I'm Not Stiller (30 page)

'Tell me,' he interrupts, 'since when have you read the Bible?'

His friend, I note, was an atheist and at the same time a strict moralist; why else should Sturzenegger defend himself for having made so much money in recent years? I haven't reproached him. Another time, because I don't say anything, he remarks:

'Oh yes, sure, of course Communism is a great idea—but reality, my dear fellow, reality!'

He spends almost half an hour describing the Soviet Union to me, the way it's described in the newspapers, in a didactic tone, as though I were crazy about the Soviet Union; I sit there as though listening to a radio, I hear the voice of a man who is speaking into the void and can't see the other person who happens to be listening to him. How is he to know who he is talking to? Hence it's impossible to raise any objections, to shake one's head, even occasionally to nod in agreement. Sturzenegger is speaking as I rise, and speaking as I stand at my barred window, long since fallen silent myself, gazing out at the autumn-brown chestnut tree. His vanished friend (Sturzenegger is only talking to him!) seems to have been a very naive Communist, more exactly: a romantic Socialist, for which the Communists, I'm afraid, would be grateful. As one who doesn't know the Soviet Union, I can only shrug my shoulders before the alternative of swearing by Stiller or by Kravchenko; I'm not convinced by either of them.

'By the way—Sibylle is expecting a child, did you know that?' says Sturzenegger, to change the subject, adding: 'I met Julika recently, she looks marvellous!'

'I think so too.'

'Who would have thought it,' he laughs. 'But didn't I always say so? She won't die if you leave her, on the contrary, I've never seen her looking so good, positively radiant—'

Once again I'm learning all sorts of things.

'Tell me,' he says. 'You've bummed around half the world, I hear. How do you feel about being back here? We've been building, my dear fellow. Have you seen anything yet?'

'Yes,' I say, 'one or two things.'

'What do you think of them?'

'I'm amazed,' I say, but naturally Herr Sturzenegger, the architect, wants to know exactly what I'm amazed by. And since he is naturally expecting praise, I mention everything I can praise with a clear conscience: how neatly, how safely, how trimly, how solidly, how seriously, how spotlessly, how conscientiously, how tastefully, how tidily, how thoroughly, how seriously and so on they build in this country, as though building for eternity. Sturzenegger admits all this, but misses any enthusiasm, and in fact I don't feel any. I once more repeat all the usual adjectives: trim, orderly, conscientious, tidy, nice, quaint. But all this, as I've said, falls under the heading of material quality, which is indeed a Swiss characteristic. I say: Quality, yes, that's the word, I'm amazed by the quality! But Sturzenegger insists on an explanation of why, although I see quality everywhere, I'm not enthusiastic. Now it's always a tricky business trying to interpret a foreign nation, especially if you are that nation's prisoner! They themselves, I hear from Sturzenegger, give the name moderation to the thing that gets on my nerves; in general, they have all kinds of words to help them come to terms with the fact that they lack all greatness. Whether it's a good thing they come to terms with it I don't know. In the spiritual realm renunciation of daring, once it has become a habit, always means death, a gentle, imperceptible, and yet inexorable kind of death and in fact (so far as I can judge from my cell and on the strength of a few outings) I find that nowadays there is something lifeless about the Swiss atmosphere, something spiritless in the sense that a man always becomes spiritless when he no longer seeks perfection. I see their blatant passion for material perfection, as manifested in their contemporary architecture and elsewhere, as an unconscious substitute achievement; they need this material perfection because in the realm of ideas they are never clean, never uncompromising. To avoid being grossly misunderstood, let me say it's not the political compromise, which is the essence of democracy, that is the dubious factor, but the fact that most Swiss are incapable of suffering in any way over a spiritual compromise. They make things easier for themselves by simply outlawing the need for greatness. But isn't it the case that the habitual and hence cheap renunciation of the great (the whole, the perfect, the radical) finally leads to impotence even of the imagination? The lack of enthusiasm, the general inability to feel pleasure, that we meet in this country are obvious symptoms of how close we already are to this impotence...

'Let's stick to architecture!' comments Sturzenegger.

