 
## A Warder's Tale

### by Michael Buergermeister

### Copyright Michael Buergermeister

### Smashwords Edition

### St. Petersburg

I have often wondered why my brother killed himself. Was it because our father had been a member of the Waffen SS? Is that a reason? He said he couldn't bear the thought. Was it because our sister had succeeded in cheating us out of our inheritance? I said at the time that I couldn't care less but for him it might well have proven the end. Was it because he'd failed to become an artist? He said he'd refuse to spend the rest of his days as a witless slave. Perhaps he was right. Was it simply Weltschmerz, his feeling that the planet was doomed? As his letters revealed, he'd predicted the financial crisis years before it had actually occurred. Or was it because he'd lost the court case in which he'd been accused of sexual molestation?

When I heard the news I was sitting in a restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt, not far removed from St. Petersburg's Hermitage, discussing literature with a Russian poet of rather limited intelligence but exaggerated opinion of himself.

The restaurant with its red walls, simple tables, wooden floor, white ceiling and low lamps was, in many respects, interchangeable with any restaurant in the so-called "West". We could have been in New York I reflected. After all one is always apt to hear Russian spoken in New York.

This was no coincidence I was later to learn. This was just one of a chain of restaurants. There were other similar ones in London, New York, Moscow as well as Kalliningrad, Murmansk and Novosibirsk all providing Kulyebaka and Rybnik, pies filled with meat, fish, onions, apricots and lemons.

I had just given a talk on Anna Achmatova half an hour before. I could not help but think of her when I heard about him. Had she not also suffered too much?

She had once told a friend that fate had spared her nothing; that it was her lot to suffer everything. Yet she'd survived and even reached the age of seventy-six. My half-brother by contrast had not even reached fifty. I thought of her last diary entries.

Feeling bitterly cold, poorly, bored and unhappily trapped in a world of oxygen masks, injections and X-rays, unsure of what was actually wrong with her, she'd focused on Prokofiev, Mandelstam, Eliot and Pushkin.

I imagined how Achmatova must have appeared in her final years: heavy-set, dressed in cheap housecoat and wearing slippers on her bare feet. What a contrast to how she'd appeared half a century earlier, her tall, thin frame draped in an elegant blue dress and yellow shawl, her black stockinged feet pressed into fashionably black pumps and her dark hair tied neatly and precisely in a bun.

Although her address had been good, Sheremetyev Palace on Fontanka Street, all she had was a small, old desk and an iron bed covered with a shabby blanket.

My impression of her apartment, which is now a museum, was in keeping with the accounts I'd read of it: one of austere simplicity.

At one and the same time she'd been expelled from the Writer's Union, deprived of bread- and food-rations, the Arctic Institute had sought to evict her from her home and both her former husband and son had been arrested.

Reduced to a daily diet of potatoes and sauerkraut, forced to share the apartment with her ex-husband's daughter, who she regarded as a pig, she suffered from appalling loneliness.

We debated her merits and the poet seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Pasternak had preferred Tsvetayeva's clarity and classicism, to Achmatova's lyricism. He was also astonished to learn that Achmatova in turn regarded Pasternak as a dilettante.

Was it not high time that I visit her grave in Komarova, to the north, on the coast? I thought of her poem, Requiem, with its lively words about the harshness of life under siege, how the dead had smiled, glad to be at peace, how the city had resembled a penitentiary, its condemned, maddened by torment, while death had come regardless, taking on different shapes, whether a poisoned shell or a germ from hell.

A day before I'd finished a translation of Thomas Bernhard's "Ausloeschung", "Extinction", which I now discussed with the Russian poet. I was undecided whether I preferred it to Peter Handke's "Mein Jahr In der Niemandsbucht", "My Year In No Man's Bay", which I'd translated one year before.

It began with Franz-Josef Murau, who was living on the Piazza Minerva in Rome, receiving a telegram from his sisters, Caecilia and Amalia, at two o'clock in the afternoon, telling him that his parents and brother had died in an accident. Toedlich verunglueckt were the words Bernhard had used.

Perhaps I should have finished this translation in Rome. It would have been nice to see the Piazza della Minerva, just around the corner from the Pantheon, as well as the Via Condotti, not far removed from the Spanish Steps, once more. It was as always a question of time. The deadline for the book's publication was approaching and my publisher was growing increasingly nervous.

I thought of Bernhard's comparison of Italian and German when talking to the Russian. Which language was heavier, English or Russian? Which was better adapted to philosophy and poetry? And how did they both compare to German?

The Russian poet excused himself went outside and started a long conversation on his mobile. When he returned we discussed how Russia's population was sinking fast. He was surprised to learn that the world's inhabitants now exceeded seven billion, with 147,650 births and 63,060 deaths a day.

The Russian poet asked about my half-brother. I told him he'd been born one year after Achmatova had died.

In 1967 the population of the world was 3.485 billion, Biafra seceded from Nigeria, Israel fought a six-day war, a military coup deposed the King of Greece, "The Graduate" was in the cinema and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was on the radio.

My half-brother had been born in an expensive private clinic and had spent his first years in the family's modern flat in Vienna's well-to-do eighteenth district. It had been, he once wrote, the happiest years of his life.

I had stopped soon after, choked with emotion. What, in truth, I asked myself, could I say about my half-brother? I knew so little about him. We had had very little in common and hadn't spent much time together.

I remembered the series of black and white photos of him as a baby wearing a jacket decorated with flowers with a daisy-like nooky in his mouth looking alternately bleary-eyed, amused and thoughtful.

There had been other photos. In one he'd turned his head sideways as he crawled out from under a blanket. In another he'd looked up as he played with toys on a bench.

One photo, in colour, was of him in cheerful mood next to his tearful sister. Another was of him in the arms of his mother and a third, in blue jacket and white sailor's hat, was of him sitting on the grass in the family's garden in Vienna's fashionable thirteenth district on a hot summer's day.

I decided to make a quick summary of the events of his life, a chronology of a death foretold as it were, and ordered a Borsch soup, which proved to be excellent. I enjoyed talking about my half-brother and the Russian poet seemed to take pleasure in listening to me or so it at least seemed at the time.

The restaurant, which had been crowded with a number of families and their children, now slowly began to empty. It was long past lunchtime but I was still hungry. I had hardly had anything for breakfast and the excitement from the talk led me to chat more freely than usual. I began betraying intimacies I'd never usually confess to a stranger.

The restaurant also played a part. It lulled me into a curious state of openness. I felt relaxed and happy that everything had gone so well. All I wanted to do was to talk.

I told the Russian poet that my half-brother had been a playwright who'd had a remarkable mind. I felt like saying that he'd been too good for this world, but that, strictly speaking, wasn't true. Perhaps the word naive would have been more appropriate. He'd worshipped art as though it were a religion and had sacrificed his life to it. Yes, a Russian poet must understand that, I told myself.

I toyed with the remains of the cabbage and egg pie on my plate as I considered what to say. My brother, I began, had been a warder in a museum. Yes, I realized, this would be a warder's tale.

The Russian poet wanted to know in which museum he'd worked. A number of his friends, poets and artists, worked in the Hermitage and it was in his circle a highly respected job.

I replied that it was necessary to tell my brother's story in its entirety first and that it would take a considerable amount of time to do so before dealing with his career as warder. I thought about the early years of my half-brother's life.

In 1968 the population of the world was 3.556 billion, Czechoslovakia was invaded, Martin Luther King was shot, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was in the cinema and "Jumpin Jack Flash" was on the radio.

The flat in Vienna's fashionable eighteenth district was quite magical. It was the main reason my brother had returned to that particular city. It was the one place he'd felt geborgen. He'd used the German word, although we always spoke in English, which can roughly be translated as meaning: to feel secure.

It was in search of Geborgenheit, security, that he'd become a warder. That is what he'd once told me. It was no surprise that he'd felt happiest of all in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, its Museum of Art History, where his mother had taken him as a child.

In 1969 the population of the world was 3.631 billion, 27-year-old Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi deposed King Idris of Libya, "Midnight Cowboy" was in the cinema and "Suspicious Minds" was on the radio.

My half-brother wrote of how he'd listened to "Yellow Submarine" while splashing around in the tub, built houses for his toy animals, had been sent by his sister into an igloo, which had promptly collapsed, and had already shown a distinct disrespect for the Law, even at the age of three.

When his sister was at kindergarten my half-brother peered up at his mother, who looked out of the window, awaiting her return. He later wrote of his sense of frustration at being so small.

In 1970 the population of the world was 3.706 billion, Biafra surrendered, U.S. troops invaded Cambodia, Brazil defeated Italy in the World Cup, "M*A*S*H" was in the cinema and "Bridge over Troubled Water" was on the radio.

Once, when climbing through a fence in the countryside, in a place called Puchberg, my half-brother got caught up in barbed wire and had been seriously injured.

On another occasion, when visiting a monastery to the south of Vienna called Heiligenkreuz, his mother told him that if he were to touch the armour he'd die. This lie quite traumatized him and he'd had nightmares about it for months on end. That he chose to become a warder was doubtlessly linked to this incident.

In 1971 the population of the planet was 3.783 billion, the Pentagon Papers were published, the microprocessor was introduced, "A Clockwork Orange" was in the cinema and "Imagine" was on the radio.

In the same year my father kicked his wife along with her two children out of the flat she'd bought. She moved back to Ireland from whence she'd come.

The fact that she'd paid for the apartment in the first place hadn't deterred my father. He knew very well that Austrian law was on his side. When he'd proposed buying the flat he'd known but had omitted to tell his wife that it would have to be in his name.

Of course one shouldn't expect too much from a former member of the Waffen SS. He later treated my own mother with equal cynicism and cruelty for which neither she nor I ever forgave him.

My half-brother's memories of Ireland were somewhat confused. He remembered the taste of barmbrack, Bewley's tea rooms on Grafton Street, the vivid green of Phoenix Park, and, most strangely of all, watching Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Julia" (Ireland was still a little behind the times) in the cinema. There was something peculiarly haunting and disagreeable about that particular experience he later wrote.

He was to reflect that the sadness he'd felt on that occasion must have been due to the loneliness and unhappiness of his mother at the time.

I pictured in my mind's eye a lone woman in a dark cinema with two small children watching a film about love and romance, a theme at one and the same time touching and painful to her and which the tiny children had no chance of either comprehending or appreciating.

From Ireland the small, battered remnants of a family was piloted by his mother, who'd failed to find work there, back to London, where her brother lived.

My half-brother wrote of his first impressions of London: how he was terrified by the prospect of falling under the screeching wheels of the tube trains, found it impossible to grasp the fact that one could pass under the River Thames without getting wet and was frightened by the rough children in the run-down neighbourhood where his uncle lived.

In 1972 the population of the planet was 3.860 billion, Nixon visited China, Britain took over direct rule in Northern Ireland, "The Godfather" was in the cinema, compact discs were developed, the video disc and electronic mail were introduced and "Telegraph Sam" was on the radio.

My half-brother's mother moved to a small, dingy, rat infested flat near a railway line. He dreaded the approach of the fast trains with a mortal fear and thought he'd die when they thundered past. His teeth ached with pain long after their passing.

My half-brother wrote of watching disturbing images of Vietnam and Northern Ireland juxtaposed with sentimental hippy ads on TV. Frequent power cuts ended the viewing while his mother helplessly rummaged around for candles.

In 1973 the population of the world was 3.937 billion, Salvadore Allende was overthrown in a coup, OPEC increased the price of oil, Nixon accepted responsibility for Watergate, "Last Tango in Paris" was in the cinema, and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'round the Old Oak Tree" was on the radio.

My half-brother went to a prep school not far removed from where his mother taught. He thought the smell of the dining hall quite strange, the taste of the food odd, and the Victorian aura of the place quite surreal.

He suffered from rashes, was appallingly lonely and would retreat to the quiet of the secluded garden to study ladybirds. Above all else he hated the humiliation of being small.

In 1974 the population was 4.012 billion, a revolution in Portugal ended dictatorial rule, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped, West Germany defeated Holland in the World Cup, "The Towering Inferno" was in the cinema and "Waterloo" was on the radio.

My father, who'd started a second family with my mother, returned to his first wife who, secure in her position as a teacher, was now renting a house in Morden, on the outskirts of London.

My brother remembered the long commutes to school. On one occasion there was blood on the road. He was curious to see what had happened but his father told him to look the other way.

On another occasion his mother tried to get her children to school using public transport and got hopelessly lost. My half-brother remembered arriving extremely late and sitting in the cloakroom, embarrassed, awkward and unsure of what to do.

Shy and too ashamed to tell anyone of his presence he simply sat on a bench and looked out of the window. He watched the serene, white clouds drift slowly in the silent, blue sky for what seemed like an eternity.

This particular logistical disaster led to the decision to buy a place close to the school. His mother's preference was ignored, thankfully it transpired, a couple had tried to sell them a house with a crack in its fundament, and a semi-detached property with a garden close to the school was purchased.

In 1975 the population of the world was 4.086 billion, Saigon surrendered, "Jaws" was in the cinema, home videotapes were developed and "Bohemian Rhapsody" was on the radio.

My half-brother fell in love for the first time. The object of his poetic, chaste affections, his distant and pious adoration, was a slight, skinny blonde girl named Louise. She was to him, with her straggling locks, doe-like eyes and pale cheeks, the very pinnacle of perfection.

Knowing my half-brother and his ridiculous shyness: she probably never even noticed let alone revelled in his affection, it was a romance doomed from the very start. Perhaps it's better that way. She might well have ridiculed him.

My half-brother's life was spent ruining shoes playing football, much to his mother's chagrin, dreaming in class or skulking in the high grass near a railway line. The children called those who'd developed the system of illicit paths: the SGS, the Special Grass Service. The only boy he happened to make friends with was Jewish, a fact his father, despite his powerful aversion, tactfully ignored.

In 1976 the population of the world was 4.158 billion, the Israelis raided Entebbe, Philip Glass composed "Einstein on the Beach", Concorde took off for its first commercial flight, "Taxi Driver" was in the cinema and "Dancing Queen" was on the radio.

It was a time of prosperity for my half-brother and he began to think his life of privilege due to some mysterious, innate, God-given superiority on the part of both him and his family. If they were well-to-do it was, he reasoned, because they were somehow, inherently, better. It was, he later wrote, somewhat cynically and sardonically, a common error of the bourgeoisie.

At school he was told that the state would take care of him from cradle to grave. He'd never have to worry about a thing. In addition to that: machines would, in the future, do all the work. Life was easy and he was led to believe that it'd very much stay that way.

In 1977 the population of the world was 4.23 billion, Bjorn Borg defeated J. Connors at Wimbledon, "Star Wars" was in the cinema and "Hotel California" was on the radio.

Amid the excitement of punk and disco the first cracks in my half-brother's world began to appear. The marriage of his parents fell apart.

His father moved back to Vienna, initially only temporarily, and my half-brother began to be haunted by a profound and abiding sense of anxiety. He started suffering from nightmares, horded water, ate anything he could get his hands on, and, above all else: put on weight.

In 1978 the population of the world was 4.302 billion, Aldo Moro was assassinated, the Jonestown massacre took place, the Walkman was introduced, "The Deer Hunter" was in the cinema and "Stayin' Alive" was on the radio.

My half-brother was petrified of the secondary school he was about to be sent to. His mother's first choice was a local grammar school of good repute but she'd failed to get him in. The fact that my half-brother was not exactly a scholar – his mother thought him a perfect idiot – hadn't helped.

The question of a private school, similar to the one his sister was being sent to, was discussed. Given his mother's unhappy memories of her childhood and his father's unwillingness to pay, a comprehensive school, although miles from home, was selected.

In 1979 the population was 4.378 billion, there were revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, Thatcher was elected Prime Minister, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, "Apocalypse Now" was in the cinema, and "I Don't Like Mondays" was on the radio.

My half-brother was a passionate supporter of Thatcher. The strikes, which had culminated in the "Winter of Discontent", had turned travelling to school into a complete nightmare. As a consequence he'd started to hate trade unions, who he'd blamed for the disruption, with all his heart. He was also frightened of the Soviet "menace", especially after the invasion of Afghanistan. He suffered from acute anxiety and feared the world was about to end.

In 1980 the population of the world was 4.453 billion, the Iran Iraq War broke out, John Lennon was murdered, "Raging Bull" was in the cinema and "Brass in Pocket" was on the radio.

Every night my half-brother watched on TV how unemployment was rising and rising. He began to suffer from a serious depression. The outlook was bleak. The bleaker the outlook the more frivolous the music being played on the radio. Life in the UK resembled a dance on the Titanic.

At home the atmosphere was even bleaker. His father stopped sending money and the family lurched from one financial crisis to the next.

His mother hovered on the verge of a nervous breakdown, got drunk on a nightly basis and screamed at her children until late in the night. Her feelings of hatred toward her husband were now visited upon her children, especially her daughter. When not humiliating or tormenting her with sarcastic comments she subjected her to verbal abuse of the vilest sort.

In 1981 the population of the world was 4.529 billion, AIDS was first identified, Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated, the first personal computer was introduced, John McEnroe defeated B. Borg at Wimbledon, MTV went on air, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was in the cinema and "Under Pressure" was on the radio.

My half-brother felt his first artistic awakenings threatened by an ever harsher economic climate. Simply being nice no longer seemed an option. He realized that he'd have to study and study hard. His sense of depression deepened.

In 1982 the population of the world was 4.610 billion, the Falklands War was fought, Israel invaded Lebanon, Lebanese Christian Phalangists killed thousands of women and children in West Beirut, "E.T." was in the cinema and "Come on Eileen" was on the radio.

If the atrocities in El Salvador, such as the Sumpul River Massacre, had given my half-brother pause to think, the Falklands and the massacre in Sabra and Shatila made him all the more conscious of man's limitless capacity for evil. Life appeared to him full of horror, fear and cruelty. It all seemed quite worthless. His sense of despondency grew. He felt as though he was falling into an abyss of despair and began to contemplate suicide. He wasn't alone. One friend attempted to slit his wrists while another succeeded in hanging himself from a banister.

In 1983 the population of the world was 4.690 billion, the world came close to nuclear catastrophe, Benigno S. Aquino was assassinated, a South Korean Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet fighter, 237 U.S. Marines were killed in Beirut, the U.S. invaded Grenada, crack cocaine was developed, "Fanny & Alexander" was in the cinema and "Billie Jean" was on the radio.

All around him my half-brother saw evil and lies while his mother degenerated into a raging, wrathful, half-demented alcoholic. His despair reached a new nadir.

In 1984 the population of World was 4.769 billion, Yuri V. Andropov died, Indira Gandhi was assassinated, "Amadeus" was in the cinema and "When Doves Cry" was on the radio.

My brother's sexual drive awoke like a thunderclap. He began to have wet dreams and could hardly control his penis, which seemed permanently erect.

He threw himself into a romantic passion, willingly undergoing extremes of ecstasy and agony, with a wild, almost theatrical abandon. This was done to disprove his sister, who'd asserted that love was merely an illusion. Love, he decided, was the meaning of life. Nothing stood above it.

The object of his desire was a girl at school. He got along well with her but somehow seemed incapable of telling her of his intense feelings. He thought it obvious but to her it was otherwise.

His self-conscious shyness and timidity meant that the affair ended badly. In its aftermath he spent melancholy hours wallowing in self-pity while listening to "Missing You" on his old record player.

He was never to suffer so much pain, whether physical or emotional, ever again. He was, once more, very close to suicide. This experience literally scarred him for life.

From then on he became wary of women and not a little cynical too. He redirected his energies to his schoolwork and became, at long last and somewhat belatedly, a successful scholar.

In 1985 the population of the world was 4.850 billion, scientists reported a hole in the ozone layer, Rock Hudson died of AIDS, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was in the cinema and "Careless Whisper" was on the radio.

My half-brother, with little faith in either his artistic abilities or judgment, desperately insecure and equally unhappy, resigned himself to what he termed: "a life of mediocrity". He resolved to first attend university and then get a job in the City. "If life was meaningless at least one should be well paid", he said at the time.

In 1986 the population of the world was 4.932 billion, the Iran-Contra scandal broke, Challenger exploded, Olof Palme was assassinated, Argentina won the World Cup, "Betty Blue" was in the cinema and "Rock Me Amadeus" was on the radio.

At university my brother sought salvation in idealism. He raised money for charity, campaigned on environmental issues and wrote letters for Amnesty International. After realizing how pointless these efforts were he quickly abandoned them. Lonely and broke, he became profoundly depressed once more.

In 1987 the population of world was 5.018 billion, Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life, "Wall Street" was in the cinema and "Walk Like an Egyptian" was on the radio.

My brother took a course in classical literature. It changed his life. In Greek tragedy he discovered a world that was oddly familiar. Women were filled with murderous hate while children wished vengeance upon their parents. He thought of how his sister had nearly strangled his mother in a fit of rage. She'd pinned her against the kitchen wall and had pushed her ever higher and higher. If he hadn't intervened his mother would most assuredly have perished. The incident had quite traumatized him and he'd wept for hours afterwards.

His sister had also shown him newspaper articles about elaborate plots of girls murdering their mothers. In one a girl had turned her boyfriend into a sex-slave. The boyfriend had then become the unthinking instrument of her mother's cruel fate.

In my half-brother's mind sex became inextricably linked with death. Sex, he believed, invariably led to disaster. He became convinced that his mother should never have married. She should also never have had children. The word family became for him one of abuse. My half-brother, inspired by the Greeks, resolved to become a playwright.

In 1988 the population of the world was 5.104 billion, a U.S. ship shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290, Pan-Am 747 exploded over Lockerbie, Stefan Edberg defeated Boris Becker at Wimbledon, the Olympics were held at Seoul and Calgary, "A Fish Called Wanda" was in the cinema and  "Need You Tonight" was on the radio.

After directing a play he'd written, which even his highly-critical mother considered a success, my half-brother wrote a second one. Although they recognized and freely acknowledged the play's excellence a clique at the university theatre deliberately sabotaged its production. My half-brother couldn't believe how base, vile and stupid they were yet somehow his love of theatre itself endured.

Despite the intrigues he flourished as a playwright. He received confirmation of his talents when a film company offered him the chance to make a film.

In 1989 the population of the world was 5.190 billion, the Berlin Wall fell, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" was in the cinema and "She Drives Me Crazy" was on the radio.

In his last year at university my half-brother abandoned the thought of earning millions in the City and decided to become, despite the meanness of spirit and petty stupidity he'd encountered at the university theatre, a playwright. His success in attracting the attention of a film company seemed to confirm his wish.

In 1990 the population of the world was 5.276 billion, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister, Milli Vanilli admitted lip-synching, Germany defeated Argentina in the World Cup, "Nouvelle Vague" was in the cinema and "Ice Ice Baby" was on the radio.

My half-brother decided to go to Vienna, live the life of a young Bohemian poet and, above all else, to finally learn German, something he'd wished to do for many a year.

He also decided to turn down the offer made by the film company. He wanted to write a play instead of a screenplay. He thought of himself as being not merely a writer but an idealistic one at that. In this respect he'd been profoundly naive.

In 1991 the population of the world was 5.359 billion, the Soviet Union broke up, the South African Parliament repealed apartheid laws, Pee Wee Herman was arrested for indecent exposure, Michael Stich defeated Boris Becker at Wimbledon, "The Silence of the Lambs" was in the cinema and "Let's Talk About Sex" was on the radio.

Instead of getting the promised modern flat in the eighteenth district, where he'd spent his first four years, my half-brother was put up in a miserable, run-down apartment. It was merely fit for a dog. It was cold. There wasn't running water and the bed was full of moths. It was impossible to work. My half-brother despaired. The dream of being a Bohemian playwright was beginning to pall.

His father gave him hardly any money at all, although the state's support for him was quite generous, and, occasionally, he starved. This led to a profound sense of grievance. He began to hate his father nearly as much as he'd once hated his mother.

In 1992 the population of the world was 5.441 billion, the Yugoslav Federation broke up, four police officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow engaged in a public custody battle, "Reservoir Dogs" was in the cinema and "Stay" was on the radio.

My half-brother was once more depressed, sick, desperately lonely, unable to speak or learn German, get a job or develop a career as a playwright. He was reduced to rags, impoverished and in debt. He thought his end had come. He pictured himself on the street and expected it to be merely a matter of time before he landed there.

In 1993 the population of the world was 5.522 billion, the European Union was created, Yeltsin's forces crushed pro-democracy supporters in the Russian Parliament, River Phoenix died of a drug overdose, Pete Sampras defeated J. Courier at Wimbledon, "Schindler's List" was in the cinema and "Would I Lie to You" was on the radio.

To my half-brother's surprise he succeeded in getting into a highly prestigious drama school. From imagining himself a beggar he began to believe he'd become a rich and famous director within the shortest time. Accepted into Vienna's world of the elite on an equal footing he was quite overwhelmed by the glamour of it all.

In 1994 the population of the world was 5.602 billion, the Russians attacked Chechnya, the IRA declared a cease-fire, O. J. Simpson was arrested, "Pulp Fiction" was in the cinema and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" was on the radio.

After criticizing a theatre production at the drama school my half-brother was kicked out. He thought he'd go mad. He turned to writing plays once more. This alone saved his sanity.

In 1995 the population of the world was 5.682 billion, scores were killed when a car bomb blew up in Oklahoma City, there was a nerve gas attack in Tokyo, Yitzhak Rabin was slain by a Jewish extremist, Pete Sampras defeated Boris Becker at Wimbledon, "The Usual Suspects" was in the cinema and "Kiss from a Rose" was on the radio.

My half-brother got a tiny grant from the government. He plunged into a project but the money soon ran out and he was forced to abandon it.

In 1996 the population of the world was 5.760 billion, Tupac Shakur was shot in a drive-by shooting, "Irma Vep" was in the cinema and "Ironic" was on the radio.

Unable to continue his work on his projects my half-brother got a job as a warder in a museum.

In 1997 the population of the world was 5.840 billion, Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule, Princess Diana died, "Titanic" was in the cinema and "I'll Be Missing You" was on the radio.

My half-brother threw all his energies into his career as a playwright but made the mistake of trying to write in German, a language he didn't truly master. He could find no theatre willing to stage his plays.

In 1998 the population of the world was 5.918 billion, Clinton was accused of having sex with Monica Lewinsky, France defeated Brazil in the World Cup, "Saving Private Ryan" was in the cinema and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was on the radio.

My half-brother abandoned the theatre and started to write screenplays but had neither the time nor the energy to promote them properly. New government regulations concerning social security increased the amount of money he had to pay. This meant that he earned less and less money as a warder. He was barely able to survive.

In 1999 the population of the world was 5.996 billion, Indonesian forces massacred thousands in East Timor, "Blair Witch Project" was in the cinema and "She's So High" was on the radio.

Undeterred by innumerable setbacks and financial difficulties my half-brother studied film with ferocious intensity. He read screenplays, interviews and watched half a dozen films a day.

The fact that he had barely enough to live, ate badly, didn't exercise properly, was beset with constant worry, was heavily overworked, and had neither a social nor a love life undermined his health.

When his screenplays, like his plays before them, met with rejection his health broke and he was hospitalized. The doctors didn't expect him to live.

In 2000 the population of the world was 6.08 billion, Joerg Haider's Freedom Party formed a coalition with the People's Party in Austria, "Erin Brockovich" was in the cinema and "Californication" was on the radio.

Worried about the direction events in Austria were taking my half-brother started working as an English teacher. He resolved to flee abroad.

In 2001 the population of the world was 6.16 billion, 9/11 occurred, "Bridget Jones's Diary" was in the cinema and "Beautiful Day" was on the radio.

Teaching proved demanding for my half-brother and he hated the job. What was more he found himself enslaved. He was in a system that demanded all his time, paid him little and offered him no security whatsoever. Life was not only hell: it was hellishly boring. He could see no escape and imagined his life stretching out into a grey, monotonous infinity. His health suffered and he began to contemplate suicide once again.

In 2002 the population of the world was 6.24 billion, a bomb in Bali killed hundreds, Brazil defeated Germany in the World Cup, "Lord of the Rings" was in the cinema and "How You Remind Me" was on the radio.

My half-brother came to despise the bourgeois social world in which he moved. And this was what so many people strove for and were expected to strive for, he wrote to me once?

For him the lives of his acquaintances were quite simply odious, vacuous and perfectly boring. Half the directors and managers he became acquainted with he considered complete idiots while not a few were out and out Nazis. And this was the elite? These were the "pillars of society"? He was outraged.

Of course at the time I didn't take him seriously. His career as a playwright was going badly. He was angry and frustrated. It was perfectly natural that he'd give vent to his spleen.

What was the point in letting his venom out in tirades, I asked myself? His attacks, which were very much pointed in my direction, seemed motivated by jealousy more than anything else.

I told him to cheer up and get a grip on himself. The world was not as black as he painted it. He should think more positively.

In 2003 the population of the world was 6.31 billion, the U.S. and Britain launched a war against Iraq, "Pirates of the Caribbean" was in the cinema, and "Crazy In Love" was on the radio.

Once the Americans invaded Iraq my half-brother finally became reconciled, at least to a degree, to his father. He no longer looked upon him critically and stopped his invective against him. At first I thought this a healthy development. How can one love oneself if one doesn't love one's own father?

In 2004 the population of the world was 6.4 billion, a tsunami devastated Asia, 340 schoolchildren died in Beslan, photos of American soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib sparked outrage, "Sideways" was in the cinema and "Hey Ya" was on the radio.

My half-brother's emails and behaviour became increasingly erratic and he was increasingly indifferent to his own fate. I shared his indifference.

In 2005 the population of the world was 6.4 billion, Hurricane Katrina wrought havoc in New Orleans, Rafik Hariri was assassinated, "Brokeback Mountain" was in the cinema and "Mr Brightside" was on the radio.

I didn't hear from my half-brother for an entire year and have no idea what he did.

In 2006 the population of the world was 6.5 billion, Israel invaded Lebanon, Italy defeated France in the World Cup, "Little Miss Sunshine" was in the cinema and "Crazy" was on the radio.

I began to regard my half-brother as a hopeless case and refused his pitiful pleas for money.

In 2007 the population of the world was 6.7 billion, Benazir Bhutto was killed in a bombing, "No Country for Old Men" was in the cinema and "Umbrella" was on the radio.

My half-brother abandoned teaching and returned to working in various museums. His options were slowly narrowing, as there were ever fewer museums to work in. Every time he had difficulty in one museum the number would diminish further. The job was increasingly insecure.

In 2008 the population of the world was 6.7 billion, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Israel assaulted Gaza, Rafael Nadal defeated Roger Federer at Wimbledon, "Vicky Christina Barcelona" was in the cinema and "Paper Planes" was on the radio.

The company my half-brother worked for filed for bankruptcy.

In 2009 the population of the world was 6.8 billion, there was a swine flu scare, Amanda Knox was convicted of murder, "Inglorious Basterds" was in the cinema and "Paparazzi" was on the radio.

My half-brother became half-mad looking for work. He slowly began to believe it quite impossible to find any form of employment whatsoever. He applied for every possible post, whether high, middling or low but found himself to be either under or overqualified. He began to curse the fate of being born a penniless playwright.

In 2010 the population of the world was 6.8 billion, Port-au-Prince was devastated by an earthquake, Spain defeated the Netherlands in the World Cup, "The Social Network" was in the cinema and "Telephone" was on the radio.

When his father and mother died my half-brother gave a sigh of relief. Finally the two people who'd been his worst enemies, who'd caused him the most pain, and who he'd hated more than anyone else on earth were no more.

He hadn't reckoned with his sister however, a highly successful and extremely ruthless corporate lawyer. She managed to trick her father, after much bullying and physical abuse, into signing a document he didn't even have time to read. It turned out to be his will and it left all his money to her.

In 2011 the population of the world was 6.9 billion, the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were overthrown, a tsunami hit Japan and caused a crisis at Fukushima, "Midnight" in Paris was in the cinema and "Pumped Up Kicks" was on the radio.

A girl accused my half-brother of molesting her. The act in question was a light caressing of the girl's breast. He'd often been caressed by women and had probably mistaken her intentions. That was how he represented the matter to me at the time. Due to the ensuing court case he was forced to borrow money from a bank to pay for a lawyer.

He desperately fought to pay back the debt but once he realized that it was impossible and once he understood that his sister had cheated him he resolved to take his own life.

We left the rather charming restaurant, walked up the steps and out onto the magnificent but congested Nevsky Prospekt. We resolved to go to the Hermitage, which was literally just around the corner.

I had bad luck with the weather the poet explained to me. It was a particularly wet summer, unusually so, and the mosquitos had turned into a veritable plague. Of course, he added, the mosquitos were bad in St. Petersburg but nothing compared to Tula. There they were as big as dogs! As we crossed the street we were very nearly hit by a blue and white trolley bus.

Finally we reached the vast square with its lone column. I found myself staring with amazement at the green, white and gold façade of the Winter Palace in the bright, summer sun. We were fortunate at not having to wait too long for tickets and were quickly inside.

It proved next to impossible to actually study the collection of paintings, the largest in the world, on account of the herds of tourists. The poet suggested we devote ourselves to the works of Matisse and Picasso on the third floor, where the masses seldom erred.

Throughout the museum he was greeted by those working there. He seemed to know everyone and I was surprised at the intelligence and culture of the warders. They tended, on the whole, to be middle-aged women who seemed anxious to share their considerable knowledge and who took pleasure in clever questions. There was nothing they enjoyed more than enquiry, had subtle and refined minds, and loved a good joke.

I explained to the Russian poet that my half-brother had worked for a company that rented students out to various museums.

One of the warders in the Hermitage, a painter, told me that neoliberalism and turbo capitalism were destroying Russia. The average Russian had returned to the days of serfdom. We could see the results on the streets. Even on the busy, prosperous Nevsky Prospekt, half-dressed, shabby figures lay like discarded detritus while the average Russian looked haggard and starved.

After leaving the Hermitage the poet took me to a restaurant in the Malaya Morskaya called Gogol. There we met a German director, Peter Stein, who he'd got to know in Tuscany a year before.

The restaurant, despite its rather ridiculous attempt to recreate the atmosphere of an earlier era, with elaborately patterned wallpaper, chairs with rounded backs, miniature paintings and rather cumbersome cupboards seemed nice enough and the food, traditional Russian fare, extremely good. This was the style the oligarchs preferred the poet told me.

The restaurant's menu included aspic, herring fillets, Siberian whitefish, salmon with crêpes, sturgeon caviar, Caspian sterlet, Сhicken Kiev, coulibiac, venison, Magret de canard, Crème brûlée, and strawberry soup.

Although the red wine punch and the bilberry shake were both tempting I opted for a sparkling kvass, which proved extremely refreshing indeed. It is never a good idea to drink wine in St. Petersburg I'd come to realize.

I was surprised at how diminutive the stature of the famous director was and how unassuming his person. He hadn't a trace of either arrogance or vanity but then again truly great men rarely do.

He had more of the demeanor, with his reader's glasses perched on his nose, of an academic rather than anything else, while his spritely, no-nonsense manner belied his years. His greying hair was long and unkempt and his black bag old and worn.

We discussed politics and how there was a conflict between Russia and the West over Syria. The affair in Syria had been carefully planned a long time before, Stein told us. The resulting political tensions made staging opera in Russia increasingly difficult. He preferred not to talk about politics though. It bored him. The only thing of value was art.

When asked by the Russian poet to define theatre Stein replied emphatically: "One can't describe theatre, one can only make it. All definitions are nonsense. One can only try to describe its historical origins". I asked him to do so.

Theatre, Stein explained, comes from the Greek word for watching: "it is something one can watch", the word "drama" comes from the word for action, and "tragedy" from the word for the wailing of a ram.

Mime, imitation, he told us, is the basis of all culture. Music and dance, both older than theatre itself, involve the imitation of nature, as do the roots of language. The ritual of rain dancing, for example, imitates rain while the ritual of hunting imitates the relationship between hunter and hunted.

At the core of theatre is ritual he explained, and at the core of Athenian theatre was the ritual celebration of the city, its stories, its folklore and, above all else: its goddess, Athena. It was in the course of these celebrations, with carnival billy-goat costumes, and phallic symbols that the ritual of tragedy was born.

The size of the chorus required the writing down of songs and this, he explained, had had wide-ranging implications. The introduction of the written word killed oral culture.

Of course, he lamented, as an aside: "Plato was the death of philosophy. The essence of philosophy is discussion."

The principle themes of the theatre included death, myths, stories, the past and the gods. Above all else: themes that were irrational. In the case of "The Persians" it was intended as a warning about the consequences of defeat. One must never forget, he added, that Aeschylus, who'd written it, and who is regarded as the father of tragedy, had been in the war against the Persians.

The core of tragedy, according to Stein, is the relationship between the individual and divinity. For the Greeks freedom is false. To act is false. Action is violence. It robs one of possibilities. Above all else: the gods don't like it. For the Greeks life is a struggle with catastrophes, which is, at best, interesting.

What theatre involves, Stein explained, is translation. The text needs to be transported. It involves moving from a text into the sphere of the oral and the mimic, moving from the verbal into the nonverbal, from the individual into the collective.

Understanding a text is by no means easy, he explained, not least on account of philology, which means, ironically enough: the love of the word. Up to a quarter of a text might be made up of corrections by philologists.

Another problem of course were idiots like Caesar who burnt down the library of Alexandria. Had it not been for a second library at Byzantium most of the texts might well have been lost.

Once a text has been decided upon the next step is choosing how to interpret it. Which attitude is needed for the different texts? Rhetoric has to be treated differently from verse. The simple language of Chekhov demands a different approach to a tirade by Shakespeare.

Whenever he read a text he immediately had a spatial image. He thought of the action in terms of time and space. The audience was the judge. Which part of the stage would it look at? Was the performance believable or not? Did it convince? Was the subtext clear? Did the audience know what the character was thinking?

The words: "I love you" can be said in a dozen different ways. Each time the subtext was different. At one and the same time every sentence had to be made believable by means of subtext and every sentence had to be spoken as though it had just been newly minted.

The text can be an enemy of the actor. It tended to limit. The actor had to think. The actor had to focus on the language and be clear about what part of the sentence needed to be emphasised. The actor had to think about the space in which he or she was working. The actor had to focus on the musicality of a text. "How can a text be transported to the ears of the listeners most effectively?"

The job of the director was to help the actor to speak in a way that was "close to the intention of the author". This might require a manipulation of the text itself. It might involve minor omissions or corrections. The director had to analyse, together with the actor, which words could be left out without the meaning of the text being changed.

The aim was to make the life of the actor easier. The text had to be "transferred into space". Only this opened the door to the ideas of the author.

The director could explain the text, rewrite the text, use different words or create parallel scenes in order to help the actor. His responsibility however was toward the author not the audience. Theatre was created for the performers, each and every one. It was a collective art.

The theme of theatre being a collective art was taken up by Jutta Lampe, who arrived halfway through Stein's discourse. She listened attentively. She was, like Stein, quiet and unassuming. One would never have guessed, other than from her elegant attire, that she was a world famous actress. She was gentle, charming, and had a wonderful, almost child-like laugh.

It was, at times, difficult for me to tell whether what she said was meant with sincerity or simply acted, so theatrical was her manner. Only later did I realize how honest she actually was. When she spoke she seemed to be addressing a point in mid-air or simply thinking aloud. What she said was directed as much to herself as to those around her.

After Peter Stein left Jutta Lampe took up the narrative.

"Art," she began "is something with which one recreates the world anew. One tries to create an image of the world, after one's own fashion."

"If one is involved in artistic pursuits it's because one needs to express oneself creatively, some as actors, some as writers, others as musicians. One needs to express what lives within one and what needs to be expressed."

"One feels the need, despite all of one's limitations, to deal with one's problems, by which I mean: existential problems; the fact that one knows that one lives and has a limited existence. This is what artists wish to express, in a variety of ways."

"Theatre is, for me, unlike other forms, a joint effort by a number of people. One cannot create theatre on one's own and above all else: one needs an audience."

"Theatre is a community of people who want to play, who want to transform themselves, who want to tell stories about life from a very different time, under very different circumstances. The human questions always remain the same. Man will always ask what love is or what death is or what despair is or hatred and that will always be seen on stage."

"The shared experience of performers and spectators is the wonderful thing about the theatre. Something wonderful takes place when a true and living moment occurs on stage."

"Theatre is very old. It originated with rituals and asserts something magical. Man sees what man is or what man can be, there on stage, as a shared experience, and is changed by this experience."

"I think it's good when one learns something or can think about something or likes something."

"For me acting has always been a means of gaining self-knowledge, a means of finding out about other people, about other women, about what they know and their experiences. Sometimes I know what they know, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'm afraid of their experiences, sometimes their experiences are foreign to me. Nevertheless, one has to play it."

"There are great opportunities for finding out things about oneself, which one didn't previously know. One can find out about oneself by playing other people."

"Acting involves a lot of craft of course, a lot of experience, a lot of fear and courage. Being together is beautiful, working together is beautiful. Working with an author or a poet, with a great poet, being immersed in a different world."

"This morning I listened to Don Giovanni and I thought: these figures are more familiar to me than living people. These figures from literature, from the opera or plays are all familiar. One is living with the dead. Mozart, Chekhov and Goethe are all dead. One deals a lot with the dead, with what those who are no longer living have told us. It's a strange thing. Sometimes I don't feel like a woman of my times. I'm not alone in this. Many actors feel this way. As do many musicians, all performers of course."

"Acting means being another. Not playing oneself but being in the world of another on stage."

"I was involved in the theatre even as a child. I was in children's ballet. By coincidence a dancer lived with us in our apartment. My mother had to rent. After a short time I was in children's ballet and then I sang in the children's choir in the theatre, where I lived, in Kiel, in northern Germany. I didn't want to leave. I wanted only to be a dancer but couldn't get the requisite training. Then I said: I'll become an actress. I began with private lessons. That was terrible."

"I had a friend who was in Hamburg, at the Music Academy. She wrote: "come here, the academy is great, it's wonderful. Do the entrance exam, then they'll look after you." I did the exam, was accepted, skipped a semester and just learned. Since then there has been no alternative in my life."

"I have been very lucky. I got an engagement in Bremen. It was a very interesting theatre at the time, perhaps the most interesting theatre."

"Peter Zadek was there. Actors such as Bruno Ganz and Edith Clever were there. They played major roles. I played, unfortunately, always light comedy, Boulevard. I was very unhappy. I didn't get on with Zadek. Zadek didn't like me and I didn't like him, which was a shame. He made exciting, great things."

"I said to Kurt Hubner, the director of the theatre: "If I only play Boulevard I'm leaving. It doesn't interest me." Then I went to Mannheim. After four days I called Hubner, crying, and said: "Please get me out of here". That was like the grave. Theatre at its worst. But it wasn't possible and I had to remain a year. So that's what I did. It was awful. Then Hubner said: come back. So I returned. The first thing was, again, Boulevard. So I said: "I'm going, immediately.""

"Then I heard that Peter Stein was coming. Peter Stein was going to direct "Kabale und Liebe", "Intrigue and Love". He'd already cast Edith Clever in the role of Louise Miller, Michael Koenig as Ferdinand and Bruno Ganz as Wurm and he needed a Lady Milford. He knew them all, only me he didn't know."

"Hubner said to Stein: "Watch her during a rehearsal of a Boulevard comedy". He did. The rehearsal ended. I'd heard about him, he'd directed Bond, in Munich. I'd read about him and Kurt Hubner had told me about him."

"I ran down. I knew he was just leaving. Someone told me: "He's already out of the auditorium". I caught him just at the door. I said: "I really want to work with you.""

"Anyway, he cast me. I played Lady Milford. We then made "Tasso" together."

"We stayed together, also privately. I fell intensely in love with him and he in me. Then we got an engagement in Zuerich with a fellow called Loeffler. He wanted Peter Stein, Bruno Ganz, Edith Clever and me. Edith Clever was, I believe, a guest in Munich."

"We went to Zuerich but were kicked out after half a year. They thought we wanted to subvert Switzerland to Communism. It was grotesque!"

"Then one day, an emissary from the Schaubuehne arrived. The theatre had existed since 1962 am Halleschen Ufer. They made, at that time, only contemporary theatre."

"Dieter Sturm was there. He was very important, a very great man, a highly read and obsessive man of the theatre. They also had money. That was a private theatre. They wanted to change. They wanted an ensemble."

"One day an emissary from the Schaubuehne came to Zuerich and asked Peter Stein if he'd like to take charge of the Schaubuehne."

"Stein then discussed it with us. He asked: "Do you want to join? I want you and you and you." We were fourteen people in all. Then came Edith Clever. Those in Zuerich all said yes, and we all went to Berlin."

"We then spent our nights lying on the floor writing about what we wanted theatre to be."

"In 1970 the Schaubuehne was newly founded. Of course that was a great time of prosperity, social prosperity, and of the whole '68 movement, which influenced us, especially Peter Stein, who'd been kicked out of Munich. He'd tried to collect money on behalf of the Viet Cong."

"We were left-wingers. We wanted self-determination and participation theater, which hadn't been done before, and we attained it. We wanted even the technical department of the theatre to be involved."

"There were large gatherings to discuss what we were doing and why. It didn't work. The interests differed too much. We couldn't agree because they wanted different plays, mostly street theatre or something similar. Of course we didn't."

"We wanted the classics. We wanted Shakespeare, Chekhov, where the theater began, where we came from, what the theatre over the whole millennia had been, what we identified as its great moments, our bourgeois origins and all these things. We drew up a paper, and that was our constitution. It consisted only of what we wanted and we worked like crazy."

"I have never learned so much in my entire life about the ancient world and about the time of Shakespeare. The theatre was like a small university, like a little monastery. It was a unique mixture of theory and practice and it had a wonderful constellation of people."

"There were also the most exciting directors, which must be said, of course. Stein managed to integrate his rivals, such as Grueber and Luc Bondy. Most theatre directors feel the need to avoid that."

"All actors loved working with Stein. They loved working with Grueber and they loved working with Bondy. And then came Robert Wilson. Of course that was phenomenal. Everyone wanted to work with everyone."

That night I saw a horse and rider on the pavement of the Nevsky Prospekt. The spirit of Pushkin seemed truly alive and well.

The next morning I told my publisher that there had been a change of plans. I had to go to my brother's funeral in Vienna and wouldn't be able to stay in St. Petersburg after all. My publisher said that I should meet him in Bratislava. From Bratislava I could take a train to Vienna. The trip was simple and would only take an hour. I quickly booked a flight.

As the Russian poet drove me to the airport he asked me about Austria. There was little I could tell him. All I knew was what I'd read on the Internet and how reliable was that?

According to one source its territory covers 83,855 km2 (32,377 sq. mi), according to another: 84,000 km2 (32,433 sq. mi), while a third states that it is 83,871 km2. One estimate of its population is 8.47 million, a second: 8,414,638 and a third: 8,221,646.

Who should one believe if it's impossible to agree on something as basic as a country's size, I lamented to the Russian poet?

I told him that Austria produced grains, potatoes, wine, fruit, cattle, pigs, poultry and lumber, had natural resources of oil, coal, lignite, timber, iron ore, copper, zinc, and had industries of construction, machinery, vehicles, metals, chemicals, lumber, paper and tourism.

As to Austria's history: all I cared about was how it had fashioned my father. That the territory had been fought over by Celts, Romans, Bavarians, Slavs and Avars, had been given to the Babenbergs and been contested by both Ottokar II and Rudolph I, didn't interest me in the slightest. The fact that it had been Christianized and how, by the sword, was more important than when or by whom.

That it had been caught up in wars resulting from the Reformation and the Counter Reformation had had direct ramifications on my family's history. My father's family had originated in Bavaria and his ancestors had received land in Bohemia. This had been in the wake of its conquest by the Imperial Army at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

My grandfather had been disinherited after his father remarried at the start of the twentieth century. He'd came to Vienna to seek his fortune in the years preceding the First World War.

The methods and modes of expansion of the dynasty that happened to be ruling (being interchangeable as they invariably are) was, to my mind, irrelevant, as was the cause of country's shrinkage. What mattered was the fact that the entity, which called itself Austria, had once been part of a multinational empire, centered on Vienna, in which a variety of languages had been spoken with a varying degree of proficiency.

Once Hungary, Bohemia and other territories had been shorn away all that remained was a rump state calling itself the Republic of German-Austria, Deutschoesterreich.

The family my father was born into at the beginning of the twenties might have been prosperous but the country itself was poor. When the Wall Street crash came my father's family suffered, lost its fortune, nearly went bankrupt and struggled hard to survive.

My grandfather, brought up in an aristocratic tradition, remained a monarchist while my grandmother, who was from a provincial, bourgeois family, became an early adherent of the Nazis.

At my grandfather's insistence, and in a tradition of noblesse oblige, the family had fed the poor. My half-brother was told by his mother, who was no friend of the family, that they had kept many in Vienna alive during the years of dearth.

When the Anschluss came the family lived in fear of my grandfather's fierce and outspoken contempt for the Nazis. He hated Hitler because Hitler meant war. He hated war because he'd been in the First World War, and had loathed it. As a consequence he'd despised nationalism and militarism, not merely as stupid and ignorant but as base and vile. Only the esteem in which the family was held in Vienna, and the fact that it had kept so many alive in times of dearth, saved it from a concentration camp.

The poet asked me about what Jean Améry had termed morbus austriacus. What was the essence of what he termed the Austrian soul? I smiled. What, I asked myself, is a soul? He asked me about Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian he admired most of all and whose work I was translating. I told him that I was going to translate "Alte Meister", "Old Masters", once I'd finished with "Ausloeschung", "Extinction".

Why not do the translation in Vienna, he suggested? The idea was good and I resolved to find an apartment for a year instead of a week, as I'd originally planned.

Bernhard had said of his ancestors that they were "wonderful people". They'd been "filthy rich, extremely poor, criminals, beastly", almost all, in some way or other, "perverse, happy", and "well-travelled". Most had killed themselves, especially those from whom it had been least expected. One had jumped into a well another had shot himself while a third had driven his car into a river.

It was, Bernhard explained, both "atrocious" and "pleasant" to think of one's ancestors, and was not unlike sitting in a theatre. The curtain opened and one instantly saw people on stage. One divided them up not only into good and bad characters but good and bad actors too.

I considered my own ancestors, on both sides of my family, as well as the ancestors of my stepfather. I could picture some, but not many, in my mind's eye. There were paintings, sketches, photographs I could refer to, stories, legends and myths I'd heard. I've always regarded my ancestors, especially my grandfathers, as sources of strength. I think of myself as having a proud tradition, which I try to live up to.

This attitude was a source of dispute and antagonism between my half-brother and myself. Not only was his family, especially his father, a burden, the idea of family itself was anathema to him.

For me the family is a means of helping one another, a way of bundling energy for a common good. For my half-brother the very notion was simply appalling. The natural state of affairs, he argued, was for one to seek out like-minded soul mates, not to be chained to those he defined as "monsters" or "creeps". This was undoubtedly the reason he wanted to work in the theatre. He'd often cited Strehler's causal connection between theatre and loneliness.

