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understand how all this came to happen. He must seek out the fault which
brought on the great disaster:- not
~mly
in the Enemy, but within himself.
Again and again, it is the v.oice of his. own conscience which gives him
eloquence. His need is urgent ;md not to be denied. It is not the need to
forget, but, most
de~ply
and vividly, to achieve realization...."
Viertel goes back to the search for his beginnings; back to his native
Austria. He remembers Marie the cook, and the songs and poems she sang
him; he remembers the Christkindlmarkt, and the narrow lanes of the
city, a man who limped and whom he followed because "Ich wollte wissen:
wohin hinkt der Mann?" and the many girls who didn't limp and whom
he followed also, with a different kind of curiosity. He remembers his
Mother, and Karl Kraus, the hero of his youth, and his Father, who used
to stand thinking with his head on one side-just as he himself stands
today. Then, with a flash of bitterness which reminds one of Yeats, he
sums it all up:
Zwischen katholischen Huegeln
Mit ihren gruenen Waldfluegeln
Sitzen
Duerre Kirchturmspitzen,
Die den Himmel anritzen.
Oesterreichisch bellen die Hunde.
So ging eine Welt zu Grunde.
Probing back into the earliest past he knows, Viertel detects, amidst
all the sweetness, cells of that infection, that decay which was to spread
to the whole body-the lack of awareness which made error possible, the
laziness which let things slide over the edge of destruction, the failure to
love which gives purchase to the power of hate. The cafe-table was set
upon the quicksand- and one bright morning, obeying the simplest laws
of nature which everyone had overlooked, the world heaved and sank,
choking the epigrams in the throats of the critics, and swallowing up the
chess-boards with their brilliant gambits. The survivors, scattered in
Right over the foreil*n countries of the earth, were at first too dazed to
know exactly what had happened. The pathos of this bewilderment, the
desperate clutching at immediate realities, the heartbreaking struggles to
adjust onesself to an alient environment, are beautifully pictured here:
Winzig sind uns die Sterne
Und New York riesengross.
But this was only the beginning. Slowly, inexorably, with many
pauses and respites and warnings, the crack in Europe widened and deep·
ened, splitting frontiers, engulfing cities, draining oceans. The process is
still continuing, the disaster is daily widening, as these lines are being
written.
It
is with the understanding of this larger process in general, and
of its special reference to the poet and his kind, that this book is chiefly
concerned. And, unlike the works of the political journalists, Viertel need
have no fear that it will be out of date next
~eason.
A man of 1980 could
read nothing else and still form a vivid picture of the moral predicament
1nd
human crisis of the nineteen-thirties. He could meditate long and
rofitably upon its symbolic figures-the spiritual bankruptcy of the man