There follows a discussion concerning the area they call the Old City. I consider it a noble idea to preserve the city of their forefathers and care for it as a memory. And then alongside it, at an appropriate distance, build the city of our own day! In actual fact, however, so far as I can see they are doing neither the one nor the other, but reconstructing their way around any decision. Architects full of talent and love of country are building, as I recently saw, office blocks on about the same scale as the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth century. A tricky business! To be sure, it's possible to camouflage reinforced concrete (as though it were shameful) with blocks of sandstone, with segmental arches and genuine medieval orioles; but it seems that piety and profit can never be quite reconciled, and the result is something that not even a Negro soldier on leave is going to mistake for Old Europe. Do they themselves take it to be that? It would seem to them crazy, criminal, simply to tear down the city of their forefathers with its narrow alleys in order to make room for their modern city; there would be a paper storm of indignation. In reality they do something much crazier: they mess up the city of their forefathers without building a new, modern one of their own. How is it that such an idiocy, which a foreigner sees at once, doesn't shock the natives? Sturzenegger can't do anything about the ruination of their Old City, on the other hand he shows me photographs of a new town at Oerlikon, a suburb of Zürich, known all over the world for its arms export industry; a town on the scale of a past that is gone, gone forever, an idyll that is no idyll. How can I explain to Sturzenegger what it is that makes me feel so uncomfortable when I see something of this sort? It's very tasteful, very clean, very serious; but surrounded by stage scenery. And in order to avoid saying it makes me want to throw up, I ask in a matter-of-fact tone whether Switzerland has such an inexhaustible supply of land that it can afford to go on building in this 'style' for a few more decades. This seems not to be the case. What is tradition? I thought it meant tackling the problems of one's own day with the same courage one's forefathers brought to bear on theirs. Everything else is imitation, mummification, and if they still see their homeland as something alive why don't they defend themselves when mummification claims to be preservation?...Sturzenegger laughs:

'You're telling me! I've been protesting for years—not publicly, of course—and by the way, our Old City is by no means the only piece of idiocy, you know—'

He describes a few others to me, which as a prisoner I can't check. His strikingly enthusiastic agreement (unfortunately it's a while before I notice this) is not based on an identity of outlook, however, but on resentment; Sturzenegger is ridiculing the chief architect of their little town—to whom, on the other hand, as he admits, he owes some not inconsiderable commissions—and it is only human that in speaking to a foreigner, who doesn't know their chief architect, he expresses himself with a positively audacious frankness that does him good. For my part, on the other hand, it is only human that I have no interest in this personality or that, but only in the general frame of mind of the country whose prisoner I am. I should like to know the nature of those who are going to sit in judgement on me; that's a very natural wish. So when we talk about architecture the only thing that interests me is the extent to which a Swiss citizen can be bold, can focus on the future, in a country which really, it seems to me, doesn't want the future but the past. Has Switzerland (I ask Sturzenegger) any goal in the future? To preserve what one has or used to have is a necessary task, but not enough; in order to be alive you need a goal in the future. What is this goal, this unattained objective that inspires them, this aspect of the future that keeps them alive in the present? They are united in the desire to keep the Russians out; but beyond this: what is their goal in the event that they are spared the Russians? What do they want to make of their country? What is to rise up out of the past? What is their plan? Do they have a creative hope? Their last great and truly living epoch (according to my defence counsel's speeches) was the middle of the nineteenth century, the so-called forty-eights. At that time they had a plan. At that time they wanted something that had never existed before, and they looked forward to tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. At that time Switzerland had an historic present. Do they have that today? Homesickness for the day before yesterday, which governs most people in this country today, is oppressive. It shows up (in so far as our prison library is representative, that is to say corresponds to the taste of official institutions) in the literature: most stories, and doubtless the best, take us back into the rustic idyll; peasant life appears as the last redoubt of sincerity; most poems avoid all metaphors derived from the world of the citizens' own experience and if ploughing is not being done with horses then bread no longer provides them with any poetry; the most essential statement in Swiss writing seems to be a certain regret that the nineteenth century is moving further and further away. And the official architecture is just the same: how hesitantly and listlessly they change the scale of their growing city, how regretfully, how reluctantly and niggardly. At one point Sturzenegger comments:

'Yes, yes, but practically speaking: as an architect, what can I do if the building laws only permit three storeys? Be fair—'