The key to understanding Bernhard, I explained to the Russian poet, was his grandfather on his mother's side: Johannes Freumbichler. Bernhard's great-grandfather had first learned to write at the age of twenty, so writing had played a considerable, one might say: revolutionary role in his life.

The ignorance of the Freumbichlers hadn't surprised me. Even my aunts hadn't visited a school. My father had gone to university but, if the truth be told, the Austrians on the whole didn't seem to attach much importance to education. My half-brother lamented the fact that the average Austrian led a brutish existence of benighted ignorance.

Education opened up new horizons for Johannes Freumbichler yet he failed to finish his high school, failed to become a military cadet and failed in his studies of electro technology. Most importantly of all: he failed as a writer.

The consequences for those around him, such as for his partner: Anna Bernhard and her daughter: Herta Bernhard, were catastrophic. They were both readily sacrificed on the altar of his ambition. Both had to literally slave on his behalf.

When his daughter met a man and went out with him she was reproached for this act of scandalous independence. When she got pregnant she was nearly cast aside. Her mother wrote that she didn't care whether she perished or not. Fortunately for her she got an abortion.

I thought of the stories I'd heard about my own father's family. They too had treated one another with cold brutality and indifference. The women had been expected to sacrifice and subordinate their lives to that of the greater good, which meant, in practice, the greater good of the male members of the family. Happiness was merely an illusion. They were, effectively, slaves. Yet they were willing slaves too. They'd believed that this was the right thing to do and they'd believed in their roles within the hierarchical system. Their fanaticism had been quite remarkable and they'd chastised those who'd rebelled against it. Those who hadn't actually shared their passion had resigned themselves to fates of melancholy wistfulness. Of course this had been a survival strategy. One had to believe or die, and what, I reflected, is life without belief?

The same applied to my father. He'd been brainwashed at school into believing in Hitler, as if he were a god. If he'd renounced the Fuehrer, in later life, it might well have spelled the end. Of course it is extremely difficult to put oneself in the shoes of a Nazi. Perhaps the Russian poet had the same difficulty imagining himself a Communist.

This was the source of the melancholy Bernhard had been so acutely aware of when he'd visited Vienna, the sense of shattered dreams and frustrated lives. It was out of this sense of hopelessness and loss that the suicide of my half-brother, as well as Bernhard's friends, had been born.

Austrian society was profoundly and brutally patriarchal, I told the Russian poet. Families were often hard, cold and materialistic while the children were all too frequently treated as labor to be readily exploited.

In all probability it hadn't changed much. It was not too difficult to figure out where the Nazi culture had come from and why the culture of Nazism still flourished in Austria. The fundamentals of the culture, especially the family culture, hadn't changed that much. The same mechanism of oppression was very much operative and in effect.

Did their brutality toward one another have to do with their history of being serfs, Leibeigene, I asked myself, and was not the brutality I'd witnessed in St. Petersburg of the same nature and of the very same origin?

Did Austrians have no pride? No sense of self-value, no self-esteem? Was it surprising that they could be Nazis? Was that not the essence of a Nazi? A person willing to subordinate and, if necessary, sacrifice themselves because they had no sense of self-worth, no pride, no self-esteem. In that respect Bernhard definitely was the opposite of a Nazi. His pride was positively satanic in its dimensions. Yet his pride wasn't derived from a pride in blood or family but rather a pride in his own intellectual and, above all else, artistic abilities. His pride was that of a concert pianist I'd once observed who'd looked at the audience he'd just performed for with complete and utter contempt. And had not that contempt been warranted, just as Bernhard's contempt had been justified?

Bernhard was born in 1931, close to Heerlen, the Netherlands, I explained to the Russian poet. His mother worked abroad in the same way that many Serbs and Turks now work in Austria itself. This was undoubtedly one thing that many Austrians had forgotten.

I knew from my half-brother that Austrians frequently complained about foreigners, Auslaender, who came to work in their country. Yet they'd forgotten how, not long before, they too had been forced to seek employment abroad. They too had once been Auslaender and they might well become Auslaender again, one day. Of course this also seemed to be an Austrian characteristic: the inability to see beyond the village tree-line, both in terms of time and space, a narrowness, a meanness and pettiness of spirit. This I had all deduced from my half-brother's letters.

While she was in Austria Herta Bernhard met a former friend from school, a carpenter named Alois Zuckerstaetter. It wasn't clear whether she'd been raped or not but one thing was certain: Zuckerstaetter had denied being the father of her child. The joke was that such a denial hadn't been merely base, cowardly and despicable, it had been completely implausible. Little Thomas hadn't just looked similar to his father: he was the spitting image of him.

Bernhard had been acutely aware of the fact that when his mother had hurled abuse at his head it hadn't been directed at him at all but rather at his absent father. Once, when she'd seen him with a picture of his father she'd seized it and, with violent words, had thrown it into a fire. He wasn't permitted ever again to utter his father's name in her presence.

Of course I couldn't help but think of my half-brother. He had been, in a similar fashion, the target of his mother's wrath and ire, and for exactly the self-same reason. His mother had seen in him, as well as in his sister, proxies of their father, and had hated them accordingly. This was, I have often observed, a phenomenon that was more widespread than many suppose.

All Bernhard knew about his father had been the fact that he'd attended the same primary school as his mother, had gone to Germany, where he'd had five children and had perished in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1943. Some said he'd been battered to death, others that he'd been shot. The exact circumstances of his death weren't known.

In reality, I explained to the Russian poet, Alois Zuckerstaetter had lived and worked as a carpenter in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He'd met a Kindergarten teacher by the name of Hedwig Herzog, had got her pregnant and they'd married in 1938. Hedwig knew that he already had a child from a previous relationship. He'd excused himself by means of lies. Although Hedwig knew that he was an alcoholic she'd tried to make the best of it.

In the mean time Zuckerstaetter had been tracked down by Herta, who'd demanded alimony.

Hedwig, fearing for her life, left her husband a year after marrying him and got a divorce. Faced with the task of paying for the alimony of two children Alois quit his job at the Berlin firm of Nordland and committed suicide in November 1940.

As a child Bernhard had wanted to commit suicide too. He'd tried to hang himself. The rope broke. It could have been a scene out of Beckett. He'd been seven at the time.

On another occasion, at the age of ten, while the family was living in Traunstein, he'd swallowed sleeping tablets. He'd survived after throwing up and had spent the next four days in bed.

From these two events it was safe to conclude that his childhood hadn't been terribly happy, I told the Russian poet. Bernhard however, paradoxically, would have denied this fact. He would then have felt contempt for himself at his own denial. Such was the complexity of his character. But in this respect, I reflected, he was hardly alone.

One of his best friends, Gerhard Fritsch, committed suicide in Vienna in 1969. Gerhard Fritsch, a writer of poetry and novels, had done his utmost to help Bernhard.

He'd written assessments, praised his work and had published anthologies of his poetry. He'd also helped Bernhard out financially. Bernhard, however, was not one to remember the kindness of others.

When Fritsch refused to resign from a jury that had awarded Bernhard the Anton-Wildgans Prize (It was doubtlessly thanks to Fritsch's efforts that he'd been awarded the prize in the first place) Bernhard broke with him.

The fact that the ceremony, in the wake of the scandal surrounding the state prize, had been cancelled had angered Bernhard and he'd demanded from Fritsch a display of unconditional loyalty. He'd expected that Fritsch resign from the jury.

The fact that Bernhard had received the money didn't count. The fact that he had the option of returning it but refused to do so, didn't count either. The fact that the ceremony itself was a complete waste of time and of no relevance whatsoever, and of this Bernhard was acutely aware, didn't count either. He demanded only that his friend make a sacrifice, not that he himself do so.

Fritsch protested that he simply couldn't afford to resign. He had three ex-wives and six children, and the former were forever pestering him for money. What annoyed Bernhard, when they met to discuss the matter, was the fact that Fritsch had had the temerity to sit at what had once been Robert Musil's favorite table in Café Museum. This was, in Bernhard's eyes, not merely an insult to Musil it was an insult to him.

Bernhard, I told the Russian poet, was not one to tolerate rivals, even among his friends, and when Heimito von Doderer died he'd been delighted. What had annoyed Bernhard even more intensely was the repulsive tone with which the pitiful Fritsch had pleaded. Later he was to downplay their friendship and Fritsch's role in his life. He'd just been someone he'd occasionally had a drink with, nothing more. Bernhard was acutely aware that he was not one to be grateful. He didn't like anyone to have a claim on him.

Fritsch had been, in Bernhard's eyes, a dullard, a member of the petit-bourgeoisie, who wore ugly, cheap suits and had grown disgustingly fat. What was worst of all was the fact that he'd merely written mediocre poetry and appalling prose.

One day Fritsch put on his wife's dress, her Dirndlgewand as Bernhard put it, and hung himself from the hook of a door. He'd been thirty-five at the time.

Fritsch had never, in Bernhard's eyes, shown a trace of distaste for his thoroughly botched life. It had all been too much and this had lead to his extinction.

I explained to the Russian poet that it was this example, as well as that of his grandfather, which had played such an important part in Bernhard's decision never to marry. This wasn't the only factor; his misogyny and bisexuality were not to be ignored, as was his dark view of life itself. For Bernhard putting children into the world was a crime.

There was no doubt in my mind that Bernhard feared for his independence as well as for his life.

Why, the poet asked, given the fact that the question of suicide played such a huge role in his work, had Bernhard not killed himself? He was too curious about life, I answered. It was merely curiosity that kept him going.

I realized that I was putting the cart before the horse. I needed to tell Bernhard's story from the very beginning.

Bernhard was born in a nunnery on the ninth of February 1931 close to Heerlen in the Netherlands. In May his mother left the Doorgangshuis, the place of temporary refuge, and moved to Rotterdam but found it difficult to find somewhere suitable for Thomas. Eventually she left him at a children's home called Bergsteyn in Hillegersberg.

She had a hard time, lost both her accommodation and job and was reprimanded for her failure to send sufficient funds to her parents. Because the children's home was too expensive she was forced to leave Thomas on a trawler, which had been converted into a houseboat. This was to prove his earliest childhood memory.

He remembered lying below deck, in a hammock hanging from a wooden ceiling. Alongside him were seven or eight newborn babies, who'd be lowered down and displayed to their mothers once or twice a week. Each time this had happened he'd screamed pitifully. His face had been disfigured by boils.

"I have always been difficult", he commented later in life. Referring to his earliest childhood memories he wrote: "Basically, I am a man of the sea. Only when I am close to the sea can I breathe properly".

Bernhard later said of this time: "My mother gave me away. I don't think she cared for me back then", and: "my mother visited me every three or four weeks."

In September 1931 Herta brought her seven-month-old son to her parents in Vienna before returning to work in the Netherlands. There she got a job working for a family who owned a margarine factory. When she wanted to return to Vienna her father opposed the idea. She did so nevertheless.

Bernhard remembered this time in the Wernhardtstrasse, in Ottakring: "My grandfather, the writer, wrote, my grandmother, the midwife, worked as a midwife while my mother earned money as a maid and cook."

I couldn't help but think that I detected a note of contempt in Bernhard toward his mother. He despised her because she was merely a maid. The fact that it was she who paid the bills was quietly ignored. Of course this was most probably not only his own attitude toward his mother but rather his grandfather's attitude toward her too.

It was at this time that his mother got to know Emil Fabjan, who was later to become his much-hated stepfather.

The failure of his grandfather meant that he had to abandon Vienna and return to his roots.

His grandfather moved, together with his partner and grandson, to the idyllic town of Seekirchen am Wallersee, north of Salzburg. His mother stayed behind in Vienna and worked hard to support the family. She only saw her son twice a year. Bernhard seems to have regarded this fact as a token of her indifference, which it was not. It was simply a consequence of her poverty.

Bernhard's grandfather had a decisive influence on his grandson. All Bernhard's knowledge derived from his "great explainer". It had been "the only useful", the "only" school he'd ever really attended. He trusted his grandfather, in contrast to his mother, who he hadn't trusted at all, had loved him and had felt loved by him. This also, of course, had a profound influence on his writing. He'd stated that "all these figures, male figures, are always my maternal grandfather."

As a child Bernhard had felt appallingly lonely. He felt that loneliness was a permanent, inescapable condition of life and that the world was made up of merely deception and doubt. Loneliness was one of the chief themes of both his life and his literature, I told the Russian poet. Bernhard had once said: "one studies but is completely alone. A boy sits next to one at school but one is completely alone. One talks to someone but is completely alone. One emerges out of solitude only to encounter an ever greater loneliness, a sense of being cut off. One changes locations, moves to big cities, Rome, London, Vienna, Brussels, learns languages, moves to a whole new part of the world yet always remains alone."

Not only was he conscious of loneliness he was also conscious of death, at an early age, a prerequisite, as Schopenhauer pointed out, to any philosophical approach to life. It is little wonder that he had such an affinity with Wittgenstein, I couldn't help but think.

Among his earliest memories were images of death. He remembered a butcher's with its hooks, hammers, and knives, bone, pus and blood and the sight of a horse being put down. He remembered being shown a young corpse, the son of a cheese maker, laid out in a mortuary chapel, as well as visits to cemeteries and morgues. His was, by no means, a sentimental education.

Bernhard, like Wittgenstein, was acutely aware of how difficult it is for us to communicate with one another. He once said: "one is incapable of being understood". Perhaps his entire life was spent attempting to make others understand him.

When Bernhard had gone to school in Traunstein, in Bavaria, where the family moved in 1937, it ended badly. "I could not figure out the easiest calculation, each dictation ended in disaster," he lamented.

Why, I asked myself, had Freumbichler moved to Nazi Germany at a time when so many artists and writers were moving in the opposite direction? Had he hoped to curry favour with the Nazis? Had he thought they'd help him with his floundering career? Or had he been infatuated with their ideas? It was odd, to say the least.

My half-brother always argued that emotional factors played an important part in his ability or failure to learn, or rather failure to perform, he'd said the word with utter contempt.

He always accused me of being no better than a clever monkey able to do tricks for nuts. He made no disguise of his jealousy in this respect. Yet it was his determination to compete both with myself and his sister that bore fruit and made it possible for him to go to university.

It had been for emotional reasons, I explained to the Russian poet, that Bernhard had been such a poor scholar. "I was the mockery of my classmates", Bernhard lamented. "The children of the bourgeoisie, with their expensive clothes, punished me with their contempt without my understanding why. The teachers didn't help either, on the contrary. I was helpless as never before. Trembling, I went to school, crying, I left."

His relationship with his mother, who had moved, together with her new husband, to Traunstein, went from being virtually non-existent to dire. Mothers are highly sensitive to both mistrust and indifference. I saw that in the relationship between my half-brother and his mother. Her eyes were close to tears when he was cold toward her, which he frequently was. Bernhard had felt deprived, as any child would, and deeply resented the fact that his mother had rarely spent much time with him during his formative years. That the cause of this deprivation was no fault of her own but rather his grandfather, who he adored, was something a child couldn't or wouldn't understand. That abstract economic forces and social injustice played a key role in his emotional starvation gave Bernhard a profound sense of grievance. He never did have much reason to love the system from the start. Bernhard's vexed relationship with his mother was almost identical to my half-brother's. Even the insults were the same. "My mother deeply hurt me with her words," Bernhard lamented, "You're just what I need! You're to blame for my misery! Go to hell! You've ruined my life! You're a good for nothing, just like your father! You're a troublemaker! A liar!" Of course a child believes such things; it has no means of knowing otherwise.

My half-brother complained that his mother wounded him in a similar fashion. He'd accepted her judgement that he was worth nothing. It was this self-contempt and indifference toward his own fate that made him so careless and it was this carelessness, which proved so fatal for both his career and ultimately his own life. It was also this sense of self-contempt that made him want to become an artist. He needed recognition and fame. Only fame could balance out his sense of worthlessness. It was undoubtedly the same with Bernhard. If he hadn't become famous he might well have committed suicide.

Bernhard was sent away to a home for difficult children called Steigerwald, in Thuringia, Saalfeld. It was an experience that traumatized him for the rest of his life. Decades later he'd grow enraged whenever he heard the mention of the name Frauenwerk (German Women's Welfare Organization). He'd never forgotten how he'd been starved and his ears boxed. Perfectly miserable he'd wet his bed at night. To compound his misery his soiled linen had be displayed for all to see in the morning. "You can imagine how ashamed I was at such an age, he once commented, I still can't comprehend how my mother could have sent me to such a place. She knew perfectly well what it was like." It was another reason for hating her.

In 1944 he was sent to school in Salzburg and taught to play the violin. The fact that he was traumatized from his experiences at home made it impossible for him to learn. The war didn't help either. Once, at the age of twelve, when he was out walking with his grandfather on a beautiful summer's day they spotted what looked like three Messerschmitts in flight. Suddenly the planes turned and started firing. It transpired that they were Spitfires and not Messerschmitts after all.

This was no isolated incident. While blueberry picking, he was attacked from the sky. The blueberry pickers he was with jumped into the bushes and, their hands raised up to heaven, had prayed with all their might. They emerged from the bushes, their clothes torn and covered with debris, while earth, wood and splinters rained down from above. Bernhard laughed out loud at the sight of them. The fact that they'd survived unscathed was immediately proclaimed a miracle.

While at school in Salzburg he took shelter in the tunnel systems, which were equipped with toilets, electric lights and benches. They housed up to eighty thousand people for hours on end. The artificial ventilation proved inadequate and many, including Bernhard, fainted due to a lack of oxygen. He later wrote about the "terrible and often fatal scenes" he'd witnessed. "There wasn't sufficient air in the tunnel and I was often together with hundreds of helpless women, children and men in the dark and wet tunnel." There were "appalling scenes of violence at the entrances," as some tried to get out while others tried to get in. The people no longer attempted to restrain their "innate brutality" and "the weak were very often and easily trampled."

On October the 16th 1944, six hundred U.S. Army bombers left their bases at Foggia in southern Italy. It was a clear autumn day. I could not help but think of "Catch 22" and Joseph Heller, whose 488th Bombardment Squadron had been based at Foggia. He'd been a bombardier in a B-25.

In Salzburg few reacted to the warnings of an air raid as it had been preceded by numerous false alarms. Over two hundred people were killed and the city was badly damaged. Bernhard later wrote of the "horribly bloody wounds" that had been "torn in the backs of the buildings", which had once dominated the cityscape. "Suddenly I was confronted with the absolute brutality of war. At the same time I was fascinated by this monstrosity. To this day I still haven't forgotten the dead covered with bed sheets lain out on the grass in front of the Konsum building. Whenever I'm in the vicinity of the train station I see these dead, I hear the desperate voices of the family members, and I smell the burnt flesh of animals and humans." This was both a decisive and damaging experience, which scarred him for life. Other witnesses to these scenes were quicker to forget.

Once he stepped on something soft. At first he believed it to be a puppet's hand but soon discovered that it had belonged to a child. He became acutely aware of how helpless the humiliated victims, confronted with the futility of their own existence, actually were. Above all else he became conscious of the fact that war was not merely a gruesome intervention, it was an elementary crime.

The question of the true nature of war deeply divided my father and grandfather. The latter regarded the glory and heroism of war with contempt.

My grandfather told stories of how he'd fraternized with Russians while serving on the Eastern Front during the First World War and had traded Austrian bread for Russian vodka.

My father was a member of the Hitler Youth and was indoctrinated at an early age. He despised his father. Becoming a Nazi was also his personal form of rebellion, I couldn't help but think. It was his way of establishing his separate, individual, identity.

This had been a major theme of my half-brother. He didn't want to be like his father. Each generation rebels against its predecessor, I couldn't help but think.

I thought of Oedoen von Horvath and his works dealing with this theme: "Jugend ohne Gott", "The Age of the Fish", and "Ein Kind unserer Zeit", "A Child of Our Time". I recalled the production of Oedoen von Horvath's "Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald", "Tales from the Vienna Woods", directed by a German director called Michael Thalheimer I'd seen at a festival in Avignon. It was somewhat odd, I reflected, to watch a play about Vienna by the Berlin Deutschen Theater in France but I went to see it nevertheless.

The play itself didn't paint a pretty picture of the Austrians. Hard, cold, materialistic, calculating, corrupt, the characters were well and truly no pleasure to watch. The murder of a baby through cold, hard, calculated neglect wasn't too flattering either.

I thought of Oedoen von Horvath, who'd been born in Fiume, now known as Rijeka, the eldest son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat. My memories of Rijeka, with its charming boulevards, cafes, quays, fishing boats and restaurants with delicious dishes came back to me.

Oedoen von Horvath, I recalled, had gone to school in Budapest and Bratislava. Only at the age of fourteen did he begin to actually read in the language in which he was eventually to write. He studied in Munich where, one evening, while out drinking, he was asked to write a pantomime. The pantomime was a disaster but it changed his life. From that moment on he became passionately committed to writing and, in 1931, he finally achieved success with his play: "Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald".

The ascent of the Nazis in 1933 forced him to move to Vienna where he wrote "Jugend Ohne Gott" and "Ein Kind unserer Zeit". I thought about those novels. They were intimately connected with the fate of my father. The first concerned the Hitler Youth.

The aim of the Hitler Youth was to make the German teenagers, they had to join at the age of fourteen, learn how to think and act in a "German way", whatever that meant. Once in the hands of the Nazi Party, they would never be allowed to escape and would never be allowed to be free again‬‬‬‬‬‬‬. Hitler openly boasted of this death of freedom. Through brutal, sadistic and petty mistreatment the children were taught discipline, obedience and toughness. They were indoctrinated above all else not to fear war but rather desire it. The highest honor was, in their eyes, to die a soldier's death in combat.

Within months of attaining power, in January 1933, the Nazis sought to eliminate all competition. All four hundred of the other youth organizations ceased to exist. Only the Catholic Youth Organization was spared, though the Nazis couldn't resist the temptation of assassinating its leadership a year later.

Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach disbanded the Jewish and Communist youth groups, harassed the Socialists and pressurized the Protestants, who quickly yielded. Within months the Nazis controlled all the youth organizations in Germany.

The youth of Germany became highly organized and, for the taste of some, excessively so. Boys as young as six weren't spared. At the age of ten boys were expected to join the Jungvolk while girls were expected to join the Jungmaedel. At the age of fourteen males were expected and later forced to join the Hitler Jugend, Hitler Youth, while females had to join the Bund Deutscher Maedel, League of German Girls, or BDM.

The children were imbued with a sense of team spirit and were forever competing against one another. They played war games, which often descended into brawls. Within a year the Hitler Youth increased from 107,956 to 3.5 million members.

The Hitler Youth was controlled from within by its own police force: the HJ-Streifendienst, which didn't just stop at denouncing other members of the Hitler Youth, parents were denounced too. Fathers or mothers could end up in concentration camps for pointing out the obvious: that Hitler was crazy.

I thought of an anecdote Bernhard related about his youth. While on his way to school in Traunstein, which was 4km away from where his grandparents lived, a woman jumped out of a bush and screamed that she'd send his grandfather to Dachau. This was the fear my grandfather was confronted with. He'd nevertheless spoken out against the Nazis.

By 1935, about sixty percent of Germany's youth belonged to the Hitler Youth and, in December 1936, joining became mandatory. Parents who didn't send their children were imprisoned. By 1938 Hitler Youth membership had swelled to 8.7 million.

For many Adolf Hitler was literally their god. They prayed to him to preserve their lives, to save Germany and to give them their daily bread.

For the Nazis physical fitness was more important than memorizing dead facts in the classroom. According to Hitler a less well educated, but physically healthy individual with a sound, firm character, full of determination and willpower was more valuable to the community than an intellectual weakling.

The classroom in the meanwhile had the task of propagating the myth of Hitler's liberation of Germany from the "international Jewish/Bolshevik world conspiracy" and elevating the "racial question" over all others.

The irony was that although the schools had the task of serving both people and state the new ideology had the effect of turning one of the best educational systems in the world into one of the worst. Teachers lived under the constant fear that they might be denounced by their pupils and might end up in a concentration camp. This, and the "racial question", were the subjects of Horvath's novel: "Jugend ohne Gott".

"Ein Kind unserer Zeit" was about how a young man slowly became disenchanted with war and its bitter rewards.

My father joined the Hitler Youth in 1938 and, along with eighty thousand others, attended the Nuremberg rally in September of that year. Hitler had spoken of his own painful adolescence and had told the teenagers that they'd one day rule the world.

It was not difficult to brainwash my father, my half-brother had told me, and make him worship Hitler like a god. He'd despised his own father on account of his old fashioned ideals.

In November he burned books during the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. He'd just turned fourteen.

In 1940 he went to the Hitler Youth's training camp in the Planneralm in Styria. There he trained and learned to fight on skis.

The Hitler Youth was competitive, brutal, and had one sole aim: self-sacrifice in war. No compassion was to be shown to the enemy while there was no regard for one's family or thought for one's own salvation. No thought in fact was to be given to anything. The average member of the Hitler Youth could barely read or write. The lives of the Hitler Youth were devoted to outdoor activities and competition. Little care was given to schooling, which was merely for weaklings.

Two years later, thoroughly indoctrinated and extremely fit, he joined the Waffen SS.

The Waffen SS was regarded as the elite, with highly demanding criteria of selection. A single filling in one's teeth could guarantee rejection.

The training at the Waffen SS was so brutal, so sadistic and so merciless that not a few recruits committed suicide.

My father was sent, due his specialist skills, to the 6th SS Mountain Division, otherwise known as Battle Group North, in June 1943. There he was assigned to the SS Gebirgs Jaeger Regiment 12 Michael Gaissmair and spent the summer, winter and spring between lakes Pya-ozero and Top-ozero, not far removed from Kestenga, in what is now Russia.

When not contending with mosquitos he learned how to keep warm by wrapping himself in newspaper. It was so cold that the air froze in one's throat. He learned always to breathe through his nose in winter.

His unit went on patrol and occasionally tried to ambush the Russians. More often than not it got ambushed itself.

A vicious game of cat and mouse ensued but the real objective of the unit, the interdiction of the strategically vital railway line linking Murmansk to the rest of Russia, was never achieved. It was quite simply too well defended.

In March 1944 he was wounded by a grenade splinter at the back of his head and lost a small chunk of his skull. He was sent south in a train full of straw and recuperated on the shores of Lake Como.

Between July and December 1944 he attended officer's training school at Braunschweig and was made a captain on the 16th of December 1944, the first day of the Ardenne Offensive, the Battle of the Bulge. He'd just turned twenty. He served as an officer in the 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment, one of the best units of the German army.

The SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 2, Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, (LSSAH) was organized in three battalions, each with four companies. It was part of the SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, which was, on the 1st of December 1944, 18,546 strong with 633 officers 4,128 NCOs and 12,820 troops.

During the Ardennes offensive it was involved in combat near Losheim, Lanzerath, Andler, Stavelot, La Gleize-Stoumont and Bastogne. Elements of the SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 2 together with elements from SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 1 spearheaded the offensive as a part of Kampfgruppe Peiper, which was made up of 4,800 men and 600 vehicles. Kampfgruppe Peiper reached Stoumont on the 19th of December but was soon surrounded and forced to abandon its vehicles. Its soldiers returned to their lines after a twenty-mile night march. Not only did Kampfgruppe Peiper fail to attain its objective, it attained notoriety on account of the infamous Malmedy Massacre.

On the 17th of December eighty-four U.S. P.O.W.s were murdered. SS Sturmbannfuehrer Werner Poetschke, commander of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 1, who was killed in action in March 1945, was later held responsible.

Whether my father participated in the massacre or not membership of that particularly stigmatized unit became very dangerous indeed, especially after the Americans stopped taking prisoners.

The consciousness that he was a marked man haunted my father for the rest of his life. Peiper himself, after a career with Porsche and Volkswagen, was murdered in France in 1976, and his house burned to the ground. Undoubtedly my father feared a similar fate. He had, in his eyes, no choice but to lie and dissemble in order to survive.

By the end of January 1945, after the heavy losses incurred in the course of the Ardennes offensive, the two grenadier regiments were regarded as being of questionable value. After fighting non-stop for fourteen weeks the grenadiers were exhausted.

Once the offensive was broken off, on the 10th of January, my father's unit was pulled out and refitted close to Euskirchen-Flammersheim. A week later it was sent to central Germany, close to Cologne, until its strength had reached 19,055. After that it continued on to Hungary.

On the 17th of February 1945 it attacked in the direction of Gywa and by the 24th of February 1945 it had succeeded in its objective of defeating the Soviet bridgehead at Gran.

On the 25th it was transferred to the area Veszprem – Var Palota and was made ready for the operation Fruehlingserwachen, Spring Awakening, the last major German offensive of the war.

Fruehlingserwachen began on the 6th of March and had the objective of securing the Hungarian oilfields. Despite bad luck with the weather, the panzers literally sank in mud, and the fact that the Soviets knew that the offensive was coming, the division managed to cross the Sio-canal, close to Simontornya on the 12th of March 1945.

On the 15th of March the Soviets began, in turn, their offensive and the division was pushed back.

My father was wounded twice in the course of the retreat and was twice sent to a field hospital. This probably saved his life.

By the 1st of April his division had retreated to Wiener Neudorf with just one objective in mind: to escape the hands of the Russians. No one wanted to die in what was now obviously a pointless war.

Hitler was furious with their failure. He ordered them to take off their armbands. They refused. Not a few sent potties with their medals to Hitler.

On the 9th my father surrendered to the Americans near Steyr. His soldiers asked him whether they should fight to the death. He said it wasn't worth it.

When he was taken captive he and his comrades swore that they'd never fight again. He became a life-long pacifist.

The American guards, who shot his comrades gratuitously when they came too close to the wire, stole his watch.

I thought of a comment Bernhard made about his early years, which very much applied to my father: "One runs away from something but one carries it along within one. The anger and fury, everything, remains within. It takes a while until the physical separation is a real separation...there probably never is a real separation...Everything we encounter stays within us."

Had Bernhard been a Nazi in his youth, I asked myself? Had that been one of the reasons for his subsequent skepticism toward the world and his willingness to be both cold and ruthless?

It was his professed philosophy that one should be willing to sell one's own grandmother. Both Bernhard and my father were supreme egotists and egotism was, my half-brother had always asserted, the chief characteristic of a Nazi.

My half-brother told me that my father had only been interested in weather reports, little else. He certainly hadn't been interested in either his wife or his children. He hadn't shown them the slightest degree of consideration. Nor had he been interested in the truth and would lie, even when telling the time. He would lie even when it was pointless to do so or he suffered as a direct consequence. He would lie out of principle. Mendacity was his philosophy of life.

He also denied that the Nazis had ever done anything wrong. If Jews had died it had been their own fault. The gas chambers had never existed. He himself had never done anything to a Jew. On the contrary: he'd helped them. Those who hadn't lived through the times had no right to judge while history had been written by the victors.

Both Bernhard and my father were somewhat cynical. Bernhard was more than willing to identify with Nazis in his plays, such as "Vor dem Ruhestand", "Eve of Retirement", and more than willing to admit that each of us has the potential to be a Nazi.

Unlike my father Bernhard was fiercely critical of the Nazi within. He even went so far as to call himself a monster, Scheussal. Unlike my father, who was physically courageous, Bernhard was morally brave. He was willing to speak truth to power, with all its attendant risks.

Unlike my father Bernhard well and truly didn't care what others thought of him. In that respect Bernhard was thoroughly: anti-bourgeois. This was, at least, what my half-brother termed the phenomenon. Was not the bourgeois the consummate Nazi, my half-brother had complained? Would Hitler have been possible without the help of the bourgeoisie, he'd asked again and again? It had all become so tiresome and tedious.

In the same way that my father rebelled against his father and became a member of the herd Bernhard had been guided by his grandfather to escape it. It was his grandfather's approach, his independence of mind and philosophical attitude to life, which proved Bernhard's salvation.

My father was like one of the swine in the Biblical tale that, possessed by demons, plunged to their death. Bernhard, by contrast, had been taught by his grandfather to despise the masses.

My father might have thought himself an aristocrat, which explains why he married two women both of whom were aristocrats, and he might himself have had an aristocratic background but it was Bernhard who truly was the aristocrat, at least in spirit, and it was Bernhard who truly showed real independence of mind.

Although not always honest himself, Bernhard strove for truth. That is what makes him worth reading. That is what makes him a philosophical writer, although he would have despised such a term.

Bernhard was skeptical about philosophy and he despised writers. He never saw himself as a writer, but rather as one who writes. He even preferred to term himself a farmer rather than a writer.

"There is no philosophy that has validity beyond the one who has created it," he once said. "What Kant wrote is all very nice and good but it's also just a philosophy of one person for that self-same person," and he added: "Every person is totally different. There are in the world no two identical people."

I thought of the narrative of a charming and highly intelligent lady, an emigre, I'd met in London a few years before. She had worked as a nurse in Vienna and had experienced the bombing during the war. There was an enormous difference, she told me, between the generation of Austrian aristocrats, who still ran the empire, and the generation born after the First World War, who grew up in an amputated, stinted little country with no future. The latter were, she said, provincial and could barely speak any foreign languages. Few, although they had sufficient funds, had been outside of Austria for any length of time. They might well have been charming and delightful to be with but they were ultimately lightweights, she told me.

She'd worked as a nurse at the Luftwaffenlazarett, the air force's military hospital, which had formerly been the Kaufmaennisches Spital, merchants' hospital, not far removed from the Tuerkenschanzpark.

The tram trip took an hour on account of the fact that the streets were pitted with bomb craters or covered with snow.

She had to get up each day at 6 a.m. and had to work until 8 p.m. She only had half an hour off for lunch, which consisted of a particularly repulsive soup.

"At least I didn't have time to think, which was a blessing at the time," she said. "It was terrible. In order to pass muster one had to look like a mud patty. One couldn't even wear lipstick!"

She had had to flee Berlin on account of her close connections to those involved in the plot against Hitler.

I thought of Bernhard. The father of his close friend: Alexander Uexkuell-Gyllenband, Nikolaus Graf von Uexkuell-Gyllenband, was the uncle of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. Nikolaus Graf von Uexkuell-Gyllenband was hung in Ploetzensee on the 14th of September 1944.

The air raids, the emigre knew exactly where they came from: the south of Italy (I couldn't help but think of Joseph Heller, yet again!) were terrible. One could hear each individual bomb whistling down and one could feel every single explosion.

The noise was deafening. The crashes and splintering of glass never seemed to cease. She was pretty shaken every time and lived in perpetual fear of being buried alive.

The one comfort were the concerts given by the Philharmonic Orchestra, which she attended every single evening. "It was the only thing that still functioned in Vienna", she commented wryly.

Eventually public transport broke down and she was forced to walk to work, which took two hours.

The breakdown of public transport meant that people had to walk for hours from the suburbs to the center of town. They did so on account of the fact that the ancient catacombs were relatively safe. Safer that is than the ordinary cellars, which collapsed all too easily.

By March the hospital had run out of coal. In the same month a bomb hit the entrance of a tunnel where she'd been ordered to take shelter. She'd been busy with work at the time and had refused to follow the order. Fourteen had been killed on the spot and the scene in the tunnel had been something she'd never forget.

The same day the center of the city was badly hit. The Opera, the last production to be staged was Wagner's "Goetterdaemmerung", the Jockey Club and Hotel Bristol, which was where she was staying, were all hit.

Two hundred and seventy perished in the cellar of the Phillipshof, the building in which the Jockey Club had been housed, while the sets for 120 productions and 160,000 costumes of the Opera were lost. The Phillipshof was never rebuilt and remains, to this day, a mass grave. A public garden has been laid out on its site. Things got to be so bad that Vienna ran out of coffins and gravediggers.

At the Bristol not one single windowpane had been left intact. One could walk straight into the dining room from the street. People scurried around, disheveled and smelling of smoke. Despite everything the restaurant functioned as usual. A candle was placed on each table and the staff acted as if nothing had happened.

By mid March the streets were so blocked with rubble that no vehicle could pass and everyone was forced to walk. It took four hours to get to the hospital and back.

The city ran out of water and electricity. It was difficult to bathe, especially problematic given the fact that smoke made everything dirty, while glass littered the streets.

She escaped in April, on the last train to leave Vienna, once the hospital was evacuated to Tyrol. Ten days later the Russians occupied Vienna.

My aunt told me about her memories of the war. She'd come out of her cellar to find out whether her friends and acquaintances were still alive. She remembered the sight of the dead being carried in wheelbarrows or being lined up in the street where they were covered with newspapers. She also remembered the long treks to find firewood or water.

Had my aunt been one of the 87,000 Viennese women who'd been raped in the first weeks of the Russian occupation? Most probably. None of my Austrian aunts had ever married. Yet how, I reflected, could I mention any of this to the Russian poet?

The Soviet Union, in the course of winning World War Two, had lost 8.6 million soldiers in combat. Of the 5.5 million Soviet POWs, 3.3 million had perished, due to maltreatment, malnourishment, and exposure, in German camps. Ten million Russian civilians had been either starved to death or brutally murdered.

I reflected on the sufferings St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, had experienced. Over a million civilians had perished during the 872-day siege. Many had been reduced to cannibalism.

A mother had smothered her eighteen-month-old in order to feed her three older children while a plumber had killed his wife to feed his sons and nieces. If found cannibals were shot.

At the end of the war the Viennese were forced to survive on 800 calories a day, which is the equivalent of what someone with anorexia might eat, while every second friend of my father had died in combat.

When, in June 1945, Bernhard's stepfather returned from Yugoslavia Bernhard was in Traunstein, on a tin roof, lying in the sun.

Bernhard immediately jumped down and ran to greet his stepfather but was simply ignored. His stepfather didn't even look at him. He went straight to his half-brother Peter and lifted him up in his arms. "I was then 14 years old at the time. Imagine how something like that affects one at that age", he later commented bitterly.

My father escaped from an American P.O.W. camp close to Linz and went into hiding in the mountains. The Allied P.O.W. camps were nearly as hazardous for Germans as German P.O.W. camps had been for Russians. A million perished.

In June 1945 Bernhard's family was forced to choose between staying in Germany and returning to Austria. Once they opted for Austrian citizenship they had fourteen days to leave Traunstein.

Bernhard was sent to Salzburg where he found an apartment that had been abandoned by a German. He barricaded the door and occupied it for fourteen days. For two weeks he lived in perpetual fear for his life and for two weeks he didn't leave the flat for a moment. It was a time when people could be murdered over a rucksack or a bike let alone an apartment.

Once the family arrived thirteen people were housed in the flat's four rooms. Johannes Freumbichler, being the supreme egotist that he was, had one room to himself. Bernhard's bed was on the landing. Since his uncle Farald had to get up at four clock in the morning Bernhard never got much sleep.

His stepfather, Emil Fabjan, provided, with his modest income as a hairdresser, the financial lifeblood for the entire family.

One morning Bernhard told his mother that he no longer wished to go to school. This wasn't as surprising as it might at first seem. When Bernhard returned to school he found little had changed. There wasn't much of a difference between the Catholics and the Nazis. He told his mother that he wanted to satisfy his hunger. He wanted to become an apprentice in a grocery store. His stepfather was delighted while his grandfather, who'd hoped he'd attend university, was deeply disappointed.

My half-brother once told me that there had never been a question about whether he'd attend university or not, it was merely a question of which one. His mother had attended university, his father had attended university and both his grandfather and great-grandfather had attended university. The idea that in order to be an artist university is not always the best of choices had occurred to him but economic fears drove him toward choosing security over freedom.

Above all else, he confessed, he was brainwashed into believing in what he termed "the bourgeois notion of superiority". By attending university he'd be "a cut above the rest". He'd rejected the idea of attending an art college. He was frightened of ending up as an art teacher.

At the Salzburg Labor Office Bernhard was given the address of the grocer Karl Podlaha. In addition to the apprenticeship with Podlaha he also attended a vocational school. He later wrote: "I was free, and I felt free". At the same time he felt safe: geborgen was the word that he used.

He wanted both to be useful and recognized for what he did. He later told an interviewer that he would have been happiest had he worked for the whole of his life in a shop. When he was young fame, above all literary fame, was the last thing on his mind.

His grandfather pushed him in the direction of music and, above all else: singing. He wanted his nephew to be a success, and, in his eyes, that meant artistic success.

"I loved Handel from my childhood, I admired Bach, but it was Mozart who was my very own world," Bernhard once said.

Of course music was, as I observed in the case of my half-brother, a necessary form of escape from the dreariness and drudgery of the world. Without the pleasure, inspiration and comfort of music he'd have ended his life much earlier.

I'm still undecided however whether music represents the pinnacle of human achievement, as some have asserted. I very much like Krystian Zimmermann's definition: "Music is using sound to organize emotion in time". For me music is inextricably intertwined with emotion. It is a prerequisite for the emotional health of a human being.

Music was, I explained to the Russian poet, the key to understanding Bernhard's work.

Bernhard always stressed that rhythm and music were of vital importance to him. The musical component was of greater significance than the subject matter itself. What he really cared about was musical form. Nothing else really interested him. The how was more important than the what. All he ever did in his work was to develop themes, I explained to the Russian poet.

At the end of the 1940s Bernhard was torn between his desire to become a singer, undoubtedly the allure of wealth, success and fame played a part, and his wish for a quiet life in an obscure shop, far from the maddening crowds.

My half-brother, when he finished university, was torn between academia and a career as an artist. He couldn't decide on which path to follow and it was this indecision, as well as the notion that it's possible to reconcile academia with an artistic calling, which ultimately caused his failure.

He only later understood that to be an artist one has to reject both academia and what he termed: "bourgeois values". He stated that: "the last thing an artist needs is to worry about what the neighbors might think".

At one and the same time, he told me, he had been both hopelessly naïve and foolish. He hadn't realized that the world of art, the world of theatre and playwriting is a business, with brutal consequences for those who fail. He seriously expected help and didn't realize that he had to rely on his own resources.

In May 1948 Bernhard travelled to Vienna for the first time in order to attend the Music Academy. He hoped to earn his living by singing in the Opera's choir. He failed in both objectives and was forced to return to Salzburg.

It is hardly surprising that once Bernhard returned to Salzburg, his hopes dashed and undoubtedly in a state of deep depression, that he fell ill. It is also hardly surprising that in such a state of mind he would become extremely self-destructive. Instead of letting his body recover he fell ill a second time, this time more seriously. He developed pleurisy, which condemned him to a life in hospitals and sanatoria. In early 1949 he was given the last sacrament. He wasn't expected to survive.

When the priest came to give Bernhard extreme unction he put down his small black bag, pressed a button and two candles shot up. He then asked the nurses who was next. He was told that Bernhard's neighbor was in an especially bad state. This was no exaggeration. When the man went to wash the next morning he fell down dead.

This wasn't to be the only death at that time in that particular hospital. Bernhard's grandfather also died on account of a doctor's mistake. At first Bernhard wasn't even told that he was sick. He only found out about his death in the newspapers. The death of his grandfather left him, on the one hand completely alone, on the other, free as never before.

He inherited from him a bed, bedding, clothes, shoes, a briefcase, a (L. C. Smith) typewriter, a radio, an alarm clock, a metal suitcase, a traveling bag and a cash box with metal fitting. It was to be with his grandfather's typewriter that he was to write his work.

The death of his grandfather, I explained to the Russian poet, was a form of release. Although encouraged by him, who'd corrected his poems when he was ten, Bernhard hadn't read or written much before the age of eighteen. Not only that: he'd hated books, especially the books in his grandfather's library. It was nightmarish, grauenhaft, living with all those books and having to see them day in day out.

He lay in a sanatorium in the mountains for months on end, through fall and winter, with always the same mountain in front of him, on the same grey, plank bed, with the same grey blanket. It was out of a profound sense of boredom and a distinct fear of losing his sanity that he began to write.

Staring at the Heukareck, which rises two thousand meters above Schwarzach am Veit, he was confronted with the choice of going stark raving mad or starting to write. He overcame his hatred of books, took paper and pencil in hand and began to make notes.

He returned home only to find the flat empty. Everyone was at the hospital. His mother was suffering from cancer.

Having lost his job and his mother fatally sick it was hardly surprising that he fell ill again. Condemned to live at home on a meager allowance he read the authors that had played such an important role in his grandfather's life: Shakespeare, Stifter, Montaigne, Pascal and Schopenhauer. "My grandfather, the poet was dead, now I was allowed to write", he later commented.

After a few months at home he returned to a sanatorium in St. Veit in Pongau. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

When he looked at the grey-blue faces of the terminally ill, watched them as they groped along the walls, hardly capable of keeping their emaciated bodies upright, sat in the dining room with their loosely hanging gowns and bent knees, incapable of picking up jugs of coffee, watched them on their way to the chapel as they shuffled, step by step along the wall, he couldn't help but think that he had no future. To even dream of a future was, to his mind, absurd, shamelessness. Phrases and slogans seemed out of place. Everything is ridiculous if one thinks about death, he realized.

On the 27th of July 1950 Hedwig Stavianicek, a 56-year-old widow of a Viennese undersecretary, heard him singing in the St. Veit parish church. She was fascinated by his voice and offered to help him.

On the 13th of October 1950 Bernard's mother died from cancer. She was only forty-six at the time. Bernhard blamed her early death on her family, who'd exploited her ruthlessly, and on the incompetence of the doctors. He only found out about her death from the newspapers.

Undoubtedly Bernhard experienced her death in much the same way that my half-brother had experienced the death of his own mother, I told the Russian poet, as one of the most painful experiences yet at the same time one of the most liberating of his life.

It was at this time that Bernhard had discovered Dostoyevsky, who was to have such a profound influence on his work, I said to the Russian poet. I thought of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery Cemetery, where not only Fyodor Dostoyevsky but also Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov are buried. I thought of the museum to the great writer in the somewhat decrepit Kuznechny Lane, where he'd created both "The Double" and "The Brothers Karamazov".

There was something dark, airless, oppressive, and faintly disagreeable about the apartment, I couldn't help but think. Dostoyevsky's writing desk was so heavy it seemed like a rock to which he'd been chained. What a contrast to the sense of airy freedom in the cemetery. Death had most probably come to him as a form of release.

What Bernhard loved about Dostoyevsky was his "insatiability and radicalism" I told the Russian poet. "Here I had my own approach, my own infamy, my own brutality, my own taste, which had nothing in common with the approach, infamy, brutality and taste of others," he later recollected. Of course not only Dostoyevsky but all the Russians were to be a huge influence on Bernhard. Other than the Russians he was influenced by Musil, Pavese, Ezra Pound, Valerie, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Forster.

Once he was sent back home Bernhard was forced to live from welfare, which meant that he was, once more, a burden on the family. He was unwilling to look for a job or to study business. He still hoped to become a singer. At the same time he neglected to go to medical appointments, which proved nearly fatal. He was very much on the path to self-destruction, a path not dissimilar to the one taken by my own half-brother.

What saved Bernhard, I explained to the Russian poet, was the intervention of Carl Zuckmayer, his deux ex machina, a former friend of his grandfather. Through Zuckmayer Bernhard was able to write for the "Demokratisches Volksblatt", "Salzburger Volksblatt", the "Salzburger Nachrichten" and "Die Furche". What was more, on account of the fact that he was Zuckmayer's protege, he was able to keep his jobs, although he was stubborn, arrogant and extremely unreliable. My half-brother, I reflected, had no such help.

Carl Zuckmayer, together with his wife, Alice, also made it possible for Bernhard to publish his first poem, which appeared on the 22nd of April 1952, in the "Muenchner Merkur". It was titled: "Mein Weltenstueck".

Bernhard had sat in Salzburg's Mirabell Gardens and imagined himself a world famous poet. He'd imagined everybody passing by and recognizing him as such. It was his first taste of fame and he soon became addicted to it. At times, if he was unable to attain fame, he sought notoriety.

While publishing books of poetry he was also working on his prose. His novels however had a habit of being announced but never actually appearing. He was later to ridicule not only his early prose but also his poetry. This treatment was unjust, I told the Russian poet. His poetry was extremely good and well worth reading.

He was contemptuous of his contemporaries who, he lamented, avoided violent, strident life and preferred a life of calm. He complained that they capitulated before pettiness, before people with degrees, before political parties while the nation of poets and thinkers had been transformed into one of officials and party members, mere passionless carriers of briefcases.

This was, my half-brother lamented, not merely the state of things in Austria while he was living there but even officially stated policy. Only mediocrity was encouraged and only mediocre writers became successful.

My half-brother, rather naively, had initially relied too heavily on the wisdom and benevolence of the Austrian state. This was to prove a fatal error. The Austrian functionaries, he came to realize, were incompetent and corrupt. Bernhard, who had more experience in these matters, realized that he had to look further afield. It was no accident that his first poem appeared abroad.

Bernhard, unlike my half-brother, benefitted from an old, aristocratic tradition of support for the arts, which dated back to the Empire. None of my half-brother's rich friends or acquaintances, by contrast, would have even considered the role of Maecenas. They all nudged him in the direction of the state. The Austrian state however, and its functionaries, failed miserably and my half-brother was left bereft of support. There were no wealthy, generous or enlightened patrons of the arts left, he was to discover.

Bernhard's most important wealthy, generous and enlightened patron, without whom he'd never have succeeded as a writer, was Hedwig Stavianicek. She was born into a well-to-do bourgeois family in October 1894. He termed her his aunt.

Bernhard was later to claim that artists and writers shouldn't be helped. This was ridiculous and was merely another example of his egotistical, narcissistic vanity. He himself stated: "For fifteen years I practically lived off my aunt. She gave me pocket money every day. I believe it was ten shillings, from which I spent seven fifty on lunch and two fifty on a "kleinen Braunen" in a café, which was enough for me. In the evening I went some place where there were people and where there was something to eat and drink. I usually came home at three in the morning."

Not only did she give him pocket money she also paid for his studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where he studied acting and directing between 1955 and 1957. This was despite the fact that she still wanted him to become a singer.

I thought how woeful the lack of support of my own half-brother, who'd also been accepted by a prestigious drama school, the Max-Reinhardt Seminar, had been in comparison. Not only had he been forced to live in primitive conditions, the modern flat that had been promised him, where he'd spent his first four years, and where he'd always felt happiest, was denied to him. His father didn't even give him sufficient money to eat and did his utmost to sabotage his studies. This was despite the fact that the state gave my half-brother a moderate sum, a sum however, which was denied to him by his father, who was entrusted with it. That my half-brother failed as a result, my father wasn't even willing to help him learn German, was hardly a surprise.

After his hopes and dreams came crashing down my half-brother thought he'd go mad. His father's cold lies, materialistic greed, corruption and brutal indifference turned his love into hate. He came to wish his father dead.

Bernhard's motivation for getting involved in the theatre was not too dissimilar to my half-brother's: "That was simply a means of escaping my loneliness". Theatre was an attempt to escape his solitude. When Bernhard failed both as an actor and a director he claimed he'd neither wanted to be one nor the other.

Of course, I explained to the Russian poet, Bernhard's knowledge about acting, directing and the theatre was instrumental to his success as a playwright.

It was my half-brother's failure to attend Max-Reinhardt Seminar, on account of his father's sabotage, which doomed his career as a playwright.

