of the nation and its social organization
now extends into the event horizon of the grotesque. Wherever one looks, an integral composition
of mountains and rivers of the agonized theatrical contemplation of surfaces. A comatose harmony of fractured dimensions.
At times such as this, one
hears on the streets of the capital, which for no clearly discernible reason
feels obliged to stage for the world a rousing demonstration of self-abasement,
much talk of the fatherland and the government, of democracy and socialism…But
the Democrats do not know, or do not wish not to know, what democracy is, and
the same goes for Communists vis-à-vis communism and the Socialists vis-à-vis
socialism, and so on and so forth…And so the upshot is this: a hundred years ago,
a person who said the monarchy was nothing was put in prison and beheaded,
today a person is put in prison (or “beheaded”) for saying that Communism is
nothing, that socialism is nothing, etc…it’s always the same old story, but I
find the same old story with culture preferable (because it is from
culture alone that I have derived anything of value at any point in my
life) to the same old story without culture, and so on and so forth. And if I do not adduce any reasons for this
preference, reasons that are bound to be completely superfluous to anyone who
understands how to think and hence to look and hence to observe (I detest all
parties and so forth!), this is because I have neither the desire nor the time
to do so…And that the proles (perforce!) have no culture, and that the
proletariat has no culture, and that the proles like the proletariat have
absolutely no interest in culture, because culture is pretty much incompatible
with the concept of the proletariat, and so on and so forth, is an irrefutable fact. Equally irrefutable is the fact that my
existence, and it may be an absolutely abhorrent existence anyway, is of no
value to me without the concept of culture, and that when I make use of the
concept of culture I am looking to apply the highest, the supremely highest
standards, that I have always looked to do so and shall continue to look to do
so until the day I die…“The Wicked Monarch and the Poor Prole” has always, in
every age, been a fairy tale, and “The Poor Prole” (today proles are ashamed of
being proles!) is now an outright lie…In my refusal to repress my devilish
irony, I can describe the fact that, for example, “half the administration has
defected to the opposition” (just give the sentence a thorough think-through,
why don’t you!) as nothing more than a propagandistic glimmer of hope, under
whose auspices, because there is no longer any prospect whatsoever of change, everyone is clinging to the god-awful old-timers. On the foundation of a global political
catastrophe, of a global political quandary, a society drawing on every resplendent
stripe of imbecile has established itself in Austria, a society that under
cover of a thousand-fold supposedly democratic blasphemies about rights and
laws adjudicates and proliferates ever more extensively until eventually and
conclusively everything with any seemingly just title to the clear and decisive
distinction known as fame is utterly annihilated. The truth is a painful operation to which in
certain circumstances the patient’s entire body must be sacrificed. Austria
Much as I
abhor making a long story out of a short one, I cannot refrain from affirming
that we in Austria Austria Europe that may come into existence someday, in another century, and we will
be nothing. We won’t turn into
nothing overnight, but one fine day we will be nothing. Absolutely nothing. And we are practically nothing already. A cartographic nullity, a political
nullity. A nullity in culture and
art. Just open your eyes and you will
see that this absolute darkness as yet amounts to but a few microseconds of the
full span of history. How, at this
moment, as I behold in its entirety the despair that permeates our nation in
doubtlessly permanently impassable labyrinthine permutations, am I to summarize
the logic of traditions, my own hair-raising, comprehensive knowledge of
the whole subject?: Austria
[1] Editors’
note: First printed in Wort in der Zeit, Vienna
[2] Andacht on its own can indeed mean “meditation,” but the word I have translated as “mutitanal
meditation” is Morgenandacht, meaning
“matins”—i.e., morning prayers or devotions.
The definition of Andacht
given by Bernhard corresponds verbatim to the one in the 1893 edition of Meyers, which continues “especially
towards God and divine matters, with the aim of elevating oneself above
finitude, baseness, [and] selfishness.”
In isolating “Andacht” and truncating its definition, Bernhard seems to
be saying both that devotions may be paid to things other than God and that
politics is in a certain sense a sacred subject.
THE END
Translation
unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Der
Wahrheit auf der Spur. Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons. Herausgegeben
von Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.
Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles. Edited
by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt :
Suhrkamp, 2011).
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