The Torch in my Ear, page 13
Nevertheless, as I soon realized, this portion of Freudianism was the most plausible. When slips were being discussed, I never got the feeling that something was being twisted to make a point, to fit into a never changing and hence soon boring pattern. Also, each person had his own way of devising Freudian slips. Clever things came out, and sometimes there was even a genuine slip, which you could tell was unplanned.
Now, Oedipus complexes were an altogether different affair. People had fistfights over them, everybody wanted his own, or else you threw them at other people’s heads. Anyone present at these social functions could bank on one thing: if he didn’t bring up his Oedipus complex himself, then it was hurled at him by someone else, after a ruthlessly penetrating glare. In some way or other, everybody (even posthumous sons) got his Oedipus; and eventually, the whole company sat there in guilt, everyone a potential mother-lover and father-killer, hazily wreathed with mythical names—all of us secret kings of Thebes.
I had my doubts about the matter, perhaps because I had known murderous jealousy since early childhood and was quite aware of its highly disparate motives. But even if one of the countless advocates of this Freudian theory had succeeded in convincing me of its universal validity, I would never have accepted this name for the phenomenon. I knew who Oedipus was, I had read Sophocles, I refused to be deprived of the enormity of this fate. By the time I arrived in Vienna, the Oedipus complex had turned into a hackneyed prattle that no one failed to drone out; even the haughtiest scorner of mobs wasn’t too good for an “Oedipus.”
Admittedly, however, they were still under the impact of the recent war. No one could forget the murderous cruelty they had witnessed. Many who had taken an active part in it were now home again. They knew what things they had been capable of doing—on orders—and they eagerly grabbed at all the explanations that psychoanalysis offered for homicidal tendencies. The banality of their collective compulsion was mirrored in the banality of the explanation. It was odd to see how harmless everyone became as soon as he got his Oedipus. When multiplied thousands of times, the most dreadful destiny crumbles into a particle of dust. Myth reaches into a human being, throttling him and rattling him. The “law of nature,” to which myth is reduced, is nothing more than a little pipe for him to dance to.
The young people I associated with hadn’t been to war. But they all attended Karl Kraus’s lectures and knew The Last Days of Mankind—one could say: by heart. This was their chance to catch up with the war that had overshadowed their youth, and there can hardly be a more concentrated and more legitimate method for getting acquainted with war. It thus constantly remained before their eyes; and since they didn’t wish to forget, since they hadn’t been forced to escape the war, it haunted them incessantly. They did not investigate the dynamics of human beings as a crowd, in which people had devotedly and willingly gone into the war, remaining trapped in it—albeit in a different way—years after it was lost. Nothing had been said about this crowd, no theory of these phenomena existed as yet. Freud’s comments about them were, as I soon found out myself, completely inadequate. So people contented themselves with the psychology of individual processes, such as Freud offered in unshakable self-assurance. Whenever I came out with anything concerning the enigma of the crowd, which I had been mulling over since Frankfurt, they found my remarks not worth discussing; there were no intellectual formulas for what I said. Anything that couldn’t be reduced to a formula did not exist, it was a figment of the imagination, it had no substance; otherwise, it would have appeared in some way or other in Freud or Kraus.
The lacuna I felt here could not be filled for the time being. It wasn’t long before the “illumination” came, during my first winter in Vienna (1924–1925): the “illumination” that determined the entire rest of my life. I have to call it an “illumination,” for this experience was connected with a special light; it came upon me very suddenly, as a violent feeling of expansion. I was walking down a street in Vienna, with a quick and unusual energetic motion, which lasted as long as the “illumination” itself. I have never forgotten what happened that night. The illumination has remained present to me as a single instant; now, fifty-five years later, I still view it as something unexhausted. While its intellectual content may be so simple and small that its effect is inexplicable, I nevertheless drew strength from it as from a revelation—the strength to devote thirty-five years of my life, twenty of them full years, to the explanation of what a crowd really is, how power comes into being from a crowd and how it feeds back upon it. At the time, I was unaware of how much the manner of my enterprise owed to the fact that there was someone like Freud in Vienna, that people talked about him in such a way as if every individual could, by himself, of his own accord and at his own resolve, find explanations for things. Since Freud’s ideas did not suffice for me, failing to explain the phenomenon that was most important to me, I was sincerely, if naïvely, convinced that I was undertaking something different, something totally independent of him. It was clear to me that I needed him as an adversary. But the fact that he served as a kind of model for me—this was something that no one could have made me see at that time.