In August 1957 Bernhard moved to his "aunt's" flat in Vienna's Obkirchergasse in the 19th district. A year later his second volume of poetry "In hora mortis" appeared. After his third volume came out he gave up writing poetry. It all seemed quite pointless. The fact that his fourth volume of poetry: "Frost", was deemed too gloomy to be published also played a role.

Other patrons of Bernhard included the well-to-do Lampersbergs, who enabled him to stage his first play in 1960.

Thanks to his "aunt" Bernhard had ideal working conditions. He began a novel, which was to prove his breakthrough: "Frost" at the beginning of 1962. It was published in May 1963, again thanks to a friend: Wieland Schmied.

Success however didn't make him happy, and he felt as though he'd "sunk into a stuffy and smelly pit from which there was no escape". He resolved to work for charity and go to Africa. To this end he learned how to drive a truck. "For months I drove out of the famous Goesser brewery. Not only did I get to learn how to drive a truck very well but got to know the entire city of Vienna."

As always with Bernhard his statements have to be taken with a pinch of salt. His driving wasn't that good, I told the Russian poet. One truck after another broke down and when he knocked over a kiosk he went to the nearest post office, posted the car papers to the company and told them where to pick up the truck.

His application to go to Ghana was rejected and he was left with no other option other than to become a professional writer. The success of "Frost" made that possible, I explained to the Russian poet.

I had no time to complete my narrative and had to dash off to catch the plane to Bratislava.

### Bratislava

I landed at Bratislava's modern airport with its replica of a brightly colored Caproni Ca 33 bomber hanging in mid-air. The wheels of the biplane were like those of a bike while its fuselage was a mere skeleton of its former self.

After failing to get hold of my publisher I went to a cafe almost directly under the plane, with black tables and white chairs. Close to the cafe was a shiny, wine red car while an orange vehicle, with green-shirted driver, slowly cleaned the polished floor. Slovakian pop music blared in the background.

The Italian bomber had been flown by General Milan Rastislav Stefanik, who'd "contributed decisively to the cause of Czechoslovak sovereignty" (or so I read) before he returned to Slovakia in 1919.

What exactly did this mean, I asked myself? I felt in a somewhat cynical mood, if only because I'd been thinking so much about my conspiracy theorist half-brother. It was something of a joke to think that a man who'd served in the French army was somehow independent of Allied influence. I thought of innumerable examples of puppet governments that had been set up in the wake of "liberations".

What was not mentioned in the long text about the plane was the fact that the original Caproni Ca 33 had crashed under mysterious circumstances in May 1919. General Milan Rastislav Štefánik had died upon his return. Was the plane a symbol of political assassination or national liberation? Was Štefánik another example of a puppet government? Or had he been killed precisely because he'd been opposed to one? The case required further research.

My half-brother had argued that the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not been a question of liberation but rather brutal conquest and willful destruction. Under the guise of "self-determination" small nation states, which could easily be dominated by international banks, had been created. The dissolution of the empire was, in my half-brother's eyes, a catastrophe.

What became German Austria certainly suffered appalling poverty as a result, as did most of the successor states. The entire economy of the region had been dislocated and plunged into chaos. When Austria was hit by a French inspired banking crisis in 1931 its economy rapidly collapsed and, within a relatively short space of time, civil war broke out.

When Wall Street crashed my father was six, when the economy nose-dived, eight and when the civil war commenced, eleven. After the Austrian economy fell apart his family lost a considerable portion of its wealth. It was undoubtedly a traumatic time for my father.

When the civil war started he was told to stay indoors. There was fighting just a few blocks away from his home. The civil war was, I have often reflected, most probably the reason he came to hate Communism with such a passion. It might also have been one of the reasons he was later to become such a fanatical Nazi. He'd been fourteen when the Nazis came to power in Austria.

As I had some time on my hands I did some research about Slovakia. It has an area of 49,035 sq. km (18,932 sq. mi), a population estimated to be roughly 5,488,339, 80.7% of whom are thought to be Slovaks and 8.5% Hungarians, and its people have a life expectancy of 76.24 years.

Its lowest point is the Bodrok River at 94m above sea level, its highest: Gerlachovsky Stit at 2,655m. It has natural resources of brown coal, lignite, iron ore, copper, manganese ore and salt.

Slovakia produces grains, potatoes, sugar beets, hops, fruit, pigs, cattle, poultry, metal products, beverages, electricity, gas, coke, oil, nuclear fuel, chemicals, manmade fibers, machinery, paper, earthenware, ceramics, transport vehicles, textiles, optical apparatus, and rubber products while its service sector constitutes 59.2% of its economy.

I wondered how Bratislava compared to Vienna. The population of the former is 462,603 while that of the latter is 1,797,337. Bratislava has 5.4 hours of sunshine a day, Vienna 5.1, Bratislava has an average temperature of 10 °C (50 °F), Vienna 11.4 °C (52.5 °F), while the former has a total area of 367.58 square kilometers (141.9 mi²) and the latter: 414.65 square kilometers (160.10 mi²).

Alone its multitude of names: Wratisslaburgium, Braslava, Istropolis, Brezalauspurch, Brezesburg, Bosenburg, Brecesburg, Poson, Brezisburg, Bresburc and Preslawaspurch, which had changed so often through the ages, spoke volumes.

As I looked up at the Caproni Ca 33 I thought about the First World War, a war in which my grandfather had fought.

I thought about it as seen through Wilfred Owen's eyes, with its profound, dull tunnels, sullen halls in which encumbered sleepers slept, distressful hands, thumping guns, oiled wheels, coughing mouths, fixed eyes, mud caked cheeks, slashed bones, hard wire, bandaged arms, trembling flares, cratered landscapes, dithering feet, drooping tongues, tormented eyeballs, wailing shells, stuttering rifles and set-smiling corpses.

I thought about the self-same war seen through the eyes of Ernst Juenger, with its interminable artillery duels, boredom, discomfort, dirt, stench, sleeplessness, exhaustion, constant anxiety, grenade splitters falling right and left, the fear of mines that fell, almost silently, from a great height, the fear of gas, the night patrols to capture one of the enemy, the confusion of battle, the fear of being killed by one's own side, the incompetence of the higher ups, the confused and contradictory orders, the pointless suicide missions, the loss of comrades, and the slow certainty that one would sooner or later be wounded or die.

I finally reached my publisher, it took quite a while for him to actually pick up, and we arranged to meet at a restaurant that evening. He promised to text me the exact address.

As I stared out of the window of the taxi I saw the brightly colored billboards for mobile phones, insurance, and soft drinks pass by. They were followed by a huge shopping complex with an IKEA, C&A and McDonalds. This formed a curious contrast to the bumpy street and grey blocks of flats from the twenties.

I was fascinated by the mixture of styles of Bratislava, with its decrepit, somewhat grey architecture dating from pre-war and Communist eras, and newly built, fiercely modern, aggressively commercial buildings.

Originally a market site created in the 13th century, Bratislava, I learned, only attained significance once it became Hungary's capital, between 1526 and 1784.

I got out of the taxi close to my hotel, booked in, deposited my luggage and walked toward the central square, the "Hlavne namestie", where I visited the City Museum.

As I studied the collection with its facsimile of the Privilege of Andrew III giving a charter to the town of Presporok in 1291, its reliquaries, censers, stoops, candlesticks, chalices, monstrances, icons, chasubles, altar vases, baptismal bowls, and statues devoted to Saint Ann, Saint John of Calvary and Saint Francis Xavier, parchments from the 13th century showing God the Father, the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Adoration of the Magi, I became acutely aware of how powerful the role of the Church had been, and possibly still was.

When I read that the building itself had been commissioned in the 1350s by Jacob II, a descendant of Mayor Jacob I, one of the first German residents of the town, who'd settled there at the invitation of the Hungarian King after 1241, I became acutely aware of how interlinked the histories of Bratislava and Vienna actually were. It was here that the Diet had assembled and it was here that kings had been crowned.

After the City Museum I visited a house where Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born and looked at a square piano he'd used when studying with Mozart. Not far removed was the Pauli Palace, where Liszt had performed at the age of nine. I learned that Bela Bartok had lived and studied in the city while Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Rubinstein had all given concerts there.

Just around the corner from the Hummel house was the magnificent Archbishop's Palace with its stunning baroque rococo rooms, decorated with elegant, gilded furniture, crystal chandeliers, Turkish carpets, and grey tapestries.

After that I went to the main cathedral. I studied with care the main nave, the stained glass windows, the Altar of St. Cross, the Altar of Our Lady of the Sorrows, which depicted the saints: Filomena, Lucia and Helena, the statue of St. Martin by Rafael Donner, which, to my eyes, looked like a hussar about to slay a naked man but which turned out to be the Archbishop giving his cloak to a beggar, the chapel of St. Anne with a cramped, dank crypt below it, the presbytery with its carved, polished, wooden figures of a pelican feeding its children, an elephant, a monkey, a rooster fighting a snake, a snarling dog, a lion, a griffin, a fox in a cowl, and a lamb carrying a cross. Not far removed was a list, painted on a wall, of the monarchs who'd been crowned there: Maximilian, Maria, Rudolf, Matthias II, Anna, Ferdinand II, Eleonora etc. etc.

Again I saw examples of interconnections and relationships. I read that those who helped build this church had helped build Vienna's St Stephen's Cathedral as well. There was also a portrait of the last emperor: Karl I and an altar created in Tyrol in the 17th century.

I had the misfortune of going to St Martin's at the time of a mass, which was being celebrated at the chapel of John the Merciful, who'd been the Patriarch of Alexandria in the 7th century, and was, after a short spell, politely but firmly ejected.

I had lunch close by, in a cavernous restaurant called Modra Hviezda, not far from where a famous poet had once lived, in a charming, old, steep, crookedly winding street, which leads up to the castle. The restaurant was dug into rock, had a multi-colored, unevenly tiled floor and a collection of agricultural implements on its walls.

I enjoyed a delicious meal of venison steak, chestnut honey sauce and potato pancake stuffed with roasted pumpkins.

As I listened to the recording of traditional folk music, occasionally interrupted by the whistling, chuckles and whoops of a caged parrot, I thought about a film: "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him". It was about Hanns Elard Ludin, born in June 1905 in Frieburg im Breisgau and hanged on the 9th of December 1947 in Bratislava.

The film was about the difficulties his son Malte Ludin had in coming to terms with who his father was and what he'd done. Most interesting of all had been the reactions of his sisters, who were very much in denial and who refused to accept the notion that their father had consciously done evil, or that they should necessarily have a bad conscience about the matter. He hadn't known, had been misinformed or the Jews had been partisans, or caught up with partisans.

Yet Malte's mother, Erla, seemed to contradict this version of events. Ludin had told her that he was working for criminals. She said to him that he should carry on regardless.

Ludin was the son of a teacher and a painter, was brought up, in Frieburg im Breisgau, to be loyal to the Kaiser, religious and a patriot. Nevertheless when he joined the army, in 1924, which was the logical extension of the beliefs he'd been inculcated with, it came as a shock to his bourgeois family. He was promoted to Lieutenant in 1927 but, in 1930, accused of Nazi activities, he was arrested and imprisoned. He was pardoned a year later. He joined the SA after his release and quickly rose through the ranks. In 1934 he was arrested, this time on account of the Roehm Putsch, the Night of the Long Knives, during which the leaders of the SA were purged and shot, including not a few of his friends. He was pardoned a second time and three years later was put in charge of the SA. In 1941 he was sent to Slovakia, where he was directly responsible for the deportation of 60,000 Slovakians. While he worked hard on sending away women and children in cattle cars his own daughters took immense pleasure in playing in the garden of the villa, which had been confiscated from the Jewish manufacturer Stein. In April 1945, with the Soviets at the door, he escaped to Kremsmuenster in Austria. There he was arrested and sent to an American POW camp in Natternberg. In 1946 Ludin was extradited from the United States as a war criminal and sentenced by a court in Bratislava. He was hanged on the 9th of December 1947. It took him 20 minutes to die. His last words were said to have been: "Long live Germany."

He hadn't considered himself guilty. Nor had many in his family. In fact for many he was regarded as being something of a hero. His grandchildren were brought up with the impression that he'd been an admirable man who'd been involved in the resistance to Hitler.

Of course, I reflected, Ludin's bestiality was not unique. I recalled another documentary with a similar theme, about two sons of Nazis. One was willing to condemn his father while the other, because he had written evidence exonerating him, a fact omitted in the film itself, wasn't.

What made the work emotionally charged was the fact that the narrator's family had been exterminated by the Nazis. Of the eighty members of his family only his father had survived. The rest, along with 3,500 other Jews, had been shot in the back of the head and then buried in a mass grave.

Emotionalism seemed to cloud the mind of the narrator. Although a lawyer he wasn't able to actually provide any evidence that Otto von Waechter, who was born in Vienna in July 1901 and died under mysterious circumstances in Rome in August 1949, was responsible for any crimes. The one thing he was able to prove was that Otto von Waechter had signed an order allowing the creation of a ghetto. This hardly constituted a crime against humanity. What I was later, in London, to find out from Otto von Waechter's son, Horst, was that there was a letter exonerating Otto von Waechter. From the letter it became clear that Otto von Waechter had refused to obey orders and had consequently saved tens of thousands of lives. Of course this inconvenient truth was omitted from the film itself.

Did the fact that he was a high-ranking official make him guilty? Perhaps. Did the fact that he was a member of the Nazi party make him guilty? Perhaps. Did the fact that he'd been a member of the Waffen SS make him guilty? Hardly. Even Guenther Grass had been a member of the Waffen SS. I thought about this interesting moral dilemma.

Otto von Waechter had regarded himself as an idealist. He saw himself as a defender of Galicia. His father, Joseph, a general in the Austro-Hungarian army, had twice defeated the Russians and thus kept them out of Galicia.

What was one to do in a position of power? Resign or try to do good from within? Otto von Waechter had obviously tried to do the latter. This fact was conveniently omitted from the film.

I recalled what my half-brother, the conspiracy theorist, had said. The Nuremberg Trials had been a joke for one, very obvious, reason: only Germans had been put on trial. The justice dealt had been far from universal. Those responsible for the deliberate murder of millions of civilians in the bombing campaign weren't mentioned nor the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps rarely took prisoners in the course of the Pacific campaign.

Wall Street and the Bank of England, my conspiracy theorist half-brother claimed, had financed both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. They then helped the latter to escape to South America. Those who refused to collaborate were either sent back to be sentenced to death, poisoned or drowned.

My conspiracy theorist half-brother even claimed that Hitler had worked for the British and hadn't died in Berlin but in Argentina, many years later. No body had ever been found. According to him what had frightened the British and the Americans was the rapprochement between the Russians and Germans in 1922. If the Germans and Russians became allies it meant the end of any serious Anglo-American influence on the continent.

Thus, he argued, they conspired with the Thule Society to have Walther Rathenau, the architect of the Rapallo Treaty, assassinated. At the same time they started financing Hitler in much the same way, and for much the same reason, that Mussolini was being financed by Morgan, at exactly the same time. Prior to becoming Il Duce in 1922 Mussolini had been a British agent, who'd agitated for Italian entry into the First World War.

The British even blackmailed Hindenburg, my conspiracy theorist half-brother asserted, into letting Hitler become chancellor. They'd dumped Hitler when he'd had the temerity to make peace with Russia in 1939. The spectre of Rapallo haunted them. A week later they declared war.

It was not difficult, my conspiracy theorist half-brother claimed, to prove his case: one need only study what was going on in the worlds of banking and industry, especially with companies such as the Union Banking Corporation, IBM and IG Farben.

The concentration camp was an invention of the British, experiments involving eugenics were financed by American foundations, while German policy toward the Jews was a carbon copy of American policy toward its indigenous peoples.

My conspiracy theorist half-brother would often say that there was only one difference between Churchill and Hitler: the latter had been a male prostitute. Who was worse, he asked, Churchill, who deliberately murdered four million Bengalis, or Hitler, who murdered six million Jews? And who ever mentioned the three million Russian P.O.W.s or the ten million Russian civilians who were deliberately slaughtered?

The British, who committed genocide all over the globe, most notably in Ireland and India, who plundered the world and sold it opium, and the Americans, who committed genocide against their indigenous peoples, were the last ones to accuse anyone of crimes against humanity. They had the advantage of writing the history books but that was all.

My half-brother was scathing when it came to his recounting how the works of history had been falsified. It was a crime, he said. In the past people, when they lied, were killed for doing so.

My conspiracy theorist half-brother claimed that it was, given this history, hardly surprising that genocide was being committed in the Third World on a daily basis or that Kissinger had created the AIDS epidemic on the African continent. The killers responsible for Auschwitz, my conspiracy theorist half-brother claimed, were still at large. Were we any less guilty than the Germans, he asked me? After all, we too knew. Would we do anything about it?

I thought my conspiracy theorist half-brother quite mad. What was all this nonsense he was spouting? Who could take it seriously? I accused him of relativism. He was simply trying to justify the crimes of the Nazis. If he had a bad conscience, well and good, if he felt guilty, well and good, but he shouldn't divert attention from their abhorrent crimes.

I couldn't help but be repelled when I read transcripts of conversations between captive German officers and soldiers, especially of the casual, bestial brutality many of the men had exhibited.

I was disgusted and sickened when I read of pilots boasting of how they'd gunned down women and children, how soldiers had revelled in the slaughter of civilians and how sailors had taken pleasure in murdering children at sea.

As I sat in the restaurant I imagined the generals philosophizing while sitting in leather armchairs and smoking cigars.

Some had expected victory, had regarded Hitler's ideas as healthy, and his achievements as lasting. If there had been excessive behavior, in their eyes, it had only been on account of the fact that Germany, given that it was a "humane" country, had been "tormented to death". War, in their eyes, had been essential to Germany's attainment of power and the ends very much justified the means. They despised those who moaned or showed signs of weakness. Criticism was, in their eyes, treachery and they consciously made those who spoke against the regime feel like criminals.

Others, a persecuted minority at first, lamented that the general staff lacked backbone, and asserted that no officer had the right to turn his soldiers into murderers. The war, for them, was a pointless crime. The only profit to be gained was the termination of a government of gangsters.

There were those who expressed annoyance at Hitler's "lack of tact" when dealing with the "Jewish question", some considered his policy "shameless", while others thought it perfectly justifiable to kill a million Jews if it were in the interest of the people but thought that murdering women and children was going too far. Others thought it perfectly logical to kill the women and children but believed greater discretion necessary.

There were those who thought it necessary to kill Jews as part of the war against the partisans while others said the sight of such crimes had been "nasty and awful" and asked what would happen once the graves were found.

Some considered the policy perfectly right, but advocated secrecy while others thought it nothing compared to the crimes committed against Germany. Some thought it too dangerous to leave Jews in German cities while others feared that they themselves would be held responsible.

There were those who believed that Germany had lost its moral right to ascendancy while others worried that the German name had been dishonored for all eternity. Some were anxious about the shame for the following generations while others were willing to contemplate sacrificing their own children if it meant extirpating their sin.

There were those who believed that a nation that had accepted lies, violence and crime without contradiction had lost its right to be called a people; that a country that had been directly responsible for such unprecedented bestiality deserved to be extinguished.

There were some who were willing to forgive Hitler his mistakes while others were annoyed that he'd never travelled and knew nothing of the world. Some thought his success due to his ability to make the Germans believe in him like a god and many considered his achievements enduring. Some thought him a criminal, others not. Some termed him irresponsible while others sincerely imagined the war fought in self-defense.

Many saw no alternative to Hitler. He alone had managed to put an end to the appalling terms of the infamous Treaty of Versailles, had ended the political and economic crisis, had restored Germany's pride and given it a chance to be a major power, something that was not to be done without considerable collateral damage. What the English wanted, in their eyes, was nothing but German slavery.

Not a few were disillusioned and had come to see the Nazis as corrupt, inadequate and self-seeking.

There were those who were in open rebellion against the way the war was being managed. Most regarded the fact that it was being fought without the slightest hope of victory as a crime against the German people.

There were those who feared that if the war were lost Germany would be eradicated, others feared ending up in Siberia while others still were worried about losing their pensions.

Of course many debated about what could be done. The question of whether the field marshals in the West would be able to make peace with the British and Americans before turning on the Soviets was much discussed.

It seemed that Stauffenberg had been extremely open in saying that Hitler needed to be got rid of and even Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Waffen SS Leibesstandarte, seemed to have been in open rebellion.

Nearly all the key field marshals had been in favor of deposing Hitler; only Manstein had been opposed. And he'd been opposed for an extremely good reason. He knew very well that the average soldier had been thoroughly indoctrinated.

There were those generals who thought their junior officers, those who'd passed through the Hitler Youth, perfectly insane. One complained of how the young officers lusted for blood while another told about how one had murdered, in cold blood, a whole Russian family he himself had invited to dinner, for no better reason than that he "couldn't bear the sight of them" and that they "weren't human"; they were "mere animals; Hitler had said so."

Perhaps for me, personally, the most interesting questions concerned SS Brigade Commander and Major General of the Waffen SS Kurt Meyer, who'd been captured close to Luettich in September 1944.

At first Meyer had pretended to be a colonel in the Wehrmacht. This was to draw not a little scorn from his fellow prisoners. Major General Friederich Freiherr von Broich regarded the fact that Meyer had been posing as a colonel of the army, as "cowardly". Now, suddenly, the army was "good enough".

Major General Gerhard Bassenge was of the opinion that Meyer seemed reasonable and his presence wasn't as disruptive as he'd feared. Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth replied that one never knew what such a man had done.

Bassenge wondered out loud whether Meyer had done things that were "incompatible with the conduct of an officer". Both Bassenge and Wildermuth decided that, although they didn't like the look of Meyer and wouldn't seek his company, they wouldn't boycott him either.

Major General Friederich Freiherr von Broich thought Meyer simply play-acting and feigning ignorance. He had no illusions about Meyer. Meyer would, he told his comrades, be the first to shoot them and their families if he got the chance to do so, and he'd enjoy it too. General Thoma declared that he wanted nothing to do with such swine.

Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth was of the opinion that the SS lacked an officer's honor and had behaved like executioners. However he was the first to concede that many in the Wehrmacht had also been guilty of mass executions. Many Waffen-SS, in his eyes, had done nothing other than fight bravely; one simply didn't know who was involved in what.

One officer stated that "the flower of German youth" had joined the Waffen SS. The scions of the oldest Prussian noble families had become its members.

I reflected on something von Moltke, the leader of the Kreisauer Kreis, the circle of resistance opposed to Stauffenberg's plans for assassination, had once said: that the majority of the higher aristocracy in Germany had been Nazis.

In an almost comical scene, one of deep, black comedy, Meyer confessed to General Heinrich Eberbach, that he'd had an NCO shot for rape.

Eberbach had replied that he thought that terror had been part of Hitler's method, at least in the East. Meyer pretended to deny any knowledge of such practices.

Eberbach claimed that he simply couldn't fathom Himmler, to which Meyer replied that the latter was simply the faithful servant of Hitler's wishes.

Perhaps most revealing, psychologically speaking, was a subsequent discussion between Eberbach and Meyer.

Meyer stated that the SS had drawn their strength and power from the belief in the "purity" of their ideas, from their belief in their "blood", and their "faith" in a "healthy, clean family". All of a sudden he, Meyer, had been treated as a pig. It was the opposite of what he'd been led to expect and it wasn't what he'd fought and killed for.

I thought about Meyer's shock. My father must have experienced something similar too. One minute he'd believed himself semi-divine, the next he'd realized he was an outcast, one of the damned, the hated and despised. My father must have been extremely bitter indeed, having been promised victory only to suffer cruel defeat. I knew all too well what it meant to be manipulated, deceived and cruelly disappointed.

I thought about Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters: Beck, Treskow and Olbricht, who'd tried to kill Hitler. The figure of Claus Schenk Count Stauffenberg had indeed been tragic. He had been expected to be a future Chief of Staff and was considered one of the most brilliant officers in the German Army. Only slowly had he realized that the management of the war, not least on account of Hitler's conscious splitting of the high command into two separate organizations: OKW and OKH, and Hitler's own strategic and tactical errors had made the war unwinnable. It was necessary to remove Hitler from power. Otherwise Germany would suffer an appalling defeat. What was worse, in his eyes, was the fact that Germany was being sullied and dishonored by Hitler's crimes. This meant that an action, however ineffective and hopeless it was, was imperative, if only for symbolic reasons. The only real hope, Beck, Treskow, Olbricht and Stauffenberg believed, was for a coup d'état to remove Hitler. All the highest-ranking officers, bar Manstein, had been in favour. Manstein had told Stauffenberg that Prussian officers didn't mutiny, that Hitler would listen to reason, and if Stauffenberg continued talking in a seditious vein he'd have him arrested. After one particularly heated discussion between Manstein and Stauffenberg the former recommended that the latter be transferred back to the front.

Stauffenberg was sent to Africa in February 1943, where he served as Ia, chief of staff, of the 10th Panzer division under Major General Friederich Freiherr von Broich. Major General Friederich Freiherr von Broich had, I recalled, discussed with Stauffenberg, his chief of staff, politics, philosophy, literature and the question of eliminating Hitler's regime, over Tunisian wine. The latter had recited verses of Stefan George, who he regarded as his master. Lines by George came to my mind:

The poet tells in secret the course of time

Winged child that sounds sweet dreams

And beauty brings to active bustle.

Though when out of evil the weather brews

Fate strikes with loud hammer blows

He sounds like raw metal and is misunderstood...

When all are struck blind – he alone sees

Reveals in vain the nearing crisis... then

Cassandra-warnings may wail through the house

The mad crowd sees just one thing:

The horse – the horse! And run to their deaths.

Then the call of the prophet might tell of

The anger of the tribal god and the trot

Of the Assyrian hordes

Who haul the chosen people into slavery:

The wise council has certain report

Laughs at the warner – locks him in a dungeon.

When the holy city is surrounded

Citizens and warriors run in confusion

Princes and priests tussle bloodily inside

For a broom-handle while already outside

The strongest bastion falls: he sighs and stays silent.

When the conqueror then, with pillage and blaze,

Storms in and forces into yokes man and woman

One part foams in fury, shifts their own blame

Onto others – one part

Tired of privation, scuffles for the morsels

Thrown before them by the insolent victors – howls

And dances themselves into stupor – licks the back of the hand

Of those kicking and hitting: He, removed, alone feels

The whole misery and the whole shame.

Go once more to the mountain, to your spirits

And bring us more comforting word to release us

From this misery!... thus speaks a greybeard...

What should heaven's voice do here where there is no ear

For the most obvious wit? What is the point of talking

Of spirit where there is no general drive

Other than that of the trough? Where every crowd

Recommends insultingly to the other their own leaking boat

That miserably founders – salvation seeks in the amassing

Of their beloved trinkets? Where the cleverest tell

Of building anew with old sins

And advise: make yourselves as small as worms so that

The thunder spares you and the lightning won't see you...

The whole tribe of the living that departed

Through long erring will burn incense before their idols

Which had thrown the tribe into dust and contemptibility

As often as they lie

Has forgotten its highest law

Which guarantees its existence

Doesn't believe in the ruler – doesn't need the atoner

Wants to get out of the calamity through guile.

Still harder ploughs have to furrow the soil

Still thicker fog has to threaten the air...

The palest blue shines out of the dark clouds

Breaks onto the present when everybody

That speaks language reaches out a hand

To arm themselves against destruction–

Regardless of whether red or blue or black the pale

Threadbare shreds of flags are shaken off

And think of vespers day and night.

The singer though takes care in sorrow

That the marrow doesn't decay – the bud get stifled.

He stirs up the sacred embers that spring over

And forms the bodies – he draws from books

Of ancestors the calling that doesn't lie

The elect to the highest aim

First through deepest desolation pass that once

Should save the heart of the continent...

And when in most dreadful distress last hopes

Threaten to extinguish: his eye already sees

The brighter future. To him there already grew

Untouched by the lustful market

From thin brain tissue and poisonous tinsel

Clad in the charm of the pernicious years

A young generation that once more man and thing

With authentic scale measures – that beautiful and serious

Happy in its individuality – proud before strangers –

At once far from pinnacle of presumptuous conceit

As from shallow swamp of false brotherliness

That spits out that which is rotten, cowardly and tepid

That out of sacred dreams act and tolerate

The one help of man...

That breaks the chains, sweeps the expanse of ruins

Into order – whips the lost home

In eternal justice where great is once more great

Master once more master – discipline once more discipline – he fixes

The true symbol onto the people's banner

He leads through storm and ghastly signs

Of dawn his faithful troops into action

On the waking day and plants the new empire.

As I sat on a long, grey couch in yet another cavernous restaurant, this time a substantially larger and lighter space, with white walls, lamps and rows of mirrors and ate a cream potato soup with dried mushrooms, dill and boiled egg I reflected on Slovakia and Bratislava's dark history. The publisher was over an hour late and I was in a foul mood.

After Hitler occupied Devin and Petrzalka, there were even calls that they be "returned" to Germany, a right wing government was formed under a priest by the name of Jozef Tiso. Slovakia became a vassal state of Germany, and in September 1941 it proclaimed its codex for Jews. In March 1942 the Slovaks began with the deportation of 60,000 Jews, 15,109 from Bratislava, to the concentration camps. Few survived.

I couldn't help but think that those who thought anti-Semitism a purely German phenomenon mere fools. I recalled the tower in York where Jews who'd taken refuge, in the eleventh century, had committed suicide, the infamous Dreyfus Affair in France and recalled how even the Irish had had their pogroms. Anti-Semitism, I reflected, has always been the shameful shadow of Christianity.

I thought of Origin, who asserted that the Jews had "committed the most abominable of sins" and that the Jewish people should be driven from their land, St. John of Chrysostom, who wrote: "the Jews do not act any better than pigs and goats," Gregory of Nysse who categorized them as "murderers of the Lord, assassins of prophets, rebellious and hateful toward God...confederates of the devil, a race of vipers, informers, calumniators, mentally clouded, pharisaic fermenters, Sanhedrin of the devil, cursed, execrable, stoners, enemies of all that is beautiful," and last but not least Martin Luther who claimed that they were "thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom." Perhaps unsurprisingly he advocated that all synagogues be burned down.

I thought of the grandfather of my stepfather, a philologist in Dresden before the war. It was thanks to his reputation, influence and connections that my stepfather was able to become a professor of history at Oxford. I reflected on the way in which he'd slowly been made to feel the humiliation of being Jewish.

My stepfather's father was a German nationalist, who devoted his life to German poetry. It came as a bitter blow when the Nazis attained power in 1933.

At first he thought the whole matter would blow over and he'd remain unaffected. He lived, my stepfather said, very much in an ivory tower. He always spoke of the long and honorable tradition of Jews in Germany. He'd also been decorated during the First World War. He was proud to be German, the "foremost nation of thinkers," the "pillars of academia", or so he thought. He was proud of the thoroughness of his work, his Gruendlichkeit, and would spend hours complaining about how sloppy the French were, when it came to the difficult business of translation.

My stepfather's father belonged very much to the classical world of Latin and Greek. In that respect he didn't differ too much from Nietzsche but, unlike Nietzsche, he didn't despise the Germans; on the contrary.

The day he woke up as an outsider, an outcast, was one of the worst days of his life. It came as no surprise that he denied that any fundamental change had taken place. People rarely want to see the truth however much it might be glaring at them in the face. He retreated into his world of books and rarely emerged.

One blow followed another. He lost his job at the university. His friends, or rather, those he'd formerly regarded as his friends, all deserted him, the servants left because they no longer wanted to serve a Jew. His wife slipped slowly into a suicidal depression and he was forced to suffer one humiliating restriction after another.

Perhaps the worst, in his eyes, was not being able to even sit on a park bench. And him a veteran of the First World War! How much he'd done for Germany! How much he'd sacrificed! How often he'd been wounded! He, who'd consciously and actively sought danger! He'd never acted the part of a coward, not once! He was outraged at the criminals who'd taken over his dear country and he was disgusted at the way the average German, the petit-bourgeoisie had been the worst, had proven Gesindel, scum.

Despite everything he'd refused to leave the country of his birth and had broken with his brother, a Zionist. His brother had been philosophical, if not somewhat cynical, about the matter. The anti-Semites want to get rid of us, and the Zionists want us to go to Palestine, he said. What's the problem?

His brother thought of himself as a pragmatist and had helped Hannah Arendt transfer Jews out of Germany. The ship was sinking, he'd say. Sauve qui peut. The writing was on the wall.

Perhaps worst of all, in his eyes, was his cousin, a half-Jew, Halbjude, who'd served in the Waffen SS. He was a Verraeter, a traitor and he'd despised him from the bottom of his heart.

The cousin subsequently ended up in Palestine. He simply transferred his murderous skills from one war zone to another. He went on to become a highly successful arms manufacturer and an important power broker in Israeli politics.

My stepfather had consequently been brought up with a life-long and profound hatred of Zionism, a hatred his father had consciously cultivated and imbued him with. It was the fact that he hated Zionism so deeply that had led my stepfather to move from Germany to England.

Germany, he complained, had, after the war, become dominated by Zionists. The Zionists, in his eyes, were responsible for the whole of what he termed the Holocaust Industry. The Germans were despicable in his eyes. They pandered and kowtowed to the Zionists in the exact-same manner they'd abased themselves before the Nazis and he despised them for it.

Jews and Zionists are mutually exclusive my stepfather always told me. One cannot be one and at the same time the other. One always has to choose between the two.

A Jew, he said, unlike a Christian, lives by principles. The irony of Christianity, he complained, was that the Christians were too stupid to realize that theirs was a bastard religion, that they were merely second-rate Jews.

What does Judaism teach one? "You shall not stand idly by. What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. All of God's children are created in the image of God." And: "You shall have one law for the stranger and the citizen alike."

Yet for all his fierce pride in being Jewish my stepfather never demanded of either my mother or I that we convert. Religion was strictly a private matter and he was extremely tolerant toward us both. Or did he, I often wonder, secretly despise us for not being Jewish? Most probably.

When I did want to convert it was on account of my love for a Jewish girl. Both she and I had been sixteen at the time. The problem was that she'd lived in Israel and my stepfather had refused to let me visit her. He didn't want his stepson to become a colonialist Israeli.

The girl in question, although she liked visiting Europe as a tourist, was frightened of actually moving there. She was profoundly worried about European anti-Semitism, and who could blame her? It is very much, as I know from my stepfather, alive and kicking. Eventually she moved, after serving in the army, teaching Hebrew to immigrants, to New York and has recently got married. I still, occasionally, resent my stepfather for his decision. On the other hand I'm a fatalist.

My publisher surprised me with the news that my translations of Rilke were being considered for a major prize. He also said that he'd been asked whether I'd be willing to write a book about Wittgenstein once I'd completed my translation of "Alte Meister".

He enquired how the translation of "Ausloeschung", "Extinction" was coming along and said that sales of my "Holzfaellen", "Woodcutters" were better than ever. Of course they'd receive a further boost should I receive the prize, he told me.

He suggested I do an interview with a newspaper once I was in Vienna. He'd organize it the minute he returned to London. Of course I agreed. I looked forward to talking more about Bernhard. I enjoyed speaking about Bernhard. It had become something of a private passion, if not an obsession, on my part.

My publisher said he was planning to travel to Innsbruck in August and suggested we meet there. Given the fact that I still had another couple of weeks before the funeral he said that it would be a good idea for me to meet a friend of his: Heinrich.

Heinrich was an Austrian writer who'd become embroiled in a court case. He'd been accused of rape. Of course it was all political, my publisher assured me. Heinrich was a well-known anarchist. That is how they shut people up nowadays, he commented wryly. Yet my doubts lingered. What if he was guilty after all? Who could tell?

My publisher also told me that a there was currently a festival of Austrian film in Bratislava. There were a number of Austrian filmmakers in the city. He offered to put me in touch with them. Of the list he gave me the two who interested me the most were Peter Kubelka and Ulrich Seidl.

The next day I walked up to the castle, the symbol of power in any city, and walked up the magnificent white and gold rococo staircase, with its gilded mirrors, designed by Hillebrandt. As I did so I heard the sound of an organ being played.

I walked swiftly through the gallery with paintings of Saturn punishing cupid, Lot and his daughters, Saint Hieronym, Saint Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory, St. Peter, Jacob and Rachel, St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, the Murder of the Innocents, Sibyla Burning the Books, the Suicide of Cato of Utica, the Merciful Samaritans, Rinaldo and Armida, Gaius Marcius Coriolanus and Rebecca and Eliezer. I then descended the winding stairs to the crown of St. Stephen's.

The crown was divided into two parts. The lower was inspired by Byzantium and the upper by Rome. Above the head was a picture of Jesus Christ, next to it were the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and next to them St. George, Demeter and Kosmas. On the back were the pictures of three monarchs: Michal VI, his brother Constantine and the Hungarian king Geza I.

To my surprise I read that the crown had been buried in the Mattsee in January 1945 and had been kept at Fort Knox before being returned to Hungary in 1978.

After the castle I visited a bright, modern cafe not far removed from it with shelves of books, green walls, plastic plants, pale chairs, racks for magazines, big, red lamps, and flat video screens where I drank a spiced chai latte with coffee.

To my right were a pair of girls, one with a blue top, the other in black, with matching black hair, black eye-liner and black boots. In front of them were pieces of paper and a file. They were alternately gesturing with their hands and drinking tea. The girl in black seemed to be teaching the other German.

In front of me two men, one a bit older than the other, were chatting in Slovakian. The younger one got a call and quickly switched to English. "Where will you fix the door handles? Where is the problem? OK, yes. I have one friend. I will call him. He is like $5 an hour or whatever. OK, she gives me a call tomorrow. I'll call the guy. He speaks a little English. So around 2 o'clock I'll call you. Then I'll call you back. No problem."

While in the cafe I read an article in the Huffington Post about "Generation Y", with its delusional sense of uniqueness, its inflated view of itself, its strong sense of entitlement, personal dreams, desire to follow its passions and wish to seek fulfillment. Its expectations invariably exceeded reality and as a result it was permanently and profoundly unhappy. Was my half-brother a member of Generation Y, I asked myself?

After the cafe I attended a talk given by Peter Kubelka. As I waited for it to begin I recalled the interview I'd been given to read by my publisher the day before.

In it Peter Kubelka explained that he'd wanted to make films at a very early age. He must have been seventeen at the time. He'd wanted to enter the film industry but it simply hadn't been possible. Neither was it possible for him to make what he'd termed "commercial films".

An artist was for him a prophet. He had to say what he thought and give expression to his vision of the world. The problem was: those who commissioned his films, such as "Schwechater" or "Unsere Afrikareise", didn't understand them at all. Not only that, he was physically assaulted when he showed them.

Even in old age, he was nearly eighty, he wasn't free of being physically abused on account of his art. He told the reporter that after showing a film at Portland, Oregon, a man approached him. He assumed it was a fan. The man simply said: "That was the worst film I have ever seen. I want to spit at you." And he did indeed spit at Peter Kubelka before calmly turning and walking out before anybody could stop him.

His films "Schwechater" and "Unsere Afrikareise" expressed, he explained to the reporter, his vision of the world. On the one hand "Schwechater" expressed the fact that the world was forever in motion, and echoed the ideas of Heraclites, while "Unsere Afrikareise" gave expression to the idea that comedy and tragedy were close neighbors, which echoed the ideas of Kleist.

His work: "Arnulf Rainer", he explained, was film reduced to its minimum: light and dark, sound and silence. This, in turn, was an expression of his vision of the world.

During the talk itself Peter Kubelka spoke about the way in which the Christian world is essentially a world of dreams. It hardly differs, in many respects, to that of the Aborigines. It is a world of myth rather than reality, a world of poetry rather than one of divine laws. Language is merely one aspect of this dream world.

We have an apparatus, the five senses, and we use them to create a model of the world, which we then term reality. All of the senses are necessary to determine a fact. A piece of film, for example, has a temperature, a weight, one can perceive it, one can taste it with one's tongue, and one can bite it with one's teeth.

We are currently living in an age in which the digital medium is supplanting physical film. This creates new facts. This creates a new space for our thoughts.

Every work in a medium, the minute it leaves a creator's hand, serves as information about the past for future archeologists. It tells archeologists about the way people behaved. Each object is an expression of identity.

Everything that moves in the universe, every gesture, is a dance, a rhythm, and we make use of this repertoire of gestures.

Socrates didn't want to have his spoken word written down because he was aware of the fact that a written language is a different language to a spoken one. He called static knowledge into question. He knew that he knew nothing.

Kleist was aware that one had to be seen when one talked and that one needs a counterpart. Talking is an erotic process.

We began to cook roughly 5 million years ago. This led to our intestines getting shorter. Before we needed more energy and we needed to chew more. Today work is regarded as a waste of time, a disgrace.

We live in a new time and a new space. In the past when an Aborigine pointed at a man he died.

There is no time as such. All there is are different methods of timing such as metronomes and clocks. We agree on time but what is an objective hour compared to one's personal, private, sense of an hour? No one has ever seen time. What is it?

We live incrementally, one step at a time. A flow is divided into increments such as in the case of Marais. Everybody moves forward in steps. In the case of film the step is the frame, in the case of Marais it's the wing of a bird, in the case of our lives: day and night.

Regular images follow one another. On the screen one only sees a static image.

When we think we always compare; there is always A and B. We are always comparing.

Film tells us about a different era. It represents a hundred years of history and thought.

Around 1750 there was a change in musical instruments. It was possible to play both loudly and quietly. Before that, with instruments such as a pianoforte, it was only possible to play quietly.

The process of production is part and parcel of the product. In order to understand romantic painting, for example, or the cave paintings of the past, one shouldn't use electric light. One only destroys them by doing so.

The film projector in the cinema is a copy of the camera and that, in turn, is derived from the human head. The Lumiere brother's camera was at one and the same time their projector.

Framing has always been important to understanding. Framing tells us: that's where one should be looking, that's what's important. Borders indicate that one should be looking in a certain direction. The rim of a plate is the frame of a meal; it directs one's attention.

With every step, with every frame, there is new information. With every step there is evolution. We experience today and tomorrow in terms of steps. The sun rises and it becomes dark. The projector is a copy of our globe. Each frame is an individual fate. We hear a clap and think it's now.

In the past the songs of the Aborigines belonged to the whole tribe. The information about where, for example, there were wetlands was embedded in the song. To divulge the song was treachery and punishable by death. The harvest song was essential for the whole tribe.

Where is a sound? That's where something is happening. Silence. Nothing is happening.

Every song and picture frame links us to the cosmos, to the universe.

Once the talk was over I introduced myself to Peter Kubelka and we arranged to meet for breakfast the next morning.

Over breakfast I asked him about his career as a filmmaker. "I decided to make films or to become a filmmaker" he told me "already before I made my Matura. I was seventeen years old. I was fascinated by film but of course I did not envisage myself becoming an avant-garde filmmaker or as it was then called: an underground filmmaker. I thought of making films and selling them and making new films but this turned out not to be possible and I was, so to speak, pushed into the underground."

"I came to Vienna to make films in '52 but soon I found myself in opposition to what people who made feature films were aspiring to and I was discontented with what I saw on the screen."

"In my experience of how the world functions it very often turns out that so-called defects, deficiencies, turn out to be a positive element. For example the deficiency that cinema has against television, that it cannot function if there is light in the room."

"Cinema functions only if it is dark and silent in the room. That deficiency has made cinema today the deepest and strongest experience of all media available."

"Because the fact that television functions under any circumstances, in broad daylight, in the kitchen, in the car etc. has led to a kind of use of the medium which is very shallow."

"People get acquainted to not paying any respect to what they see on television because television is humble and cannot be humiliated enough. It still functions."

"If you go to the cinema you have to go there. You have to stay seated for a certain amount of time. It is dark and you cannot do anything else but watch the film. You are protected by the darkness and everybody in the cinema respects that. So a seeming deficiency turns out to be an asset."

"I have never been able to let verbal theory override the messages which my senses were bringing in. For example, when I have to go to a so-called high-class restaurant and I have to eat these dinners described in majestic poetry on the menu. All these other things, like text or images or knowing how expensive the restaurant is and knowing how it is classed in the food guide, doesn't obscure the fact that I don't like the soup."

"It is amazing how fast the more developed nations like America and Western Europe are losing their confidence in their own senses and how fast they are moving toward what could be called virtual life. Which means that you don't see or hear anymore, you don't judge your life according to what you see or hear, in terms of real events but you feed yourself with artificial, virtual experiences and prefer them to reality."

"There is the seeing of reality and there is the artificially made picture and there is of course a difference."

"Language is a very special medium because language already uses the system of human thought. Namely to think in clusters, which could be called concepts. For example, when you say: War. This is not a single view or acoustical event. It is a sum of millions of experiences and these concepts are named or connected with acoustical signals. When you use such an acoustical signal it triggers the idea of the concept to which it is tied. So language does not really bring, like a photographed image or a painted image, an analogous copy of reality but it draws on experiences that are already stored in the brain. Of course it is a very effective way of connection between human beings but it is totally removed from our contact with reality. It draws on inner experience."

"My philosophy is home made. I'm a reasoning and talking craftsman. I am not a member of the philosophical community. In fact I do not like philosophy because of it's being linked too much to language. I do not rely, in my lectures, on definitions which are solely based on language but I always use visuals, music and examples from cooking to make people understand what I think."

"So this is one of my strongest motives: to look toward a world understanding which is not given to language alone but which encompasses central contact."

"Language gets so easily into nonsense. If you trust language too much you lose what is called common sense."

"In my theory common sense is the single most important factor."

"Language I use only as a medium and to give hints. So when I do my lectures, the public is not supposed to stick to final definitions in language but to take my talking as a hint and do the process of understanding themselves."

"Joyce is one of my fathers. I had an interesting experience with Joyce. I was born in '34 and I lived through the war realizing what it was. Right after the war my, so to speak, intellectual life, and intellectual hunger for information of what had been done in art, in literature and in music was very great."

"The situation immediately after the war in Austria was a complete lack of information about the development of modernity, so to speak. Because the Nazis, of course, had cut off everything. What was possible, during the war, was Duerer's "Hare" and Grimm's "Fairy Tales", which are both good things but that's not enough."

"After the war there was no possibility to read James Joyce. It was not there. I heard the first time about James Joyce in the German literature lessons when the teacher said that there was somebody called James Joyce. He had written a book with hundreds of pages on only one day. What he wrote was about normal, banal things of daily life."

"When I heard this I knew that that was the kind of literature I was looking for. It took years before I got hold of Ulysses. But as I say: this thing was in the air. I felt it and Joyce had done it. The situation was obviously ripe for this kind of attack, for this kind of point of view."

"After the war all artistic generations were very radical. I myself was very radical. The generation which followed, Nitsch and Muehl were still more radical and then it leveled out."

"It is very possible that the war created that. We didn't know what there was so there was this great thirst of getting what the world was about and what we were kept from experiencing."

"And then the Austrian society and the Austrian state, after the war, was not very eager to open up to these developments. In fact they just tried to be like: you were a person who has done something bad and you are forgiven and then you try to be just nice."

"I always said that the Austrians after the war did not really trust anybody of their own anymore. The last one they had trusted was Hitler and it had ended badly."

"So they had the feeling: let's do what in Germany is middle class. This applied in art. What I had done in cinema was something nobody had done, neither in Germany nor in America."

"I was completely derided here and I was an outcast. Had I done something, which in Germany, at a conservative festival, would have got second prize they would have been more than happy. But they didn't want anybody from their own to do something, which was not classifiable and which was not internationally middle class."

"I was invited, in 1955, to go to the Biennale, in Venice, with my first film. The Austrians didn't send the nomination because they didn't trust my film."

"I participated on behalf of Vietnam. I went there and I had a Vietnamese friend who had studied in Rome. A jury selected the films."

"It was still a national contest so the nation from where it came from had to nominate it. The jury selected my film, which they had seen in Italy, and told me that Austria should nominate the film. And they didn't. And then my Vietnamese friend went to his ambassador and he did. So this film "Mosaik im Vertrauen", which is also in Austrian dialect, not even German, participated as a Vietnamese film there."

"When I came back from the Biennale I thought it would be a big scandal and I was ready to accept it. Then they said nothing because I was successful there and then they just congratulated me to my participation in the Biennale."

"Vienna, which had been the capital of a huge empire, was, after World War One, left with a very small, seven million-strong, nation."

"In addition: this seven million-strong nation represented just one racial element of what the monarchy had been. There were no longer any more Hungarian, Czechoslovakian or all these other elements for which Vienna had been a breeding-ground for talent and for which Vienna is still a breeding-ground for talent."

"A city is like a uterus and it is used to a certain biological life. Vienna was, of course, the supplier of talent for all the other territories. It still continues to produce talent but the country is too small and has another mood."

"There are really two things in Austria: Vienna and the rest. Vienna is a place where too many people compete for the few opportunities, which are there."

"When I first came to America, in '66, this was shocking for me to see, when I visited, let's say Brakhage, a very famous filmmaker in his house in Colorado, how happy these people were to welcome talented young artists."

"In Vienna when the next one comes along everybody shoots him down, of course, because they step on each other's toes. So it is very important for Viennese talent to leave and then maybe to come back. But you have to leave. If you stay you are suffocated."

"There are many examples in avant-garde film. There are several filmmakers who were suffocated by not wanting to and not being able to leave."

"When you take poets like Priessnitz because his language was German. He drank himself to death. He was one of the great poets after the war and now he's not even in the anthologies. If you stay here as an artist, who really does something of his own, you are doomed."

In the afternoon I was able to talk to the comparatively shy and quiet but equally confident Ulrich Seidl. At first he seemed almost timid, he didn't want to come anywhere near me, and it was hard to believe that he was as old as he actually was. His trials and difficulties hadn't aged him a bit; on the contrary. They'd evidently kept him young.

I told him what I was doing and asked him about his relationship to Thomas Bernhard. He was obviously tired, hadn't slept much and at the first had difficulty speaking English.

"I have no relationship to Thomas Bernhard. I never got to know him, unfortunately, which I regret. At film school I wanted to make a film about Thomas Bernhard because, as you know, there is almost nothing about him or little, very little."

"Basically I see his books as being very realistic, very tough and truthful. On the one hand his books are relentless, on the other humorous, exaggerated."

"I see affinities and I feel related: in his view of life and people, in his ruthlessness, in his nakedness but also in his humor and his exaggeration. Not cynicism but humanism. Many people can't tolerate it because it's too crass, too truthful."

"I'm interested in people. It wouldn't be an option for me to make a film exclusively in order to make fun of people or for me to approach a project with preconceptions. I won't do that. That would be a waste of time. When I start a project I'm interested in people, the milieu. I let them lead me."

"The reality is, so to speak, always the basis and I think of that as a special privilege. Very often movies arise out of reality. Observing reality often results in a documentary and then there is, as the next stage, a feature film."

"The viewers of my films see, hear and interpret my films very differently. Every viewer sees a different film because it always has to do with oneself."