When I ask him who makes the building laws, he doesn't answer but goes on describing the legal obstacles that make the building of a modern city simply impossible, and I learn all sorts of things that as a layman I didn't know, but I don't get any answer as to why they don't change the laws. Sturzenegger simply says: We're a democracy! I don't understand. Wherein lies the freedom of a democratic constitution, if not precisely in the fact that it gives the people the permanent right to change the laws by democratic means, when it's necessary in order to maintain their position in changed times? It's simply a question of whether they want to. I challenge the dangerous assertion that democracy is something that can't change and the other assertion that you remain as free as your forefathers if you don't dare to outstrip your forefathers. What does realistic mean? Sturzenegger keeps saying: fine ideas, yes, but we have to be realistic. What does that mean? It is true that, when we talk about the romantic notion of limiting new towns to two storeys, Sturzenegger agrees from a professional point of view that it will become increasingly difficult to live in the style of the nineteenth century and that it is the height of folly to keep dotting their spatially limited country with these 'villages'. Hence my repeated question: what's your idea then? History won't stand still even if the Swiss want it to. How are you to remain yourselves without following new paths? The future is inescapable. How are you going to shape it? It isn't being realistic to have no idea.

His smile, his air of cheerful resignation, has been annoying me for a long time before we quarrel openly. Pale with earnestness so long as he was expressing his feelings about their chief architect, and for the rest, as soon as we started to discuss mere ideas, full of the lighthearted hilarity of an untroubled soul—that was Herr Sturzenegger, my counsel's architect, Stiller's friend.

'My dear fellow,' he says finally, putting his hand on my shoulder and laughing,'—you're just the same as ever!'

I say nothing.

'Always wanting to pull something down,' he adds. 'Still destructive. We know all about you—you old nihilist!'

Thereupon I call him straight out (it's a coarse expression but after long thought no other expression occurs to me to describe people like Herr Sturzenegger, people filled with cheerful resignation who have no other goal than their own comfort, and who start talking about nihilism as soon as someone makes it clear there is still something he wants) an arse-hole, and would you believe it he goes on laughing, slaps me on the back and hopes we'll soon meet again 'in our old pub, you know where I mean'...Then, alone in my cell, I repeat this one expression again and again. Types like this Sturzenegger (and my defence counsel) put me in a thoroughly bad mood; that's what I hold against them.

***

Dreamed about Julika. She was sitting in a boulevard café, perhaps on the Champs-Élysées, with writing paper and a fountain pen, looking like a schoolgirl who has to write an essay. Her eyes beg me urgently not to believe what she writes me, for she is writing under constraint; her eyes beg me to set her free from this constraint...

***

Went to the nursing home today.

Sibylle (my public prosecutor's wife) is a woman of about thirty-five, with black hair and very bright, lively eyes, beautiful in her happiness at being a mother, combining youth and maturity in one person. Women in this condition have something like a nimbus round them, which tends to embarrass the man, the stranger. Her face is brown and when she laughs one sees a mouth full of enviable teeth, a very powerful mouth. Fortunately her baby wasn't in the room, to be quite honest I'm rather at a loss with babies. When the sister led me through the double padded doors, she was sitting in a blue cane chair out on the balcony. The lemon-yellow dressing gown (Fifth Avenue, New York) suited her admirably. She sat up in her chair, took off her dark sunglasses, and as the sister had to go and fetch a largish vase, we were immediately alone together. I felt somehow very comical with my flowers. And then she unfortunately put her dark glasses on again, so that I could not read her eyes. Her husband, my prosecutor, had kindly lent me twenty francs, so that I appeared before the happy mother with an armful of long gladioli that quivered as I mounted the linoleum-covered stairs and rustled in their tissue paper. Thank God, it was not long before the sister returned with a rather cheap and nasty, but capacious vase. It was no easy matter to arrange the stiff gladioli in a reasonable cluster. (I should have much preferred roses, only, in view of the fact that I had to touch my public prosecutor for the money, I found them too dear.) It was teatime, the sister had no idea that I had come straight from prison and asked me with the greatest solicitude whether I preferred rolls or toast. At last we were alone again, this time without any prospect of an early interruption.