The illumination, which I recall so clearly, took place on Alserstrasse. It was night; in the sky, I noticed the red reflection of the city, and I craned my neck to look up at it. I paid no attention to where I was walking. I tripped several times, and in such an instant of stumbling, while craning my neck, gazing at the red sky, which I didn’t really like, it suddenly flashed through my mind: I realized that there is such a thing as a crowd instinct, which is always in conflict with the personality instinct, and that the struggle between the two of them can explain the course of human history. This couldn’t have been a new idea; but it was new to me, for it struck me with tremendous force. Everything now happening in the world could, it seemed to me, be traced back to that struggle. The fact that there was such a thing as a crowd was something I had experienced in Frankfurt. And now I had experienced it again in Vienna. The fact that there was something that forces people to become a crowd seemed obvious and irrefutable to me. The fact that the crowd fell apart into individuals was no less evident; likewise, the fact that these individuals wanted to become a crowd again. I had no doubt about the existence of the tendency to become a crowd and to become an individual again. These tendencies seemed so strong and so blind that I regarded them as an instinct, and labeled them one. However, I didn’t know what the crowd itself really was. This was an enigma I now planned to solve; it seemed like the most crucial enigma, or at least the most important enigma, in our world.
But how stale, how drained, how anemic my description now sounds. I said, “tremendous force,” and that’s exactly what it was. For the energy I was suddenly imbued with made me walk faster, almost run. I dashed along Alserstrasse, all the way to the Gürtel; I felt as if I’d gotten here in the twinkling of an eye. My ears were buzzing; the sky was still red, as though it would always be this color; I was still stumbling, but never falling; my stumbles were an integral part of my overall movement. I have never again experienced motion in this way; nor can I say that I would care to do so—it was too peculiar, too exotic, a lot swifter than is appropriate for me, an alien thing that came out of me, but that I didn’t control.
Patriarchs
Everyone found Veza exotic. She drew attention wherever she went. An Andalusian who had never been in Seville, but spoke about it as though she had grown up there. You had encountered her in The Arabian Nights, the very first time you’d read any of the tales. She was a familiar figure in Persian miniatures. But despite this Oriental omnipresence, she was no dream personage; your conception of her was very definite; her image never melted, it never dissolved; it retained its sharp outline and its radiance.
Her beauty was breathtaking, and I threw up a resistance to it. As an inexperienced creature, barely out of boyhood, clumsy, unpolished, a Caliban next to her (albeit a very young one), awkward, insecure, gross, incapable in her presence of the one thing that may have been in my control, namely speech, I cast about for the most absurd insults before seeing her, insults to armor me against her; “precious” was the least; “saccharine,” “courtly,” a “princess”; able to use only half of language, the elegant half; alien to anything real, inconsiderate, rigorous, relentless. But I only had to recall that lecture on April 17 to disarm these accusations. The audience had cheered Karl Kraus not for his elegance, but for his rigor. And when I was introduced to her during intermission, she had seemed controlled and lofty, and was not about to flee the second part of the program. Since then, at every lecture (I now attended all of them), I had stealthily peered around for her and always found her. I had greeted her across the auditorium, never daring to approach her. And I was dismayed whenever she didn’t notice me; mostly, however, she returned my greeting.
Even here, she drew attention, the most exotic creature in this audience. Since she always sat in the first row, Karl Kraus must have noticed her. I found myself wondering what he thought of her. She never clapped, it must have struck him. But the fact that she was always back again, in the same place, was a tribute that must have mattered even to him. During the first year, when I didn’t dare visit her despite her invitation, I felt more and more irritated about her sitting in the front row. Failing to understand the nature of my irritation, I concocted the most peculiar things. I felt it was too loud up there: how could she stand the intensest parts? Some of the characters in The Last Days of Mankind made you feel so ashamed, you just had to sink into the ground. And what did she do when she had to cry, during Hauptmann’s The Weavers, during King Lear? How could she endure his watching her cry? Or did she want him to watch her? Was she proud of this reaction? Was she paying homage to him by weeping in public? She was certainly not devoid of shame; she struck me as being extremely modest, more than anyone else; and then there she sat, showing Karl Kraus everything he did to her. She never went over to the platform after the reading; many people tried to crowd up there, she merely stood and watched. Shaken and shattered as I was every time, I, too, remained in the auditorium for a long while, standing and applauding until my hands ached. In this state of mind, I lost sight of her; I wouldn’t have found her again but for her conspicuously parted, blue-black hair. After the reading, she did nothing that I could have regarded as unworthy. She stayed in the auditorium no longer than others; when he took his bows, she wasn’t among the very last to leave.
Perhaps it was her concurrence that I sought, for the excitement after these readings persisted on and on; whether he read The Weavers, Timon of Athens, or The Last Days of Mankind, these were high points of existence. I lived from one such occasion to the next; anything occurring in between belonged to a profane world. I sat alone in the auditorium, speaking to no one, making sure I left the building alone. I observed Veza because I was avoiding her; I didn’t realize how deeply I longed to be sitting next to her. This would have been quite impossible so long as she sat in the first row, visible to all. I was jealous of the god I was imbued with. Even though I didn’t try to barricade myself against him anywhere, at any point, even though my every pore was open to him, I begrudged him the exotic creature with black, parted hair, sitting near him, laughing for him and weeping and bending under his tempest. I wanted to be next to her, but not up front, where she was; it could only be where the god didn’t see her, where we could exchange glances to communicate what he did to us.