"I, as a spectator, create a relationship between what I see, what I am and how I understand the world. I can deny what I see. I can, so to speak, refuse to yield to what I see. There are plenty of viewers who won't yield to what they see on the screen because it's too close to them, because it provides them with a mirror of themselves. Not everyone tolerates that. If you do yield to it, and that's why my films have, so to speak, an international fan club, it's an enriching experience.

"It has to do with knowledge. I see something, I see how I stand in relation to it, and it enriches one. That is what I require of my films and that's what Bernard's books achieve. They have something lasting. They bother you, they don't leave you alone, emotionally they don't leave you alone, apart from their exact, precise descriptions and their repetitions."

"Form is not interesting if it is only form. Form is interesting if it treats a specific content in a specific way. My films have special forms and images, which are unique. No one else does this and I try, as in a painting, to communicate something visually. The spectators have a leeway in the pictures. Through this distance they have, the space they have, spectators have more opportunities to interpret and to look."

"If one can only see a face or if I try, as a filmmaker, to present the viewer with something in exactly the way I see it, close-up, etc., that is the common film language."

"I prefer to move back and let things speak for themselves. On the one hand there is room for interpretation and on the other: nothing is accidental. It's all done very precisely. The images are made very precisely. The images are designed. The environment is designed, the room is designed, the furniture, the people, what they are wearing isn't random."

"I'm interested in two things; on the one hand: reality, observing reality without affecting it; so-called Cinema Verite. One goes into the public sphere, into reality, sets up a camera and lets what happens happen."

"On the other hand I'm interested in the design of the image. My guiding principle is very often reduction. It is not a question of what needs to be added but rather: of what needs to be taken away."

"There is always an artificial and exaggerated image. Bernhard's form also uses exaggeration."

"Of course, I had difficulties at the beginning. When I made my first movie: "Good News", the commission saw the film in a rough cut and were horrified. The film was very critical of Vienna. They said: "You'll never ever make a film in this country again.""

"I then showed the film to Werner Herzog, who helped the film to become known abroad. It was premiered abroad, in Switzerland. It caused a sensation. It then came into the cinemas, also in Austria, and was a great success."

"For me it was a very, very long way. This must not be forgotten. I first started making films late. I was twenty-six. I then left film school, after two years, and had to wait seven years before I could make my first feature film. Others give up. I think one can only do this if one knows one has a vision that can be transposed. One has to be relentless. Otherwise it can't be done."

### Heinrich

Who was Heinrich? I asked myself three days before. And who was the lady he was said to have raped? The few photos I managed to obtain had provided me with scant information. They were old, three years to be exact. Would he look different now? I'd asked myself then. Was he a criminal? Was he evil or simply insane? Or perhaps all three.

I arrived at Vienna's Secession, shortly before three, on a hot, breezy, June afternoon. The front of the building was in shadow and only when the wind blew the branches of a plant, to my left, in a large, wide basin, adorned with a blue and gold mosaic in curling designs, did I notice that the sun was almost directly above me.

Three masks stood over the entrance and beneath them, in gold lettering, were the words: Malerei, Architektur, Plastik, Painting, Architecture, Sculpture. Further up was gold leafing and, protruding out above that, stood: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, Der Kunst ihre Freiheit, to each age its own art and for art its freedom.

I ascended, alongside some fat, motley-clad tourists, toting cameras or simply carrying plastic bags, the worn, faded, vaguely marble-looking, red stone steps, and passed a tiny window, with green curling metal work, to my right.

As I reached the top, the doors, with their green frames and glass panes, seemed to open of their own accord.

The entrance hall, faintly lit by sunlight, was, after the dry blustery heat outside, agreeably cool. I passed an installation, with photos of children and naked men hanging from plastic branches, before entering the main, humid, exhibition space itself. "Crush, slice and grind" appeared on a video-screen.

To its left was what looked like a large, metal fireplace and in front of that were large, square, brown and orange cushions, on polished metal sheets.

The staccato sound of somebody cutting up what looked like an onion started to get on my nerves and I was glad when it was replaced by the words "From Bangkok with love," yellow on pink, on the screen.

Dazed and not a little confused I stumbled down the narrow, neon lit stairs in the direction of the basement. I wasn't sure if this was the right time or even right place for the appointed meeting. Something told me it was but another voice, equally strong, told me it wasn't.

To my right was a sign pointing in the direction of the WC. Since I had a few minutes to spare, most probably looked wind-swept, needed to go to the toilet, and above all else, to freshen up, I followed the arrow.

Inside the WC I couldn't help but marvel at the simplicity of the rectangular mirrors and the metal basins, between which there seemed to be a heater. It was lit on the one hand by four lamps, two above the mirrors and two above the urinals, and on the other by an ovoid, frosted, double glazed window, which, with the round metal object in the middle, reminded me of an eye. After leaving the bathroom I descended a fresh batch of stairs.

It took me a while to orient myself in the basement and when I hit upon the room I was seeking, which wasn't at all as grand, considering its reputation, as I had expected it to be, adjacent to one with an account, in word and picture, of how the building had developed from being nothing more than a sketch to being built and then rebuilt after the war, it was purely by accident. To my relief I saw the man I was looking for and went straight up to him.

"It is not easy," Heinrich said, studying the knight of the Beethoven Frieze, "having a father who was a member of the Waffen SS." He always heard the first strains of Wagner's "Rienzi" in his imagination upon seeing it he told me. Not Mahler, who the knight was supposed to represent, but Wagner. "Klimt's interpretation of Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven."

I was aghast not so much at what but how he said it, with a callous laugh and a warning flash in his eyes. It was cold in the room in the basement of the Secession and I made the mistake of mentioning this fact.

"It is always cold here and the harsh light which lights the room is abstossend, repellent, repulsive, repugnant." His whole gaunt frame seemed to shake with mirth before he continued. "At first the whole frieze struck me to the core with terror. Nazi art, but, and that was the most frightening, of the highest niveau." He looked at his cheap, Swiss army watch. It was five past three.

He'd already spent half an hour there, walking around the room trying to entschluessel, decode, the meaning of the work. The hideous hags, the pristine knight, the lovers. He felt bruised and frustrated as if he'd been running against the walls themselves, he told me.

Heinrich was tall, thin, and shabbily dressed. Indeed it was difficult to guess that he was a successful writer returning to his native Vienna to attend to legal matters. He spoke briefly about the matter in hand, the reason for his return, the case:

"Do you think that I'm a rapist too?" I was caught off guard, having at that point been trying to guess his age as if it were the most important thing in the world. He gave me a keen glance. I tried to disguise the fact that I did behind a mock naivety and cool empirical gaze.

"I don't know," I said somewhat truculently. He was amused at my courage or at least show of it. He smiled one of his x-ray smiles, which seemed to see through me.

"Sie haben mich durchschaut," I proffered, as if the fact that I had uttered it in German were an ameliorating circumstance. I felt a proper fool and was angry at being put in such an awkward position.

"You know I consider myself a very feminine guy. I have chosen a very feminine profession. I have tried to be sensitive toward my fellow man, respectful to the ladies, and what you in England would call a decent chap." He paused and looked away for a moment before addressing me again. "But you know what" he proffered with one of his cold smiles, "I think that you are right."

The case concerned an event, or sequence of events or supposed sequence of events, which had occurred five years before. At that time Heinrich was neither successful nor well known and was living more or less like a down and out. I couldn't escape the impression that this case would never have come into being had it not been for the fact that he'd become rich and famous. There was something of the old fashioned vendetta about it.

"What does it mean to love women more than anything in the world and at the same time to hate them with the exact same intensity if it isn't an example of the Beethoven Complex?" Heinrich was staring at the benighted figures, uttering this rhetorical question as if no one else were in the room. "I always love one woman but sacrifice her on behalf of another. Does that not sound odd? What does it sound like in German? No, I'm not sure I could even formulate that in German."

And the rape? "That was a misunderstanding. Even at my age I don't know what women want. You think that I should know better than that. And apart from which I get so easily irritated." Here he stopped abruptly.

"Alma Mahler said to the effect that although this building wasn't what one might call beautiful it was interesting. Which didn't stop her falling in love with its architect of course. But that was a long time after her affair with Klimt. He pursued her to Italy and her stepfather, also an artist, upbraided him for it and called him a shallow fellow. This was of course before falling for Mahler, who was hesitant about marrying her, having then no secure position."

"It is odd to think that Mahler, who adapted the choral part of Beethoven's Ninth for trumpets for here by the way, that poor Jewish boy from the provinces, was admired so much by that other poor boy from the provinces, Adolf Hitler, another sufferer of the Beethoven Complex of course. And it is even odder to think that Hitler attended the same school at the same time and was roughly the same age as one of the sons of the chief sponsors of this building, a certain Karl Wittgenstein, father of Ludwig."

Freud I said to myself, but where does Freud fit in to it? Heinrich had mentioned, almost in one breath, and all somehow in connection with this building, everyone else I'd ever heard of, of fame in Vienna at that time.

"Yes Beethoven" he sighed reverentially, "you have to read not just his letters, but his diary too. It is all there, in black and white, his neuroses. His letters, his early ones especially, are wonderful. They show him to have been highly insecure, unsure if he would ever be a genius, with high-minded intentions, generosity of mind, radical stance, democratic inclinations, a penchant for flouting convention, and a habit of flaunting his revolutionary ideas in front of his high aristocratic patrons, who by the way, must have been highly indulgent to take this viper to their breasts at a time when revolution was sweeping Europe."

"His diary reminds me, with its appeal to Eastern Mysticism and stoicism as well as misogyny, not a little of Schopenhauer. It is odd that they were both inspired by William Jone's translations. But there is another connection between the two of course. Both knew Goethe. The times, during and after the Napoleonic wars, must have been especially rough to have inspired such profound pessimism."

"And there is a third connection too. I often think that Wittgenstein was inspired as much by Beethoven as by Schopenhauer."

He pointed at the frieze and his hand swept over it. "The first part, the sleek feminine figures, which are borne through the air, represent the longing for happiness, Die Sehnsucht nach Glueck. The second, the emaciated kneeling figures and girl, the suffering of weak humanity, Die Leiden der schwachen Menschheit asking the knight, perhaps a portrait of Mahler, der wohlgeruesteten Starken, for happiness."

"Interesting is the explanation as to the motivation of the knight, reminiscent of Nietzsche's portrayal of Wagner in Bayreuth: als aeussere, Mitleid und Ehrgeiz als innere treibende Kraft, die ihn das Ringen nach dem Glueck aufzunehmen bewegen, externally compassion and internally ambition as the driving force that compel him to wrestle for happiness."

"In Nietzsche's text Wagner had been presented as the silent hero, with few friends and many enemies, an adventurer and discoverer who discovered art itself, rendering everything before redundant, a Wille zur Macht Mensch a Will to Power man if ever there was one, a unifier and simplifier yet at the same time a liberator whose music was the transformation of nature in love in ihrer Kunst ertoent die in Liebe verwandelte Natur, a revolutionary who became one out of compassion for the people."

"After this group come the powers of evil, Die feindlichen Gewalten, the giant gorilla-like Typhoeus against whom even the gods were powerless, his three daughters, the three gorgons, snakes curling with anguish in their hair, Sickness, Madness and Death. Next to them are Lust, pent up, her leg bent and head tilted, Impurity, with a somewhat dreamlike expression on her face, and obese Intemperance and not far removed, cowed and veiled in sorrow, Gnawing Care. Yet above them the figures representing the desire for happiness fly on, reaching their destination, the calm of poetry, a Greek girl with a lyre, the arts which seem to be borne up from a well, the serene choir, pure joy, happiness and love, and the fulfillment in a kiss." He smiled ironically.

"It is a bit like my life, between Sickness, Madness and Death. A bit like the life of Wittgenstein too. He also, of that I am sure, was inspired by Nietzsche, especially his demand that language should, once more, fit emotion."

"Not far away from here is where Beethoven's "Leonore", later renamed and reworked as "Fidelio", was first performed, in the Theater an der Wien, where Beethoven could lodge for free, for a short time, in a tiny garret."

"Is that not art? The search for, sadly, all too elusive happiness? Come, we'll leave this building and I'll show you Vienna, my Vienna."

As we ascended the narrow stairs he quoted a few sentences from Beethoven's diary: "Beethoven wrote curious things such as "Erst uebe Wunder, willst du sie enthuellen: Nur so kannst du dein Dasein erfuellen." First practice wonder, only in revealing it will you fulfill your Being. And: "Er hat mich ja entsagen und entbehren gelehrt, im heiligen Gefuehl der Pflicht." He taught me abstinence and abjuration, in the holy feeling of duty."

We left the rather squat, stumpy looking building, which somehow reminded me of a factory, and turned around to face it. In the summer sun the whitewash seemed to gleam with nearly the same intensity as the spherical wreath of gold, which rested on what looked like four chimneys.

"I remember when it was grey and its crown lusterless and even I thought it warranted the nickname given to it by the Viennese: the Assyrian toilet. It was first renovated by a Swiss architect named Krischanitz in 1985. His offices are around the corner. That was after the Americans, thanks primarily to that mild, old man of American letters, Carl E. Shorske, had discovered Fin de Siecle Vienna. It was at that time that Fin de Siecle Vienna became fashionable and everybody wanted to know about it. Before that Freud, or rather Fraud, had been a dirty word here."

"Of course of interest is the Spruch, the epigram: "Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit". The question always arises as to the relation of art to its time. What is meant by for each time its own art? For Hitler, for example, that was by no means obvious and he sincerely believed that one could consciously create timeless art."

"And then there is the other question: For art its freedom. Taken too far one has Otto Muehl and his abuse of children, taken not far enough one has boredom, triviality and banality, in short 99% of the art that is produced and consumed today. Art has to be free but the artist has to be courageous and take risks even if it means being execrated like Thomas Bernhard was. You can't possibly imagine the scandals his works provoked. He didn't seek to be loved. Feared and respected maybe but never loved."

We walked on and passed through, the sun in our eyes, the kasbah-like Naschmarkt, the largest open-air market in Europe or so I'd been told, through which, in the 19th century, the river Wien had flowed. A variety of scents assailed my senses.

To my left were tiny shops, with green wooden paneling, faded orange awnings and large stalls, a couple of which were packed with avocados, strawberries, mangoes, melons, bananas, peaches, cherries, pineapples, apples, oranges, pears, and many fruits of which I didn't know the names.

To my right were shops selling meat and fish, some of the latter swimming around in tanks, under what seemed to be rather insalubrious circumstances. But they were nothing in comparison with the shops selling herbs and spices. The aromas, which wafted from them, were unlike anything I'd ever encountered before.

It was not that I found the curious mixture, the mingling of the savory and the piquant, pleasurable, but rather disturbing. Indeed after a while I found the amassed array, the quantity and variety, to be simply overwhelming and not a little repugnant.

"This is where Hermann Nitsch buys his things when he prepares for his Orgien Mysterien Theatre," Heinrich told me. "Of course it is a nonsense to try to capture a sense of primeval authenticity on video but that is precisely what he tries to do. His ideas though, with their curiously Viennese blend of Freud, Surrealism and Wagnerianism, are not without interest. Perhaps they seem a little dated today but they were very much of relevance forty years ago. Then a man could still get killed here for protesting against the Nazis. It was their culture that was prevalent at the time and Vienna was ripe for catharsis. Which is what Nitsch, Brus, Frohner and others tried to provide it with of course. Not that it got them anywhere, other than a spell in prison, which is where most Viennese would most probably throw a latter day Mozart or Beethoven. The times of aristocratic patronage are dead and buried you see and the ones who now rule the roost are the petit bourgeoisie and the peasantry."

Finally we arrived at the Theatre an der Wien, one of two venerable old theatres, although one wouldn't have guessed it from its facade, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, still standing in Vienna. At the time Beethoven's "Fidelio" was produced here the building had been brand new.

To the left of the entrance, behind doors that slid open, was the Beethoven Zimmer, a recreation of what Beethoven's room might have looked like. It was beautifully cool inside.

On the left was a bed, in Biedermeier style, as was everything else in the room, adorned with a pink sheet and a white pillow. Above it were four small pictures. Next to the bed was a cupboard upon which books and a candle had been placed. To the right of it was a small piano and behind that was a clock and a mirror. Close to the piano was a lectern, upon which there were some music notes and a quill. We left the room and walked up the Milloeckergasse.

"Of course the history of Beethoven's opera is a long and arduous one. As was everything with him. He was not like Mozart. Music didn't come to him in his dreams. No, with him the process was long and laborious, tiresome, tortuous and not a little tedious. It is no surprise that he took an age finding the right theme for his opera, then the right librettist and, of course, an inordinate amount of time composing the thing, which he only completed with extreme difficulty. Only for it to be banned of course. The authorities were very sensitive to his portrayal of a police state, a state not dissimilar to Austria at that time. And then came the French bombardment and capture of Vienna, which didn't help matters. It is ironic when one thinks about it. French officers watching an opera based on a French play based on the consequences of the French revolution and not understanding a word of it. Of course it had to be a failure and was only performed a couple of times. Do you believe in fidelity?"

I thought (how could I but?) of my girlfriend, Anne, who was teaching at Stanford at the time. She materialized in my imagination not as she was as she'd said goodbye but as I remember first seeing her, reclining, nonchalantly, on a couch. It was above all her figure, slender and elegant, combined with the tender and kind expression in her dark eyes, which had struck me then. And her soft voice as she'd spoken those first words to me of course, which still reverberated, without any of her subsequent shriller tones, in my audile memory.

Was she staying true to me? She doesn't have time not to, I told myself, and if this thought failed to content me at least I comforted myself with it, as I habitually do with most of my illusions.

"Yes I do," I proffered somewhat belatedly but Heinrich had moved on, lost in his train of thought.

"Of course Beethoven is not a patch on Mozart when it comes to opera. Mozart was a child but he understood the human soul and he understood how weak the flesh truly is and therefore the necessity of forgiveness. In that respect he was peculiarly Catholic. Are you a Catholic?"

I had to confess that I'd been baptized in an Anglican church but that had been the first and nearly last time I'd been inside such a venerable institution. I explained that I didn't really have a faith as such I could think of and thought of myself as being agnostic, whatever that was.

"Perhaps all we men were ever concerned with was what Goethe called: Das Ewig-Weibliche, the eternal feminine, and what women were always concerned with was what we might term eternal manliness. We will never understand one another I fear."

"I am, I'm afraid, a profound believer in a Manichean world-view. Is not everything dualism? From Yin and Yang to Mondrian. All duality. But not the duality of mind and body or soul and body but the duality of man and woman. Irreconcilable. Eternally at odds. Is it not so?"

I had to beg to differ, explaining that although I was one who was perhaps overly fond of harmony and ever willing to shy away from conflict, I didn't share his pessimism. After all, I reflected, was I not enjoying a surprisingly harmonious relationship with Anne? It was just a question of perspective, I explained. He looked at me as if at a fool and smiled his bleak smile, leaving me in little doubt as to whom he regarded teacher who pupil.

"Yes, I have loved. And how. With such ardor, such passion. But what has come of it? What ever came of the love, the passion of a penniless artist? I don't mean thereby to go begging for sympathy but there are some notable examples, which spring to mind."

"Take Nestroy for example who made his breakthrough here in this theatre in April 1832, at the age of thirty, with his caustic play: "Die Verbannung aus dem Zauberreiche oder Dreissig Jahre aus dem Leben eines Lumpen"."

"The one true love of his life abandoned him for a richer man. Had he, who'd performed in "Fidelio" in his twenties, not a right to be cynical about women after that? At the time this theatre was built he'd just been born and at the time Beethoven died twenty-six."

"Of course he passed away, in 1862, rich, seldom enough for any artist, but unhappy. He was an astute observer of the feminine mind if ever there was one. His acerbic wit had its root in bitter experience."

"Of course women are to be excused that they give so much weight to material matters. After all they are the ones who bring the kids into the world and have to support them. But can't we help despising them for it nevertheless?"

Heinrich's misogyny was beginning to pall. He has a bit of a cheek, I said to myself, making such pronouncements about the world, mine included, in such a debonair fashion. I was perfectly happy with women the way they were. I couldn't help but picture him, for a split second, as a murderer in a Victorian illustration who, having seduced a woman, stands in a darkened doorway, over her corpse. I couldn't help but formulate that old question, that old chestnut, the connection between art and crime in my head. I had to restrain myself from asking it. It would only have irritated him, seeming curiously out of place, and have stopped the flow of his thought, which emerged slowly, like molten larva, glowing and steaming with hate and anger.

"It was a cold December day when I first met her though I can't for the life of me remember the year. When one grows old everything swims around in an Einheitsbrei, everything is nebulous."

"Of course both Kant and Schopenhauer are very interesting on time. Kant wrote: "Die Zeit verlaeuft sich nicht, sondern in ihr verlaeuft sich das Dasein des Wandelbaren". Impossible to translate of course but I shall try. It is not time itself which runs its course but rather the existence of the mutable passes within it or time does not, in itself, run but rather the being of the changeable runs within it."

"Almost poetry really, and not a little mystical if one thinks about it. Now Schopenhauer: "Sukzession ist das ganze Wesen der Zeit". Succession is the whole essence of time. And that Schopenhaueren way of thinking about time is one of the keys to Bernhard of course. Just think of the opening of his "Korrektur", "Correction"."

I wondered whether it had been a good idea of my publisher to ask me to get in touch with Heinrich. He said he could act as my guide as well as help me with my translation. Of course, knowing my publisher, there was always a hidden purpose to everything. If he was hoping that I'd be willing to consider translating Heinrich's books he was very much mistaken.

As I looked at Heinrich, mentally turning off the volume, not listening to a word he was saying, I noticed, for the first time, his teeth. They were somewhat brown at the base and curiously irregular. I found myself asking the question as to what he was actually thinking of in that curiously formed head of his and then subsequently if I really wanted to know. Perhaps it is better sometimes to leave people to their own nightmares. But his books and plays were good, exceptionally good, I had to confess. He seemed to guess what I was thinking and then, as if out of the blue, said:

"Nietzsche is of the opinion that art can change life but do you believe that?" I hardly thought myself qualified to answer. "Art, what is art?" I asked myself but proffered aloud: "Difficult to tell really." That sounded good and the cool confidence with which I said it even better. His face emerged briefly from a shadow.

"You know you English never did understand art. To understand art one has to be Catholic or at least be born a Catholic. The last great English artist was Shakespeare."

"And Bach?" I proffered, remembering that I had read somewhere that Wittgenstein had said of him that he'd been a profoundly Protestant composer.

"There are, of course, to every rule, exceptions. Bach was born into it. He was genetically programmed and that particular program ran on for centuries. It started long before Luther was born." I was stumped I had to admit it.

"Of course I have always been a fool about women. Nearly as stupid about religion. And those are the two things you're not taught at school or anywhere else for that matter. If you don't learn about them from art you don't learn them anywhere. Mind you even the great Wittgenstein, that holy man who liked to beat the living daylights out of little girls, nevertheless was a fool on the question of religion. He wanted to believe you see. He didn't realize that in this respect you can't charm the soul in the same way you can charm a snake out of a basket. But what am I talking about? We don't have a soul. That is just the point."

We had, in the meantime, after having turned into the Lehargasse, arrived at a perfectly charming looking coffeehouse, Cafe Sperl.

From the outside I could see at least two large snooker-tables, which had been very popular with budding politicians, I was later told, at which youths, dressed in jeans and T-shirts were playing.

As I pushed open the large door I found, to my surprise, a second one, which, nearly equally heavy, also needed opening. The interior seemed ill suited to the summer sun. The warm summer breeze only made one aware of how badly aired the place actually was, how faded the coverings of the seats and how dirty looking the coffee-colored ceiling.

We passed the counter facing the door with its neo-baroque paneling and numerous panes of frosted glass behind it, the tables with very juicy looking slices of apricot cake and heaps of newspapers, and found two seats next to the window. I wondered whether it might not have been a better idea to sit outside, but Heinrich hadn't even seemed to have considered the option.

To my right, on the sill next to the window, was a white artificial flower inside a bronze pot. To my left were two rows of tables and chairs, each row a different style, the first one heavier, the tables more ornate, the second much simpler though equally somber, and against the wall were benches, much like the ones we sat on, with faded red paisley coverings, beneath dark wood paneling.

Behind me was a tall mirror, a clock, two coat stands and a large, black grand piano. Lamps, with a multitude of bulbs hung from the ceiling.

"Of course I could take you to another one but this is, in my opinion, the best coffeehouse in Vienna. And what does Vienna have which other cities don't when it's not the coffeehouses?"

"There was a time when Hawelka was my favorite but then it became a tourist trap. Then I moved to Braeunerhof but the waiters, old cranky tyrants, thought that they could boss their guests around and were surprised when the place nearly went bankrupt. Then I moved to Prueckl and here."

I looked around the place. There were few people inside, the majority tourists, and they were drinking beer. It hardly had the ambiance of a traditional coffeehouse I had been hoping to catch.

Heinrich's mood seemed to have mellowed and for the first time since meeting him he seemed almost agreeable. His tone changed, softening somewhat, as he spoke.

"It was Haydn who was the innovator not Beethoven as many suppose. Beethoven simply learned from Mozart's mistakes. He realized why everyone had grown bored with him. He always sounded the same. So Beethoven always tried, like Haydn, to surprise. That was, in fact, one of his key artistic aims. He wanted to catch his audience off guard."

"Of course sometimes what he demanded of the musicians was technically impossible at that time and even, to some extent, today. But that didn't bother him in the least. You see he tried to be difficult, for much the same reason Shakespeare sought to be difficult. It deterred potential plagiarists. It is no accident that Shakespeare never printed anything in his lifetime. It was not that he didn't know his worth. Of that I am sure. But he was not as vain as Jonson and he knew that he could make more money from his plays unpublished than published. Oh yes, Shakespeare understood the importance of having a couple of pennies in the bank. The artistic importance that is. Without financial independence there is no artistic independence. Mozart understood this fact too and it was the bane of poor Haydn's existence that he continually had to suffer humiliation after humiliation on account of his lack of it."

"As a matter of fact Haydn used to live not far from here when he had, despite everything, amassed a fortune in old age. I shan't take you to see it. It would bore you silly. There is nothing more frustrating than visiting the former houses of great men."

"When the French attacked they blew out all of his windows. He said to his servants: "Don't worry. Nothing will happen to you. Haydn is here! How ridiculous!" But I guess age and genius allow for a lot. He wouldn't have gotten away with that today!"

"Although he lacked the same degree of financial independence both Mozart and Beethoven enjoyed he had at his disposal an orchestra with which he could experiment. Perhaps the difference could best be expressed by the metaphor of the scientist. He was like Edington whereas Beethoven and Mozart were more like Einstein and Schroedinger."

All of a sudden, in a twinkling of a proverbial eye, Heinrich's mood, like a blue sky visited by a summer squall, changed and he grew dangerous once more.

"Of course Beethoven was a tyrant. You can see it in his attitude towards his nephew. My God would you treat your nephew in the way he treated his? It was appalling. The inhumanity of it. No wonder the fellow hated him. Not allowing him to see his own mother regardless of how awful she might have been."

"This was another expression of his misogyny of course, his shattered relationship to his own mother, once close, cruelly cut off. Of course he couldn't form relations with anyone, let alone women. He was notoriously quarrelsome and was forever striking his friends out of his book in much the same way Molière's Misanthrope did his."

"I am not sure if that is admirable. On the one hand it shows integrity on the other one is terribly lonely afterwards."

"I once was of the opinion that for friendship to blossom, true, close, fast binding friendship I mean, there has to be a certain amount in common."

"Of course I could never find the perfect friend just as I could never find the perfect, for me that is, woman. A fruitless, futile task."

"Do you get on with your mother? I used to hate mine. I used to hate her to the extent that I wished her dead. I hated her even more than I hated my father and the day he died was one of the happiest of my life."

"I used to dream of seeing him perish in flames and then flushing his ashes down a toilet. A nice family life, you may think. But I used to love both too, once. Perhaps at a certain age it is simply necessary that children and parents part. Of course it was easy for me to hate my father. Everyone hates Nazis. And, my God, are they worthy of hate!"

"Sometimes I can't understand how I manage to live here. Nothing but Nazis, Nazis, Nazis. It is surprising how quickly people make excuses for them. People you wouldn't expect, people you previously respected. People you thought intelligent, civilized and, above all, independent minded."

""Oh no", they say, "they aren't that bad. They aren't that bad at all. Nothing like the ones before." Whereas in reality they are worse, infinitely worse. In the past people had the excuse: "we didn't know", which, to a certain extent, was true. They didn't care either. That was also true. But today? What excuse can there be today? But I don't know why I get worked up about them. They are ubiquitous and scum."

We paid and made our way up the Fillgradergasse to the rather pretty steps with ornate, green, Jugendstil lamp-posts, which dated from the turn of the century and link it to the Theobaldgasse.

From there we quickly found our way to the Mariahilferstrasse, which had been turned into a pedestrian zone, Heinrich told me, to make it more accommodating. I admired the palm trees, the shops, especially the one displaying Augarten Porcelain, which I thought very elegant, and the open-air cafes, with their chic, pretty girls chatting excitedly amongst themselves.

After reaching the end of it the Kunsthistorisches Museum, a huge neo-baroque looking building, loomed large before us and that was, in fact, where he was taking me, Heinrich explained.

I wasn't sure what to think but didn't have much time to make up my mind. Before I had done so we had already paid and were inside.

"A classic of the Ringstrasse style of course. It took twenty years, between 1871 and 1891, the first ten on the exterior the latter ten on the interior, to build and was the product of a tiff between two of the most eminent architects of the time, Carl von Hasenauer and Gottfried Semper after whom the depot we passed was named."

"Of course no expense was spared but even then no electricity was installed. To this day they still haven't finished installing it. And the odd thing is: nobody seems to know why. Or, for that matter, why it was designed without regard to its requirements."

"It remained, for a long time, crammed full and most of its paintings are still rotting away in warehouses, too dangerous for humans to visit."

"The irony of it! We can skip most of it and go up to the first floor. The rest is for the birds. Of course of interest is a plaque thanking the Rothschilds for their "donations", the greatest expression of Viennese cynicism one can imagine."

We ascended the rather magnificent staircase. A figure representing Theseus slaying a centaur dominated the stairwell. Above it were vignettes by Klimt and a ceiling painted by Munkacsy.

"Of course the staircase is magnificent but it takes up a third of the space on the ground floor! One would nearly think it alone was the museum and that was it."

We started with the Italians: Titian, Giorgione, Raphael, Bronzino, Veronese, and stopped in front of Tintoretto's "Man With The White Beard".

"I was once here at a reading of "Alte Meister", "Old Masters", given by a magnificent actor, Wolfgang Gasser. He was probably the best interpreter of Thomas Bernhard I have ever heard. It was wonderful and the then director, an art historian, I can't remember his name, stumbled about ten times, in his thoroughly superfluous, tedious and inaccurate introduction, over the word Kunstschwaetzer. That is what Bernhard called art historians, literally art chatterer. Of course Bernhard was right. It is scandalous what art historians are allowed to get away with. Just like English or Germanistik professors. As if the same empirical rules and methods, which are applied to other branches of learning, don't apply to the arts just as well."

"One should in fact go through all books on art and literature with Hume's precept in mind: that if they don't contain concrete facts but merely speculation they should be consigned to the flames."

"After all: why do we need all this speculation? Does it help us to understand art? Is it what Boltzmann would have called zweckmaessig? To any purpose? No. It is simply a waste of time and money. And what is worse, it brings art into disrepute. Everyone complains that they don't understand when there is, in fact, nothing, in the sense that the professors mean it, to be understood. And it is not as if literature or art were not worthy of study or for that matter so difficult to analyse. On the contrary: there are few subjects, with the exception of physics and history perhaps, which are not more so!"

"And I wouldn't mind if these blasted so-called "art historians" had taste but you should see how the Brueghels, pronounced Breuchel by the way, are hung. The room, with its shit brown walls, is hideous." We walked to the rooms with the Flemish artists.

"Here is one of the earliest and most important examples of a technique, which revolutionized art," Heinrich said. "Jan van Eyck's portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, which was created in 1431. What was revolutionary was the fact that Van Eyck utilized a mirror lens to create the painting."

"Van Eyck did a sketch of the cardinal, using a mirror lens, and then blew it up, with the same mirror lens, in order to make the painting."

"The beauty of a mirror lens is that it can transfer a two dimensional image from one surface to the next. Not only that: the scale can be changed and can be either enlarged or diminished."

"This remained a Flemish secret until 1473, when Tommaso Portinari, who worked on behalf of the Medicis, who were active in banking in Bruges at the time, commissioned Hugo van der Goes to create the "Portinari Triptych"."

"When the "Portinari Triptych" was sent to Florence it helped transform Italian painting." We walked over to paintings by Carravagio.

"The interesting thing about Carravagio is that he made markings on the canvases with his paint brushes so that he knew where to position and reposition his models. In that way he could work quicker after breaks and didn't need all of his models at one and the same time."

"He would project an image onto the canvas using a lens and would then correct the pose until it fitted the form he'd marked with his paint brush."

"The problem with the influence of these tools, such as the camera obscura, is that they create limitations. Before the advent of them people didn't give a damn about verisimilitude. With the advent of them verisimilitude and the static, one-point perspective came to dominate, for roughly three hundred and fifty years. Until, that is, the Europeans discovered Japanese and Chinese art in the nineteenth century, which liberated them from this mind-set."

"All of a sudden artists were no longer bound by superficial surfaces or by the one-eyed perspective. This, eventually, led to Cubism, which is more of an attitude than a style."

We then walked over to a work by Giorgione. "Giorgione's painting "The Three Philosophers" depicts three forms of Aristotelian thought: the scholastic Aristotle of the Paris Sorbonne, the Averroistic Aristotle derived from the Arabs, and the modern Aristotle of Padova-Rialto."

"It was commissioned by the Venetian noble Taddeo Contarini, a Venetian merchant with an interest in the occult and alchemy. It was finished shortly before the painter died in 1509."

"The Venetians, who were profound believers in Aristotle, in contrast to the Neo-Platonist Florentines, were the true founders of modern philosophy. It was they who influenced Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke etc."

"Foremost amongst them was Paolo Sarpi, who was born, to a merchant father and a noble mother, in Venice in 1552."

"He wrote: "We are always acquiring happiness, we have never acquired it and never will, and although our intellect may be divine from its birth, nevertheless here below it lives among these earthly members and cannot perform its operations without the help of bodily sensation.""

"Sarpi was an empiricist. He wrote: "There are four modes of philosophizing: the first with reason alone, the second with sense alone, the third with reason and then sense, and the fourth beginning with sense and ending with reason.""

""The first is the worst, because from it we know what we would like to be, not what is. The third is bad because we many times distort what is into what we would like, rather than adjusting what we would like to what is. The second is true but crude, permitting us to know little and that rather of things than of their causes. The fourth is the best we can have in this miserable life." He was also a Protestant."

"The Venetians had, together with the Genoese, acquired a powerful position in Europe. They managed to get hold of the silver looted by the Spanish in the New World and used it to pay for spices from the East."

"Their wealth only invited envy and in 1508 Venice was nearly exterminated by the League of Cambrai. This defeat had a profound effect on the psyche of the Venetian oligarchy and they redoubled their efforts to create chaos among their enemies."

"One must bear in mind that Venice was the only power that had an effective system of intelligence gathering at that time, and it made good use of it."

"One of their most effective weapons was Luther. They did their utmost to propagate his ideas."

"Instead of being a mere dispute among friars the Venetians used their diplomatic skills to turn what was merely a theological dispute into a European wide conflagration. They helped, behind the scenes, to organize the Protestant princes on the one hand and the Counter Reformation on the other."

"They also used their considerable wealth to acquire a foothold in England. One can see the battle of ideas in the fight between Marlowe and Shakespeare. Marlowe, the spy, was, in many respects, typically Venetian. He was a republican ("Tamburlaine"), a homosexual ("Edward II") and an occultist ("Doctor Faustus") while Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a monarchist, heterosexual, and Catholic."

"It is no accident that Shakespeare wrote about Venetian deceit in the form of Iago. One can truly smile but be a villain, as the Venetians repeatedly proved. They were always the masters of disguise and always the masters of propaganda."

"In order to strengthen their foothold in England the Venetian oligarchs imposed austerity in Venice itself, with catastrophic consequences for the Venetian Renaissance, for Venetian industry and the Venetian population, which sunk by a third."

"Of course it was not long before the Venetians, who had made vast sums from slavery themselves taught the English how to make money from slavery in the New World. James I sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves."

"The trade with spices was eventually replaced by the more profitable trade in opium and England, which practiced the same policy of causing chaos and mayhem in Europe in almost the exact same manner Venice had done before, gradually came to dominate the world. And it still does in many respects. It and America of course."

"There are two different models: Venice and Florence. Both had prosperous, flourishing industries. While the Medicis did their utmost to foster manufacturing the Venetian oligarchs liquidated Venetian industry and turned to banking instead."

"This is the piratical and parasitic form of capitalism that has come to dominate the world and it is the Venetian world view, the obsession with the idea that the world is overpopulated and its population needs to be reduced, which has dominated policy for the last forty years."

"It is no accident that the idea of shareholder value was created in the seventies. It is a cancer. It destroys manufacturing and transfers wealth from the poor to the rich."

"None of the policies of the last forty years, such as creation of AIDS, de-industrialization or the deliberate starvation of the Third World, are accidental. They are all part of what one might term: the Venetian blueprint, which has been oh, so successfully copied by the British and Americans. It is these policies which killed your half-brother."

After leaving the Kunsthistorisches Museum Heinrich stopped and looked over at the Museumsquartier. "I want to show you that the criteria we apply to so-called modern art is exactly the same as that which we apply to the so-called old masters. It is simply that with the old masters the play of form and color, which gives expression to the artist's feelings, are obscured by other, more superficial elements, and the average visitor, spellbound by the princely settings and themes, fails to realize, not only that he is in a gallery of whores and fools, but that he is a part of the same game with simply slightly different rules as that of modern art. I will now take you to the Museumsquartier but shan't take you to the MUMOK, the Museum of Modern Art, for the simple reason that it is, although opened only a few years ago, being renovated."

"Typical for Austria. Not only was there no chance given to an architect of international standing, a Gehry, Foster, Libeskind or Hadid but the politicians and not the architects took all the crucial decisions."

"Which meant that the planned glass tower wasn't built, ostensibly because it might spoil the skyline, although it would not even have obscured the flak-tower, and everything else looks like a bunker or its interior."

"Again National Socialist aesthetics. Grauenhaft. Appalling, simply appalling; provincialism, rampant and disgusting. It is little wonder that the architects didn't give a damn about it in the end. In America those responsible would have been jailed."

That evening we went to a production of "Fidelio" in Theater an der Wien. We sat in a box under a low ceiling and I had a chance to observe the Viennese bourgeoisie at close quarters. Ungainly in motion, primitive in appearance, unfashionably dressed, loud, somewhat obnoxious and repugnant on account of their disgusting perfumes, they didn't make a terribly good impression.

The airless and stuffy theatre itself, with its heavy, leaden colors, seemed somewhat oppressive and I was glad when the lights dimmed and the opera itself began.

For all its faults at least the acoustic in the theatre was excellent. The conductor: Marc Minkowski and the orchestra: Les Musiciens du Louvre were extremely good but the singers and staging were weak.

The masked tenor performing Jaquino was dressed in a ridiculous costume, with bulging green jacket and bloated red trousers, the bass singing Rocco was in an equally absurd, equally swollen garb, more resembling a Michelin Man than anything else, while the soprano playing Marzelline looked like a cross between a ballet-dancer and a puppet, with her legs dangling freely.

All looked equally insecure while moving on the huge scaffolding and the ample use of colorful lighting and projections didn't seem to help much either.

Outside the theatre Heinrich bumped into an old friend of his, Franz West, who invited us to visit him in his studio in Vienna's third district.

The next day Heinrich gave me a personal guided tour of the Burgtheater. As we walked into the curving foyer of Burgtheater, with its multitude of swinging doors, marble clad walls, stucco ceiling, pink floor and cluster of lamps, each emitting a dull glow, Heinrich told me about Max Reinhardt.

"Whenever I think of Burgtheater", he told me, "I think of a professor of mine: Professor Hoesslin, who knew Max Reinhardt personally. Max Reinhardt learned everything here. This was his university."

"For Professor Hoesslin Reinhardt was a god of the theater, a theacrat. He couldn't believe it when he once witnessed Reinhardt actually urinating. Gods, in his eyes, didn't urinate."

"Reinhardt was intensive, obsessive. He was obsessed by the roles of his actors. He formed the actor until they'd been metamorphosed into the shape he wanted."

"He didn't mess around or waste time. He walked into an auditorium and simply said: Attention! Rehearsal!"

"Then came the rehearsal. If it was a success Reinhardt would laugh his famous laugh. The actor had been transformed into the role Reinhardt wanted him or her to play."

"Reinhardt was always interested in the play in its entirety, not just details. It was not the case that there would automatically be a performance. There would only be a performance if the production were good enough. If it wasn't, it simply wasn't performed."

"Then Reinhardt would go off to Paris, Berlin or Moscow. "I'll be back in a month," he'd say. "This role has to be recast. She's too young. She's not good enough."

"Once, when a girl wasn't playing the role of a prostitute properly, Reinhardt asked: "Does she have a boyfriend? Then get her one!""

"The roles would then be recast, the virgins deflowered and rehearsals would begin again. The rehearsals sometimes stretched on for over half a year."

"Reinhardt was capable of sending the audience home half an hour before the premier was due to begin. "The premier is cancelled," he'd say. "The play is not yet ready." And the premier would simply be postponed."

"When he premiered Faust in Salzburg it poured with rain but the people stayed in their seats. Today that is unimaginable. The people were in awe of him. They trusted him. They admired him."

We walked up the red carpeted stairs to a corridor with low ceiling, also lit by dull lamps and walked into the auditorium, with its sloping floor, rows of seats, boxes and stage.

"Reinhardt once said that although the theatre is capable of descending into commerce and the most miserable prostitution the passion to watch and to play will always remain a fundamental one. Every human has a desire, some are less aware of it, others more so, for transformation."

""We all have the possibilities for all the passions," he said, "all fates, all forms of life are within us. Nothing human is alien to us. If this weren't true we could never understand one another, either in life or in art. Heredity, education, individual experiences fertilize and develop only a few of the thousands of seeds within us. The others gradually wither and die.""

""The bourgeois life is very limited and poor in feeling. It has made virtues out of its poverty, and it is difficult to escape. A normal person usually feels but once in a lifetime all the bliss of love, once the joy of freedom, hates thoroughly but once, buries with deep pain a loved one but once and dies but once.""

""That is not enough for our innate abilities to love, hate, rejoice, and suffer. We exercise daily to strengthen our muscles so they don't shrink. But if our spiritual organs, created for a whole life, remain unused and untrained they lose, over time, their capacities to work.""

""Yet our emotional, spiritual, and even our physical health depend upon the undiminished functioning of these organs.""

We then walked up to the main foyer with its chandeliers, mirrors, parquet floor, pink, marble clad walls, gilded Corinthian columns, tables, gilded chairs and paintings of actors I'd never heard of, such as Anna Stephanie, Christiane Weidneren, and Antonie Adamberger and roles they'd once embodied: Azora in "Die indianische Witwe", Queen Elisabeth in "Die Gunst der Fuersten", and Rosina in "Der Jurist und der Bauer".

"Die indianische Witwe" by Nicolas-Etienne Framery, originally: "L'Indienne", "The Indian Woman" from 1770, was a one-act comedy premiered by the Comediens Italiens in 1771, Heinrich told me. It was performed by Anna Stephanie between 1771 and 1802.

At least some of the lines given to the pretty actress were comic, he said, such as: "To be burnt to death at twenty-two, and on account of a husband! If only it had been on account of a lover!"

At the time she'd first uttered those lines she'd been twenty, the last time, just before her death, she'd been fifty-one.

"Die Gunst der Fuersten", "The Unhappy Favorite" (1682), by John Banks had been banned in England for political reasons before being performed in Vienna between 1748 and 1794. I tried to imagine the plump lady in the painting saying the lines of Queen Elisabeth:

Condemn me first to hear the Groans of Ghosts,

The Croaks of Ravens, and the Damned in Torments

Just Heaven, 'tis Music to what thou canst utter

Begon—Fly to that utmost Verge of Earth,

Where the Globe's bounded with Eternity,

And never more be seen of Human kind,

Curst with long Life and with a fear to dye,

With thy Guilt ever in thy Memory

And Essex's Ghost be still before thy Eye.

Antonie Adamberger had performed in "Der Jurist und der Bauer", "The Lawyer and the Farmer" (1773) by Johann Rautenstrauch between 1807 and 1817. She'd been seventeen when she first performed the role and twenty-seven when she'd ceased to play it. I imagined her saying the line: "A bride? Today? It might be a nice thing to be a bride."

We walked on to the Erzherzogzimmer with its huge mirror, crystal chandelier, ornate wall and ceiling. "This is where royalty is usually received", Heinrich told me.

We then went to the Feststiege, Grand Staircase, on the Volksgarten side of the building, with its ornate lamps, topped by a cluster of bulbs, windows and statues in niches.

The two wings had not been part of the original concept but had been demanded by the emperor. He wanted to reach his royal box in style, Heinrich explained.

Gustav and Ernst Klimt had been, together with Franz Matsch, given the task of decorating the ceilings with depictions of "The Altar of Dionysis", "The Theatre of Dionysis", "Romeo and Juliet" and Moliere's "Hypochondriac".

Heinrich showed me the small rehearsal room nearby, which was unremarkable, as well was the one on the other side of the building, the Landtmann side, with its curved metal plates on its ceiling, which were designed to improve the acoustics.

The Feststiege on the Landtmann side was not too dissimilar from the one on the Volksgarten side. It's ceiling had also been decorated by Gustav and Ernst Klimt as well as Franz Matsch. The works included "The Apollo Altar", "Antic Improvisations", "The Mystery Stage", "The Theatre on Taormina" and "Harlequin at the Funfair".

It was here that the busts of Arthur Schnitzler, Anton Wildgans, Hebbel and Nestroy were on display.

Heinrich took me all the way down, two stories, to the metalwork department, which was, to my surprise, lit by daylight from above, and all the way up to the roof, where I had not a little fear of falling. The view from the top, with the Rathaus in front, the Volksgarten to the left and the university to the right, was quite stunning.

To finish off our tour Heinrich took me to the canteen with its flowers and plants in its open windows, letting in the warm, summer air, pale, yellow benches curving around the black tables, white walls, photos of actors and flat screens.

Heinrich told me that Bernhard had once, in the mid-seventies, been asked to be the director of the Burgtheater. Bernhard had thrown himself into the business of drawing up lists of actors, directors and dramaturgs with gusto but the opposition of the actors themselves had proven decisive in preventing his appointment.

He'd been determined, he later wrote, to "turn this hovel into a theatre once more. But of course the masters of mendacity, hypocrisy and incompetence, the grand masters of intrigue always were in Vienna."

"In this respect he is not without justification. A director of the Burgtheater was recently intrigued against in a infamous conspiracy and lost his job as a consequence," Heinrich told me.

"You can't imagine the scandal Bernhard's play: "Heldenplatz" caused here in 1988."

"Originally he'd wanted all the houses, which had once belonged to Jews, to receive a plaque. This had been rejected by the then chancellor. So Bernhard wrote a play set in Palais Epstein, which looks onto Heldenplatz. It's caustic comments about Austria, its inhabitants and their less than heroic past were then leaked to the press."

"The reaction was, to say the least, extreme. Piles of manure were poured in front of the theatre while Bernhard was verbally abused and spat upon. It all confirmed his worst fears."

### Neustift am Walde

I walked past the bunker-like gatekeeper's lodge and a vista of hills opened up before my eyes. A light breeze passed through the birch trees next to the cemetery wall and I felt a drop of rain from the cloudy sky.

There was a neat row of polished, uniformly grey gravestones with names carved, uniformly, in gold: Familie Frischl, Anton Brandstetter, Wagner, Familie Kunz, Familie Boes, Familie Mikulas, Leitner, Messerschmidt, Muehl, Ott, Schwab, Forstner etc. Most of the graves were adorned with flowers and each had a glass case with a candle inside.

I passed a grey, steep-roofed chapel and continued down the path with its dappled shade. Sunlight alternated with shadow while in the distance one could hear a lawnmower. Grass was growing through the cracked concrete of the steep path and, as I walked swiftly, fir tree cones crunched under my feet.

The smell of decay emanated from a compost heap intended for wreathes, bouquets and grass while the sound of dripping water could be heard above the rustle of leaves.

Seeds floated on the dark surface a water tank. Next to it was a bin for non-biodegradable waste such as candles, packaging and pots.

The wind picked up and the cemetery was alternately brightly lit and cast in shadow.

I passed the newly cut hedgerows and finally found my family's grave. On top of the gravestone a hand with a finger pointed upwards accusingly. My grandfather, I couldn't help but think, certainly did have a strange sense of humor. Next to the grave was a magnificent birch and nearby was a pile of wilted wreathes.

Just as I noticed how vineyards, in the distance, were lit up by the sun I caught sight of an old lady, wearing a pink scarf, dark blue jacket and black trousers, who was crossing herself. As shadows of clouds moved silently and swiftly over the distant hill the old lady bent down to put some flowers on a grave.

My half-brother had left no will and my half-sister decided that the cheapest solution would be to bury him in the family grave alongside his father, aunt and grandparents. There was no ceremony and only one mourner, other than myself, actually attended the funeral. Dressed in a white baseball cap, washed out shirt and jeans the singular mourner was tall, pale and lanky.

Once the coffin was carried down the steep path by six pallbearers, all sturdy looking, well-fed, somber men, and all wearing long, grey uniforms, it was gently laid into the open grave. It was, all things considered, a beautiful funeral, if only on account of its simplicity.

I accosted the strange mourner, whose air of calm and philosophical detachment intrigued me, and invited him for a drink. We went to the Salettl Pavillon in the Hartaeckerstrasse, which wasn't far removed from the cemetery.

The turbulent, blustery morning had turned into a bright, sparkling day, quite the opposite of the muggy one, which had preceded it.

We sat in the shade of trees, next to a green, wooden fence, and I faced the burgundy pavilion with its large, cream framed windows and green gutter.

Some students sat down at an adjacent table and started to talk about courses and professors.

A blonde girl, seated further away, in the sun, wearing sunglasses and dangling a cigarette limply from her lips caught my eye as she stole a glance at me.

The faint knell of a church bell and the sound of a dog barking could be heard above the rustling of the trees while, through the boughs, a satellite dish could be observed in the distance.

There was a crunch of gravel and I looked up to see the young waitress, in orange top and blue jeans, who'd come to take our order. The opening and closing of the menu was, on my part, simply a matter of form. It was to be a Kleiner Brauner or nothing.

The man, Fritz, had known my half-brother for over a year. They'd become acquainted in Steinhof, where both had been institutionalized. The tone of Fritz was dry and matter of fact but occasionally his voice had a hint of gallows humor. Now and again he gasped for air and it seemed as though he had difficulty speaking.

Those who were most endangered, he told me, were on the highest floor of the pavilion. On the top story security was extremely tight and the door to it was rarely opened; the lower down the level the more lax the supervision.

Girls and boys were strictly separated, which didn't prevent the occasional rape. Whether the rapes were carried out by inmates or staff wasn't clear and I didn't ask.

My half-brother, Fritz told me, had kept very much to himself and had either written or read in the communal room, which was used for relaxation. He'd at first been unwilling to take either medicine or participate in the therapy but was warned that his continued refusal would be followed by expulsion.

He developed a passion for playing football with the refugees, who were housed close by, and it was after one particular match that he struck up a friendship with Fritz.

They spent hours together. Fritz had shown him both the ponies, which were kept on a special farm, and the long walks, with their stunning views.

Fritz told me the story of his life. Born in Kaisermuehlen, on the other side of the Danube, he wanted to work as a fitter but had ended up driving a forklift truck in a warehouse instead. There the great misfortune of his life had occurred: he met Angelika.

Angelika seduced him at the firm's Christmas party and they ended up having a baby: Veronika. The couple married but divorced within a matter of months.

He was arrested, shortly afterwards, by Angelika's new husband, a policeman, for not paying his alimony.

His first spell in prison lasted fifteen months. When he came out he landed on the street, which was no pleasant affair. All he had was a jacket, a shirt, a pair of jeans, and a pair of socks. He stank to high heaven. The only way he could get a shower was by going to a brothel.

He wanted to see his daughter but the youth welfare service forbade it.

The second time he landed in prison, for 10 months, was again on account of not paying his alimony.

He stayed with his aunt for a while but there simply wasn't enough space for him in the tiny apartment and he was forced to live on the streets once more. Eventually he found a job and a girlfriend.

He was arrested for a third time. This time he went to jail for twelve months.

As he pondered, in the eight square meters of his cell, on the injustice that had been done to him he woke with anger at six in the morning, ate with anger at midday and looked on in anger as he was locked into his cell at two in the afternoon. He grew to hate the state in which he lived. His treatment had been barbaric. He was left to rot until the early hours of the morning.

After he was attacked and beaten by four policemen he took the Republic to court.

Of course his effort at seeking justice was doomed from the start and it only resulted in him landing back in prison for a fourth time, this time for a whole year.

Once out of prison he fell in love again, with equally disastrous consequences as before. This time his passionate advances were scorned.

Rejected, his heart broken, Fritz resolved to take his own life. After downing a hundred tablets and a liter of wine he lay down to die. A neighbor found him. Had he been discovered half an hour later he would have died.

He was taken to a hospital and, a day later, came to Steinhof, to Pavilion 10, on the third floor. It was there that he'd met my half-brother, who'd also attempted suicide.

Fritz told me where my brother had lived and I resolved to visit his apartment the next day. Fritz departed and we promised to stay in touch.

Originally I'd planned to do some work in the afternoon but, after chatting to Fritz, was no longer in the mood to actually do so. I wasn't sure of what to do so I phoned Heinrich. Fortunately he too wasn't in a working mood, was visiting a friend, a painter, close by, in the eighteenth district, and had some free time on his hands.

An hour later he came to Salettl. He asked about the funeral and I told him Fritz's story.

"Of course the state does its utmost to destroy families," Heinrich said, "that is the reason it propagates feminism. It wants women to work. It wants to increase its tax base. It wants the children for itself. It wants to mold the young into taxpaying, consuming little idiots. It propagates so-called "individualism" and so-called "freedom" but what it means by this is egotism, greed and consumerism. It knows full well that this will merely lead to emptiness, loneliness and misery."

"The state has perfected the art of creating sheeple. That is why it puts fathers in jail. It wants the children to be emotionally disturbed. It wants them to be wholly without orientation, lost and, above all: brain dead."

"It wants to destroy them, emotionally, psychologically and, eventually, physically. It is no accident that our society is confronted with an epidemic of mental illness. This is a deliberate policy."

"The state creates artificially high, completely unrealistic expectations and then dashes all hopes, resulting in profound unhappiness."

"Men are brought up to be obsessed by sex and, when their desires are frustrated, they turn into rapists. Women are brought up to obsess about beauty and, when their desires are frustrated, they kill themselves. This too is deliberate. Generation Y is no accident. It is culturally engineered to be a complete and utter failure."

I told Heinrich about how my half-brother had always been fearful of sharing the same fate of Fritz. He was frightened of marriage. He saw what had happened to his own parents and believed, for a while, that divorce should be illegal.

He had little time for the so-called alternative youth culture, the culture of sex, drugs and rock and roll. He had been, in many respects, extremely conservative in his views.

"It is not a question of being conservative," Heinrich replied, "it is a question of seeing through the lies. There is nothing radical or even mildly liberal about the so-called "youth culture", with its sex, drugs and rock and roll. It is profoundly conformist. It has been created by the state to destroy people's minds. The state wants people to be drug addicts."

"Have you ever read Burroughs? He wrote, decades ago, that nothing is simpler than curing drug addiction, and I know that this is, for a fact, perfectly true. The state wants drug addiction. It earns vast amounts from drug addiction. The entire economy is dependent upon drug addiction. Most major corporations deal with drug money. Without drugs the banks, which make trillions from money laundering, would literally collapse."

"Which are the most valuable commodities in the world? Oil, arms and drugs. The state makes a fortune from all three. It would probably cease to exist without them."

"It needs them as a source of funds on the one hand and as a raison d'etre on the other. It can only justify its existence by combatting terrorism and drugs, both of which it secretly fosters. All terrorism is state sponsored terrorism. The state is a state of terror. That is the true nature of the state. The state is only interested in the state and the state only wants one thing: Orwellian control."

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, numbered, regulated, indoctrinated, controlled, censured, and commanded. To be governed is to be counted, taxed, measured, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, and punished. To be governed is to be derided, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, hoaxed, robbed, repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, abused, deported, sacrificed, betrayed, imprisoned, judged, condemned and shot."

"I know that your half-brother suffered from anxiety and depression but he was not alone. Anxiety and depression have reached epidemic proportions. This is because people are lonely as never before. The social engineering has worked."

"Families have been destroyed, women have been persuaded to become slaves in the name of liberty, so that the tax base can be doubled, and the youth have become emotionally crippled. They have neither hope of a future nor even of a present and lack all self-confidence and all sense of self-worth."

"You don't understand. The whole matter is a comedy. I'm sorry to have to say this on the day you buried your brother but: was his life a comedy or a tragedy? I really don't know."

"He wanted to be an artist. Fair enough, but in this world that is not enough. It is a trade, a craft. One has to learn it. Whether one learns on one's own or from a master is irrelevant. One has to learn."

"Art requires a critical eye, a diagnostic eye, an educated eye and a carefully cultivated impulse, a powerful and unerring instinct. Art requires a careful balance between knowledge, ideas and passion. If one doesn't get this balance right one doesn't have anything at all."

"An art academy or a drama school is a waste of time if not positively pernicious."

"Your brother seemed, from what you told me, unwilling to learn. He thought himself a genius! He suffered from hubris. He wasn't about to be self-critical. He was never about to actually learn."

"He was, as the Pythagorians would have put it: volatile and unstable if not positively fickle in his drives and desires."

"One minute he wanted to do one thing the next another. It might be true that it was the absence of a father figure or the absence of friends, which played a role in his downfall. Perhaps he lacked enough love in his life, the right girl to inspire, as you say."

"Did he deserve to die? I don't know. Who is to say? Just look around you. Look at all these Austrians. They are the children of murderers."

"If you see a rich Austrian you see a thief; someone who has, in all probability, stolen from a Jew. Most of the houses and flats they live in were once owned by Jews, Jews they murdered. And how do these people regard themselves: do they have a hint of guilt? Of course not. They think, because they have a bit of stolen cash in their pockets, that they are God's gift."

"They all think they are perfectly wonderful, all film stars in their own movies, all horribly glamorous, elegant and chic."

"And it is not just the Austrians or Germans. Think of how the Americans and English are forever talking of Nazis, Nazis, Nazis. And what are they themselves? Infinitely worse! They too believe the state benevolent. They too think their countries do good in the world. Yet what do their states, their countries do? They create slavery and perpetuate imperialism while deluding and destroying the world."

"People talk about the Nazis but in reality the crimes perpetrated right this minute are equally bad. Of course one doesn't see them. They are in another part of the globe but they are no different."

"There is no need for one, single child to die of hunger but one dies every five seconds. One dies an excruciating death, an agonizing death, a wholly superfluous death."

"And do the people here, sitting in this café, care? Of course they don't. All they care about is their next visit to the hairdressers or the next car they intend to buy or their next holiday in Jamaica."

"That is the only thing in their heads. And people talk about the Nazis as if they belonged to the past. In reality, this disease is a disease of the present."

"But why should one get upset about such matters when there are much more important things, such as art and literature?"

"Not far from here is where Schnitzler lived, in a house on the Sternwartestrasse, number 71 to be exact."

"Of course Schnitzler, who Heinrich Mann termed "einen Dichter des Todes", a poet of death, was nothing compared to Chekhov or Ibsen for that matter. He had not suffered enough. But he is fascinating nevertheless."

"What he shared with Chekhov was a clinical eye. That was the key to his success."

"And what he had, like Wittgenstein, was integrity. He was not willing to speculate like Freud nor was he willing to compromise his ideals. Of all the writers and artists living in Vienna in 1914 he was the only one who was not willing to give his support to the war."

"It is strange to think that he'd once envied Herzl, his elegance, his ability as a writer, his success with the ladies, at a time when he was far behind in all respects. But he rejected his Zionism. Just as he rejected the anti-Semitism, which was prevalent, even among his fellow Jewish writers, and which he termed "madness". Which it was and is."

"Of course there was a humorous side to the anti-Semitism of Schnitzler's time. One has to remember that it was Vienna, which brought forth the adage: "Die Lage ist hoffnungslos, aber nicht ernst", the situation is hopeless but not serious. The Burschenschaftler, who are still very powerful here, these curious orders of predominantly neo-Nazi nature, who dress up in silly Gilbert and Sullivan costumes and cut each other up with swords, kept challenging Jews to duels. The problem was that they were continually being beaten. So they decided to make it beneath their dignity to challenge Jews in the future."

"It is remarkable that Schnitzler arrived at his convictions at the age of eighteen. In old age he termed himself a liberal, a rationalist and a skeptic. That's exactly what he'd been in his youth, as his diaries make evident. Why is it, by the way, that the diaries of writers are so often more interesting than the works themselves?"

"I wish I had been so sure of myself and, indeed, so well-educated, at the age of eighteen. My God, when I think about it. I couldn't even think straight. Nobody in my family could and still can't for that matter. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise, although my mother was an educated woman. Not like my father."

"It took me many years to arrive at my convictions and that was the chief hindrance to my being a writer, apart from my sense of inadequacy, that is, which both my father and mother succeeded in instilling in me in my youth, with their repetition of the old mantra that I was a heartless egotist, which I am I suppose, but which I have become. Before I wasn't one. On the contrary, I was a fiery idealist, willing to sacrifice my life for an ideal, if I could find one that is, that was worth dying for."

"I picked art. Don't ask me why. If there had been a war going on I would have fought and most certainly died in it. Of course I could say, and this sounds rather melodramatic, but is not wholly without truth, that art saved my life."

"Had I not had art, especially the poetry of Trakl and Rilke, I don't know what I'd have done with myself. I was, at that point in time, so miserable that I was willing to agree with Nietzsche that the only justification for existence was art. And of course once you swallow that it is a short step to wanting to be a genius yourself."

"You are doubtlessly thinking about the case, wondering whether I acted in a Nietzschian, egotistical, fashion. Perhaps I did. I don't remember. At any rate I was capable of doing so at that point of time, being so thoroughly in a state of despair."

"You see the thing is, once one knows that one's father is evil, thoroughly rotten to the core, it is not difficult to assume that oneself is. After all genes are genes. I must have some of his in me. And there are times when I am perfectly aware of my capacity for evil. I know, all too well, that I am capable of the most heinous acts. That is why I'm no longer shocked or surprised when I read history. My expectations are lower. I no longer think of man as semi-divine but rather as a beast. And I include myself in the reckoning. Which is why I regard myself as being guilty. A kind of original sin if you like."

"Perhaps if I am prosecuted, convicted, and actually go to jail I may think differently. And if I find out that I was actually innocent I will be outraged and think it unfair. But there is that sense, essentially Catholic, of inherent sin, impossible to extirpate. I am evil, therefore I am punished and therefore the punishment is justified. It is a satanic circle. And I am not an exception to this rule. This is how I, in my innermost, feel. I am a fatalist you see. If it comes to a court case and right now we just have the preliminaries, nobody in Austria knows about this yet, you only found out by happy accident, and I am convicted, I will have deserved it, not perhaps for this specific act but for innumerable other petty ones I could mention."

Why I asked, if that was his attitude toward the case, had he bothered to come back?

"To see Vienna for a last time. Why else do you think I am wandering around? Bringing back memories, refreshing impressions. I want to recreate this city, but in my imagination. Perhaps I have a lot of time before me, perhaps very little. But you forget, it is the city of my birth and that isn't something one should ignore."

We walked through the Tuerkenschanzpark, created in the 1880s and extended ten years later, which was built on the site of a Turkish camp in 1683.

There was a hammock tied between two trees with plaques, one with the name "Zuergelbaum", "Celtis occidentalis" and the other with the name "Douglasie", "Pseudotsuga menziessie" on them, with what seemed like a body inside, a bike propped up against one of the trees and trainers beneath.

Sunbathers lay in swimsuits on mats on a slight incline while, in the shade, groups of old men played board games.

Boys were playing tennis with yellow bats next to baby carriages on the grass, skateboarders were skating on concrete, while volleyball players were playing on sand.

We crossed a black, iron footbridge before reaching a redbrick tower, with disused stairs winding around it, before passing a pond where, even half-frozen, children skated in winter, and came out at the corner of the Gregor-Mendel- and Hasenauerstrasse.

We walked down the Gregor Mendelstrasse before reaching the Sternwartestrasse. Schnitzler's former house must have been one of the most unprepossessing in the whole district, with a simple, yellow facade and just five windows facing onto the street.

We continued on down the Sternwartestrasse, passing hardly a soul on the way, with its grand villas, toward the city center. We caught a tram to the corner of the Nussdorfer- and Waehringerstrasse and went to an Aida cafe.

I could feel my feet ache as we sat down in its furthest corner and was glad to have the heat of the day off the nape of my neck.

There were mirrors behind and in front of me and when I looked at one I saw my image multiplied into infinity.

I looked out onto the street and an improbably fat woman, dressed, or rather draped in black, caught my eye as she turned to cross the road.

The part of the cafe we were in was brand new yet it retained the 50s style of the Aida chain, with red cushioned benches, light, walnut wood paneling, Eames plastic chairs, metal tables, grey and pink squared floor and lots of mirrors.

"It was here, in this cafe, that I experienced one of the most humiliating days of my life," Heinrich said. "I was rather like that man, do you remember him? Skinny and bare, begging on his knees, before the knight in the frieze, for the acknowledgement, the Anerkennung, of a famous author who has since passed away. I was at that time just starting on my career as a writer and was desperately unsure of myself. I wanted confirmation that my decision to embark on this career was right and reassurance that I wasn't making a complete fool of myself."

"My family you see, especially my mother, had, although they'd initially encouraged me, succeeded in planting a seed of doubt in my head. I wasn't sure of what I should do."

"You see I was and, indeed, still am, ambitious. I wanted to make something out of my life. I wanted fame and fortune. And I was also, I have to concede, considering a career in academia. I didn't want to sacrifice those hopes for more ephemeral ones."

"And so I needed proof, definitive proof, that I had talent. I needed someone, of international repute, to say to me: "One day you will be something young man.""

"That is all that I needed. That would have been enough. I did not need food, clothes or even a roof over my head. I was young."

"But what I did need, what I could not live without and what I still to this day can't, is the hope, however vain, that the work I have created is of artistic value."

"That is the only thing I have ever cared about. Without that hope, I would have done away with myself long ago."

"And it was that hope which this particular writer denied me, for which I never forgave him as long as he lived. Oh yes, he made overtures to me, once I was established, was even warm and friendly, but I was always cold and contemptuous toward him, which seemed to disturb his wife more than he."

"At any rate before that I gave him a work of mine and not only did he not reply but I saw a crude copy of it on stage. That only added to my disgust. You see I had idealized him. He was one of the last of the tradition of Jewish writers and intellectuals who'd created the Fin de Siecle culture. But of course I forgot the man."

"My life has been in other respects very much like the frieze. I see myself as always having been in a fight against the impossible, against the gorilla-like specter of National socialism, which still haunts Austria, and which, as I said before, even the gods are powerless against. Because it is a monster, make no mistake about that, albeit one buried deep in people's hearts. You only catch glimpses of it occasionally and then it is quite appalling how brutal, callous and stupidly selfish people can be."

Heinrich had, in the meantime, made a signal to the waitress that he wished to pay, paid without uttering a word and we left the café, walking in silence along the very busy Waehringerstrasse.

He pointed in the direction of Schubert's house on the Nussdorferstrasse.

"Of course when we hear Schubert we often think it is someone else. We think we are hearing Haydn but no it is Schubert, Mozart, but no it is Schubert, Beethoven, but no it is Schubert. He was quite literally crushed by his contemporaries. He even said to one of his friends: "What can one do after Beethoven?""

"It all seemed quite pointless and hopeless to him. And the irony was that he was the only one of them actually born in Vienna. Mozart was a Salzburger, Haydn came from close to Eisenstadt and Beethoven from Bonn. And here he was in his own hometown, squeezed out by foreign competition. A pitiable subject."

We stopped under the windows of the flat where Heimito von Doderer had once lived. "No great man of literature, but interesting nevertheless. He was one of the most important influences on Bernhard, who was delighted, incidentally, when he heard of his demise."

"Down that street is the Strudelhofstiege, designed by Theodore Jaeger in 1910, and practically opposite, in a flat on the corner, on the second floor, is where Erwin Schroedinger, more due to his fear of not getting a pension than because he found post-war Vienna intellectually stimulating, spent his last years."

"Over there, do you see the four windows on the top floor above the Buchbinderei, the book binders? That is where Bruckner lived and composed his second, third, fourth and fifth symphonies. He was, like Rilke, from Linz. They even attended the same school there, not far from the castle."

The fumes from the traffic and the sound of the trams thundering by were growing insufferable but we persisted on our odyssey nevertheless.

"To our left is the Clam Gallas palace, now the French Institute and to our right the Josephenium, built in the 1780s, one of the institutions of enlightened despotism, which helped hinder Austria from sliding into revolution."

"Next we see, up there, above Cafe Stadlman, a plaque commemorating the fact that Mozart composed "Cosi Fan Tutte" here."

"Of course the great opera about the human condition, how we are all faithless, weak, and all in desperate need of magnanimity, generosity and above all forgiveness, was no success at the time."

Finally we arrived at the Berggasse, which was then like a large building site, with a huge, yellow crane at its top, and, below it, blue umbrellas of innumerable open-air cafes.

"Down there is where Freud lived, and on the other side is the Schwarzspanierstrasse, the black Spaniard street, where Beethoven died and Weininger committed suicide."

As we sat in a café Heinrich told me about the history of the Jews in the city. The earliest recording was of how Shlom (Solomon), master of the mint, and fifteen other Jews had been murdered in 1196.

Leopold VI erected a second synagogue and in 1238 Frederick II granted the Jews a charter of privilege, which gave the Jewish community extensive autonomy.

Soon a Jewish quarter flourished in what is now Vienna's first district, around the Seitenstettengasse and Judenplatz. It consisted of roughly 70 houses and 1,000 Jews.

The Jewish community established a cemetery, a synagogue, a hospital and a slaughterhouse and there was even a special Judenrichter, Judge of the Jews, to adjudicate in disputes between Christians and Jews.

Despite the efforts of the Judenrichter Christian envy and hatred grew and, in 1421, Albert V, in need of money and looking for someone to plunder, ordered the annihilation of the city's Jews.

The synagogue at Judenplatz was destroyed, Jews were murdered, expelled or forced to convert and Albert seized their property.

By 1512 there were only twelve Jewish families left in Vienna. Despite suffering restrictions, such as a ban on new settlements, the community miraculously managed to survive.

In 1624 a ghetto was created in the Leopoldstadt, in what is today Vienna's second district. By 1670 it had 136 houses, and accommodated 500 families.

In 1635 a document of privilege permitted the inhabitants of a ghetto, mainly merchants and traders, to circulate within the inner town, what is now Vienna's first district, during business hours.

Financial exigencies, the anti-Semitism of Bishop Kollonitsch as well as that of the Empress — Margarita Teresa (1651–1673), immortalized by Diego Velazquez — led Leopold I to plunder the Jewish community once more. In 1669-70 between 3,000-4,000 Jews were expelled and their property stolen by the Emperor.

If the desire for money had led the Emperor to expel the Jews it led him to readmit them again not long afterwards.

Samuel Oppenheimer was appointed financier to the court and in exchange for a payment of 300,000 florins and an annual tax of 10,000 florins Jews became "tolerated subjects".

By 1737 a Sephardic community was established in Vienna, with its own religious community and synagogue. The community prospered as a result of commerce with the Balkans but remained, due to the restrictive residence rights, small. In 1752 merely 452 Jews lived in the city.

In 1781 Joseph II issued his Toleranzpatent, decree of tolerance, which paved the way for emancipation. This led to the establishment of a Hebrew printing press and an increase of assimilation.

Between 1846 and 1854 the Jewish population of Vienna increased from 3,739 to 15,000.

By 1923 there were 201,513 Jews living in Vienna, making it the third largest Jewish community in Europe.

The fact that the brightest and best frequently moved to the city helped set the stage for a remarkable flowering of Jewish genius at the beginning of the twentieth century.

New opportunities, material prosperity, and a sense of security meant a large number of Jews could create theatre, write, philosophize, and compose like never before. The era produced Reinhardt, Schnitzler, Zweig, Mahler, Schoenberg and Wittgenstein, to name but a few.

The social and material success of the Jews, 1,345 of the 2,163 lawyers, and 2,440 of the 3,268 doctors were Jews, led, perhaps inevitably, to envy, jealousy and hatred.

In March 1938 the Third Reich annexed Austria in the infamous Anschluss. As a consequence Jews were faced with uncertainty and chicanery at the hands of the authorities. On the 17th of March, for example, a policeman and a man from the SA searched and plundered the flat of Abraham Adolf Blum in Vienna's 21st district while in order to force Richard Knoepfmacher to sell his café he was tortured and threatened with deportation.

The plundering and theft by the authorities however had been preceded by "wild plundering" by the public at large. On the 12th of March cars and petrol had been stolen while flats had been confiscated from Jews.

In November 1938, in the course of the infamous Kristallnacht, thousands were turned out of their homes. Others were forced to divorce. There were so many suicides Goering complained about the fact.

Egon Friedell, who lived in the Gentzgasse, in Vienna's 18th district, told the Nazis, who'd come to pick him up, to wait a moment. He then went to his study, called out to the pedestrians to watch out and jumped out of the window.

Many, such as Stefan Zweig, succeeded in escaping only to commit suicide in exile.

All the while the Nazis pretended that everything was above board, legal and perfectly respectable. After all, they argued, sacrifices had to be made for the sake of the state.

Jewish firms encountered difficulties because nobody felt obliged to pay their debts while Jewish companies were sold at a fraction of their true value. The money was subsequently confiscated.

For many this was merely the beginning and not the end. Johannes Waldmann, for example, although imprisoned and his property confiscated, was told to pay large sums to the authorities.

The legal owners of property frequently weren't even informed about what had become of it.

When Ella Zirner lost the restaurant Drei Husaren, which was considered the best in the city, she was told that she'd have to vacate it, at her own expense, within two months.

When Sidonie Bloch sold her villa in the 13th district, for a fraction of its real value, she insisted on at least getting cash for it. Even that small sum wasn't paid and disappeared into a mysterious bank account.

Jews were only allowed to escape once they'd left their property behind. The fact that they'd left "of their own free will" was later used as an argument against restitution. The euphemism for dispossession was: "arisiert", aryanized.

In 1938 there were roughly 166,000 Jews, approximately 10% of the city's population, and about 59 synagogues in Vienna.

Over 100,000 emigrated before the war, of whom about 18,000 were later caught in other European countries. Another 18,500 managed to escape before the general ban on emigration in the fall of 1941.

Between October 1939 and September 1942 the vast majority of Jews were sent to labor, concentration or extermination camps and in November 1942 the Jewish community of Vienna was officially dissolved.

By June 1945 the number of Jews, those who'd survived either in hiding or the concentration and labor camps, was estimated to be about 4,000.

The building my half-brother had lived in, in the 15th district, must have dated from the middle of the nineteenth century. It's dark, grime grey exterior, which a century and a half of pollution and war had left behind, was, in true Biedermeier style, the style Loos had so admired, without ornament. Large chunks of plaster had fallen off, revealing brickwork underneath.

I pushed open the heavy, brown door, with a small, square of rusted grating, which reminded me of a medieval mini portcullis and looked in astonishment at the steps, curved in the middle, worn by a century and a half of usage. It was as if they'd been at the bottom of a stream.

I was enchanted with the dark hall, paved with cracked, polished stone, it most definitely had character, and above all, with its coolness, after the oppressive heat outside.

To the left was what looked like an anachronism: a very modern door. On it was a small plaque with a picture of a German Shepherd, with tongue hanging out. I, after some initial hesitation, undecided as to whether I should knock or not, ventured further.

I always found the Viennese system with their various Stiegen, staircases, thoroughly confusing, and have not a few times run up to the top floor of one stairwell only to find that the flat I was looking for was in another one. I therefore invariably asked the concierges, the Hausbesorger, who usually occupied the first flats, the way.

The door at the end of the passage opened and a frail looking old lady, in blue smock with wisps of fair, greying hair dangling in front of her face, with wine red pot in hand, came out. She blinked and looked at me with watery blue eyes for a couple of seconds before asking me what I wanted.

After explaining to her what it was she bade me come into her flat: "Kommen Sie herein. Kommen Sie herein."

I was overwhelmed by the stench of the place, which seemed not to have been aired for decades. A fat, ginger cat sat on a table with yellow tablecloth beneath a high window, hung with a torn, brown rag, which served as a makeshift curtain, and stared at me with a look of philosophical indifference born of resignation. Another cat, dappled brown and white, with a look of fright, thinner and faster, jumped down in front of me and bounded away, its hind legs skidding on the yellow, worn linoleum floor.

Next to an ancient black stove were rows of plastic litters for the cats. Although the weather was glorious all the windows were hung with drab, brown cloth hangings, cum curtains, and the place was lit by a lone, weak bulb, hanging from the ceiling, with a light brown shade above it.

The little old lady came back, this time with her glasses, with the paper I had given her in hand.

"He lives on the top floor." She told me, to my surprise, in perfect English.

I ventured slowly up the stairs, which were also worn, like the ones I'd encountered before, and was not sure if I should hang on to the black metal railing, which ran along to my right, on account of the fact that some of the stones were loose.

On the second floor, the top floor, I caught sight of a Bassena, a tap with metal basin, which lent their names to such apartments: Basenawohnungen. At the end of a corridor, with worn, wooden floor, with two flats on one side and windows looking out onto a courtyard on the other, was my half-brother's apartment.

I took out the key I'd been given and put it in the lock. Behind the first door, with flaking white paint I found, to my surprise, a second, older, wooden one, which hardly seemed strong enough to resist any truly determined intruder. The dozens of locks, which kept it secure, seemed thoroughly superfluous.

Next to it I saw a sticker with the emergency numbers of police, fire brigade and ambulance but no phone. Directly next to the door and beneath a window was a white, enamel washbasin upon a wooden stool. Then came a wooden partition, with planks of pinewood ranked horizontally, with a narrow doorway and above it: a lamp.

Beyond that was a rickety looking cupboard with old crockery, a window, with cracked pane, which served as a fridge, and rows of Chiquita banana boxes piled up on high. In the middle of the room was, on a low table and under a cover, a small TV set, a desk with white Formica top, a bench and, to the right, an elegant cane chair, a modern looking gas herd and next to that: a green oven.

To my surprise I found my half-brother's diaries. They were entitled: "A Comedy of Errors" and were primarily concerned with his erotic misadventures. He seemed extremely fond of analyzing his emotional and sexual problems. There seemed something obsessive and rather unhealthy about it.

History he wrote, is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. "We are paralyzed by the past. We are trapped like rats and have no hope of escape. Not only the sins of the fathers but the sins of the grandfathers are visited upon the children."

### Alte Meister

I was staying in Vienna's seventh district, in the Schottenfeldgasse, an interesting street with everything from web designers to carpenters and every style of building one can imagine, in a small, rather soulless flat, which had been rented by the publisher on my behalf. It was well equipped, with cable T.V., laptop and printer, all I really needed.

Without further ado I set about with the task in hand: the translation. "Alte Meister", "Old Masters", begins with a quote by Kierkegaard: "The penalty corresponds to the fault: to be deprived of all desire to live, to suffer the highest degree of ennui."

Bernhard was clearly suffering from boredom at the time, I couldn't help but think. The limitations of his life were beginning to pall. This was a frequent complaint of his: all he did was work. That is how he perceived his life, though others perceived his lifestyle somewhat differently.

The fact that he began the novel at the beginning of January, in 1985, also played a role, I considered. It was the deepest of winters and he was most probably depressed. He completed the book largely in Vienna.

The novel, which is seen from Atzbacher's perspective and is consequently narrated in the first person, begins when Atzbacher meets Reger at half past eleven in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. He'd already been waiting there since half past ten, in order to observe Reger from an "ideal angle".

The framing of the narrative in this manner, the avoidance of a divine, all-knowing voice, was very much in keeping with the Wittgensteinian approach adopted by Bernhard. Everything is seen from a highly subjective angle. Everything is seen after the motto: I am my world.

Of course, I reflected, Bernhard had been obsessed with punctuality. To be, by even a minute, late was considered a mortal insult on his part.

I had long known that there was no such thing as an actual Bordone room. This was an invention of Bernhard. This I knew from my half-brother.

My half-brother, when he'd first worked in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, had asked where the Bordone room was. He'd looked and couldn't find it. An old warder had smiled and my half-brother had been surprised that the old warder had known all about "Alte Meister". This was a frequently posed question and those who worked there were better educated and more intelligent than he'd supposed. This error on his part had very much to do with what he was later to refer to as his "bourgeois prejudices".

Reger, who was dressed in a winter coat and black hat and who had a walking stick clamped between his legs, had his "Vormittagsplatz", his morning spot, on a velvet-covered bench, opposite Tintoretto's "Portrait of a White-Bearded Man".

Bernhard had found the painting interesting on account of the blackness of the background, the way the light was focused like a spotlight, and its highly dramatic effect.

I compared it to Bernhard's approach to fiction: "Once one opens my work one should imagine one is in a theatre. One opens, with the first page, the curtain. The title appears. Total darkness. Words emerge slowly, out of the background, out of the darkness..."

I revisited the Kunsthistorisches Museum to study the exact same painting: Tintoretto's "Portrait of a White-Bearded Man", which is the central focus of Bernhard's book.

I sat down on the grey seat, which Bernhard had described as a "velvet-covered bench", though the material was most certainly no longer velvet, and studied the "Portrait of a White-Bearded Man" in the corner.

Casually dressed tourists passed by. The room might be cool, I reflected, but it had a disagreeable smell and the squeaking of the parquet floor made thinking difficult.

In addition to that there was the sound of the tourists, talking in Spanish, English and Japanese as well as the electronic noise of the audio guides. I could understand perfectly well why Reger would want the room closed off.

Japanese tourists gestured in the direction of the paintings or stood silently and studied them with an air of respectful awe.

Most visitors ran around with an audio guide in one hand and a camera or a map of the museum in the other.

One tourist, in yellow T-shirt, beige Bermuda shorts and sandals took an inordinate amount of time photographing each individual painting. He mumbled something to himself while doing so.

My eye wandered from the "Portrait of a White-Bearded Man" to the portrait of "Kurfuerst Johann Friederich von Sachsen" by Titian. He'd been one of the chief protagonists of the Schmalkaldic League and had been captured after the battle of Muehlberg in 1547. Again and again, I reflected, the Wars of Religion and the schism of the Church came back to haunt the world.

I studied Titian's portrait of Jacopo Strada from 1567, an architect, goldsmith and dealer in antiques, holding a small statue in his hands, as well as Titian's "Nymph and Shepherd" from 1570.

Two plump, white shirted, black trousered, artificially tanned warders chatted amicably while an elegantly dressed French pair, he in black, she in a red, paused in order to admire Titian's portrait of Isabelle d'Este from 1534, which they then proceeded to discuss in earnest.

What a contrast it was to Ruben's portrait, considerably later, of the same lady, I couldn't help but think. According to what I'd read the portrait by Rubens, from 1605, was supposed to be a copy of an original by Titian. It hadn't pleased the sitter and she'd requested a second portrait, much in the way that someone not happy with the result of an assessment might ask for a second.

Her husband: Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua had served the Venetian Republic. He'd then been captured by it in the course of the War of the League of Cambrai, between 1508 and 1516, when he'd fought against it. It was this war, I recalled, a war between Venice and practically the whole of Europe, which had very nearly resulted in the annihilation of the former.

Next to Titian's portrait of Isabelle d'Este was another work by him: "Diana and Callisto" from 1511, as well as "Girl in a Fur" from 1535. Next to them was Jacopo Tintoretto's "Sebastiano Venier" from 1571.

It had been Venier who had commanded the Venetian fleet at the decisive battle of Lepanto, where Cervantes had served. Not long after that Cervantes had been captured by Ottoman pirates.

Venier had been seventy-five at the time and went on to become the Doge of Venice at the age of eighty-one.

Reger and Atzbacher discussed the "Tempest Sonata", "The Art of the Fugue", Bach, Schumann, and Mozart. Or more exactly: Reger held forth on the subject.

Of course of interest was the figure of the warder Jenoe Irrsigler, who Reger had known for thirty years. Irrsigler had, according to Atzbacher, an "unpleasant appearance, the regularity of clockwork" and an "annoying look". He employed his "annoying look" to intimidate museum visitors.

My half-brother told me that museum visitors were not to be trusted. Some spat at, scratched or simply put their hands through precious old canvases. This was, in both his eyes and mine, sacrilege.

He was quite passionate about his job, which he defined as "defending civilization against the barbarian hordes". He literally didn't care about the money and frequently had to be reminded, when it came to the monthly settling of accounts, of times he'd worked but which he'd completely forgotten.

For someone passionate about art there could be no higher pleasure, he once told me, than being in such close proximity to it. His work as a warder not only paid his bills: it inspired him.

Of course working in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where he was taken as a child by his mother, and which he frequently visited with his sister as a teenager, was a special pleasure. Here he felt most geborgen, most secure.

It was also a form of liberation. He'd been able to move out from living in a terrible flat and had found a room of his own, in the Singerstrasse, in Vienna's first district.

Irrsigler was wont to come "suddenly and silently" around corners and was, in Atzbacher's eyes a "repugnant" figure, with his "grey, poorly cut uniform hanging on his skinny body like a clothes rack" and his "grey cap" on his head. He resembled more a warder in a prison than a "state guardian of works of art".

My half-brother had worked for a company that rented out warders to a variety of museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum for Applied Arts, Kuenstlerhaus, the Technical Museum as well as the Kunsthistorische Museum.

The company that had rented out warders had found its genesis in the latter. It had been set up, my half-brother had been told, in order to fill a gap.

Half of all the warders in the Kunsthistorisches Museum had been on sick leave at any one point in time. The idea was to draft in students to replace the missing staff. In addition: they would have the advantage of being cheap and easily dispensable. When no longer required they'd simply disappear.

This was a classic example of what some think-tanks term "flexible labor". At first my half-brother had been enamoured by the idea. It meant that he could work in whichever museum he chose whenever he wanted.

Being used to abject poverty, he was frequently forced to go hungry, he felt like a millionaire. Working in Kunsthistorisches Museum brought in the princely sum of 800 Schillings a day, which is roughly equivalent to $65.

Irrsigler was forever pale, though not sick, and Reger referred to him as one of the state's dead. He was also corrupt and took money from Reger, who wanted to secure his peace and quiet in the Bordone-Saal. Irrsigler would simply seal the Bordone room off from visitors.

Irrsigler had completed an apprenticeship in Bruck an der Leitha but had abandoned carpentry in order to become a policeman. He was rejected due to his physical weakness.

This was, in my half-brother's experience, very often the case. A number of the warders who worked permanently at the museum had sought to become policemen but, whether due to political changes, budget cuts or other reasons, had failed to do so. This had made them bitter and frustrated with their comparatively unglamorous, boring and unrewarding jobs.

The fact that they were rejects was, in their eyes, both a stain on their character and a blight on their lives.

Most of the permanent staff had an air of stoic endurance and embittered resignation. The few who took their job seriously were treated with contempt or simply ignored. One left because she was unable to persuade anyone to actually practice a fire drill. She ended up driving a bus instead.

The malaise, which affected the museum and affected those who worked there, and which resulted in the high degree of sick leave, was due to the complete and utter indifference on the part of the management.

My half-brother told me that he'd once found, hidden in a corner of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, covered in dust, instructions on what was to be done in the event of a fire. The procedure was so absurd and so bureaucratic as to verge on the criminally insane, he told me. This and other incidents gave him an insight into the arcane and Byzantine structure of the museum, an institution, which actually got worse, and more expensive for the tax-payer, once it was privatized.

I thought about the theory and practice of museums, about the idea that museums represent "an organizational principle for the content of cultural identity and scientific knowledge" and the notion that we share a "museal consciousness".

I asked myself whether the museal objects put on display actually embodied "the discourse of memorial representation". I wasn't so sure.

Do museums determine what we remember, I wondered? Or simply how we remember? Do museums, I reflected, affirm and inform? Do they inform a viewer of the significance of an object and affirm its significance? What did all that mean? I recalled my debates with Anne, who was currently giving a series of lectures at Stanford about art history.

She was, at that point in time, Stanford is nine hours behind Vienna, most probably preparing her talk on British Art, which she usually gave in the early afternoon, I reflected.

She'd told me that she was currently writing about Richard Long. Richard Long had spent, she told me, most of his childhood drawing and painting. Art had already been his language when he went to art school. He'd only begun to make sculpture at the age of nineteen. Sculpture had seemed to him at the time to be "the best way to be both inventive and experimental". He'd studied in two art schools, Bristol and London.

By the mid-sixties however he'd become convinced that "the language and ambition of art was due for renewal". He noticed that art had neither recognized natural landscapes nor had used the experiences those places could offer. Starting on his own doorstep and later spreading, part of his work was to try to "engage this potential".

He'd made his first circle in 1966 without giving it too much thought. A circle was, in his eyes, "beautiful, powerful, but also neutral and abstract". He'd realized that it could serve as "a constant form, always with new content". A circle could carry "a different walking idea, or collection of stones, or be in a different place, each time". A circle suited the "anonymous but man-made character" of his work. His ideas could be expressed better without what he later termed "the artistic clutter of idiosyncratic, invented shapes".

Circles and lines were also practical, in his eyes, because they were "easy to make". A line could be made just "by aligning features in the landscape, and it could point to the horizon, into the distance".

The particular characteristics of each place determined which was most appropriate, a circle or a line. A circle was, in his eyes, "more contemplative, focused, like a stopping place, and a line was more like a walk".

A circle outdoors, in his eyes, "focused our attention on the environment it is in, while when indoors, the circle and its materials demanded our attention."

How did the work of Long, I reflected, fit into a museum, if at all? If anything, it seemed a complete antithesis to the very idea of a museum. My skepticism toward museums increased.

Irrsigler had got the job in Kunsthistorisches Museum through one of his uncles, his mother's brother, who'd worked there. This was highly characteristic for Austria, my half-brother told me. Only a third of jobs were ever advertised while the reliance on family connections meant that whole organizations could be inter-related.

Irrsigler had taken the job because, although it was under-paid, it was safe. Of course this was before the advent of flexible labor. Once that kicked in the job was merely underpaid.

My thoughts drifted back to museum theory. What was all this for? There are those who argue that being collected means being "valued and remembered institutionally" while being displayed means being "incorporated into the extra-institutional memory of the museum visitors".

Of course the question of collecting, what to collect, what not to collect was a frequent topic of discussion between Anne and myself. One of her friends even went as far as to stipulate that in her marriage her husband had the right to spend their money whichever way he saw fit but she and she alone would monopolize decisions concerning which art should be purchased. Yet for all this display of independence it was always Anne who'd be called upon to adjudicate and advise. Thankfully Anne is not only extremely intelligent but has taste too.

How exactly, I asked myself, did museums "endow objects with meaning"? And what exactly did "objectified memory" mean? Was there such a thing or was this phrase yet another example of the nonsense art historians are so eminently fond of spouting?

Could one really talk of memory "not belonging to one individual so much as to audiences, publics, collectives, and nations"? Were they not all comprised of individuals and is it not the individual who ultimately counts?

Obviously it was at one and the same time patently absurd and true to life that the only reason Irrsigler had wanted to join the police was because he didn't have enough clothes to wear. He wanted to "slip into the same garment", which would then become his "lifelong garment", which he himself would never have to pay for. It would be paid for by the state.

In this respect there was no difference as to whether he was employed by the police or by the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The police paid more but working in the Kunsthistorisches Museum involved greater responsibility and was a good deal easier.

To work for the police was dangerous while to work in the Kunsthistorisches Museum was not.

I couldn't help think of the case my half-brother had told me of. Some robbers had burst out of a bank in Vienna and had run into a traffic cop. He'd reached for his gun but they'd been quicker. In this respect I couldn't help but think the British tradition of the unarmed bobby incomparably superior. It also had the advantage of avoiding the shooting of innocents, which was as harmful to the shooter's mind as it was to the victim's body. There had been a spate of incidents in Austria. One had even been turned into a film.

Of course to work in the museum involved a certain monotony but Irrsigler claimed to love it. In addition to that walking forty to fifty kilometers a day in a museum was preferable to sitting on a hard chair in an office for the rest of one's life.

My half-brother told me that he would simply switch off while walking and it was exactly this Zen-like, meditative state, in which he had neither anxieties nor worries, which appealed to him. It was no different to cycling or any other physical activity, he told me. Just as thinking too much while cycling is ill advised so thinking while walking is not always a good idea.

Of course there were periods when he grew bored but the main trick was not to think about time. If one made the mistake of continually looking at one's watch one would slowly go mad. Yet, this was true of all jobs, he told me.

He once worked at night as a security guard. Nothing happened and it was the fact that nothing happened that made the job unbearable. The worst period was between three o'clock in the morning and dawn. Nothing was worse than waiting, praying for the sun to rise and nothing delighted him more than the first sound of birdsong. The birds started singing an hour before the first rays of light made their welcome appearance. They were the harbingers of salvation.

Was it true, I asked myself, that museums had been transformed from early modern, private cabinet collections into public museums due to the creation of the bourgeoisie? Was the function of the museum to educate and to preserve or did it have a more sinister goal? I have often thought the aim of a museum is to freeze time, to desiccate and to sterilize. Did museums help culture or did they consciously aim to destroy it?

It reminded me of the problems surrounding the advent of the large opera houses in the course of the nineteenth century. Is it a coincidence that the repertoires of nearly every major opera house in the world are stuck in the nineteenth century, I reflected, with their eternal Verdis, Wagners and Puccinis? Whenever a new opera is produced it is almost invariably produced outside these old houses and very rarely takes up residence within them.

I thought of how Boulez had once, in 1967, remarked that it was necessary to blow up the old opera houses and how, in 2001, he was hauled out of bed at three o'clock in the morning and arrested in Zuerich on charges of terrorism. But then, I reflected, what should one expect from brainless bureaucrats? What did they understand about anything, let alone something as complex as art?

Is the aim of a museum to destroy culture rather than to preserve it, I asked myself? After all, I reflected, culture is, by definition alive and organic. It can never be institutionalized. And is not institutional control invariably harmful?

This topic was very much discussed by my half-brother and myself as it continues to be discussed between Anne and myself. Yet all three of us have come to the same conclusion: art needs to be free from the dead weight of materialism and the pettiness of institutionalized bureaucracy.

Some of Anne's friends argue that museums "mediate between the public and private sphere, between the humanistic notion of collecting and social demands of prestige and display, that they are cognitive fields of ideas, words and artifacts and have epistemological structures."

My half-brother always subscribed to the notion that a museum is a place of contemplation. He was once infuriated when he heard people chatting away in the Rothko room of the Tate. This had been for him a reprehensible and despicable example of profanity. The museum was, for him, very much a modern substitute for the ancient temple.

There is invariably the question of what deserves to be preserved, kept and treasured and what doesn't. Which memories deserve to be stored? Perhaps, I reflected, it was fitting that a Venetian, Giulio Camillo, might refer to "theatres of memory" and knowledge as involving "tangible and visible objects". The problem being of course that so much of what we know is both intangible and invisible.

Collecting and remembering, it has been written, "facilitates the control of information that lies at the heart of any well-ordered polity".

A museum is also a place, "where the muses dwell, it is a domain for the muses dedicated to the housing of learned men."

I myself have always been somewhat skeptical about this claim. Historically speaking museums can be traced back to Ptolemaic "mouseion" at Alexandria, which was conceived as a repository of knowledge and a place for scholars, philosophers and historians.

In the modern age the term "museum" or "musaeum" was first used in 1683 with reference to what has become the Ashmoleon, which is generally considered to be the first modern museum.

I recalled my frequent visits to the Ashmoleon, as well as the rather bizarre Pitt Rivers, and the last exhibition I had seen at the former: one comparing and contrasting the works of Bacon and Moore.

I thought about the trick Moore liked to play on visitors to his country house. He showed them objects but wouldn't tell them that they were things he'd found. They'd invariably think these artifacts were by him and praise them accordingly. Of course this amused him hugely.

I also reflected on David Sylvester's interviews with Bacon, which I finally read at the urging of Anne.

Bacon's starting point had been Picasso and the way he'd related organic form to the human image, or more exactly a distortion of it. What he was attempting was a "tightrope walk" between so called figurative painting and so called abstraction. It was an attempt above all else, as he termed it, to "bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly."

For him all painting was "accident". What he foresaw was transformed by the actual paint. Of course there was always a selective process of deciding which part of the accident to preserve, always trying at one and the same time to "preserve the vitality of the accident".

One of his chief aims was to "return the onlooker to life more violently". To his mind a painting ought to "leave memory traces". Ultimately however painting was "simply a game by which man, an accident and futile being, distracts himself."

What he wanted was to "distort" the thing portrayed or painted, but "in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance."

He was concerned with making an image immediately real, by which he meant: "recording one's feelings about certain situations as closely to one's own nervous system as one possibly can."

I thought about the individual works in the Ashmolean: the "Studio Interior" from 1936, the "Man Kneeling in Grass" from 1952, the "Lying Figure" from 1959, the "Sketch of a Turning Figure" from 1962, the "Portrait of Henrietta Moraes" from 1963 and the "Study From Portrait of Pope Innocent X" from 1965.

What a contrast I couldn't help but think to what Anne terms "Art Bullshit" and which I prefer to call "Art Nonsense", which seems to dominate the art world today with all its ridiculous talk of "fields of the real", "meaningful constellations of heterogeneous elements", "ornamental currents", "unfolding of ideas beyond specific and anecdotal limits of experience", "generative backgrounds", "pictorial signifiers", "enciphered figures", "tensions between internal psychology and external reality", "profound matrixes", "presentational devices", "transcendental origins", "radical questioning of perception", and "autonomous processes", its talk of serving to interrogate, functioning to question, encoding, transforming, subverting, imbricating, displacing of visualities, globalities, potentialities, and experiencabilities.

Irrsigler preferred to shadow museum visitors because museum visitors were, in his eyes "a better class of person, people who had a sense of art". I couldn't help but laugh at this particular passage.

Irrsigler himself was in a position to give a tour of the museum but regarded this enterprise as pointless. After all: "people were incapable of comprehending what was said to them". I underlined this passage.

My half-brother told me that the warders who worked in the museum often had irreverent and critical eyes, which most art historians lacked. They would spot errors and contradictions most visitors missed with their superficial glances. They would see feet or hands, for example, which weren't attached to bodies.

Of course, I couldn't help but reflect, Reger was perfectly right: museum guides have been overwhelming visitors with the same nonsense for decades.

It isn't only the world of art, I couldn't help but think, that is deluged with what Wittgenstein calls Unsinn, nonsense, and which many term bullshit.

I thought about the book I'd picked up in Vienna, it was in German although the text was originally in English, on the subject of bullshit. It defined bullshit as being somewhere between deceptive misrepresentation and bluff but ultimately could provide neither a satisfactory definition nor explanation for its prevalence. It proved to be, in its woolly thinking, an example of the self-same phenomenon it professed to counter.

Of course Wittgenstein, who saw the main role of the philosopher as being the detection of nonsense, was infinitely superior. It was, of that he was acutely aware, essentially a negative role and a thankless one. All one could really do was to say: one can't say that, one can't say that etc. etc.

Everywhere one looks, whether in the world of art, literature or the media one is confronted with the same phenomenon: a proliferation of language and ideas, which bear little if any relationship to reality. Contemporary language and ideas often deal with images of reality, ideas of reality and all too often deliberate lies about reality without actually having the remotest resemblance to facts.

They frequently have the pretention to truth, the semblance of truth, rather like a snack that is made to look organic although it is a synthetic product of a laboratory, and, above all else: appear to have the authority of truth.

The difference between what resembles truth and what is truth is often subtle and cleverly disguised. Sentences are all too often clogged up with specialized terminology, pseudo-erudition or jargon and meaning is all too often left completely obscure.

The Wittgensteinian precept concerning clarity is all too often ignored: that which can be said, can be said clearly. Style is everything, content and meaning nothing. All one needs, in the modern age, is to appear sincere. Appearance is all.

My half-brother claimed that the prevalence of bullshit was due to the bourgeoisie, the bane of his existence, who always had to have an opinion, whether factually accurate or not, about everything.

Perhaps the best and most damaging example of bullshit or nonsense in the modern age I can think of is economics.

Economics pretends to scientific precision but, upon closer inspection, is made up not of empirical observation at all but merely theory, hot air, guff, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to reality.

In economics one is taught that a rational person, when confronted with a set of options, will always attempt to choose the best option available. In reality however habit, time and emotions, upon which advertisers prey, rather than rational choice, dominate. The theory of economics bears no relation whatsoever to observed experience.

Once there was an experiment done in which students were asked to choose between eight different commodities. They were allowed to choose any amount of them they could afford within a given budget. The end result of the experiment was that the choice of different combinations was literally infinite.

Another experiment was done. It was assumed that a supermarket had between 10,000 and 50,000 items. To simplify matters the items were segmented into 100 different groups. The question was then posed as to how many different shopping trolleys could then be filled if there was a decision to buy or not to buy one item from each group. The answer was: 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376.