Although steadfast in my proud resolution not to visit her, I was jealous of her and failed to realize that I was gathering strength to abduct her from the god. At home, while thinking I would suffocate under my mother’s animosity, which my conduct provoked, I pictured the moment when I would ring Veza’s doorbell. I shoved that instant away from me like a solid object, but it came closer and closer. To remain strong, I imagined how the flood of Asriel chitchat would smash over me. “How was it? What did she say? I thought so! She doesn’t like that. Of course not.” I could already hear the warnings of my mother, who would be told everything “hot off the press.” In an imaginary repartee, I anticipated the conversations that eventually did take place. While painstakingly avoiding any closer contact with Veza and unable to figure out what I could say to her that wasn’t too gross or too ignorant, I devised all the nasty, hateful things I would get to hear about her at home.
Notwithstanding my self-inflicted prohibitions, I always knew I would go there; and every lecture I saw her at made this realization more intense. But when the time came, one free afternoon, more than a year had passed since the invitation. No one learned that I was going; my feet found their own way to Ferdinandstrasse. I cudgeled my brain to come up with a plausible explanation that didn’t sound immature or servile. She had said she wished she were English; what could be more obvious than asking her about English literature? I had recently heard King Lear, one of Karl Kraus’s grandest readings; of all the Shakespeare plays, it was the one that absorbed me the most. I was haunted by the image of the old man on the heath. She must have known the play in English. There was something about King Lear that I couldn’t cope with. This was what I wanted to talk to her about.
I rang, she herself opened, greeting me as though she’d been expecting me. I had seen her just a few days earlier at the reading in the Middle Concert Hall. By chance, as I thought, I had come near her, applauding, on my feet with the others. I behaved like a lunatic, waving my arms, shrieking “Bravo! Bravo! Karl Kraus!,” clapping. I wouldn’t stop, no one stopped, I dropped my hands only when they ached. And then I noticed someone next to me, in a trance like myself, but not clapping. It was Veza; I couldn’t tell whether she had noticed me.
Letting me into her apartment, she took me through the dark corridor to her room, where a warm radiance welcomed me. I sat down amid books and paintings, but I didn’t take any closer look at them, for she sat opposite me at the table and said: “You didn’t notice me. I was at Lear.”
I told her I had very much noticed her, and that was why I had come. Then I asked her why Lear has to die in the end. He was a very old man, granted, and had suffered terrible things. But I would gladly have gone away knowing he had overcome everything and was still there. He should always be there. If a different hero, a younger one, were to die in a play, I was ready to accept it, especially braggarts and fighters, the sort people called heroes; I didn’t mind their dying, for their prestige was based on their causing the deaths of so many other people. But Lear, who had grown so old, ought to grow even older. We should never learn about his death. So many other people had died in this play. But someone should survive, and this someone was Lear.
“But why he of all people? Doesn’t he deserve to have peace and quiet at last?”
“Death is a punishment. He deserves to live.”
“The eldest? Should the eldest live even longer? While young people have preceded him into death and been deceived of their lives?”
“More dies with the eldest. All his years die. There is a lot more that perishes with him.”
“Then you’d like people who are as old as the Biblical patriarchs?”
“Yes! Yes! Don’t you?”
“No. I could show you one. He lives two rooms away. Perhaps he’ll make his presence known while you’re here.”
“You mean your stepfather. I’ve heard about him.”
“You couldn’t have heard anything about him that approaches the truth. The only ones who know the truth are we, my mother and I.”
It came too quickly for her, she didn’t want to tell me about him right away. She had managed to protect her room, her atmosphere from him. Had I had an inkling of what it cost her, I would have avoided this subject of old people who ought to keep on living because they have grown so old. I had come to her blind, as it were, from Lear, and thankful that we had experienced something wonderful together. I had to talk about it. I was in Lear’s debt, for he had driven me to her. Without him, I would surely have waited longer before coming; and now, here I sat, filled with him; how could I not have paid homage to him. I knew how much Shakespeare of all authors meant to her, and I was convinced there was nothing she would rather speak about. I didn’t get to ask about her trips to England, and she didn’t think about my childhood there. Originally, she had invited me over so that I might tell her about it. Now, I had struck her sorest point; for both of them, her mother and herself, life with this stepfather was a torment. He was almost ninety, and here I came and seemed to be saying if a man was that old, it was best that he keep on living.
I hurt her so deeply at my first visit that it was very nearly my last. She pulled herself together, because she was so visibly frightened; she felt as if she had to justify herself, and she told me—it was difficult enough for her—how she made herself at home in this hell.
* * *
The apartment in which Veza lived with her mother consisted of three fairly large rooms in a row, their windows facing Ferdinandstrasse. This apartment was in the mezzanine, not very high; it was easy to catch their attention from the street. A hallway led from the apartment door past the main rooms, which were left of the hallway; the kitchen and the other rooms were to its right. Behind the kitchen lay a small, dark maid’s room, so out of the way that no one thought about it.