The next step was to pose the question as to how long it would take to figure out the utility gained from each trolley at a rate of 10 trillion trolleys per second. Even at this speed it would take 100 billion years to find the optimal one.

I thought of how unpretentious, how self-critical and how self-deprecating Francis Bacon had been.

He once posed the question as to whether art was about being "as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation". This was in opposition to being "a simple illustration of the object".

I reflected on his preoccupation with and consciousness of death, violence and suffering and my thoughts returned to Bernhard.

Irrsigler, like Bernhard, had had a difficult childhood, and his mother, like Bernhard's, had died of cancer, also at the age of forty-six. His father was, like Bernhard's, both unfaithful and a drunk. Unlike Bernhard however Irrsigler came from Bruck an der Leitha "an ugly place, like most places in Burgenland".

In Irrsigler's opinion those who can leave Burgenland but most cannot. They're sentenced to life there, which is like lifelong imprisonment in the worst of prisons.

The people of Burgendland are convicts, in Irrsigler's eyes, their home a prison. They might convince themselves that Burgenland is nice but in reality it's bland and ugly.

In winter Burgenland is knee-deep in snow and in summer a haven for mosquitos. In Europe, in Irrsigler's eyes, there is no poorer or dirtier place than Burgendland. Burgenland has brought forth nothing other than Haydn.

Irrsigler had come to Vienna, with a small, worn bag, "in a state of extreme hopelessness", and had rented a room in the Moelkerbastei.

I remembered how, after passing under the Schottentor complex Heinrich and I had arrived at the Moelkerbastei.

This curious little island, which seemed to be stranded from another century, was where Beethoven had lived between 1804 and 1815 and had composed his 4th, 5th and 7th symphonies. It was also where the famous "Third Man" doorway sequence had been filmed.

From here we looked out, over the trees and monument to the mayor of Vienna in 1683, who happened to have embezzled the orphan-fund, Heinrich told me, across the ring toward the university building, built in the style of the renaissance by Heinrich von Ferstel between 1873 and 1884.

Its façade happened to be renovated that summer and was shrouded in plastic wraps, with scaffolding beneath it. I was beginning to feel the weight of the night before on my eyes and throat.

The stench of cigarette smoke still clung to my clothes, which in turn, on account of the sweat, clung to my skin. It must have been at least 39 degrees Centigrade in the glaring sun and I was quite happy about hanging back and staying in the shadow.

"Of course" Heinrich began, "the irony of building the university here was that it was on an army parade ground. It was decided on by a Liberal government, which was the heir of the student revolt of '48. During the rebellion the students, of whom von Ferstel was one of the leaders, had succeeded in shutting the army out of the city. This the army never forgave."

"Once the revolt was crushed, by Croatian regiments, with the utmost brutality of course, it was resolved that the walls be torn down and a wide avenue be created, difficult to barricade, and on which the army could move its regiments quickly from one barrack to the other."

"It was also resolved that the university be scattered all over the city. Only in the 1860s did it find a "new home", as it were, and shortly after, this building was built."

To the right was a modern building, with a pinkish grey, granite-like facade and a green roof, which I vaguely remembered, but wasn't sure of, had been the scene of the OPEC hostage crisis in the seventies. Carlos had been hired by Gadaffi to knock off a rival and make it look like an accident. For some reason I thought the affair too trivial to tax Heinrich about.

Unlike Irrsigler, who didn't have time to get to know Vienna for over a year, I, with the help of Heinrich, got to know it extremely quickly indeed. I remember how Heinrich said: "Come I shall show you Vienna's soul. I will show you its heart of darkness".

We walked past the old, brown lamp-post, past the coat of arms on the corner of the "Pasquali" house, past its row of bricked up windows, past the "Drei Maedel" house, built in 1803, with its charming baroque rococo exterior, past the famous "Third Man Door Sequence House", with its symbol of the holy trinity above the middle window and two cherubs above the door, down the cobbled street, with tufts of grass growing out from between the cobble stones, left the Bastei and walked down the Teinfaltstrasse, passing the Irish pub "Molly D'arcy's", on our way.

At the end was the Schottenkirche. Its yellow facade, partly in shadow, had been inspired by the Jesuit church Il Jesu in Rome, as had many churches in Vienna. There were three niches for three saints, one above the main door and two on either side of the main window.

"There you see, it was the fault of the Irish all along. They are the source of Austria's woe. Bringing that accursed institution, the Church, to Austria. It is everywhere. Omnipresent."

Next to it was the Schottenkloster, built by Josef Kornhaeusel between 1826-32, and, on the façade, was a plaque commemorating the fact that a number of writers had attended the school. The only name I recognized was that of Nestroy.

"To your right you see Palais Kinsky and not far removed: Palais Harrach, two of the families, which rose to eminence during the Counter Reformation."

The long side of Palais Harrach, with its dull, yellow pastel façade, tall windows and classical proportions, simple in comparison to that of Kinsky, with its caryatids, cupids and numerous figures aloft, had the advantage of offering us shade. Inside there was an exhibition about the Medici and, in the courtyard, was a restaurant.

Next to it was Palais Ferstel, with a dingy passage, in which a lone man sat at a table and indistinct figures in motion disappeared into the gloom.

As we turned into the Naglergasse the buildings, reflected in the windows, seemed to turn too. It was a narrow street but seemed to have a lot packed into it: a shop for paints, one for fashion, one for antiques, a piano bar, a Beisl, and a bakery.

Above the shops, on the alternately grey and yellow façades, sometimes crumbling, sometimes not, were innumerable representations of the holy family in small, compact groups. On the side of a building, built in 1901, was a plaque commemorating the fact that Roman remains had been found there.

"If one walks from Stephansplatz, along the Graben, through the Naglergasse, passes the Heidenschuss, turns right into the Tiefer Graben, turns right after the Concordiaplatz into the Salzgries, follows that to the end and passes, after the Marc-Aurelstrasse, into the Franz-Josefs Kai, turns right into the Rabenstrasse, and follows it until the Fleischmarkt meets the Rotenturmstrasse, and follows the latter until one gets back to the Stephansplatz, one will have encompassed the walls of the Roman camp of Vindobona, where Marcus Aurelius is reputed to have died," Heinrich told me.

"The Principia was between, what is now, the Judenplatz and the Tuchlauben. Directly south west of it was the Praetorium. These were surrounded on three sides by barracks and, to the north, by a hospital. A main road transected the camp, along the line of Wipplingerstrasse – Lugeck, connecting two gates at either end."

We passed onto the Graben. Heinrich turned quickly and looked up at a grey, neo-Gothic, turret-like tower, which seemed to jut out of a building, beneath which a yellow caryatid seemed to squirm. "This is where Helmut Zilk, the former Buergermeister, mayor, lived. He had his hand mutilated by a bomb sent to him by Nazis, who are still at large. And under us: the dead. Vienna was always built on the dead, consumed by turpitude."

We stopped briefly and I looked down in the direction of the Michaelerplatz. Gold ornamentation, atop a green dome, glistened in the sunlight.

Next to a newsstand, and a dark-skinned gentleman, dressed in a bright red jacket, selling newspapers, were rows of benches and palm trees in grey, wooden boxes.

We walked on, in the direction of Stephansplatz. "To your right is the Ankerhaus, built by Otto Wagner in 1893-95, where, at the top, Hundertwasser had an atelier, and practically next door, the Equitable Palace, built in 1890-91, by Andreas Streit. When you have more time I would recommend your going inside."

We were soon in the courtyard of the Deutschordenshaus, in the Singerstrasse. It was cool and, with its various plants, a tree in the corner, vines clambering up the walls and palm trees scattered around it, it had a vaguely Mediterranean air.

A white minibus stood in the sunlight and there were a couple of tables and benches in one corner. Heinrich pointed up at the white facade, above which the top of the tower of Stephansdom could be seen, and said: "Up there is where Mozart, together with the other servants, was, between the 16th of March and 21st of May 1781, quartered."

"He rebelled against this treatment, which caused a breach between him and the Archbishop, much to the embarrassment of his father of course, who was still in his service."

From there it wasn't far, we passed through the narrow Blutgasse, mercifully also, at least half in shadow, to the Domgasse, and its "Figarohaus", which, with its green, framed windows and pale, yellow façade, looked rather dilapidated. This was where Mozart had composed "Il Nozze de Figaro".

"Another lesson in humility, magnanimity and forgiveness of course," was Heinrich's sole comment. A big, blue BMW, which seemed to emanate from a chancellery, sped through the narrow street at breakneck speed, nearly running us over. This didn't seem to perturb Heinrich in the least.

"There are some good galleries here, which you should take time to investigate later, one owned by a very nice colleague of mine, Manfred Chobot, and another, which played a pivotal role after the war: Galerie Naechst St Stephan. It was run by a particularly enlightened priest, Monsignor Otto Mauer, who effectively sponsored the breakthrough of Rainer, Mikl, Prachensky, Hollegha and the rest."

Heinrich showed no particular desire to dally there either and it was not long before we'd crossed the Wollzeile, to my regret passing a particularly nice looking coffeehouse: Cafe Diglas, and reached the Baeckerstrasse.

We passed the "Haus mit Renaissancehof", Cafe Alt Wien, with its grey, pealing facade and statue of a Madonna over the entrance, as well as a restaurant: Oswald & Kalb.

It was on the Ignaz Seipelplatz that our odyssey had its end. The Jesuit church stood, in full glare of the sun, in front of us.

Six statues lingered in six niches, on either side of a central window, above the main entrance.

To my left was another building, from which a cherub protruded with a small dagger in its left hand. In its right it held the mouth of a fish, whose tail curled up behind it. Over that was what looked like a shell.

Above the cherub were six columns and, between them, three windows. On the other side of a walnut colored door, which seemed to be the main entrance, was another cherub, this time with a trident in hand, piercing what looked like another fish. Beneath it were shells, a tortoise, a lizard, plants, and flowers.

"This is what I wanted to show you," Heinrich said, after a moment's pause, with not a little gravity.

All I could see was the church, built in 1636-31 by Andrea Pozzo, in the standard style of the Jesuits based on the original, "Il Gesu", in Rome, and another building, the "Academy of Sciences", built in 1753-55 by J. Enzenhofer, which I must confess was pretty but looked just as baroque as any other, to our left.

"Here you see the origin of the Austrian tragedy and the authors of its unhappiness: the Jesuits. You have to remember that Austria was, in the 16th century, a profoundly Protestant society. It was indeed, probably, the part of Europe where Protestantism, at that point in time, was strongest. And what happened? It had Catholicism imposed upon it, by them," he pointed accusingly at the church, "and the Emperor who fell under their sway. And the families, which rose to power, whose palaces we passed, were those unscrupulous enough to serve this policy of imposing a religion with fire and the sword, until the emperor was dependent on them, and they on him. And so one became inextricably entwined and enmeshed with the other, church, aristocracy and empery until the empire choked under the weight of them."

"Until the defeat at the hands of the Prussians that is. The famous rape of Silesia by Frederick the Shameless. That was a lesson both Maria Theresia and her son, Joseph, learned well, and it spelled the eclipse for them," and he pointed to the church again "and paved the way for them," and he pointed at the other building, "the children of the Enlightenment."

"You have to bear in mind that nearly half the land at that time was in the unproductive hands of the church. But Austria proved not strong enough, in the long run, to survive the pressures of progress and still proves to this day to be basically the society created by them," and he pointed to the church yet again, "backward, ignorant and provincial, in one word: medieval. It is a sad, sad story."

We walked into the Akademie der Wissenschaften and Heinrich showed me the main hall.

As I sat in the ceremonial hall of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Academy of Sciences, I tried to imagine Haydn, at the age of 75, making his last public appearance with his "Die Schoepfung", "Creation", here in 1808. I was told that 1,300 had been present at the time. I studied the rococo plasterwork, the statues in the alcoves and the elaborate frescoes on the ceiling representing medicine, theology, philosophy and law. I also thought back to when Bernhard had received his prize here, in 1971, the year my half-brother had left Vienna.

Bernhard had arrived with his "aunt" and had looked around for someone to receive them. They walked around the entrance hall of the Academy but nobody paid them the slightest bit of attention.

They walked up the stairs to the hall but again nobody seemed to notice them.

They stood close to the doors of the hall but instead of being welcomed they were practically crushed by the crowds pressing to get in. Soon the hall was nearly full.

Bernhard decided to simply go in, together with his "aunt", and take a seat; there weren't that many left. As they pushed their way to the middle of the tenth row many were forced to get up.

Despite the fact that the so-called "VIPs" were seated the ceremony didn't begin. Excited men ran back and forth, at ever shorter intervals, on the stage. They were looking for something or somebody: Bernhard. Unrest spread throughout the hall.

Suddenly Bernhard saw a man on stage whisper something in the ear of another while gesturing in his direction. The man got up, walked to the tenth row and forced his way through to Bernhard. Again many were forced to get up.

He asked Bernhard what he was doing sitting so far back when two seats had been reserved for him in the front row. He requested that he come forward. Bernhard responded that he would only do so if the president of the academy asked him personally to do so.

Bernhard's "aunt" stayed silent while unrest spread once more throughout the hall. The man forced his way through the row back to the stage, whispered a few words to the president of the academy before the president of the academy came to the tenth row and forced his way through to Bernhard. Again many were forced to get up. He apologized profusely before accompanying Bernhard and his "aunt" to the front row.

Once the interminable speeches concerning Grillparzer were over the president of the academy read a few notes about Bernhard, getting all the particulars of his life and all the titles of his works completely wrong. This didn't disturb the minister of art in the least. He snored on sonorously.

Of course if the Grillparzer prize was a scandal it was nothing compared to the scandal surrounding the Austrian State Prize for Literature four years before, in 1967, the year of my half-brother's birth. It was exactly thirty years after Bernhard's grandfather had received this prize, in 1937.

Bernhard didn't like the idea of receiving a prize intended for someone twenty years younger than himself. He also had a difficult relationship to both the state in which he lived and the ministry of arts, with which he'd had dealings.

He found himself continually cursing the officials in the ministry and hated the way in which both he and his peers were treated. Not only were the officials autocratic, they had no idea what he was talking about, and had the worst taste imaginable. In the ministry stupidity and hypocrisy reigned supreme.

The bureaucrats seemed not to have changed much in the course of nearly half a century. I recalled what my half-brother had said about them. In the course of nearly twenty years he'd only received the equivalent of roughly $2,200, enough to keep him alive for a couple of months. It was they, he'd once bitterly claimed, who'd been responsible for his descent into misery and poverty. It was they, I reflected, who were ultimately responsible for his death.

Others, those who'd had friends within the ministry, had received small fortunes in comparison. This was despite the appalling quality of their work. The injustice and the corruption of the system had enraged him.

However much he hated and despised the ministry, Bernhard, who was heavily in debt, needed the money. The sum involved was not vast, merely 25,000 Schillings ($2,000). Yet he needed it.

He regarded the fact he'd been awarded the Small State Prize for Literature rather than the larger one as an effrontery. The problem, in his eyes, was that those who sat in the jury were assholes.

Those who sat in the senate for art were not mere normal, run of the mill assholes, they were, in his eyes, Catholic und National socialist assholes, with a few Alibi-Jews thrown in.

They were, he said, mere failures and swine. To offer him the small rather than the large prize, at his age, was simply a disgrace. He had little time for talk of honor, which he regarded as, at best, non-existent and at worst: perverse.

Given his contempt for both the prize and the state his "aunt" was of the opinion that he should refuse it. The state, he argued, throws out not just millions but billions each year. The citizen has a right to at least a small fraction of these sums, the bread crumbs as it were. Apart from which: he was no fool.

The government might be worthless and might use every means to stay in power, the state might be going to the dogs, but he'd take the twenty-five thousand anyway. His "aunt" accused him of inconsistency. She was not convinced. If he didn't take the money a "complete idiot" would do so, he countered. He or she who would merely cause a calamity or pollute the air. He decided to take the money and run. The problem was: he had to give a speech.

For weeks he thought about a possible theme: art, culture, the state, the situation of the world, the underdeveloped countries, or the neglected health care system. He simply couldn't decide. No idea occurred to him. He found the matter "repulsive and nauseating".

At the very last minute, on the actual morning of the ceremony itself, when both he and his "aunt" were already dressed to go, he typed up a few sentences. This was a far cry from what might be termed a speech.

They caught a taxi from the Obkirchergasse, where they lived, to the city center and the ministry. Filled with anxiety Bernhard felt he was on his way to an execution.

When they arrived at the audience chamber of the Ministry for Art, Culture and Education the minister, by the name of Piffl-Percevic, a former secretary of the Styrian Chamber of Agriculture, hadn't arrived yet.

Piffl-Percevic, who couldn't even speak a single sentence correctly, had always been, in Bernhard's eyes, an abomination. He might know a thing or two about Styrian calves but he understood nothing about art or culture.

The ceremony began, the musicians played badly and Bernhard was none too happy when the minister talked about him. Most of what he said was nonsense. He mentioned that Bernhard had written a novel set on a South Sea island, a novel about which Bernhard had never heard. Worse followed. He said that Bernhard was a foreigner, born in Holland, who'd "been living among us but for some time now". Enraged Bernhard gave his speech, which didn't go down terribly well.

"There is nothing to praise, nothing to condemn, nothing to indict" he began, "but there is much to be ridiculed. Everything is ridiculous in the face of death. The demonic within," he said, had "rendered the country a perpetual patriotic prison," in which "stupidity" and "lack of consideration" had become the "daily routine". "The state is an entity", Bernhard told the minister, "doomed to failure. The people, he told the audience, are doomed to infamy and imbecility. We Austrians are apathetic," he continued, "we lack an interest in life. We have nothing to say other than we are pathetic. What we think is regurgitated, what we feel is chaotic, what we are, is unclear. We need not be ashamed, but we are nothing and we deserve nothing but chaos."

Bernhard later wrote: "I had not finished my text, when the room was quiet, I didn't know why, because my text was quietly spoken and the subject was philosophical."

These short sentences, which Bernhard termed: "philosophical" caused a veritable scandal. The minister and his entourage stormed out. Everyone else, bar a few friends, fled. He later wrote that he didn't understand why there was such a commotion: "I was aware of no guilt".

When we left the Akademie der Wissenschaften it began to rain. Neither of us had an umbrella. Heinrich suggested taking refuge in the Alte Schmiede, in the Schoenlaternegasse, which was literally just around the corner. He told me that Friederike Mayroecker was giving a reading. Soon a monsoon like deluge began.

We followed the arrows, taking us down a set of stairs, into the basement. I wasn't sure whether this was the right place, so inauspicious and insignificant did it seem. Heinrich insisted it was. Not many people were assembled and I was, despite Heinrich's assurances, cast into doubt.

Was there so little interest, I asked myself, in Vienna's pre-eminent writer, who'd rivaled, I was told, Elfriede Jelinek for the Nobel Prize? I left Heinrich sitting on a chair and looked for a bathroom.

Water was dripping from the ceiling, trickling down the mirror and forming into an ever-growing puddle on the floor next to the toilet as I undid the zip of my trousers. As I washed my hands I was half frightened of being electrocuted.

I returned to my seat, sat down and studied those around me. How many of these people, I asked myself, were wannabe writers, how many lovers of literature and how many academics or students? I looked at the variety of their haircuts, jackets and shoes. Nobody stuck out. Only some students, who arrived later, impressed me with their eccentricity.

A middle-aged lady, with short, spiky hair, arrived. I couldn't help but notice that she'd been drinking, so overpowering was her breath. She asked me whether the seat next to me, which had a rucksack on it, was taken. It was. Fortunately she decided to sit on the other side of the aisle.

Academics, journalists, writers, students and others chatted among themselves as the room gradually filled but I was in no mood to make conversation with the tall, balding, middle-aged man with glasses who spoke to Heinrich, nor was he in the mood to chat with me. As I waited I studied the curved, bare, pale brickwork above my head in the rather sterile, ugly light that lit the room.

Finally Friederike Mayroecker arrived, dressed in a black, elegant suit, which made her tall frame seem all the taller and her white face seem all the whiter. She received a lukewarm applause.

She sat at a brightly lit table, too brightly lit for her taste, and looked appreciatively at the man who gave an introductory talk about how she turned everything into poetry.

She read with her quiet, gentle and not altogether steady voice, nearly as frail and slow as her physical movement, from a choice of works, which dated from 1947 to the present.

I thought of what Bernhard had written in "Holzfaellen", where she'd appeared under the guise of the schoolteacher Schreker. Poor Ernst Jandl had simply been referred to as her "poetry-writing partner".

Bernhard had found her pronunciation "hissing" and "repulsive" even thirty years earlier. Then, in the fifties, she'd been regarded as "Austria's Gertrude Stein" or "Austria's Marianne Moore". In reality, according to Bernhard, she'd merely been "the Austrian Schreker, a megalomaniac Viennese writer". She'd followed the way from "young talent" to "repulsive servant of the state." She'd gone from being an "imitative virgin" to being an "imitative matron" and had followed the path of mediocrity rather than genius. She'd gone from a "Marianne Moore like obsessiveness" to a "Marianne Moore pose."

Schreker and her partner had abandoned their visions, intentions and passions to become "despicable servants of the state". Their "innate failure of character" had led them to become the exact same "repulsive" and "despicable" creatures, which they themselves had been contemptuous of. This had been at the beginning of the sixties.

Bernhard was not willing to forgive their "infamous betrayal of Literature". In the fifties they preached against such disgraceful behavior. In the sixties they practiced it. Schreker crept into her role in a repulsive and opportunistic way back in the early sixties.

In the fifties they preached against the state, which they termed a "fundamental misfortune" for the unsuspecting people. At the beginning of the sixties, according to Bernhard, they surrendered to the state and abandoned themselves to it in the most unscrupulous and treacherous of fashions.

They sold out to the atrocious and ridiculous state. Schreker, who'd always been merely a marginal phenomenon, had always suffered from a "Marianne Moore-delusion" and a "Gertrude Stein-delusion".

Back in the fifties it was, in Bernhard's opinion, "a real madness" and a "real disease". By the sixties, when she'd become a vile beneficiary of the state, it had become merely a literary pose.

In the fifties he idolized Schreker. At the beginning of the sixties he regarded her as a mendacious, shallow petit bourgeois.

Thirty years later he viewed her as obnoxious, repulsive and arrogant. He thought of her as being merely a petty, cunning, ambitious beneficiary of the state, who betrayed literature and art for ridiculous prizes and a guaranteed pension. Perhaps worst of all: she only produced imitative kitsch.

Schreker had always railed against the so-called Art Senate, yet had no problem receiving the so-called Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature from it. She had no problem embracing those she'd once abused as abominable and harmful.

More or less all Austrian artists, in Bernhard's opinion, end up selling themselves to the unscrupulous, vulgar and vile state, the vast majority from the very start.

To be an artist in Austria means, for the vast majority, to be a docile servant of the state, and to be supported by it for life. It is a base and deceitful path of opportunism, paved with scholarships and prizes and papered over with orders and prizes. It only terminates in a honorary grave at the Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery.

Schreker, in Bernhard's opinion, wasn't able to develop a simple idea and had just written nonsense for decades. Yet she was considered an intellectual writer. This fact was not only characteristic for the current degenerate Austrian intellectual life, but intellectual life in general. But in Austria this catastrophic state was even more catastrophic. The repulsive was always more repulsive the absurd always more absurd and the ridiculous always more ridiculous.

Schreker and her partner had pretended to be rebellious, revolutionary and progressive for twenty years while devoting all their energy to running up and down the backstairs of the money-giving ministries.

Schreker and her partner embodied the prolix, imitative, pseudo-intellectual literature Bernhard hated. They might have been loved by fanatically fashionable or imature readers and senile officials of Ministry of Culture but Bernhard detested them nevertheless.

Of course, I later reflected, it was this attitude, which informed Bernhard's harsh statements in "Alte Meister". I thought of a few of the many examples: "genius and Austria don't mix" and "in Austria one has to be mediocre to have any say or be taken seriously. One has to be a bungler and provincial hypocrite or have a suitably petty mentality. A genius or an extraordinary mind is sooner or later killed in an ignominious fashion." The country was dreadful, and cursed by degradation, hatred, oppression and ignorance.

I couldn't help but think of my half-brother. While I'd gone into the City and worked, albeit briefly, for the Chemical Bank, he'd believed, rather naively as it transpired, that he could depend upon those, whether public or private, outside of the family to support him.

In contrast to his situation, my step-father, disproving the lamentable libel about Jews lacking generosity, had supported me when I'd told him about my disillusionment with the City, with economics and high finance, which had proven to be merely a world of lies, smoke and mirrors.

Was not my half-brother's brilliance, his genius, not incomparably greater than mine? Yet he hadn't been supported and had gone to the dogs on account of this lamentable fact.

He had been given innumerable opportunities to become a professor of art history or a high level bureaucrat in the EU but had refused them on principle.

I remember one particularly passionate letter about Fauvism he'd once penned with his Mont Blanc on Elco paper. He'd lambasted the book written by his professor at Oxford.

"What was Fauvism?" he'd written: "just a word". Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck hadn't "evolved a style". They weren't an "experimental group of artists". Van Dongen had been perfectly right when he'd denied the existence of any kind of doctrine. The use of the term "Fauvism" was a foolish and superficial distortion, a ridiculous falsification and ultimately a deceptive trap. A journalistic label, which should never have been taken too seriously, had been transformed into a whole construct of ideas, ideas which had never actually borne any resemblance to reality.

Instead of studying the individual artists with more care academics could adopt the lazy task of dividing artists into those who were closer and those farther removed from the idea of "Fauvism".

Instead of helping one this artificial construct simply obscured complex reality. This was what my half-brother termed "sloppy thinking".

In the case of Van Dongen he merely found the colors of the impressionists a bit dull. Vlaminck, on the other hand, was profoundly inspired by Van Gogh while for Matisse: "Rules have no existence outside of individuals".

Was it possible to help my half-brother, I asked myself? He'd been so passionate, so idealistic, so uncompromising and so foolishly impractical.

He'd reminded me very much of Van Gogh, who, at the age of nineteen, when he wrote his first letter to his brother, was working in the art dealership of Goupil & Co. At first he'd worked in the Hague and then in London. Rejected in love he'd become religious.

In 1876, after working for seven years in the art dealership of Goupil & Co, and unhappy at the way art was being treated as a mere commodity, he'd been asked to tender his resignation. He was twenty-three at the time.

He'd returned to his family, which is often described as upper-middle class. His father had been a man of the church. Like Van Gogh my half-brother had regarded his youth as austere, cold, and sterile.

He became a supply teacher in Ramsgate of all places (I couldn't help but think of Tracey Emin's Margate) but ended up in Isleworth.

It was here that he had to walk to the East End in order to collect money owed to the school and it was here that he became acquainted, for the first time in his life, with the reality of poverty. This increased his religious fervour and his desire to be a missionary on behalf of the Church.

It was decided however that he should return to the Netherlands, where he was sent to study with his uncle, a respected theologian, in Amsterdam.

The family hoped he'd study theology at the University of Amsterdam but he failed the entrance exam. He failed too to become a Protestant missionary, after a three-month course. Despite this fact his father arranged a post for him close to Brussels.

This didn't work out and he headed further south to the coal-mining village of Borinage. His passionate desire to sacrifice everything in order to help the villagers was looked upon dimly by the powers that be and he was accused of undermining the dignity of the priesthood. After being warned several times about helping others he was dismissed.

In the winter of 1879/1880 he slowly began to realize what his true calling was: to be an artist, and above all else, an artist who portrayed the poor and who worked on behalf of the poor.

### Ohlsdorf

Having slept badly the night before I got up with difficulty in order to catch the 9.56 train to Salzburg. I was on my way to Gmunden, from where I wanted to get to Ohlsdorf. I was not quite sure where to get out in order to change trains.

I walked quickly through Wien Westbahnhof, a building dating from the fifties, with simple sandstone façade, huge windows and numberless clock.

As I got a ticket from a red machine, I was so tired I wasn't sure whether I'd pressed the right buttons, an agitated man started badgering me. I told him in no uncertain terms that I was as clueless about the whole process as he was. I bought my ticket and hurried off to find platform 8 and the train to Salzburg.

People were running wildly in different directions, which complicated my task. I got on the third wagon and searched for an unreserved seat, which was by no means easy. Eventually I found one with a table next to a window.

Once the train started I looked out as dirty, old locomotives, cylindrically shaped transport wagons, shiny, new trains, trees, flats and shrubs flitted past. Inside the train itself pale, thin, poorly dressed youths excitedly talked about football and how "shitty" Mozart's music was.

One of the skinny teenagers, with short, blond hair, a light green athletics T-shirt, beige Bermuda shorts and grey shoes got out a banana and studied it with a skeptical look. He clumsily began to peal while two others gave him advice on how to do so. "What a beginner!" one mockingly exclaimed. After taking a swig of Coca Cola from a huge plastic bottle he put his earplug to one ear, pressed a button on his mobile and closed his eyes.

I looked out at banks of clouds above the pale, blue sky, a light screen of trees, strips of fields in different shades of green, old, derelict farm buildings next to a new car dealership, followed in rapid succession by office buildings and blocks of flats with masts for mobiles and electricity. I then closed my tired eyes. When I opened them again I saw that a bejeweled, carefully coiffeured, heavily set lady, dressed in black, Chanel jacket, pearl necklace, white trousers and black pumps had taken a seat opposite me. After glancing in my direction her face assumed an expression of boredom, discontent and hardness.

I looked out at a cluster of red-bricked farm buildings and stripes of yellow fields. Clumps of trees were followed by a tractor next to a yellow building. The sun glanced off the red roofs of solid looking buildings, glass houses and a yellow van.

The lady began reading from a stack of tabloids, one more low-brow than the next, but soon tired of them. She pulled a carefully packaged, thin slice of melon out of a brown, paper bag and began eating it with a white, plastic fork.

Outside sand, which had been piled high, and industrial buildings with tall, darkened windows, which had grown derelict, passed by.

Once finished with the melon she started rummaging in her black purse, took out a white mobile and phoned a friend. The conversation revolved around her family: "Yesterday I had an argument with my mother. She is always so vicious and devious. It's such a shame! Of course she's not going to change now, not at her age!"

It then turned to her lover: "Peter phoned me at a quarter to six in the morning. I've more or less dumped my lover. The madman tried to phone at a quarter to six in the morning! I really don't know what I should do with him. He's so chaotic. He always postpones. In three years he still hasn't been able to decide. He's very nice and polite but... Now I'm on my way to Ischl to relax. I need rest. They're all killing me."

A huge industrial complex with yellow cranes next to a river, large concrete containers, grey storage facilities, chimneys with white smoke against a blue sky and electric pylons passed by.

My thoughts and imagination were very much preoccupied with the work at hand, the translation, which I continued to work on while the train was in motion.

Reger had mistakenly believed, given his history of illness, that it was he who would die first, not his wife. "She lived a life of health, while I've always lived a life of sickness, of fatal sickness". He'd never seriously considered the possibility that he'd outlive her. He'd always expected to follow her within the shortest space of time. Now he was confronted with the consequences of his error. He'd believed her to be immortal. He'd also been too cowardly to kill himself. Yet he felt he was stronger than ever, his lust for life was fiercer than ever and he lived with a greater intensity than ever. Had he known that she'd die, and die so suddenly, so abruptly, he'd have acted completely differently. That was what annoyed him.

Of course, I reflected, Reger was Bernhard and Bernhard was reflecting on the loss of his "aunt", Hedwig Stavianicek, to whom, as he publicly and freely acknowledged, he owed everything.

We always take people for granted, I couldn't help but think, until they actually pass away. It is only when we actually lose them, and it's too late, that they become incomparably precious. Some memories remain vivid while others are sullied by time.

The subject of death has become so taboo in the modern world, I reflected, that one can't even mention the word in an obituary. Yet I have known those who laugh at death, and even those who laugh at the prospect of their own deaths.

My half-brother once told me that death had taken on two forms in his imagination: a cold breeze over a dark precipice and a black, vacuous emptiness beyond the curtains of a stage.

I wondered what Anne would say to Reger's observation: "Art historians are the real destroyers of art". Knowing how mockingly she spoke of her colleagues and their asinine comments as well as their ridiculous notions she'd probably agree, I reflected. In Reger's opinion art historians "waffle art to death". They "drive art out of the helpless flocks" who wander through museums.

Reger asserted that "the business of art historians is the worst business there is". That not only art history but also art itself is a business was something my half-brother had failed to grasp. Van Gogh had also made the same mistake. Both had believed that only a willingness to give and a willingness to make sacrifices sufficed. Both had ignored the reality of the world around them. It was sad, I reflected, that my half-brother had burnt all his plays.

"The waffling art historian ought to be whipped out of the art world" in Reger's opinion. Anne would undoubtedly agree. The greater the meaningless nonsense the greater the shrinkage of art and ultimately the greater the damage done.

I thought of a letter he'd once sent me. He was angered, once again, about the book his professor in Oxford had written. His professor had gone from the propositions that "all human action is expressive" and "all art is expression", and shown this was true throughout the entirety of art history, to the completely illogical conclusion that the term "expressionist" could only be used for the works of "Die Bruecke" and Kokoschka.

Yet again, the term "expressionism" had been just an advertising gag, a label, a designation for an exhibition, nothing more. Those organizing the exhibition had been, my half-brother had written, most probably at a loss for what to call it. Somebody had come up with the bright idea of the name "expressionism", which was suitably all embracing, banal and meaningless, at the very last of moments.

Ever since academics have argued about the name and which artists should be included under this umbrella definition, and which not, and have completely forgotten the art itself.

Emil Nolde was not concerned with "expression", my half-brother had written. He cared about the "values of nature" and "spirituality". What he wanted, in a world of "complexity", was to create something "concentrated and simple".

Kandinsky on the other hand was concerned with "internal meaning" and "inner resonance, psychological effect", and "inner" or "spiritual vibration". He was, above all else, concerned with the "soul".

Nor was Kokoschka interested in "expression". He was interested in "visions within ourselves", our "ability to conceive them" and our "inner voices".

As for "Die Bruecke" Kirchner had written that what the group was concerned with was the desire to "derive inspiration for work from life itself, and to submit to direct experience". This obviously had least of all to do with "expression".

My half-brother told me once that he'd grown to hate professors as well as critics. All the money and honor went to the former while all the latter seemed to do was dig up dead writers, whose scandalous sex lives they aired, analyzed and then thoroughly discussed in the Sunday newspapers.

Literature was reduced to the level of a banal and ridiculous soap opera. The difficult, yet vitally important, task of actually producing new texts was wholly ignored. Not that there was a shortage of texts. There was simply a shortage of good ones. And part of the reason was the crowding out by the boring, the banal and the superficial.

At university students of literature read secondary texts about primary texts. They never actually had time to read the latter. This meant that they became garbage collectors. There was consequently a shortage of those capable of distinguishing between the good, the bad and the well and truly ugly.

We live in a world of mediocrity, my half-brother once wrote to me. This was not accidental. This was what the kleptocratic corporate world wanted: a uniform, conformist, consumer oriented, brainless, superficial, soulless, deadened, brutalized, insensitive bourgeoisie.

What distinguished the bourgeoisie, my half-brother asserted, was the fact that they isolated themselves from reality. What distinguished the bourgeoisie, my half-brother claimed, was the fact that they haven't the slightest trace of a conscience. They were quite incapable of feeling for their fellow man my, half-brother wrote. Without the bourgeoisie neither Mussolini, Hitler, Thatcher, Reagan, Blair nor Bush would have been possible. Without the bourgeoisie, my half-brother charged, Auschwitz would never have been thinkable. Without the bourgeoisie it wouldn't be possible to murder 100,000 a day. The bourgeoisie, my half-brother complained, was psychopathic and genocidal in its tendencies. The bourgeoisie, my half-brother lamented, would destroy the world with its stupidity and cupidity.

I knew very well at the time that my-half brother regarded me as being a member of that unfortunate class. I was angered by his insults and consequently didn't respond to his provocations. Above all else: it was he and not I who'd once been an ardent Thatcherite. It was he and not I who'd argued that trade unions be banned. How ironic, given his fate, I couldn't help but think.

One of the things I least understood about "Alte Meister" was its discussion of "fragments" and "the whole". I was not quite sure what Bernhard meant by it. What did he mean when he wrote: "The greatest pleasure we have is from fragments, as only then do we feel the greatest pleasure in life. How horrible is the whole and the perfectly finished? Our age is, as a whole, intolerable. Only where we see a fragment, is it bearable". The perfect was unbearable and thus even the paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum were, in Bernhard's eyes, basically appalling.

The perfect, in Bernhard's opinion, not only continuously threatens us with our destruction it destroys everything we term a masterpiece. Only by finding fault and by reducing a so-called perfect work of art to a fragment is progress possible.

He'd found serious errors in each of the so-called masterpieces, none of which had proven whole or perfect, and this fact reassured him. Only when he'd realized there was no such thing as the perfect and the whole, did he think there was a chance of survival.

It was the failure of the great composers, writers, artists and philosophers, their helplessness, which inspired feelings of love.

The closer I got to Ohlsdorf the more my thoughts revolved around the question of the Bernhard's house.

Karl Hennetmair, who was working as an estate agent, had placed an ad in the Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten and the Salzburger Nachrichten that the Vierkanthof, four-sided farmyard, Obernathal 2 in Ohlsdorf was up for sale.

Bernhard had responded to the ad with a postcard. At the time he'd been with his "aunt" Hedwig Stavianicek on holiday in St. Veit.

On the Epiphany of 1965 Bernhard viewed the building. He arrived at eleven in the morning and by one thirty had signed the pre-contract. Bernhard wanted a means of subsistence should his career as a writer end. He also needed his own space. At the time he was living out of a suitcase.

The building, which had once belonged to the monastery of Traunkirchen, had first been mentioned in 1325 and was due for demolition in April 1965. The sellers, the Asamers, wanted to use the land to grow corn.

The purchase of the property, which cost 200,000 Schillings, was financed with the help of the 10,000 Marks (70,000 Schillings) Julius-Campe-Prize Bernhard had got for Frost in 1963. His "aunt" Hedwig Stavianicek provided 70,000 Schillings, and the Ministry for Education and Art supplied a loan of 30,000 Schillings, which Bernhard failed to pay back for eleven years.

He also succeeded in blackmailing his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, into giving him 40,000 Marks, which was necessary for both the purchase and the renovation (250,000 Schillings).

By September 1965 Bernhard wanted to sell the house. It demanded too much of his time and energy. It also excluded a number of possibilities and had become a terrible burden.

The problem was: it should never have been sold to him in the first place. The Assamers, who sold it, didn't have the deeds while only a farmer was entitled to own the building. Bernhard only owned it two years later, in 1967. Only then could he actually sell it.

Property is invariably a burden, I couldn't help but think. The need for security is clear yet any possession, great or small is as much a curse as a blessing.

I could perfectly understand how the wealthy I knew suffered from the severest of depressions. All they wanted to do was escape from the burden of property. Not a few committed suicide. Not a few were reckless and foolhardy.

One friend, who went into venture capital and warned me of the crushing boredom of the "grey suits" of the City, a warning I foolishly ignored, went on holiday to Thailand. He deliberately went into the jungle although he knew perfectly well that his health was delicate. He didn't survive the encounter.

Another group of friends went sailing in a boat in the midst of a storm, although all four were drunk at the time. They too didn't survive.

Of course consciousness of wealth, privilege and security creates the emotional need to take risks. Hence the large number of well-to-do drug addicts.

The truth is that many of my wealthier friends despise life and have ended their dreary and dull existences at a relatively early age. Too much security, this I knew from my own experience, is a bad thing.

Once in Gmunden I realized that I should have taken more care with my planning. It was a bigger town than I'd anticipated and I was completely disoriented. I saw a tiny streetcar but had no idea where it was going and was too foolish to ask. Before I'd resolved to do so it was on its way.

Eventually I found the right path, a winding road, passed the famous porcelain factory, passed prosperous looking houses with tennis courts, and eventually arrived at the lakefront.

As I sat on the terrace of the Seehotel Schwann I studied the numerous tourists on the shore, the sailboats on the lake, the small Schloesschen in the distance and the mountains with their shades of azure, grey and green.

The sound of loud music drifted over from two white marquees, while ruddy faced pensioners with ill-fitting clothes sat at the next table, drinking beer. Close by were a group of cyclists with blue and red helmets, drinking mineral water.

I finished the cream soup as well as the celery and beef ragout, with chanterelles, quickly and made my way to Bernhard's house in Obernathal, Ohlsdorf.

When I arrived the courtyard was half in shadow. I walked through the rooms with photos of the building when it was more or less a ruin and a video in which Bernhard, with his tongue very much in his cheek but maintaining a straight face, stated without shadow of doubt, that he wasn't protesting against anything, that he was perfectly content and his happy existence, a Catholic one.

I passed through an old barn for young animals, with a black Puch bike, a new barn, which could accommodate up to 180 people for a performance, passed a cellar, where Bernhard stored cider at 5 degrees, a tractor with green trailer, a hayloft and an arched vestibule with larch floor. It had taken, I learned, ten years to restore the house.

Of course, I reflected, Bernhard had always had a plan B. He bought the house so that, if necessary, he could survive as a farmer, should his career as a writer take a nosedive. Without this financial independence it would have been impossible for him to write with such passionate honesty.

I passed a cloakroom with a weatherproof cape for rain, a few jackets, hats and boots, and a kitchen, which had once been a stables.

I couldn't help but think of "Holzfaellen", "Woodcutters", when I saw the Ohrensessel, the wing chair. Next to it was a lamp, a black phone and a small, black trunk, which had once belonged to his mother. I thought of his words: "my farmhouse hides what I do. I have bricked it up and bricked myself in. Rightly so. My farmhouse protects me".

The dining room was furnished with a table and chairs that had once belonged to a hotel. This didn't surprise me in the least. The whole house, with its light curtains, tiled stoves, and spotless floors, had the air of a hotel. There was nothing comfortable or cozy about it. It was almost as though Bernhard had never wanted to actually relax within his own four walls.

I thought of his words: "I prefer to be alone. Basically, it is an ideal state. My house is like a giant prison. I like bare and cold walls. It helps my work. What I write is like the house in which I live. Sometimes it seems that the individual chapters in a book are like the individual rooms in this house".

There were three wing chairs close to a record player in the parlor and, in a glass showcase, porcelain from Turkey, Portugal and Spain. Engraved on a tray was the title of the play: "Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige". Close by were shotguns and rifles as well as a portrait of Joseph II.

Bernhard is frequently considered a child of the Enlightenment, I reflected, and the whole house expresses the austere simplicity of Josephenian architecture.

Of course there was his famous collection of hand-made shoes, his cupboard full of shirts, ties, pullovers, and jackets and his bottles from all over the world.

I thought of Canetti's description of the house. It was little wonder that the two writers didn't remain friends.

"Three wing chairs. Twenty pairs of shoes and boots. Emptiness. Forty small beer glasses. Emptiness...No animal in the whole building...The big white barn: empty. Six rooms below: empty. Nobody ever cooks. Hygiene of emptiness. Books in a single room above: counted on a wall, up to half the height, and hygienic. Meyer's Lexikon, old edition, the Bible of modern literature. Grammophon next to the image of the mother: classical music fills the whole house..."

I passed through a bedroom, with its table with inlay work, Rococco Lady, masked lamp, tiled stove, Biedermeier mirror, Empire cupboard, and spruce floor.

There was a picture of Schopenhauer behind a lamp and one of Voltaire above the TV in the TV room, with its floor of larch, small table and couch.

I thought of Bernhard's words: "My own life, my own job, my own day seems to be monotonous, repetitive and meaningless".

I passed by the glass case with first editions, photos of Bernhard's mother, of his grandfather: Johannes Freumbichler, and his inherited typewriter.

In the next room was a small library, consisting merely of fifty works, a typewriter, and his record collection: Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Bruckner, Chopin and Dvorak.

I couldn't help but think of the case of the neighbor, Johann Maxwald, who claimed to want to build a pigpen just a few meters away.

The agricultural engineer from the farmer's union claimed that it was the only feasible location for the pen.

When Bernhard offered to help pay for the expense of it being built elsewhere Maxwald immediately responded: "With money you can fix anything, we can talk about it".

He was immediately told by the agricultural engineer to shut up. In the eyes of Bernhard's friends it looked very much like an attempt at extortion if not pure blackmail.

When Bernhard blurted out that he would be ruined Maxwald retorted: "Others have to croak before I croak".

It summed up so much of what my half-brother had told me about the Austrian mentality. It reminded me of the story of his next-door neighbor.

Born and raised in the country she grew bitter at the cruelty, meanness, and brutality of the people living there. In order to survive she had to drink the milk directly from the cows and would have perished had it not been for the kindness of a baker.

The people she worked for didn't care whether she lived or died. They were only interested in making money on the black market and little else. She moved to the city, was bombed out twice and only miraculously survived.

The son she bore in the aftermath of the war was murdered by his wife, a greedy, materialistic and deceitful woman from Salzburg and the police had refused to investigate.

My half-brother had told me of another case, of a family of perfectly respectable lawyers.

The son, egged on by his greedy, unscrupulous and materialistic wife, had killed his own mother in order to get control of a valuable piece of property. Again the police hadn't investigated.

When Bernhard thought the plan to build the pigpen would go ahead he broke down and cried. He wanted to tear down the building he'd spent so many years renovating.

Eventually the matter was settled when Bernhard paid Maxwald 100,000 Schillings, which was a considerable sum at the time. His own house had cost twice the amount.

Maxwald, was, I reflected, the embodiment of the dark side of Austria. It was little wonder that Bernhard hated it so much.

The most interesting objects in the guest room, with its view of the courtyard below, were the pictures above the bed of heaven and hell. This was ultimately what Bernhard was all about, I reflected. It had been the title of one of his volumes of poetry: "Auf der Erde und in der Hoelle", "On Earth and in Hell."

I studied the pictures of people being buried or burned alive. Here was Bernhard's consciousness of the omnipresence of death and his vision of the world as a hellish place in a nutshell.

### Eckel

I walked into the restaurant Eckel, in the Sieveringerstrasse, in Vienna's 19th district, half an hour before the appointed time. I was due to meet an American journalist called Ben to talk about Thomas Bernhard. It was one of Bernhard's favorite restaurants, being not far removed from where his "aunt" and he had lived: in the Obkirchengasse.

To the right was a brightly lit traditional "Stueberl", with wood paneling and to the left were two lamps, a mirror and a huge bouquet of artificial, pink roses.

I passed a fish tank with dark trout, a long, grey couch upon which children played with gadgets, a showcase with glasses and walked toward a garden at the rear of the restaurant.

All the tables in the garden were reserved so I took one inside. I studied the saffron roses, the dull, orange and brown striped chairs, grey carpet, white sloping ceiling, large, square lamps above the tables, inbuilt cupboard, with rail and coat hangers and couches. I imagined Bernhard sitting here.

On the walls were water colors showing vineyards, old houses, a church, a man drawing wine from a cask, a couple in a carriage, a beggar, a pair of drunks, various figures, some elegantly attired, some in rags, a man playing an accordion, one holding a Maypole, others singing and playing guitars, groups of old women in shawls huddled under trees, and one of their number selling wares.

To my left was a big French window, which permitted cool air to flow into the room. An army of waiters hurried feverishly around the garden and, in their nervousness and excitement, were perpetually knocking against tables. Many of the guests were regulars and the waiters greeted each with a curious mixture of familiarity and deference.

I studied the huge, old poplar and chestnut trees, their twisted trunks weathered by time, the bright, red flowers against the wall, the folded umbrellas, the black, metal chairs with green cushions and tried to imagine the scene as Bernhard might have seen it.

I could picture him sitting in my chair and pointing at the various guests, who were invariably, and rather suspiciously, speaking in hushed tones.

Who is that, an acquaintance of Bernhard might ask? The vice-chancellor, a Nazi. And that? The editor of a leading newspaper, an old Nazi. And that? The president, an old Nazi. And that? The Minister of Art, an idiot. And that? The chancellor, an idiot.

I turned my attention to the menu and studied it attentively. I was unsure whether to have the baked rabbit with mixed salad or the grilled octopus and shrimps with garlic and rice. Other options included crab with dill sauce and rice, fried char with herbs and potatoes, pike-perch with spinach and creamed potatoes, turbot with lemons, chanterelles with eggs and green salad or venison and mushrooms. I decided to wait and ordered an apple juice, which was excellent.

As I waited for the American journalist, I reflected on Bernhard's idea, which was conveyed to the then chancellor: Franz Vranitzky, in this restaurant, on how to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss.

Bernhard's concept was to put plaques on each building that had been aryanized, forcibly taken away from their Jewish owners.

The journalist Ben, who termed himself a "sunny boy from California" and a "surfer dude", arrived on time and was extremely amicable.

"It's all about the picture we have of something, right? Am I wrong?" he stated, after I'd asked him about his view of journalism, "and that's where I come in, O.K.? Sometimes we get news fast, sometimes it's slow but it's always indirect. We treat the picture like it was the environment, right? We believe a picture to be true. We act accordingly, O.K.? But the problem is: we forget why we believed in it in the first place. You get it? It's really simple!"

"I mean: take the rich and famous. What are they? Real? Or just fictitious? They're just symbols, nothing else, just constructions. What I want to find out is who Thomas Bernhard really was, what he was really like, you get me?"

"We all live off fictions and symbols. That's what people don't realize. There ain't no facts, man. That's the truth of it."

"There are some kind of events somewhere, O.K.? We don't see them and they're kind of complicated. All we have are ideas, O.K.. Do you get me? It's my job to shape those ideas."

"What kind of an idea should the great American public, who can't read German, O.K.?, and who probably don't know where Austria is, and who don't know which is bigger: Austria or Germany, have about Thomas Bernhard? That's where I come in. I shape the idea. You get it?"

"Hey, but we're here to talk about you and Thomas Bernhard. Tell me about him."

I told him exactly the same story, without the slightest embellishments, I'd told the Russian poet and picked up the narrative in the year of my brother's birth: 1967.

My half-brother was born exactly the same time as Bernhard was in hospital. The latter complained about the monotony and the heat. His stay there meant that his summer was "botched" and the whole year "stupid".

The only, somewhat cold, comfort was that Bernhard didn't have cancer but rather sarcoidosis, Boeck's disease. My half-brother also suffered from it but whereas it only affected his lungs and he was cured it affected Bernhard's heart and ultimately killed him.

I told Ben what the causes, in the case of my half-brother, had been and strongly suspected that they applied to Bernhard too: undernourishment, neglect and overwork. He simply hadn't looked after himself.

Bernhard was, I explained to Ben, still toying with the idea of abandoning writing. He even termed himself a farmer and was a member of the Farmers' Federation.

He lamented at the time that, in the space of just fifty years, Austria had been reduced to complete and utter insignificance. It was a regrettable fact, in his eyes, that Austria was a victim of the "world proletarian revolution". Culture, he drily commented, "is incompatible with the concept of the proletariat".

One has to realize, I explained to Ben, that Bernhard was mourning a culture, society and country, which had long disappeared. He contrasted the present with a golden age of the past: the age of Musil, Wittgenstein and Schnitzler, and found the present very much wanting.

The Austrians had failed to take advantage of either the fall of the monarchy or the fall of Hitler and were ruled by what Bernhard termed a "perverse-impotent-narcissistic bipartisan dictatorship".

It merely helped hurtle the country into an ever-deeper abyss. Austria's destiny, in his eyes, was to be a cartographic nothing, a political void, a nonentity in terms of culture and art.

When talking of his art he said: "everything is artificial in my books. All the characters and occurrences are on a stage and the stage is totally dark...when lit the contours become clearer, everything becomes clearer against a background of darkness. One distinguishes", Bernhard stated, "not between good or bad people but between good or bad actors".

Bernhard was often regarded by his contemporaries as something of an actor, I explained to Ben, who liked to play different roles. He was a player and his art always has, however serious the matter it is dealing with, a playful aspect. Perhaps one can even say: the more important the subject the more playful Bernhard's approach.

"There must be nothing whole", Bernhard asserted, "one has to destroy it. Something successful, beautiful is always suspicious".

What he hated was what one might term kitsch and what he termed perfection.

"I hate stories", Bernhard said. "I destroy stories. If I see a story developing I kill it in its infancy."

His style was somewhat conservative, a return to the nineteenth century in many respects, I explained to Ben. Bernhard had little time for the self-styled "avant-garde".

He was not though, I said, interested in telling a story in the way it might have been told a century before. What he wanted to do was to develop, in a musical sense, themes. At the same time his approach was, I explained, in the tradition of Robert Musil and Proust: essayistic.

A short story or novel would have an introduction, then the first theme would be introduced. Then there would be either a development of the first theme or a transition to the second. At the end of the book the themes would be recapitulated, much like a coda. His structure and architecture, I explained, often borrowed a lot from the structure and architecture of music. He himself said: "It's a musical process. Phrases, words are constructed. It's basically like a toy. One puts things on top of one another. One builds four, five floors, like a kid, studies it, and then, like a kid, destroys it. Yet just when one thinks one is rid of it a new novel emerges, like a cancer, out of one's body and gets bigger. Basically a book is like a malignant growth, a cancer."

To understand Bernhard, I explained, one has to understand the way he thought and he thought, above all else, in musical terms. For him the musical component counted more than the story itself. As he put it: "What I'm concerned with in art is the so-called musical form...Nothing else interests me. I invent nothing. I've never invented anything".

Schopenhauer, who had a huge influence on Bernhard, argued that all art tends toward music. When Bernhard pushed prose and drama in this direction it was very much part of a Schopenhaurian philosophical program, I explained.

What he was doing was exploring the world with the help of musical structures. At one and the same time these musical structures remain separate and independent from the world itself and ought not be identified with it. Their virtue lies in their artifice not in their verisimilitude and it was their artifice Bernhard was proud of.

Bernhard was not interested in factual accuracy and thus his works are littered with errors. This didn't bother him in the least. He terms Kettenbrueckengasse, where he once cleared out a cellar for a few pennies, Kettenbrueckenstrasse or Kettenbruecken.

Bernhard never portrayed the world in which he lived, I told Ben, he played with it, much in the same way a child might play with a toy.

His works were not models of the world but rather sounding boards. His books were invested with Bernhard's own personal observations, thoughts, feelings, and above all else: passions.

He termed all his works "agitations". Although he rarely used material that was not autobiographical his works were autonomous and artificial constructs.

This often led to misunderstandings, most notably the scandal surrounding "Holzfaellen", "Woodcutters", when those who felt themselves portrayed: the Lampersbergs sued on account of their resemblance to the main figures of fun: the Auersbergers.

They failed to grasp what Bernhard was doing, I explained to Ben, and they failed to understand that he was playing with reality rather than describing it.

There hadn't been, for example, a dinner hosted by the Lampersbergs in the Gentzgasse. The fact that the novel was read, rightly, by contemporaries as a Roman a clef, didn't help.

The Auersbergers were inspired by the composer Gerhard Lampersberg and his wife. The choreographer was inspired by the figure of Joana Thul, who'd committed suicide eight years before the book was written.

Her husband had been inspired by the tapestry artist Fritz Riedl. The poet Jeannie Billroth was inspired by the poet Jeannie Ebner, who, ironically, was delighted by the publicity the scandal generated, the poet Anna Schreker was inspired by Friederike Mayroecker and her partner was inspired by Ernst Jandl. But inspired means just that, I told Ben. Nothing more.

What caused Bernhard's anger, and what created the initial impulse for the novel, was a fight between Bernhard and the Lampersbergs at the home of Christa and Franz Josef Altenburg in a place called Breitenschuetzling, which is not far removed from Ohlsdorf.

Bernhard asserted that it was their own fault that the Lampersbergs had failed to become famous. This the Lampersbergs hotly denied.

They, in turn, claimed that Bernhard owed all of his success to them. It was they who'd helped him. It was they who'd provided him with the connections and it was they who'd introduced him to good society. This was only partly true and piqued Bernhard's pride.

It might well have been the case that without the help of others he couldn't have achieved anything but to denigrate and discount his own efforts was an infamous lie. They themselves had had the means and the connections at their disposal but had failed to utilize them. They'd remained artist manques.

They will only go down in history, I explained to Ben, as the infamous couple who'd tried to destroy the great Thomas Bernhard.

I couldn't help but ask myself the question, relevant to my half-brother, as to what constitutes success and more exactly: artistic success?

What were its necessary ingredients? Why had the Lampersbergs failed but Bernhard succeeded? Obviously money wasn't everything.

I have known many rich friends who've tried to write. They failed precisely because they were rich. Too much security is the death of art. Yet not enough is also disastrous, as both the cases of Van Gogh and my half-brother showed.

In the work of Bernhard emphasis plays an important role, I explained to Ben. Some things are emphasized, by means of italics, others not. Repetition is also significant. Some things are repeated, others not.

In the case of "Alte Meister", "Old Masters", the introduction is the meeting of Atzbacher, the narrator and Reger, the hero, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Museum of Art History. One of the first themes concerns Irrsigler, the warder in the museum with whom Reger is befriended. From Irrsigler the theme passes over, almost seamlessly, to the themes of Austria and what Bernhard terms "Kunstgeschwaetz", or bullshit about art, which is then developed. The focus of the novel then returns to Reger and this theme is pursued. The theme of Reger is then contrasted with the theme of Austria, in a contrapuntal fashion. The theme of the restaurant, in Hotel Ambassador, which sadly now is merely a clothes store, is then introduced and developed etc. etc.

Most important of all for Bernhard was being able not only to compete with his contemporaries, he jumped for joy when his rival: Heimito von Doderer died, but also past masters. The authors Bernhard most admired, and who he used as his personal benchmarks, were: Musil, Pavese, Ezra Pound and the Russians. Once he said: "I was in Stuttgart where I went to see a Chekhov: Three Sisters. I thought: that could have been from me only I would have done it much better. I would have been much more concise..."

His competitive streak made relationships with contemporary authors, from which he could well have profited, such as Handke or Canetti, extremely difficult. It was his fierce competitiveness though, his naked ambition, which turned him into the world-class writer that he was.

Despite numerous reversals and problems with his health Bernhard slowly became a wealthy man.

In March 1971 he acquired a small farmhouse called Krucka, for a purchase price of 250,000 Schilling ($200,000) located in a place called Grasberg and in November 1972, he got a place called the "Quirchtenhaus" in Niederpuchheim for 315,000 Schilling ($260,000).

He didn't actually have the money for the latter. He simply borrowed it. He went to a bank and lied shamelessly. He pretended that the house had once belonged to his family and that he didn't want it ending up in the hands of strangers.

He piled up debts in order to force himself to write, I explained to Ben. He couldn't otherwise do it.

The important thing to understand about Bernhard, I told Ben, is that he was an absolute individualist. He once said: "every person is totally different. There are no two people in the world who are alike. No philosophy is valid beyond its inventor. What Kant wrote is all very nice and good but it's just one individual's philosophy and is only valid for that self-same individual. That hundreds, thousands or millions of people accept it, soak it up like a sponge, and make it their own is another matter. That doesn't necessarily make it true..."

His intense subjectivity colored his judgment. Consequently his pronouncements must be taken with a pinch of salt. When he happened to do a lot of work abroad he said that he "always" worked abroad. When he happened to work at home he said that he "always" worked at home.

### Kunsthistorisches Museum

I thought long and hard about Atzbacher's statement: "I've always been happier in the world of art than in nature, which terrifies me. I've always felt safe in the world of art".

This was the exact same idea, albeit more elegantly formulated, that my half-brother expressed.

Like Bernhard Atzbacher had been brought up by his maternal grandparents. As to whether he was, like Atzbacher, actually happy in his childhood, is something we'll never actually know.

Bernhard's grandfather undoubtedly represented the world of art and it is perfectly feasible that Bernhard felt secure in this world and most secure, and perhaps happiest, in the world of music.

My half-brother termed himself a neo-classicist. He had a low opinion of human nature, put much emphasis on civilization, education and politeness, and was wary of what he termed "emotional outbursts". This was on account of his mother's drunken rages. He had little time for what he termed "romanticism".

His wariness of emotion however was hardly to keep him in good stead when it came to questions of friendships and love.

His mother's rages and his sister's tirades not only destroyed his self-confidence, they left him in emotional turmoil and rendered him not a little misogynistic. He had a profound fear of womankind.

He was, in many respects, an emotional cripple and was profoundly unbalanced. He invariably went from one extreme to another and was never quite able to find the golden mean.

He was either too passionate or not passionate enough, either too confident or not confident enough, too anxious or not anxious enough, too trusting or not trusting enough. His judgment was invariably appalling.

He lurched from one mistake to the next and one catastrophe to the next. All his plans went awry.

This was undoubtedly due to the absence of a father figure in his life. There was nobody he could go to for advice. There was no role model he could emulate. On the contrary: he hated his father.

At one point I simply gave up trying to help my half-brother. It all seemed perfectly pointless. Perhaps, I reflected, it had only been a question of time before he'd put an end to it all. He'd been a suicide waiting to happen.

Undoubtedly his life as a warder had helped him. It had given him a sense of order and stability, and, oddly enough, a genuine feeling of self-worth.

The tirades of his mother and sister had completely destroyed his self-esteem and he needed time, desperately, to rebuild it.

Museums provided a shell within which his persona could recover from the shocks of the world. Yet, they had, and this I argued vigorously at the time, cut him off from reality. What he needed to do was to focus on his career.

I reflected on Bernhard's observations of visitors to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Some groups didn't "go through the museum, they ran through it", and "were completely uninterested in what they actually saw".

"The French walk in a rather bored fashion through the museum, Bernhard wrote, the English pretend they know everything, the Russians are full of admiration while the Poles look at everything with a sense of pride."

"The Germans study the catalogue while they walk. They pass the originals on the walls, and pay them scant attention. They crawl ever deeper into the catalogue until they've reached the last page, by which time they've left the museum."

The Austrians, and especially the Viennese, Bernhard observed, rarely go to a museum, and if they do it is almost invariably with a class at school.

It was the schoolchildren my half-brother feared most of all. It was they who were most aggressive and most destructive.

Bernhard blamed the teachers, who he termed "brutish, vacuous petit bourgeois", who suffocate any real interest the children might have in art "with their pedantic narrowness". Their effect is quite "devastating". Having visited a museum once they never do so again.

Teachers don't just, in terms of art, "annihilate and inhibit". Instead of showing children that life is an "inexhaustible source of riches" they destroy all hope in them.

For my half-brother, the son of a teacher, for whom education had once been sacred, this was a bitter truth he'd been forced to accept. It was one more disillusionment that brought him ever closer to the grave. He felt betrayed, he once told me.

For his mother, who had the zeal of a missionary, teaching was a quest to bring enlightenment and civilization. She helped people, or so she thought.

My half-brother came to see education as brain washing. We are, he once told me, simply conditioned to become tax-paying slaves, nothing more. Was that, he once asked, a meaningful existence?

He always spoke of what he termed: the three ecstasies: art, sex and religion. Without them people are driven to drink and drugs.

This was also, he told me, quite deliberate. Without religion as an opium governments had turned to opium itself to dull and destroy.

There was nothing accidental about the epidemic of drug abuse just as there was nothing accidental about the creation and spread of AIDS. Only a fool, he once told me, thinks drugs are cool. I called him a "conspiracy theorist".

For Bernhard "teachers are poor creatures, whose mission in life seems to be to obstruct and depress the lives of the young".

Worst of all: "teachers are the henchmen of the state". In Bernhard's eyes the Austrian state and its teachers are "mentally and morally crippled". They merely spread "brutalization", "putrefaction" and "chaos".

In Austria, in Bernhard's eyes, this was very much linked to the power of the Catholic Church. Austria, in Bernhard's opinion, was a "Catholic state". It lacked taste and consequently its teachers also lacked taste.

Teachers, Bernhard asserted, are told to teach bigotry, brutality, baseness, maliciousness, turpitude, and chaos. "From these teachers, the students have nothing to expect, other than the hypocrisy of the Catholic State".

All they were capable of conveying was "their ignorance, their incapacity, their stupidity, their inanity". All they did was "stuff the heads of students with garbage" in much in the same way "a goose is stuffed".

My half-brother often lamented the fact that little of what he'd learned at school had been of any use to him. It had been a huge waste of time.

Everything he learned he discovered in the library at home and everything he learned had been due to his own curiosity. He'd only ever found out anything because he'd been passionate about it, he once said.

As to university, he said it had been the wrong kind of training. Analytical, critical and skeptical thought are helpful in as much as they help one understand the world around one but are of little use when it comes to creating the complex structures required of art.

"The state thinks that children are the children of the state", Bernhard wrote, "and acts accordingly, and has been doing so for centuries, with devastating effect."

My half-brother often asserted that he was a victim of the state. The state, he asserted, had deliberately destroyed his family. Even the act of generosity, the so-called "child support", he asserted, was designed to make children loyal to the state rather than to their families.

He claimed that what he termed "pseudo-intellectual feminist nonsense" his mother had been fed with had been designed to destroy his family.

His mother was encouraged to rebel without thinking of the consequences. The consequences were disastrous for both himself and his sister.

It was hardly surprising, he once said, that his sister went not a little crazy, had become completely psychopathic and had become money mad, while his mother had ended up a raving alcoholic.

His mother's decision to go it alone had thrown his world into chaos. It was at that time that he'd started to suffer from anxiety and depression. He'd never recovered from it.

His mother had told him that his father had been a member of the Waffen SS. That didn't bother him in the least, he'd explained at the time. He'd read that the Waffen SS was an elite unit and that the real villains had been the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, who'd been the ones responsible for mass murder.

My half-brother blamed his mother for marrying his father. Knowing full well who he was and his rather lamentable character she'd stayed with him. She'd even decided to have children with him. This was, in his eyes, unforgivable.

That Bernhard himself had a vexed relationship with womankind should hardly surprise anyone. His extremely difficult relationship with his mother scarred him for life.

Bernhard was an implacable enemy of the very idea of the family, never married, never had children, and was sincerely convinced that nobody else should have any either.

In Bernhard's eyes "it is the state that gives birth to children" and it is the state that consequently owns them. "There are no free children, there are only children belonging to the state, with whom the state can do what it wants...The state's children come out of the state's belly and they go to the state's school, where they are taken in by the state's teachers...The state creates, and only tolerates state people...natural man has ceased to exist..."

The state, in my half-brother's eyes, had brainwashed his father as a boy and had turned him into a killing machine. The state had been responsible for starting a war. It had forced his father to kill. The state had then destroyed his father both psychologically and emotionally. He'd returned from the war a changed man, a victim of the state. Rather than helping him in any way the state had abandoned him, as it invariably abandons its "patriotic heroes".

The state was, in my half-brother's eyes, a criminal enterprise and the super-state structures of "One World Government", even more so. Again I termed him a "conspiracy theorist".

Even the art on the walls of the museums was "state art", in Bernhard's eyes. All the works were ultimately products of "Catholic statecraft". All the artists were "mendacious state artists". They wanted to do nothing other than please their clients.

To term Velazquez a "state artist" is not only unfair but inaccurate if only because the state, as we now know it, didn't exist at that point in time. The term is inappropriate for a number of reasons and I was annoyed, from a philosophical standpoint, at Bernhard's sloppiness.

There happened to be an exhibition of works by Velazquez in the Kunsthistorisches Musem and I resolved to go to see it.

In the first room were two paintings of "The Immaculate Conception", which Velazquez painted when he was eighteen, "The Adoration of the Magi" from 1619, pictures of "Saint Paul", "Saint Thomas", and "Saint Peter" but also "Three Musicians", "Peasants at Table", and "The Water Seller", which had no obvious religious or political agenda.

Taking time to study "The Water Seller" and thinking about Bernhard's ideas I couldn't help but think it revolutionary in its implications. Here Velazquez was elevating a simple water seller to the same status as a saint, king or emperor. It was at once quintessentially humanistic and profoundly subversive.

I began to view the other paintings differently. Instead of seeing Don Luis de Gongora the poet I saw Don Luis de Gongora the man. Instead of seeing King Philip IV the king I saw King Philip IV the man. Instead of seeing Infante Baltasar Carlos the prince I saw Infante Baltasar Carlos the child.

I began to study other pictures in other rooms in a new light: especially: "Democritus", "The Buffoon Juan de Calabazas" and most important of all: "Don Juan of Austria". In the case of the latter I'd initially simply read the title and given the painting itself merely a cursory glance. It had seemed a bit odd and somewhat irreverent at first but I'd quickly passed on. Then a thought struck me and I'd returned to it.

The figure was not the actual Don Juan, the victor of Lepanto, but rather a court jester, who'd assumed his name. The irreverence was directed at the entire warrior caste, in the same way that the humor and irreverence of "Don Quixote" had been directed against the elite.

The ruling elite, both Velazquez and Cervantes were telling us, are mere fools while the so-called fools were, in reality, the equals of the so-called kings.

Kings and beggars are not the same, Velazquez and Cervantes were telling us, they are simply different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Velazquez was standing the world on its head. And the whole time I hadn't realized the fact.

Although Bernhard's charges against Velazquez might well have been unjust they might well have applied to Rubens.

I read once that both Velazquez and Rubens had served as diplomats and, in that capacity, had met. Whether this is true or not I don't know but the thought still fascinates me. Perhaps the encounter had been as banal and ridiculous as the meeting of Proust and Joyce. Proust had asked: "Do you know such and such?" Joyce had negated. Proust mentioned other names. Joyce continued saying that he didn't know them. Eventually the conversation petered out and was abandoned.

Of course it goes a long way to explain Joyce's superiority to Proust. Proust overvalued society. Joyce saw it for what it was. He had the clearer eyes and the clearer head.

I walked from one side of the museum to the other and visited a room with works by Rubens. Rubens was, according to what I read, court painter to the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Albrecht and Infanta Clara Isabellia Eugenia, who'd resided in Brussels. The altarpiece for the Jesuit church in Antwerp was the largest painting in the Habsburg collection, and consequently determined the height of the rooms of the museum.

"The Miracle of St. Ignatius of Loyola", dated 1618, at the very start of the Thirty Years War, can hardly be termed a masterpiece. The saint, the Basque knight who founded the Society of Jesus in 1539, and who had only been beatified shortly before it was painted, is in priestly garb. He stands next to the altar and is flanked by what looks like a row of monks. Behind him are classical columns and above cherubs fly. Beneath him are wild looking petitioners, a dying woman and a man who is already dead. The scene hardly makes a pleasant sight.

Next to the work is a portrait of "Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy", who died in battle near Nancy in 1477. His death paved the way for the ascendancy of the Habsburgs.

After that is a painting showing St. Ambrose refusing to allow Emperor Theodosius enter a cathedral because he massacred the citizens of Thessalonica. Given the times in which it was painted this might have been interpreted as a warning directed toward the powers that be that murdering the population might not be such a great idea. If that was indeed the intention it failed miserably.

I sat down and watched the visitors: lightly clad groups of teenagers, couples, mothers with daughters and more serious, slower, middle-aged men.

The next, small, piece was a group of cherubs, which was the very embodiment of kitsch: "The Infant Christ with John the Baptist" and "Two Angels" from 1620. I quickly turned to the next painting. There is one highly noticeable mistake in the imperfect work: "The Assumption of the Virgin Mary", from 1620. At the bottom of the painting is a disembodied foot. Yet this is not its only fault, I reflected. The cluttered and unclear composition irritates, the colors are ugly and the squirming cherubs quite ridiculous.

Neither the "Lamentation of Christ by the Virgin Mary and John" from 1615 nor the "Penitent St. Magdalena and her Sister Martha" from 1620 impressed me much. The former I considered sentimental and ugly while I found the latter positively comical in its caricatures. The occasional family with teenage children passed by as I sat and studied the painting.

The idiotic expression and ugly armor of "Emperor Maximilain I", painted in 1618, a century after his death, didn't endear me to the work in the least. It was his marriage to Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the Bold, which laid the foundation for the success of the Habsburg dynasty.

As I studied the huge painting of "The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier", 1617, the counterpart of "Miracle of St. Ignatius of Loyola", with its chaotic, melodramatic composition, I couldn't help but think that Ruben's skills could have been better employed otherwise.

The saint, in black, on a pedestal, looks down at two men who have just come back to life, much to the amazement of the theatrically attired onlookers.

I returned to the difficult task of translating "Alte Meister". "The so-called Old Masters served only the state or the church, which amounts to the same thing", Bernhard wrote. He also attacked the "so-called great artists as ruthless and mendacious" and let Reger, his spokesman, term the artists, on account of their willingness to bow to the powers that be: "pathetic". At the same time Bernhard was the first to admit that just as "the so-called free man is a utopia...so the so-called free artist has always been a utopia, and more often than not a madness".

This is, for many artists, a paradox they aren't able to deal with. My half-brother certainly wasn't able to do so. He wanted to be independent and was proud of his integrity. He knew full well that the Austrian state only supports art that serves the Austrian state. Yet he refused to serve it. He also wasn't willing to serve theatres the fashionable, superficial plays they demanded. He had even turned down highly lucrative opportunities for working in film. He had no interest, as he put it, in "playing the game".

Yet, I pointed out, it was only by playing the game that he'd be able to survive. Compromises, I explained, are always necessary. I reminded him of the fate of Van Gogh. Did he really want to end that way? He replied that he wasn't a prostitute and preferred death to dishonor. This was to be his motto but also his fate.

Bernhard termed the old masters: "liars in questions of religion" and mere "decorators for the European Catholic powers".

It might be "great painting" but at one and the same time "infamous" on account of its "religious nature", which Bernhard termed "repulsive". These works were simply "painted vulgarity. These artists painted to survive, to make money and to go to heaven and not hell".

Painters have, in Bernhard's eyes, "bad characters" and consequently "bad taste". The "Old Masters" were "corrupt" and consequently "repulsive". Yet he still studied them.

"We are fascinated by a work of art", he wrote, "yet it is, at the end of the day, ridiculous". The same applied to Goethe or any other work of art, if one takes the time to study it carefully that is. Stifter, for example, was just as bad a writer as Bruckner had been a composer.

Stifter's style was "terrible" and his grammar "beyond the pale", while Bruckner's "noise" was "chaotic" and "wild". Stifter's language was "faulty and bungling". His "unclear" and "blurred" prose was "cluttered with oblique images" as well as "foolish and outlandish ideas". His text was "irresponsible" and suffered from a "petit-bourgeois awkwardness".

Bernhard seemed to reserve most of his scorn for two novels in particular: "Witiko" and "Mappe meines Urgrossvaters", "My Great-Grandfather's Briefcase".

I thought of the opening of the latter and translated it in my head. The book begins with a quote by Hegesippus, a chronicler of the early Church: "It is sweet, among immense dwellings, to recall past words and deeds".

"I begin this book", Stifter wrote, "with the help of the Latin quote from the long forgotten Hegesippus and with the help of this book I return to the distant, old house of my father. The quote once played a role in one of my awards at school and for that reason I remember it. I remembered it too while walking in the rooms of my father's house. Our house was full of objects that had once belonged to our ancestors. I really felt the strange joy and pleasure expressed by Hegesippus". The first couple of sentences were cumbersome I had to admit.

I thought about both books and although I found them quaint I couldn't help but think them by no means the worst written by the somewhat dull, dry and pedantic Stifter. His early texts were simply unreadable. How many of his books had I begun and given up out of sheer boredom?

"Even the first lines with their bumbling, frivolous, verbose, sentimental, insipid prose, full of internal and external errors, are an attempt to present the piece as a work of art Bernhard wrote about My Great-Grandfather's Briefcase. In reality it is merely a petit bourgeois Linzer concoction".

Stifter wasn't, in Bernhard's eyes, a genius but rather "an uptight Philistine, a stuffy, petit bourgeois schoolman who wasn't capable of meeting the least demands of language, let alone producing works of art".

Bernhard then passed on to his next theme: Bruckner, about whom he was equally scathing: "Bruckner too was no genius. His music is just as confused, unclear and amateurish as the prose of Stifter". Both were, in his eyes, "sloppy". Both produced a "devout" and "socially dangerous" art. Both produced "rubbish". Both were merely "overrated duds".

The reason for their success was the same: "Sentimentality is now, that's what's so terrible, in high fashion, as is kitsch". This applied to literature, music, theatre and painting.

It also applied to Heidegger, the third theme. In the same way that Stifter, in Bernhard's eyes, had turned high literature into kitsch so Heidegger, "the Black Forest philosopher", had turned philosophy into kitsch.

I thought of some quotes from Heidegger: "The everyday Being to death is as decadent as a permanent escape from it. Understanding involves, as the disclosedness of the there, always the whole of Being in-the-world. Existence depends on a "world" one encounters. Dependence is essential to it's Being".

Of course these sentences were nonsense. Heidegger's words muddied and confused rather than enlightened and soothed an aching brain.

Other sentences by Heidegger make more sense: "Death reveals itself as a loss, but is experienced more by those who remain behind. In suffering the loss it is not the loss of Being that becomes accessible, which the dying man "suffers". We do not really experience the death of others, but are at best merely "present"."

Even at his best, I reflected, Heidegger doesn't come anywhere close to the elegance and economy of Wittgenstein: "Death", says Wittgenstein, "is not an event of life". What Heidegger clumsily tries to express in three long, verbose sentences Wittgenstein succeeds in expressing more precisely with a mere six words.

Of course when thinking of Heidegger I invariably think of Wittgenstein: "Everything that can be thought can be thought clearly. Everything that can be expressed, can be expressed clearly", and: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language".

Although both Heidegger and Stifter were "petit bourgeois megalomaniacs" Heidegger was, in Bernhard's eyes, "even more ridiculous than Stifter". Yet while Stifter was a "tragic figure" Heidegger, by contrast, was merely "comical".

### Leopoldsberg

I went with Heinrich for a walk in the legendary Vienna woods. We started from Leopoldsberg, where King Sobieski had attended mass in a chapel before assaulting the Turks in 1683.

Before setting out we went to a charming restaurant. To my left, below the green, metal railing, lay the city, spread wide at my elbow, beneath the blue sky, with only a few wisps of cloud in it. The sky faded to white the nearer it got to the urban sprawl, or more precisely Vienna's 21st district, to the north of the Danube, Floridsdorf.

Beyond that were, in the distance, the plains of Hungary and the foothills of the Carpathians. The U.N. city was visible, reputedly built over a toxic waste dump, as was its Donauturm, Danube Tower, cloaked in a red ad, which looked like dirty laundry. In the center was a white tower, the Floritower, made all the more distinct by being framed by woodland, and what looked like a lake, the old Danube, behind it. To the left of it was what looked like a modern heir of the Gemeindebau, council flats, a large pink building.

Two boats, one a barge, draped in blue and one white, clearly designed for tourists, waltzed slowly on the grey, green mass of water, which comprised the Danube. I counted seven bridges, spanning both the river and its blue canal.

In front of me were a set of tables, like ours, protected from the sun by orange umbrellas and, at the table closest to us, sat an old lady, with sagging bags under her eyes and sagging cheeks, dyed blond hair and an inexpressibly sad expression in her eyes.

She was discussing her financial problems with her friend, who broadened out, like a sack of grain, from a red head of hair to fill the whole seat of the chair beneath her.

Behind me I could hear French being spoken and, to my right, a group of Japanese men, predominantly dressed in grey, were drinking whisky cokes while nervously studying everything around them with an unsettling intensity.

Shrubs grew in the gravel at the base of the mottled, gnarled and warped trees.

To the extreme right was the Leopoldskirche, which was our next objective, and behind me was another equally old building, this time with grey, flaking façade, Romanesque columns and a balcony. It housed another part of the restaurant, from which delightful odors wafted of what was probably nothing more exotic than fried chicken and Wiener Schnitzel. Behind that was another view of the winding Danube, this time with Klosterneuburg, with its green domes and spires, beneath the trees.

We walked into the church, which, when I first laid eyes on it, reminded me of a Spanish or Mexican pueblo, so strong was the intensity of the sun on its resplendent white façade, and so strongly did the pines remind me of cacti.

In the center, behind the black metal railing, was an altarpiece with a painting of a man looking upwards. To the right and left of him were green columns with Corinthian tops, and beneath that, two gold statues with mitres and crooks.

Above it was, with Hebrew inscription, what looked like a burst of golden rays. To the right and left were grey and pink marbled niches, with statues of saints in white stone.

There was, not a little incongruously, a permanent exhibition in the apse commemorating the fact that it was here, at 4 a.m. on the 12th of September 1683, that King Sobieski had gone to mass before commencing his attack on the Turks, who were then besieging Vienna. Soldiers from both sides as well as their weaponry and fighting techniques were on display.

The siege of Vienna lasted from the 14th of July to the 12th of September 1683. The Turks, sent by Sultan Muhammed, and led by the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, were a force roughly 200,000 strong.

They dug trenches close to the Lowel and Burg bastions and the Burg Ravelin, between where the Hofburg and the Moelkerbastei now are, and encamped in Ottakring and Waehring.

They succeeded in taking the Burg Ravelin at the beginning of September. By this time a 76,000 strong relief force, led by King John Sobieski III of Poland, composed of Poles, Bavarians, Saxons and Imperial troops, was approaching.

There was an interesting facsimile of the original order of battle written by the Polish king, in French, in what had at first been a steady but which had grown increasingly nervous hand, four days before the battle.

He had placed his own Polish hussars, dragoons and infantry on the right flank under Jablonowski, the Bavarians and imperial troops of cavalry and battalions of infantry, under Max Emanuel and Waldeck, in the center, and the Imperial, Austrian and Saxon cavalry and infantry, under Lorraine, on the left.

On the 12th of September they attacked the Turks. The Duke of Lorraine, on the left flank, attacked the Nussberg while the Saxons struck in the middle, advancing through Sievering and Poetzleinsdorf, and the Poles attacked the Gallitzenberg on the right flank.

Despite falling back to a second line of defense, along the line of roughly Dornbach – Heiligenstadt, the Turks were incapable of either preventing the Saxons from capturing the Tuerkenschanz fort or resisting a charge of the 20,000 strong Polish cavalry, between Breitensee and Hernals.

Having failed in a last attempt to take the Lowel bastion and routed in the field the Turks were forced, by the evening, to quit the field, with a loss of roughly 15,000 man.

We left the church and, along with the other tourists, viewed the city from the red-bricked parapet. I could only make out the newly built Millenium Tower, on the bank of the Danube, and the gleaming gold of Hundertwasser's incinerator, pumping white cloud into the atmosphere, amongst the urban sprawl, above which a haze hung, similar to the one which cloaked the surrounding hills.

Only with great difficulty could I locate the tiny, but dense, mass of the Stephansdom, which had once been the highest point in the land.

Between us and the city were vineyards with regular lines of vines. It was rather as if someone had crosshatched, in green, the hills. Amongst the vineyards were villas with red roofs.

We walked down the steep, winding, path, the sun behind us, toward the city, which the closer it grew, the more audible it became.

The path was made up of old, greying tarmac, broken by occasional steps, with a flaking, green railing to the right and a concrete gully, with dry leaves in it, to the left. Above and around us were the protective branches of berry bushes and trees.

It was a magnificent high summer's day. There were fresh breezes and the air seemed especially clean.

"It was from here, as well as from the south and west" Heinrich explained, "that the Soviets attacked in April 1945."

"The Austrian resistance, led by Carl Szokoll, had been pressed by the Soviets to launch an uprising but nothing came of their efforts. A number were captured and hung at Floridsdorf am Spitz. Their number included Major Karl Biedermann, Hauptmann Alfred Huth and Oberstleutnant Rudolf Raschke."

"The Soviet troops were given training in house to house fighting and received grenades, Molotov cocktails and pole charges."

"Each regiment was given a district, each battalion a quarter and each company a few streets as their objective."

"Some of the Viennese attacked the German troops with hot water while others served as guides and couriers for the attackers. Doors were locked to those Germans looking for cover while those who deserted were immediately given civilian clothes to wear."

"Fanatical Nazis, even girls from the German Young Women's Federation, and young boys from the Hitler Youth volunteered to fight while others threw themselves out of windows in suicidal desperation."

"Orders were given to destroy the water works, the electricity generators and all transportation but they were ignored. The Buergermeister: Hanns Blasche, declared the facilities off limits."

"The German troops, mainly Waffen SS, were forced back and took up positions along the Danube Canal. This saved the inner city from being destroyed."

"In the ensuing chaos shops and banks were plundered while Stephansdom, the Stock im Eisen Platz, the Kaerntnerstrasse and the Singerstrasse were set on fire."

"Yet miraculously, only a small portion of the city, roughly 10%, was actually destroyed in the fighting."

We stopped at a very charming, very small, Heuriger, which specialized in serving the wine from the new crop of the year. It was little more than a wooden hut and a few benches fenced in, situated on a particularly exposed side of the hill, with fresh breezes around it, and a splendid view of the city below.

"This is where, when not in Moedling, Beethoven came to compose in the summers, and where Bernhard took long, brooding walks. Indeed, not far removed, in the Grinzinger Friedhof, cemetery, was where he was, alongside Mahler, amongst the other Geistesgroessen, great minds, buried."

I requested to see the cemetery and we did. I had been expecting the name Thomas Bernhard to be all over the place, rather like Jim Morisson's, in Pere-Lachaise.

To my surprise, although there were two lists of famous artists who were buried there, the most illustrious of the many illustrious guests, Thomas Bernhard, appeared on neither the one nor the other. This was despite the fact that from the names listed, including those of von Ferstel, whose monument was in a distinctly historical style, Sacher Masoch of Mascochism fame, Doderer, the architect Sicardsburg, and the actors Aslan and Hoerbinger, I had only heard of a fraction.

The grave of Mahler was not difficult to find. It was probably the most unprepossessing in the whole cemetery, which seemed to have a love of earthly pomp and display.

Around the simple granite slab and overgrown grass was a hedge, which needed clipping, and just a few pink, red and blue flowers. It was a charming cemetery as were most in Vienna.

Only after much searching did we actually find the grave of Thomas Bernhard. It came as something of a shock when I saw the names engraved there, which included not only Bernhard's and Hedwig Stavianicek's but also that of her former husband. They had formed a silent, eternal, menage a trois.

The next place we went to was the so-called Heiligenstaedter Testament house in the Probusgasse, around the corner from where Bruno Kreisky had once lived.

I opened the low, brown, wooden door, with its ornately curved handle and was surprised to see a charming cobbled courtyard, which stood in the shadow of a large tree.

Next to the tree were stairs leading up to the exhibition space. The only thing Heinrich did was to silently point at the text placed under a sheet of plastic:

"For my brothers Carl and Johann Beethoven. O you men, who hold or declare me to be malignant, obstinate and misanthropic. How you wrong me. You don't know the secret reasons for that, which makes me appear so, my heart and disposition having been, from childhood onwards, always disposed to the fine feeling of benevolence, even the accomplishment of great deeds, for which I have always been inclined. But just think that I have been suffering, for 6 years, from a hopeless condition, made worse by the folly of doctors, from year to year betrayed in the hope of improvement...to an abiding illness that... (the cure of which might take years or, indeed, may be impossible) forced me, although I was born with a fiery, lively temperament, ever susceptible to the distractions of Society, to isolate myself early on, live a lonely life, and if I wanted to, now and then, set myself apart from all that. Oh how I was, then, repelled by the doubly sad experience of poor hearing. It wasn't possible to say to people: speak louder, scream, because I am deaf. Oh how was it possible for me to admit to the weakness of that one sense, which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense, of which I once had a greater degree of perfection, a degree of perfection that few in my profession have ever had... Therefore forgive me, if you see me recoil, when I would very much like to be with you. My misfortune causes me double woe, in that I am misunderstood. Relaxation in society, fine discussions, the effusion of ideas have no place in my life. I venture into society just as much as is absolutely necessary. I have to live like an exile. If I get close to a social gathering I become fearful. I fear the danger that my condition will be noticed – that was how it was when I spent this half year in the country. Asked by my sensible doctor to spare my hearing it coincided with my own inclination. Driven by a desire for society I sometimes let myself be lured into it. But what humiliation, when somebody standing next to me could hear afar a flute and I nothing, or somebody heard the singing of shepherds and I, again, nothing. Such incidents brought me close to despair. It wouldn't have taken much and I would have put an end to my life. Only art held me back. Oh, I couldn't believe it possible to leave the world before I had brought forth everything I was inclined to. This is how I spent this miserable life – truly miserable. I have a body so sensitive that a sudden change can transform me from the best to the worst of states. Patience – that is what is necessary. I have to choose it as my guide. I am patient, continually. I hope my decision will be to endure until inexorable fate decrees that the thread be broken. Perhaps things will get better, perhaps not. I'm ready – already forced to be a philosopher at the age of 28. It is not easy for the artist, more difficult than for anyone else. Divinity, you look down upon my inner self. You know it. You know that there dwells within me a love of humanity and the disposition to do good. Oh you, when you once read this, think that you have done me wrong, and the Unhappy One, he comforts himself with finding one similar, who despite all the impediments of nature, still did everything in his power, to be accepted into the ranks of worthy artists and human beings. You, my brothers Carl and Johann, as soon as I am dead, and Professor Schmid, if still living, ask him, in my name, to describe my illness, and add this sheet to the history of my sickness, so that at least part of the world is reconciled to me after my death. At the same time I declare you both to be the heirs to my small fortune, if one can call it that. Divide it fairly, and get along with and help each other. The wrong you have done me, you know to be forgiven long ago. I thank you, my brother Carl, especially for the evidence of your devotion you have displayed of late. My only desire is that you live a better life, without worries, than I. Recommend virtue to your children. It alone provides happiness, not money. I talk from experience. It raised me in my poverty. And besides I thank it both my art and the fact that I never put an end to my own life – good-bye and love one another. Thanks to all my friends, especially Prince Lichnowski and Professor Schmid. I would like one of you to look after Prince L's instruments, though this shouldn't give grounds for argument. As soon as they can serve some useful purpose, sell them. How happy I am when, even buried I can be of use to you. This is how it should happen. Happily I hurry toward my death. If it comes before I have the chance to develop all my artistic talents, it will still come earlier than I would wish, despite my harsh fate. And I would prefer it at a later date – though then I will also be content. Will it not free me from an endless condition of suffering? Come, when you want to, I meet you with courage. Goodbye and don't wholly forget me. I have not earned it, having often thought of you, to make you happy, it is-

Ludwig van Beethoven

Heiligenstadt

on the 6th of October 1802

### Mauthausen

I bought my ticket from a red ticket machine at Westbahnhof, went up the escalators and looked at the screens to find the platform from which my train was due to depart.

The train, which was made up of new and old cars, was destined for Bregenz. Nearly all the seats were reserved. Eventually I found one that wasn't.

As I sat waiting to depart I thought about Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz's diary concerning life in Dachau, kept at considerable personal risk, which he began in November 1942.

He wrote of how 500 "invalids" had arrived. 51 had perished in the course of the six-day journey, 49 soon after arrival, while two had been eaten. The prisoners had begun to suffer from delirium and had begun to eat one another.

In Dachau he wrote, 10 died a day while in Mauthausen the average was 50.

Dachau was one of the first concentration camps built. It was created in March 1933 to house political dissidents: Communists, Socialists, Liberals as well as Monarchists.

Construction of Mauthausen, with labor from Dachau, was begun in August 1938. It was intended to house the intelligentsia from what had once been Austria and Czechoslovakia, especially the Communists, Socialists and Anarchists, and was designed to literally work them to death, hence its nickname Knochenmuehle, bone-grinder, and its classification as a Stufe III, Grade III camp, the toughest in the Third Reich.

Poles, Spaniards, Russians and Hungarians all arrived there in the course of the war.

When not dying of exhaustion or hyperthermia prisoners were thrown against electric wires or pushed off a high cliff the Germans nicknamed Fallschirmspringerwand, parachutist cliff.

I recalled something Heinrich told me: a majority of young Austrians wanted Mauthausen reopened.

A young, pale man with glasses and white headset, in light blue T-shirt and short jeans, put his backpack and mat up onto a transparent rack. He then got out a plastic bag with food and began to eat.

Another young man, tanned, in white, printed T-shirt and tartan Bermuda shorts, studied his mobile.

A couple, he in dark blue T-shirt, dark Bermuda shorts and moccasins, she in a black dress, fed their two children.

Would they care, I asked myself, if Mauthhausen were reopened? Did they care that their clothes were made in sweatshops? Would they care if people were gassed to death? Probably not.

What if all these people, I thought, were to end up in Mauthausen? What if they starved on this train? Would they eat one another? Were we all potential cannibals? The past seemed curiously present.

Coffee, orange juice, pizza and cake were consumed, football and parking discussed while children started to scream.

I stared out at the stumpy buildings, the red and grey trains passing by and the scattering of clouds in the light blue sky.

While the lady in the black dress energetically cleaned her son's arm with a tissue one of the young men pushed his hairy knee up against the table before working feverishly with his thumbs on his tablet. The other young man tilted his head back, closed his eyes and dropped into his own world.

I reflected on Wittgenstein's observation that we are each our own universe. Is our isolation complete, I asked myself?

My half-brother had suffered from appalling loneliness. It had made his life unbearable. Wittgenstein's too. I recalled how a relative had once noticed in what a bad state Wittgenstein had been. The latter had resolved to throw himself off a bridge. The former had accosted him, begun a conversation and had accompanied him home. That undoubtedly had saved his life.

My half-brother complained that he'd suffered from such terrible loneliness and such depression at university that he'd been quite unable to speak.

He'd met an acquaintance and had literally not known what to say, so lost was he in his own world, and so heavily burdened by his own inner gloom.

Of course, he explained to me, it was his loneliness that had led him to the theatre. Giorgio Strehler, for whom loneliness was oppressive and nightmarish, had explained theatre in terms of loneliness and our innate need to overcome it.

The fact that he'd never found acceptance in the world of the theatre and had never flourished in it was to prove my half-brother's doom.

My half-brother complained that he was treated like a concentration camp prisoner by the company he was working for. By that he meant that he was basically a slave. What if the future of mankind, for the children in the carriage, was slavery, I asked myself? And what if Heinrich was right? What if the aim was population control? What if everyone on this train would be culled?

Trees in different shades of green, a bank of grass, blocks of flats, and electric transformers flitted by.

Red and green barriers, a cement factory, piles of wood, lorries, a truck carrying Ottakringer beer, a silo, a tractor, a garbage truck, white windmills, and a smoke stack with a white and red chimney passed by.

The woman in the black dress cradled the head of the girl in her lap and looked out of the window with a look of care. Now and again she studied the photos in a magazine. After a while she fell asleep and the children were left alone to entertain themselves.

A bank of flowers, red slanting roofs of small houses, huge blocks of flats with masts for mobiles were followed by a bus station.

The couple hurriedly screwed tops back onto bottles, got their children ready and closed their bags in preparation to get off the train.

It was one o'clock and we were at Amstetten. I thought of the story I'd read about in the papers.

Josef Fritzl held his daughter captive in an underground apartment in Amstetten for around 24 years. Over this period he repeatedly abused and raped her. The first time he raped her she was eleven years old. He fathered seven children, three of whom he adopted and three of whom were held underground.

Surely it was no accident that the son of a victim of Mauthausen, his mother had been incarcerated there for attacking a policeman, would behave this way, I reflected? Brutality perpetuates itself.

His mother had locked him in a dark room and had beaten him until he'd bled. Years later he revenged himself upon her.

There was something very Austrian about the case, my half-brother had commented at the time: the authoritarian patriarchal family structure, the brutality, the coldness, the lies, the willingness of so many to collaborate, the indifference toward the fate of the children. It had all reminded him very much of his own family.

He witnessed the maltreatment of children on countless occasions, he told me. It was quite usual for Austrian fathers to beat their children. Why, he once asked, given the brutality of the Austrians toward one another, should it surprise anyone that they should behave equally brutally towards others?

I thought of Bernhard and how badly he'd been treated by his stepfather. What a contrast to the way I'd been treated by mine, I couldn't help but think!

After a quarter of an hour I arrived in Linz. After that the train carried on into Bernhard country: Wels, where his half-brother had worked as a doctor, Attnang-Pucheim, Voecklabruck, and Salzburg. At Linz I caught a bus for Mauthausen.

Mauthausen is heavy set and lies low in the beautiful countryside, with long, brown, solidly built, stone walls, atop of which watchtowers and barbed wire are intermitently interspersed.

Nothing remains of the camp for the sick, the sport and exercise square, the quarters for the SS or the fire-fighting pond. The place of execution, most of the barracks and the workshops have also disappeared. The Nazi eagle, which once sat astride the portal has long been torn down.

I walked through the entrance. To my left was a round tower that looked more like a viewing platform for tourists than anything else and to my right was a tall watchtower, which reminded me of the ancient Romans.

I walked through the courtyard, with its huge, brown doors and lamps, passed the commandant's office and walked up to the second entrance, which is flanked by two squat, square towers.

To the right of the towers is the Klagemauer, Wailing Wall, where newcomers were lined up and had to stand for days on end. They were chained to iron rings and had to turn their faces to the wall.

One plaque commemorated the murder of General Karbischew, who was forced to undress in February 1945. Water was poured over him until he froze to death. His body was then burned in an oven.

There were other names: Marin Chilom, Edmund Hirsch, Dr. Emerie Mezei and Filip Weiss and other plaques commemorating Greeks, Spaniards, Bulgarians, Poles, Czechs, Swiss, Slovaks and Roma and Sinti who'd perished here.

The laundry building, with its dimly lit rooms, low ceilings, brick floor, corroded pipes, oven and shower was dark and sinister.

It was a beautiful summer's day outside yet the rays of sun proved incapable of penetrating its dismal, nightmarish gloom.

The few remaining huts, with exhibitions, were harmless in comparison. Not even the most hellish photos could convey the horror of that space.

### The Medici

I went to an exhibition about the Medici, who supposedly made their money as apothecaries before turning to wool and banking, and who patronized the best artists of their day.

It did not take me long to find Palais Harrach, designed by Domenico Martinelli at the end of the seventeenth century.

I walked under the black baroque lantern, passed the large, white, tiled stove and the cloakroom's wooden counter, bought a ticket, and ascended the red-carpeted stairs, with its rococo urns at both the top and bottom of the balustrades.

The first room, with its five landscapes, painted above the doors, dark, panelled walls, and huge chandelier was somewhat airless.

The next, with its large mirrors, marble-like surfaces, rococo gilded decor, white ceiling, ornate, parquet floor and massive chandelier equally so.

The third, with its black, marble fireplace was even more airless than the others.

I looked at the objects in the room associated with Lorenzo de Medici. The first thing that struck my eye was his death mask from 1492, the year of both the fall of Granada and the "discovery" of America.

The second was a cup of petrified wood and sardonyx, which is associated with honour, courage, and success. The third was a bowl of red jasper, symbolizing insightfulness.

The fourth was a vase of the violet and grey. The fifth: a painting from Botticelli's workshop of "Madonna with Saint Dominic, Cosmas, Damian, Francis, Laurentius, and John the Baptist".

I imagined Easter Sunday 1478, when the Pazzis, with the support of the Pope and the Archbishop of Pisa, had tried to murder the Medicis in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Flore.

It seemed likely that Giuliano de Medici, who was sick, might not come and two of the plotters: Francesco de Pazzi and Bernardo Baroncelli returned to the Palazzo Medici, where they persuaded him to attend mass.

Pazzi put his arm around Giuliano in a friendly manner while Baroncelli contrived to bump seemingly accidentally against him. After they'd ascertained that he was indeed wearing neither armour plaiting nor mail they accompanied him to the cathedral.

At a given signal Bernardo Baroncelli plunged his dagger into Giuliano's side. Falling against Francesco de Pazzi he was attacked by him too. Stumbling toward the exit to the Via de Servi Giuliano collapsed, having been stabbed nineteen times.

Two priests then approached Lorenzo, who was twenty meters away from Giuliano, outside the choir, on the south side of the altar. One grabbed him by the shoulder but only managed to wound him lightly on the neck, below his right ear. Lorenzo drew his sword and wrapped his cloak around his left arm.

Others in the church intervened and one of them: Francesco Nori, was killed by Baroncelli.

Jumping over a light railing, which enclosed the octagonal choir, Lorenzo ran in front of the altar to the north sacristy, where his friends succeeded in closing the heavy bronze doors on his attackers. While Baroncelli, Pazzi and the priests fled Antonio Ridolfi sucked the wound in Lorenzo's neck lest it be poisoned.

Machiavelli, who was a witness to the scene, later wrote that the cause of the conspiracy was Lorenzo's decision to deprive the Pazzis of the inheritance of Giovanni Borromei.

What would have happened had the Pazzis succeeded? Could there have been a Renaissance without Lorenzo, I asked myself?

Lorenzo, who was interested in poetry, rhetoric, music, and philosophy, was a true Renaissance Man.

I imagined the discussions the seventeen year old Michelangelo and Marsilio Ficino had at Lorenzo's table. The latter was a translator, with Lorenzo's financial help, of Plato and Plotinus.

Ficino defended the immortality of the soul against what he considered to be the growing threat of Epicureanism and Averroism, especially the idea that the soul wasn't eternal. He argued that a "World Soul" was "imminent in the material world, imparting motion, life, and order". He asserted that matter was less real than those incorporeal entities, such as souls and forms, which transcend the senses. He undoubtedly told Michelangelo that material qualities were "mere shadows that come and go like the reflections of lofty trees in a rushing stream". At the time the young teenage sculptor was commissioned by Lorenzo to make "Battle of the Centaurs" (1491–1492), a theme suggested by Poliziano, translator of Epictetus, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch and Plato.

Another question concerned the influence of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose ideas Pope Innocent VIII had termed "heretical", "scandalous" and "offensive to pious ears".

According to the Pope Mirandola "reproduced the errors of pagan philosophers, inflamed the impertinence of the Jews" and favoured arts that were "enemies to the Catholic faith and the human race".

Mirandola might have talked to Michelangelo about the "Chaldean books of Esdras, of Zoroaster and of Melchior". He may also have mentioned the mystical Hebrew Kabbalah and the late Classical Hermetic writers such as Hermes Trismegistus.

He probably told him that there were "no limits to what man can accomplish. A sacred pride should grip us of not being satisfied with the mediocre but to strive with the exertion of all our strength to attain the highest".

He may have urged him to "scorn what is of this earth, and hasten to the proximity of the sublime deity".

What did Leonardo da Vinci, who reputedly visited the home of the Medici and, through them, knew Marsiglio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle, mean when he wrote: "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me"?

And why did Lorenzo send Leonardo as his ambassador to Milan? Did he want to get rid of him? Perhaps this was a gesture of generosity and diplomacy, similar to his sending of Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Pietro Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli to Rome to paint murals in the Sistine Chapel — a move that was interpreted as sealing an alliance between Lorenzo and his erstwhile enemy Pope Sixtus IV.

I thought of Sandro Botticelli, who'd been commissioned to paint the traitors of the Pazzi Conspiracy. It was Lorenzo's cousin who commissioned him to paint "Primavera" (c. 1482) and "The Birth of Venus" (c. 1485).

I thought about the Greeks, such as Argyropoulos, who translated: "Categoriae", "De Interpretatione", "Analytica Posteriora", "Physica", "De Caelo", "De Anima", "Metaphysica", "Ethica Nicomachea", "Politica"; and an "Expositio Ethicorum Aristotelis", and about how Lorenzo's agents tried to acquire classical works from abroad.

Most intriguing and fascinating of all was the thought that Savonarola had been invited to Florence by Lorenzo on the advice of Mirandola, and that he'd also been a friend of Botticelli.

The ascendancy of the Medici was not to last. Lorenzo's eldest son and successor: Piero "the unfortunate" acquired his name because he was forced to flee Florence in November 1494, in the wake of the invasion by King Charles VIII of France.

At the time Savonarola was at the height of his influence. He headed a delegation to meet Charles in order to persuade him not only to spare Florence but also to reform the church.

The tide against Humanism turned. Both Mirandola and Poliziano were poisoned the same year while the Medici were expelled and their property plundered. While Piero took refuge in Venice his brother Giovanni travelled to Germany, France and the Netherlands.

I thought of Heinrich's idea, that there was a dialectic between the Florentine and Venetian models. The Florentine model involved investing in manufacturing. It aimed at increasing the size of the population. This was its means of increasing the wealth of the state. The Venetian model by contrast focused on trading in commodities and sought to reduce the population. It was the Venetian model, Heinrich suggested, which currently dominated.

I also thought of my last visit to Florence, just a few years before.

I traversed the forty-five rooms of the Uffizi in just one hour. It was extremely difficult given the crowds and the guided tours and not altogether a pleasant experience. How changed it was to the Uffizi of my childhood, which I'd loved so much!

Yet to my surprise I found I enjoyed many of the early masterpieces, such as the "Ognissanti Madonna" by Giotto or "The Madonna in Majesty" by Cimabue more than previously. My taste had most definitely changed. I was also surprised to find a portrait of "Martin Luther and his Wife" by Cranach.

I thought of Heinrich's theory: that Protestantism had been a creation of the Venetians shortly after the War of the League of Cambrai, fought between 1508 and 1516. Protestantism had been a means of dividing their enemies and causing chaos.

During the war Venice had been nearly eradicated by a coalition of the Papal States, Florence, the Duchy of Ferrara, the Duchy of Milan, Aragon, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and England put together by Pope Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere, the "Warrior Pope".

While Julius wanted Romagna, Emperor Maximilian I wanted Friuli and Veneto, Louis XII wanted Cremona, and Ferdinand II wanted the Apulian ports.

After the Uffizi I went to a café called Colle Bereto on the Piazza degli Strozzi.

As I sat at the cafe I studied the Strozzi palace, which was used for exhibitions, such as one by Ai Wei Wei. He'd hung nine, red rubber dinghies from the side of the renaissance palace, which had been built between 1489 and 1539. Its fortress-like appearance was no accident.

The Strozzis, who'd acquired their money through banking, had been the wealthiest family in Florence, until that is, the Medicis had banished them in 1434. The Medicis, although poorer, had succeeded in getting control of the government and had succeeded in eliminating their rivals.

The palace had been started by Filippo Strozzi il Vecchio (1428–1491), who'd been a banker and soldier of fortune before reconciling himself with the Medicis and returning to his native city in 1462.

It had been finished by Filippo II (1488–1538), who married the daughter of Piero di Lorenzo de Medici, "Piero the Unfortunate". Although married into the family he became one of the leaders of the uprising against it in 1527.

I sat at a square white table on a white seat, which also formed the wall of the café. To my right sat a dyed blonde beauty, in white top and denims, with angular face, Amazonian body and a look as hard as nails. Occasionally she threw a look in my direction. Out of boredom she tapped with her mobile phone on the table. The funky, Italian disco music coming from the four speakers obviously bored her.

A young couple arrived and sat at another corner of the café. Before long they were kissing and photographing themselves while doing so. The blonde beauty looked at the young couple not a little enviously, as did the black clad, North African waiter, who'd seemed unhappy enough before their arrival.

Alternately the young couple stared into one another's eyes, kissed, caressed one another or dealt with banal matters like handbags or mobile phones. In the distance a church bell chimed and a dog barked. It was hot and close but the clouds no longer looked as threatening as before.

The blonde girl, an orange cocktail sitting in front of her, rubbed her lips, stroked and straightened her hair before lighting up a cigarette. She looked pointedly in my direction. She could have been out of a film by Antonioni, I reflected. There was an air of melancholy, a whiff of loneliness about her.

I reflected on the history of the Medicis. Piero died in 1503, drowned in the Garigliano River while attempting to flee the aftermath of a battle, which the French, with whom he was allied, had lost.

At the same time Giovanni, who'd been educated at his father's court by Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, was commencing his career within the Church. Giovanni succeeded Julius as pope, naming himself Leo X in 1513.

In the next room I saw portraits of two of the four Medici Popes: Leo X and Clemens VII, by Domenico and Valore Casini from the beginning of the seventeenth century. I couldn't help comparing the former unfavourably to the portrait of Leo X by Raphael I'd seen at the Uffizi.

Leo was confronted with renewed alliances and crises, whether they were the French and Venetians fighting against Milan, the French attempting, once more, to conquer Naples or Suleiman the Magnificent renewing war in June 1521.

Yet all these problems, and an attempt by cardinals to poison him, didn't prevent him traveling around Rome at the head of a parade featuring panthers, jesters, and Hanno, a white elephant. Nor did they prevent him spending on retirement homes, hospitals, convents, discharged soldiers, pilgrims, poor students, exiles, cripples and the sick. Above all else: he was a generous patron of the arts and learning. In 1515 the first Greek book printed in Rome appeared.

Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici, the bastard son of Giulimo and Leo's cousin, who was also educated by Lorenzo, became pope in November 1523 and adopted the title: Pope Clement VII. Like Leo before him he was caught up in the wars between France and the Empire, supporting Francis I after he'd captured Milan and deserting him after his annihilating defeat and humiliating capture at Pavia in February 1525.

His switching sides came too late and didn't prevent the imperial troops, including 6,000 Spaniards under Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, and 14,000 Landsknechte under Georg von Frundsberg, sacking Rome in May 1527.

A third of the population was murdered in just eight days, and only a heroic rear guard action by the Swiss Guard saved the life of the pope.

Close by the portraits of the popes was the picture by Jacopo Chimenti of Catharine de Medici marrying the second son of Francis I.

Next to it were paintings by Francois Clouet of Henry II and Catherine de Medici. Below them was a casket decorated with scenes from Christ's life by Valerio Belli made of gilded silver, enamel, engraved mountain crystal and silver given by Clemens VII to Francis I on the occasion of the marriage of his niece, the granddaughter of the most unhappy Piero. They were both just fourteen at the time.

I walked on and studied an oil portrait by Alessandro Allori of Cosimo I in armour, one in mosaic made up of marble and jasper by Francesco Fernucci del Tadda and a bronze bust from the workshop of Baccio Bandinelli.

Nearby were pieces of armour made in Innsbruck, a battle-axe from Egypt and a receptacle for incense, which were said to have once belonged to Cosimo.

On one wall was a large tapestry, over six meters wide and four high, from the tapestry workshop founded by Cosimo, depicting a boar-hunt and on the other a Mameluke carpet that was ten meters by four.

Scattered around the room were various objects: a falconry cap, a tiny marble of a "chastened cupid", a marble of Hercules with an apple, a bronze by Benvenuto Cellini of "Ganymede riding atop an eagle" and a reliquary made of rock crystal, niello, enamel and gold.

I thought of Cosimo I, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Maria Salvati, who married Eleonoro of Toledo, and who, when he turned the Palazzo Vecchio into the Palazzo della Signoria, painted over the ceiling of the Sala dei Cinquecento commissioned by Pietro Soderini with images celebrating his own military and political successes. So impressed was he with the work of the young Giorgio Vasari that he commissioned him to build the Uffizi.

In an adjacent room were portraits of Francesco I, heir of Cosimo, and his wife: Johanna of Austria, a daughter of emperor Ferdinand I and sister of emperor Maximilian II. Beneath them were bowls of lapislazula, armour and a dagger.

I thought of how Francesco I had, in contrast to his father, shown little interest in politics and devoted his time to collecting, how his marriage failed to produce an heir, his son: Filippo died at the age of five, and how he'd married his mistress, Bianca Cappello, once his wife had died.

In the next room were portraits of Ferdinando I and Christina of Lorraine. Fashions had changed. Instead of the fur-lined jacket Francesco and the patterned dress Johanna had worn, both Ferdinando and Christina wore a ruff, and their attire was relatively plain and sombre.

Close by were sketches by Bernardo Buontalenti for the costumes of nymphs and sirens in "La Pellegrina", a comedy by Girolamo Bargali, which had been staged in Teatro Mediceo in the Uffizi to celebrate the marriage. On a wall was the coat of arms of the Medici, with its distinctive five red balls combined with the Fleurs de Lys in the form of a tapestry on the one hand and a stone mosaic on the other.

There were mosaics of landscapes and biblical scenes, a cup made of emerald, gold and enamel, and a spoon of agate, karneol and gilded silver. On an adjacent wall was a portrait of Francesco di Ferdinando I as a child painted in 1597.

In the next room were portraits of Christina of Lorraine as a praying widow and Claudia of Lorraine, the daughter of Catherine de Medici and Henry II who married Charles III of Lorraine.

I thought about how Ferdinando had, although the fourth son of Cosimo, inherited everything once his brother: Francesco had died. He'd been a cardinal in Rome at the time. In order to secure an heir he married Catherine de Medici's niece: Christina of Lorraine.

The next part of the exhibition was devoted to the era of Cosimo II, a student of Galileo, who died at the age of thirty-one. It included portraits of him and his wife: Maria Magdalena of Austria by Cristofani Allori, his son Francesco by Justus Sustermans and a bust of him out of porphyry by Mattias Ferrucci. In addition to that were paintings, on stone, lapis lazuli, and canvas of subjects as different as a scene from Orlando innamorato, Persian hunters and peasants being transformed into frogs.

In the middle of the room was a casket of ebony, gilded bronze with painted lapis lazuli, upon which were depicted scenes from the New and Old Testament. Next to it were an agate dish, a nautilus shell cup, a bottle made of red jasper, a silver reliquary, armour breasts, and a steel horse.

On the walls were tapestries, out of wool and silk, depicting a competition to hit a target with a lance in the Via Larga and a game of football on the Piazza Santa Croce from the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The next section of the exhibition was devoted to Ferdinando II, and included a portrait of him in armour, his face scarred by the pox, portraits of Vittoria della Rovere as a child by Justus Sustermans, who Ferdinand, although a cousin, married, a head of Medusa, stone mosaic table tops, a jasper cup, a female bust made of agate, chalcedony, lapis lazuli and amethyst, swords, daggers, and a portrait of Charles of Lorraine Duke of Guise, who was murdered by the French King in 1588.

There were also portraits of Cosimo III as a child, Margarethe Luise of Orleans, a map of Italy dating from the seventeenth century, a portrait of Claudia Felicitas, still lives of flowers, bronze medals, allegorical paintings of justice and peace, a cup made out of Rhino horn, red vases in various shapes and sizes, and an ornate hunting rifle from the end of the seventeenth century.

I thought of how Cosimo III was regarded as the beginning of the end of the dynasty, not least on account of his failed marriage with Margarethe Luise of Orleans. The latter, a cousin of the French King, thought her husband a bigot, a hypochondriac and most probably an idiot. She left him and returned to France.

The last section of the exhibition was devoted to the downfall of the dynasty and above all the failed marriage between Gian Gastone, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Anna Maria Luisa, Kurfuerstin von der Pfalz. It included a portrait of Gian Gastone by Niccolo Cassana, and bronze statues of Christ being baptized, virtue struggling with vice, the rape of the Sabines as well as Laocoon.

The family seemed cursed. Ferdinando, the eldest son died young and it was left to Gian Gastone, the third child born in the unhappy marriage of Cosimo III and Margarethe Luise of Orleans to carry on the family tradition.

Abandoned by his mother at the age of four, raised by his grandmother Vittoria della Rovere, he was forced to marry Anna Maria Franziska von Sachsen-Lauenburg when he was twenty-six. He moved to Bohemia to join his wife but when he returned to Florence, ten years later, it was without her. Reputed to be a homosexual and, without a doubt, an alcoholic the dynasty died with him in 1737.

### Franz West

One morning I went with Heinrich to a press conference with Bill T. Jones, who I have long admired as both a dancer and a choreographer. Heinrich had to write an article for a newspaper and thought the event might interest me. It did.

To my surprise he was the only one who posed any questions. I was somewhat shocked at the seeming lack of interest on the part of the Viennese journalists.

I noticed how a couple of older gentlemen nodded off while others smiled cynically among themselves. Few took any notes while the majority seemed to treat the occasion as simply an opportunity to enjoy a cup of coffee and a piece of cake among friends.

That one of the great dancers and choreographers of the twentieth century was in front of them was a matter of indifference. Perhaps the Viennese, I reflected, lacked an understanding of or a passion for dance.

When asked whether art was an affirmation of life Bill T. Jones replied: "Oh yes – I really think that dance is the greatest expression of the human spirit."

"I find that a lot of art, a lot of it started in this city, a lot of ways of looking at art in the twentieth century had to do with concept, the idea. A lot of my work on the other hand has to do with the heart."

"Why do we dance? You know. People think everyone can dance. We go to a disco. We dance to seduce, right?"

"But then I'd like to have a dance that is like the dance in a culture which makes the rain, a dance that makes babies come, you know? Of course I'm not that but how do I get that sense of communal, maybe even a tribal, feeling in each work and that's what I truly believe in and that's the thing which has helped me recover from the great sadness of loosing Arnie Zane, dancing. So it is an affirmation for me."

Asked about the relationship between art and looking he replied: "Well you know I'm frustrated right now with dance because I would love it to be as free as walking into a gallery and seeing an installation. I can look if I want to. I can walk around it. I can leave. I can come back. But theatre is not that way. You pay your money. The door's open. You sit down. The curtain comes up. You have to watch. Either you like it or you don't. The curtain goes down and you go home."

"Yet I am constantly looking for how do we make it a contemplative experience, period, without being so stylized and slow or how does it stay rich and visceral but yet it's like a bit of a contemplative experience."

"A piece like "Ursonate", maybe. "Bluephrase", yes. A piece like "Some songs" is designed for my dancers to give to you from their hearts, from their bodies. It's designed for you to enjoy the dancing but some of the pieces are really designed for you to look at them as you would at a painting or listen to music."

"I do want you to look at a stage full of people mind you. Don't assume they are anything. They are people, dancing. They aren't machines, they aren't ideas, they aren't musical notes. They are people, dancing, because I think people are sublime, you know, spiritual things."

Asked as to whether dance is a question of tension and relaxation he replied: "The essence of life is. Sex is. Growing old, being born is. I'm sixty-five now. When my body is at rest it doesn't want to move. I have to go from being at rest to make it move. And it resists me every inch of the way and this seems to be what I'm learning about life, I mean when I meet people. How do I share the view of what I feel."

"There is a tension in my ego and your perception of it and how do I make us one? And it's very true in dance also. Duets are very attractive to make but I don't want to make duets about conflict all the time."

"I like very much the poster of the festival but I wonder if people always think that dance is...This is a mating ritual, right? I'm not interested...I don't want to do that."

"I think that people think that this is what dance is about: f...king – the world thinks that that is what we are about: f...king, and I think there is another metaphor there too – about opposites and all, but I'm trying to understand how to talk about other things that we do that involve this tension. You know what I mean?"

"A lot of people feel that dance is very narcissistic, about sex, always. Basically that's what they think it's about and there is nothing wrong with sex, it is a great driving engine but somehow it's harder for us to rise above it, to move away from it."

Asked about his principles or methods of construction he replied: "Well I'm very improvisational in my thinking. I work from moment to moment. I'm very interested in asymmetry. I have a distrust of symmetry. Maybe because I tend to be a very symmetrical person. So I'm constantly thinking about the potential of throwing things off balance."

"In the work for José you will watch sometimes how he will repeat a movement several times but every time he repeats it, it is somehow slightly different. A lot of the improvisation is made in my body and I never do anything exactly the same. So that's the principle of living in the moment, realizing it."

"Who was it who said you can never step in the same river twice? How to give the impression that what you are seeing is being made for the first time. That is a guiding principle."

"They say that art should always surprise you. I don't know if I always succeed but I'm trying to understand: what is the nature of surprise? I don't know you. How do I know it's going to surprise you? So maybe that's a principle also."

"I torture my dancers all the time when we do a simple movement. I always say: that was good but it was too easy. Now let's make it more difficult and they think that's perverse but me I think it's a way of pushing, of looking for new solutions."

Asked about the qualities of a good show he replied: "I think it's got to have a certain clarity. I think it has to have a certain aspect that is never resolved. It's a very twentieth century way of looking at things, I know."

"I learned a lot from working with Mozart's music for the Lyon Opera Ballet. Mozart always resolved. Here, in the twenty-first century, we distrust resolution and I think that I'm a very twenty-first century person but I'm at war with that because I need in my life now resolution. I need to find something to really believe in and to trust but it shows. I see it in my sequences. Things always sort of fall apart or are left unanswered. To a twenty-first century person this is true."

"I worked with Trisha Brown and the way she would build in one movement after another, very slowly, until she got this thing, that's her great genius."

"My genius, and I think I'm good, is in the moment of dancing...I'm a repository of what modern dance has been dealing with, of a lot of that because of what I have studied and my position."

"I started dancing in the early seventies. I studied contact improvisation. I studied Cunningham, Grant, Ballum, the Humphrey-Weidman technique, and lots and lots of improvisation. I can do those things. They are part of me. So when I dance to Mozart or when I dance to Stravinsky I'm having a dialogue with them, a very rich dialogue. Rather than throw it away I frame it, I stop it and then I have to go inside of it and analyze it to teach it."

"I was born in 1952. Brown vs. Welfare education was 1954/55. The march on Washington was in '64. Stonewall, the gay liberation was in 1969. Merce Cunningham became the Senior at a time when I was just beginning to study what dance was. Merce was already establishment. Judson Church. All of those experimental art forms. My generation came directly after that. So all of that is dumped into us and we lived in a little crucible that was an art ghetto. So we were constantly creating ourselves, recreating ourselves."

"I think that a lot of that is in my muscles, a lot of struggle in the last, forty, fifty years are literally in my muscles and you see it when I dance to Mozart, you see it when I dance to Beethoven and I think that that's something that I am proud of. But...I don't want to throw it to the eternal spaces anymore. I want to capture it so I can share it with somebody else knowing that they're going to make it different."

Asked whether the key to good choreography is knowing when to leave the individual dancer space to develop and knowing instinctively when to be supportive he replied: "You'd be a very good director. That's exactly the truth. I think that people, like children, need boundaries and they also need a challenge that says to them: I dare you to jump over this boundary. And when they try you say: No, I don't believe you. No, try it again. That is what a good director is. I think a person who sets up boundaries and also a place where people feel safe. Feel safe to test those boundaries."

Asked what he expected and demanded of his dancers he replied: "I expect that they are compelling human beings. Make me interested in you, in your questions. Then technically. Can they cut the demands of the choreography. And, are they a bit crazy? In other words, do they want something badly. The way José would act that material was exactly what I was looking for. I could see him every day grabbing it, taking it till it was his. He is a stage animal. The meaning of his life is apparent when he is on stage. I'd like every dancer in my company to have that. Not everybody has it. No. Some people are much cooler than others. Some people are bad. They want to be loved but they have nothing to love."

Asked about what young dancers have to do and to learn he replied: "They have to learn at once how to free themselves and to control themselves. Do you exercise every day on some level? Even if you're not doing it for a choreographer are you doing it for yourself? Do you take what you do seriously? No, I think dancers are very self-effacing people. They often have a real bad self-image. Therefore they tend to be bitchy. They tend to think badly of themselves and what they do. They degrade it. I don't want them around me."

"You know in Karate when you walk in to the Gosho. You say: "Good morning Sensen". Even when there is no teacher around. I was told that's not about the teacher, that's about the practice. They hold the practice in such high esteem that they honor it in the acceptable space. We don't do formal things like that but I don't accept any disrespect to the work. You can critique the work. You can say it's bad or good but you must respect it."

That night I went to Vienna's Volkstheater, designed by Hermann Helmer and Ferdinand Fellner in 1889. There I studied the curved, ornate, gilded ceiling, part of which was covered by a swathe of painted figures.

To my left was a statue of a woman, her back to me, stretching out and twisting, and a cherub, looking somewhat awkwardly into space. Three chandeliers and beyond them: a bank of grey stage lights hung from the ceiling.

The audience, a mix of young and old, lovers and the lonely, the boring and the cool, spoke a variety of languages. It was hot in the theatre and not a few were fanning themselves. Raucous conversations could be heard as well as the usual low murmur of expectation and one was left in no doubt about how high the spirits of the excited young dancers, who made up a large part of the audience, actually were. "The course is so theoretical," one young, frail-looking, clear-eyed girl said to another.

The production, which was called "Speak low if you speak love..." was by a company called Ultima Vez. It was founded in 1986 by a choreographer, photographer & filmmaker called Wim Vandekeybus. He happened to have, I noticed, the exact same birthday as my half-brother.

There were two chairs on the stage and the dancers could be heard but only dimly seen as the audience slowly filled the auditorium.

Two dancers, both in dark suits and dark ties, then sat on the chairs. They attached a rope to their necks. When one spoke, in Italian, into one microphone, he jerked the other away from another. This game of back and forth continued for quite a while.

Other, this time casually dressed, dancers appeared, their hands on their hips, prancing and stretching with lithe movements, as though they were imitating highly stylized fauns, and started to gallop around the stage.

Occasionally they would either jump over or under a rope. Another dancer appeared, this time in a grey suit, and spoke, in English, about how he longed to be a sponge at the bottom of the sea. He wanted the weight of the water upon his shoulders.

The performance switched pace and rhythm as often as the accents and languages spoken on stage. The light and costumes were also continually changing.

One of the most effective scenes involved a dancer dashing around with a lamp in the darkness. Then a second lamp appeared. Then a third, until all twelve dancers flew around in the darkness, each with a single lamp.

There were two videos, both in Italian, with elaborate costumes, comical characters and surreal scenes. Even the fish spoke Italian.

Dancers froze like statues, played dead, clambered over rows of seats, shone lights into the audience, caught oranges with knives, mimicked fights, accused one another of stealing each other's words, scrambled around, completely naked, on all fours, howled like wild animals, twisted and turned, at high speed, in midair, bumped into one another, stood, in crooked fashion, on their heads or sprang up before descending on their feet.

To my surprise I met Franz West, who had also attended the same performance, outside. We went for a drink at a bar. It was a warm, balmy evening, and it was a delight to sit outside.

The first thing I noticed about Franz West, other than his profound mistrust, was his loneliness. The second was his tone of mockery, especially self-mockery. He didn't take anything seriously, least of all himself.

His tone of speech was nasal, sometimes indistinct, he gestured a lot while talking and when trying to read something would hold it close to his eye.

The first time I saw him he was dragging his left leg and he reminded me a bit of a pirate. Over the period of time I got to know him his health got progressively worse. He had injured his knee while working and no doctor seemed capable of repairing it.

His state of health was, altogether, woeful and he suffered from hepatitis, cirrhosis of the liver and a number of other ailments. In a matter of weeks his pallor, which was pale to begin with, would grow more and more yellow.

It didn't take long for him to find a role for me. I was to be his biographer, the creator of his legend and guardian of his secrets.

When he was growing up, he told me, there was a subversive element in Vienna. It was opposed to the seriousness and respectability of the Nazis. He grew up in a culture of subversion and cynicism, and these were important elements in his work.

His half-brother: Otto Kobalek, who was seventeen years older, was an actor. He hung out in restaurants, bars and cafes frequented by actors, painters and writers such as Gutruf, in the Milchgasse.

Gutruf was in the same building Mozart had got to know his wife: Constanze, and had composed "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail", "The Abduction from the Seraglio". It was also where the likes of Helmut Qualtinger, Fritz Wotruba, Alfred Hrdlicka, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl, Markus Prachensky, H. C. Artmann, Reinhard Priessnitz, and Gottfried von Einem had hung out. It was through Otto that Franz had come into this artistic circle at an early age.

Vienna at the beginning of the seventies, Franz told me, was dominated by the literati. Their severity meant that he didn't dare show them what he was writing. Ironically it was they who all ended up as academics while it was he who went on to publish his texts.

He was forced to do so on account of what he termed "the incomprehensibility of the critics. They seem", he told me, "to have a passion for writing nonsense". If the public was to be misled, he reflected, it should be him doing the misleading.

Otto Kobalek drank a lot, which ended his career as an actor. Yet his exaggerated gestures, his "living language", his "moving speech" proved to be an inspiration for Franz's adaptives.

Franz recognized a subject for his art. He puzzled over questions such as which objects might be appropriate for which gestures. Otto Kobalek also took Franz to second hand shops and helped him search for images.

Another source of inspiration was an uncle, on his mother's side, who dealt in African art. When Franz looked at his uncle's collection of masks and staffs he couldn't help but think that one should actually put on the former and make motions with the latter. African art was, for him, a direct art and that was what he wanted.

I thought of Matisse and how, after he'd discovered African sculpture at the Trocadero museum, he embarked on a trip to North Africa in the spring of 1906.

In the fall of that year he happened to pick up an African piece at a curio shop before visiting Gertrude Stein. He showed it not only to her but to Picasso too.

In June 1907, Picasso also began visiting the African collections at the Trocadero. These visits were to prove pivotal in the development of his art.

Franz told me that he very much enjoyed working with others because, as he put it, "I see not only how bad I am, but how bad others are too. It often happens that one looks at one's work, gets upset and thinks: it's really a mess. But when one looks at the work of others, this feeling rapidly evaporates."

"Of course there's always bickering. I've had fights with more or less everyone I've ever worked with. There is a point where one has to surrender one's own sovereignty in the production process. There comes a time where one has to subordinate to the other, and then there's invariably a quarrel."

Artists, he told me, are always jealous of one another and, if they fail to control their feelings, they're forever forced to look around for new friends.

"Encounters," he said, "are good, but bonds not...Apparently it's the fate of artists to live an isolated life..."

I had part of the explanation for his loneliness. One event, which I experienced considerably later, provided a separate clue. A gallerist, with whom Franz had collaborated with for many years, asked Franz to put in a good word for him with the minister of arts. He wanted to become a director of a museum.

The minute the gallerist left the room Franz picked up the phone, called the minister in question, and told him, in no uncertain terms, that there would be serious consequences if the gallerist were to get the job.

Franz could be very ruthless with those around him. He also took an impish delight in doing others a bad turn, whether it be deceiving, tricking or cheating them.

Yet this was extremely childish rather than malicious and chimed in with his cynical sense of humor. For him this was fun. He also had no inhibitions about using or humiliating those around him. He created his own universe and it was his laws, which ruled supreme.

The other part was his thirst for independence. "I no longer let myself be told what to do," he told me. "The gallerists have a passion for bossing people around. I am a man who frequently gets angry but then I move on. On the whole I've managed to achieve a degree of financial independence."

Later he said of his youth: "I grew up in a very dull time, at the beginning of a period of prosperity. It was the time of Viennese Actionism but that was merely provincial."

He told me, in the course of the evening, his life story. He was born in 1947, the son of a coal merchant and a dentist and was brought up in Karl Marx Hof, in Vienna's 19th district. He was later to confess to me that he hated his father.

He began to work as an artist in his early twenties, created his first adaptives, which later made him famous, in 1974 and studied art, between 1977 and 1982, with Professor Gironcoli at the Art Academy.

The next day I went to the address he'd given me but was told that I'd come much too early. Franz usually first arrived in the studio at lunchtime.

I decided to visit the Museum for Applied Arts, MAK, designed by Heinrich von Ferstel in 1867 and built between 1867 and 1871, which was not far removed from Esteplatz. It was where my half-brother had worked as a warder.

As I walked into the museum a small, middle-aged man, with grey beard, dressed in ill-fitting, grey uniform, of inferior material, with black postman's bag dangling at his side, was kneeling, his arms spread out, on the floor. He was being photographed by a pretty looking girl with straight, dark hair and plump, tanned, cheeks.

As I admired the spacious, cool, umber red entrance hall, which reminded me of an Italian arcade, I bumped into Heinrich.

"I remember a wonderful work here by an artist," he told me "I think her name was Jetelova or something similar. It consisted of the illusion of a part of this hall, from the colonnades above to the stony floor below, being swallowed up by a mound of red earth, rather like these old monuments from ancient times, half-submerged by history. And I thought: This says something about Vienna. How so much of its past has been deliberately buried and the immobility, the paralysis, the lethargy, which has been wrought by this fact."

As we sat in the glass-roofed, interior courtyard on grey, metal chairs at a dark round table, we chatted about Franz and what he'd told me.

To the right was a room with the word Orient above its entrance, next to that one with the word Barock, in front: one with the word Ostasien, and to the left: one with the word Mittelalter.

I couldn't help but think that I was in an art historian's nightmare. All these superficial, meaningless, patronising terms had been petrified for all eternity.

Above me was a huge skylight with 16 spots. There was a breeze from the open door behind me and, mingled with the noise of the traffic outside, was the murmur of voices, footsteps of tourists and the sound of advertising emanating from a video monitor.

A woman sat, in orange tank top and sunglasses, to my right, and flicked through a brochure.

To my left was a blond student, with grey baseball cap, marking a textbook with a bright green marker. Behind him was a dark haired teenager, an unread book open upon his bear knees, sleeping on a Franz West divan. The yellow patterned cover contrasted with his blue Bermuda shorts.

We got up and walked toward the room marked Orient. Before I actually crossed the threshold I took a minute to study the curved ceiling above my head with its white birds, grey griffins, cherubs holding medallions that metamorphosed into leaves, and figures with urns crowning their heads, wings instead of arms and flowers instead of legs.

The room was lit by a mixture of muted daylight and spots. The dimness and the mode of presentation meant that the carpets on display seemed to float in semi-darkness.

The carpets, some whole, others horribly dismembered, came from Anatolia, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Persia, India and the Caucasus and dated from between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

I freely confess to having a weakness for carpets and especially admired the so-called "Polonaise", from central Persia, with its restrained and somewhat faded tones, which dates from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.

The "Lotto" carpet from Anatolia, which I also liked, had, by contrast, a richness of colour and dramatic tension of design. Yet my favourite remained the one from Northern India, with its symmetry counterpointed by birds, figures, boats, and water.

We returned to the room titled Historismus, which was darkened by white shutters. In the centre was an aisle and to the right and left of it were white screens. Behind them were chairs, armchairs, and sofas lit in such a way that their shadows were projected onto the screens.

All the pieces of furniture had been either designed by Michael Thonet, who'd been invited to Vienna by Prince Metternich in 1842, or his sons.

I especially liked the armchair made of stained beech wood designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Cabaret Fledermaus in 1907 as well as the one created by Otto Wagner for the Oesterreichische Postsparkasse in 1906.

In the adjacent room, devoted to Empire Style and Biedermeier, were, among other things, armchairs, chairs, tables, a chest of drawers, a davenport, a writing table, a bedside table, a sideboard, and a secretaire as well as showcases with kettles, jugs, candlesticks, casters, ewers, coffee pots, sugar bowls, cups, glasses, beakers, bowls, flacons and vases.

The spacious room had large windows, parquet floors, umber walls and a wooden ceiling. It also had, just below the latter, twelve horizontal LED signs by Jenny Holzer, with speeding texts about how to preserve flower buds through winter.

I especially liked the oval writing table, of cherrywood and ebonized wood, with six drawers and two cylinders for holding flowers.

In addition I admired the mahogany cupboard with mirror glass and gild bronze mounting made by the Danhauser Furniture Factory for Archduke Charles in 1825 as well as the mahogany side chair created for the Viennese court in 1815.

We crossed the courtyard, stopping briefly to get a cup of water, and walked into the room marked Mittelalter. In it were cabinets, cupboards, folding stools, vessels, jugs, vases, dishes and vestments ranging from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. I especially liked the densely detailed imagery on the maple cabinet from Augsburg dating from the sixteenth century as well as the maiolica dishes and jugs on account of their rich colours.

Next to that was Barock with its so-called "Porcelain room" from Palais Dubsky, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, a door by Canevale, from the same period, which I especially admired, mirror frames, commodes, cabinets, clocks, a maplewood game table by David Roentgen and wallpaper from Canton, with scenes of children, hunters, shopkeepers, carpenters and travellers, which I considered quite splendid.

As we sat on a Franz West divan I told Heinrich about my half-brother's experiences while working in the museum. My half-brother had got a job interview but was told that he "didn't want to work with such people". This extraordinary attitude toward the personnel was profoundly abhorrent to my half-brother. He was shocked and appalled at the way in which the personnel were treated. He was equally shocked and appalled when he himself became a victim of this attitude.

Once he had to sign a piece of paper stating that he couldn't sit down for eleven hours. This was, he was told, a condition of the people lending the work. This had been completely insane, he told me. A work is not more secure if a warder is tortured or tormented. On the contrary: if one tortures a warder he is incapable of reacting in an emergency. A good warder, he told me, is a rested warder. A bad warder is one who doesn't care whether anything happens to a work or not. The joke was, he told me, that the director of the museum had thought of himself as being left wing.

The brutal and sick regime in the museum led to various forms of perversion and revolt. One warder threw bottles out of a window, causing accidents to passing cyclists, another stole guns from a show which, because they had no registration numbers, were worth a small fortune on the black market, while yet another turned his wife into a prostitute and died of AIDS. There were forever horror stories emerging from MAK, my half-brother told me. But given the culture of brutality, which reigned in the museum, this didn't surprise him in the least.

"Of course I know and despise these people: these incompetent, irresponsible, criminal, indecisive decision-makers, these members of the bourgeois "elite". They are all Nazis." Heinrich said. "Most Austrians are Nazis. Even those from whom one would least expect it."

"I know of one actor and director, I won't mention any names, who poses as a "left-winger", who is always playing the Jewish card. He pretends to be a radical anti-Nazi. How does he treat those who have the misfortune of working under him? Like a complete Nazi. He uses and abuses. He promises to pay and doesn't. He is a swine, a vicious animal, who is adored by the liberal public, of course, who venerate him because of his highly authentic "anti-Nazi" credentials. And if anyone dares say the truth? He takes them to court. An evil monster if ever there was one."

"I know of those in the world of film, who claim to be anti-Nazis yet who, when push comes to shove, prove to be complete Nazis."

"They have narrow, provincial, petty, ignorant, stupid attitudes and combine their mediocrity and wrong-headedness with extraordinary arrogance. They really do believe they know everything and viciously slander those who genuinely do know more."

We walked out of the museum and Heinrich spent a while talking about the sculptures by Franz West on the Stubenbruecke, which was close by.

"Hermann Czech wanted depictions of human beings for this bridge, which crosses the small river called Wien, Vienna, in Vienna's Stadtpark, it's City Park."

"Franz had never done any so-called "naturalistic" sculptures before and was worried about what to do."

"He'd drink a lot, and sometimes, in the mornings, after waking up, he'd have headaches and imagine he saw faces in the duvet."

"One says in Vienna, in such instances, that one sees lemurs. Franz being Franz of course thought about how lemurs come from the Saturnalia, the Roman Carnival, and how Bakhtin, the Russian formalist, believed that all art comes from the Saturnalia. Lemurs are half ape, half human. These lemurs are the spirits of the dead."

"Franz wanted to mount a text by Heraclitus on the wall: "You cannot step twice into the same river, and always new souls emerge out of the water.""

"Transposed to Vienna that means: one can never retrieve the best of the past but new souls will always emerge from the river. These heads also represent how Franz sees the Viennese."

Heinrich agreed to accompany me to Esteplatz and we spent an extremely agreeable afternoon with Franz. What surprised me most of all was the air of calm, serenity and leisure, which reigned in the studio.

When we entered Franz was sitting, legs crossed, on one of his own divans at one of his own tables, reading Verlaine.

The room itself, with its white walls, upon which paint had been spattered by paint bombs, was devoted to office work. Two people sat at two computers and dealt with various administrative and archival matters.

It seemed that one of the main tasks was to find out which works in circulation were authentic and which were not. In addition there was also an awful lot of organization that needed to be done. Trips needed to be planned and flights booked. Exhibitions needed to be put together, transport thought through, invitations accepted or rejected, and communication with gallerists, art dealers and curators maintained.

There was even the odd occasion when a work would fall apart and would need to be sent back to the studio to be repaired. Yet all this work was done with only the minimal of fuss and only the minimal of involvement on the part of Franz, who, Heinrich told me, was notorious for his procrastination and his unwillingness to take decisions.

Franz was pleased to see Heinrich and when I quizzed him about the lack of stress in the studio he said, "I have always regarded work as something especially vulgar, as something particularly bad. People used to call me a parasite but these accusations never bothered me in the least. It is only fools who work nonstop and continually create new products."

"Hegel, I believe, argued that one has to work in order to realize oneself but this is nonsense. One should be able to do nothing and still survive. I never wanted to live in a mercantile sense, but simply to exist. I've never learned or striven and have always followed the path of least resistance."

"My work," he added by way of explanation to why he did anything at all, "is about the displacement of emptiness. My youth was horribly empty. I just sat around. It was terrible. I was incredibly bored."

Franz gave us a guided tour of the studio, which struck me as being a magical place. One room was where Franz displayed the art he collected. It also doubled as kitchen and library. The second was where much of the work was done.

Assistants either mixed papier-mache in big buckets next to huge piles of newspapers, painted collages so that the colors wouldn't fade, or worked on various sculptures.

In the basement, which was huge, other assistants worked on pieces made of metal or wood. This was where the metal frames for the divans were welded and the tables assembled.

After the guided tour Franz took us to Kiang, a restaurant on the Landstrasse close to Rochusmarkt. It had been designed by Helmut Richter, an apostle of Wittgenstein and an uncompromising modernist, who was known for his "hand-tailored tech" designs. For him no detail was irrelevant.

I was impressed by the sleek, airy elegance of the restaurant. It had a simple, glass façade, a metal wall and a red floor. It was the embodiment of Viennese modernity and I understood perfectly well why Franz, who was also the embodiment of Viennese modernity, liked it so much.

The location was also extremely fitting, Heinrich told me. Not far removed, in the Rasumofskygasse, was where Robert Musil had lived and the Parkgasse, where Ludwig Wittgenstein had built a house for his sister, Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein. As an apostle of Wittgenstein myself I expressed a desire to see it. I was also, I told Heinrich, a huge fan of Musil.

I was undecided what to eat and studied the menu. There was grilled squid on green salad, Thai seafood with Chinese vermicelli, pilgrim's muscles with summer vegetables, Taiwanese spring rolls with monkey nuts, grilled halibut in ginger sauce, rice noodles with Sha-Cha beef, fried rice with lamb and aubergine, fried beef with spring onions and General Tso's Chicken.

I asked for an iced green tea while Heinrich and Franz advised me on what to order. I opted for the General Tso's Chicken. Who could resist a dish with such an intriguing name?

I remarked on how comfortable and elegant the chairs in the restaurant were.

Franz explained to me that one night, after a concert, he'd been allowed to walk up on stage and sit on one of the chairs. It had been a moment of revelation. He'd realized how comfortable the chairs actually were.

He'd then used the musicians' chairs as the starting point for his own chairs. "A chair of a musician was taken and its dimensions exactly calculated," he told me. "They were a bit ugly but the form was ideal. The seat was slightly bent, the back was just right, so that one could sit on them for a long time. They were ideal chairs."

Of course, the whole matter was a good deal more complicated than that. He'd been asked to create sculptures by Kasper Koenig for an exhibition in Muenster and was unsure of what to do.

His adaptives were unsuitable. They fell apart outdoors. So he had the idea of creating seats. He observed some youths on the banks of a river and thought about creating seating for them.

"For me art was always coupled with idleness," he said. "Umberto Eco wrote that man is a slave of a daily life, which is prescribed for him. Few people are able to escape from their obligations. The difference between the slave and the free man is that the latter has leisure."

He still had doubts about creating works of furniture. He thought about "Viennese Actionism", the "Happenings" and "Environments" on the one hand and the fact that artists were being asked to design furniture on the other. He also was reacting against concept art. This gave him the courage to create something that was both within the modernist tradition and, at one and the same time, new.

"For me usability was the transgressive element while at one at the same time: I wanted more than the satisfaction of mere viewing, of the pure thought of concept art."

I remembered the first time I'd seen Franz West's divans: at the Documenta in Kassel in 1992. There were 72 of them. They were a complete contrast to the installation: "The Toilet", by Ilya Kabakov, which had preceded it. "The Toilet" was a small building, a public restroom containing six toilet stalls, with a bed, crib, dresser, nightstand and a table. Some of the toilet stalls were storage closets. The chaos, clutter and profound sense of poverty left a deep impression. It might have been a disagreeable work but it certainly left an imprint on one's mind.

I remembered being somewhat perplexed and unsure of what to make of the rows and rows of Franz West's divans, which were all covered with carpets, at the time. Was it intended that one should sit on them? Were they art or simply a mockery of it? I really didn't know. Yet I remember sitting down and feeling both very relaxed and highly relieved.

I thought briefly about that particular Documenta, which had been curated by Jan Hoet.

Which works had stuck in my mind? Other than the ones by Franz and Kabakov: those by Joseph Kosuth and Anish Kapoor. I thought about how the former questioned what art actually is. For Kosuth meaning rather than form or colour is important.

I recalled Anish Kapoor's "Descent Into Limbo", his "Building for a Void, a space full of darkness, not a hole in the ground", his 6×6×6m cubed building with a dark hole in the floor.

"I wanted to create a different environment," Franz explained. "I once read of how Marcel Duchamp talked of a fourth-dimension. This idea fascinated me. I imagined the fourth dimension to be a world in which one can live. For me there is no fundamental difference between my adaptives and my furniture. They are interchangeable. I'm not interested in utopias or appearances," he added by way of explanation, "I'm interested in realities."

I asked him about Bruno Gironcoli and how he came to study with him at the academy. I thought of my own half-brother's disastrous failure at Max Reinhardt Seminar. Of course it was as much due to his father's refusal to support him financially as his own mistakes. He'd hardly been able to speak German properly at the time.

"I was living with my mother," Franz explained, "who was a dentist. She had an assistant, who'd earlier been a set designer. It was she who taught me how to work with papier-mache. That was an impossible material. I always stored my work in the cellar and one winter there was a leak. Water flooded in and destroyed everything. I was very demoralized."

"A friend of mine, a poet called Hermann Schuerrer, came to visit me and I lamented my misfortune. He suggested that I attend the academy. I was terrified. The arrogant, snobby students, who seemed to know everything, treated me with the utmost contempt. No, I said, I didn't want to go to the academy and explained why."

"He said he knew a teacher there: Bruno Gironcoli, who was new and who needed students. He said he could phone him. I got anxious. No, I said, don't bother. I didn't want to go."

"He picked up the phone and dialed a number. I hoped nobody would be in but Gironcoli picked up the phone."

"The next day I was at the academy, where I then studied for five years. I never imagined that I'd ever be able to make any money with art. Nobody did and there were very few students in those days."

"Then everything changed. Art became fashionable. People thought they could make money with it. Students stormed the academy. There were exams and one needed to do well to get in."

After lunch we returned to the studio at Esteplatz. An American curator from the Mid-West named Katherine Rich, an ugly, red-haired, buxom lass, a true farmer's daughter if ever there was one, had appeared and wanted to ask Franz a few questions. She was preparing an exhibition of his works in Minnesota.

She spoke the language Franz hated and was forever spouting gobbledygook such as "feeding other types of worldmaking into the imaginary", "juggling between the different artistic positions", "the dynamo of community", "the logic of visibility", "the dialectic of affirmation", and "the marketing spectrum of an over-promoted industry".

If it wasn't merely her profound and truly repugnant narcissism, her vanity and blindness, her talking of how "pretty", how "clever" and how "sensitive" she was, it was the repetition of the word "branding", which really seemed to get on Franz's nerves. Everything was, for her, a "brand".

She seemed to embody what Franz hated. Franz however was too sly and too polite to let on that she'd aroused his ire. Instead he played along, humored her and answered her ridiculous questions with complete and utter nonsense. He enjoyed playing the language game and enjoyed quoting Derrida, Foucault and Barthes. Now and again he would smile to himself, but subtly, so as not to let on.

Suddenly his eyes lit up. She had asked him a question that allowed him the opportunity for exacting his revenge. She was annoying him, and, worst of all: she was wasting his time. She had asked him what "Viennese Actionism" actually was.

Franz told one of his assistants to get a broom and told Katherine to take off her panties and bend over. The assistant, seeing what was about to happen, protested that the broom was much too dirty. This didn't bother Franz in the least. The dirtier the better. Then he told the assistant that he knew perfectly well what he had to do and that he was to use the utmost vigor.

Katherine squealed with pleasure, excited at finally finding out what "Viennese Actionism" truly was. Franz laughed in delight at his practical joke.

### Kuenstlerhaus

A few days later I visited Kuenstlerhaus. The central staircase, with its brass railings and sturdy, stone banisters, was lit by an old skylight. The skylight had hexagonal panes into which spotlights and a fan had been installed. It was framed by stucco, of floral design, not unlike a painting. The floral theme was continued in paint, in historicist style, with an urn filled with flowers, curling, winding wreathes, blue, yellow and red on an ochre surface, linking the skylights to the tops of Corinthian columns. In the niches, between the tops of the columns were classical profiles, repeated in almost stamp-like fashion. Above them, against a background of exotic birds, could be seen three arches, with Corinthian columns in between. A neo-classical, mask-like face, linked by wreathes, was above the top of each arch. The walls, between the pale, marble-like columns, were salmon-coloured, with borders of grey. At the top of the stairwell were black gates, each adorned with a golden shield. Behind the black gates was an ornate, wooden door.

Passing through the ornate, wooden door one found oneself in a large space with wooden floors. To the right and left were narrow galleries, with low ceilings and skylights. They, in turn, were linked by an open gangway.

On the ground floor was a large, spacious and well-proportioned room called the Plastiker Saal, with a large skylight and creaking parquet floor, to the right of it was the so-called Belgische Saal and to the left of it was the so-called Spanische Saal.

The Oktagon Saal, with a mosaic floor, made up of a multitude of differently coloured stones, linked the Plastiker Saal and the Spanische Saal.

I carefully studied the white model of Ur, at the time of the third dynasty, in the twenty-first century before Christ, showing the north harbour linked by a canal to the west harbour, and not far removed from them: the ziggurat and the court of Nanna. Nearby were tiny model palm trees and on the canal: tiny model boats.

On display were a small, copper alloy figure of an interceding god with a crown of four horns, a small, alabaster statue of someone praying, bricks with cuneiform texts, seals, a clay panel of a work report and a bronze standard with two lions.

I thought of Ur, the capital city of Sumer, founded on alluvial land five thousand years before Christ, which, on account of its proximity to the Persian Gulf and the fact that it was well supplied with water, became fabulously wealthy.

Under Urnammu, in 2113 B.C., it was oval shaped, 63 hectares big and had a population of 30,000. It connected Afghanistan, the Iranian mountains and the Mesopotamian low lands in a web of trade, which transported gold, silver, copper, tin, lapis lazula, cedar wood, carnelian, seashells and steatite.

The houses were built in the same way they are today: with sun dried, clay bricks baked at dusk, loam plaster, roofs of loam and doors of wood.

The temple, the zikkurat, the terraced temple tower, was also built of clay bricks. It had three stairs and drains for rainwater. It was believed to hold the world together and be a connection between God and man, the cosmos and the underworld. Food and sacrificial offerings were brought up to its pinnacle every day.

I thought of the patron divinity of the city: Nanna-Sin, the god of the moon for whom the zikkurat was built, and his priestess, who played the role of his wife: Ningal. Temples and chapels were scattered all over the city, including ones devoted to Utu, the god of the sun and Nimin-tab-ba, the goddess of underground and sweet water, of wisdom and magic. Yet neither the gods, for all their strength, nor the wall, made of clay brick, eight meters high and twenty-five meters broad, could prevent the city being plundered and destroyed by the Elamites and Amorites two thousand years before Christ.

Nearby was the white model of Hattusa, with its Lower City on a hill and Upper City below it. Around it were various artefacts: a small, copper alloy figure of a Hettite god, dating from 1,400 B.C., a ceremonial bronze axe, a stamp seal, sandstone reliefs of charioteers, faience heads, a clay pitcher and a letter from a king in defence of a priest.

I thought about the empire, which lasted between the seventeenth and twelfth centuries B.C., how it was sustained by a combination of trade, natural resources, especially silver and copper, and how its power waxed, destroying Babylon and dominating Syria, and waned due to internecine conflicts within the ruling family and conflicts with neighbouring peoples, before it, in turn, was destroyed.

I thought about the kings, whose time was largely taken up with religious rituals, the massive temple, and its gods, who were thought to reside in it all year round: the weather god Hattis and the sun god Arinna.

It came as no surprise that the population of the city was mainly made up of bureaucrats and those working in the temple.

In an adjoining room were white models of the centre of Achaton, with the flat roofs of the buildings cut away, the king's house, with its large courtyards, containing a pool and a tree alley, and its extension for the throne, two-stories above the ground. Around it were limestone figures of King Echnaton, dating from the fourteenth century B.C., of Echnaton bringing a sacrifice to Aton, limestone reliefs depicting servants, frond and fan carriers, courtiers, boats, a courtyard, the carving up of a sacrificial animal, a rose granite figure of Amenophis III, a face of Echnaton made of lapis lazuli, the statue of a princess made of quartzite, a clay jar, a large storage vessel, a clay vase, silver amulets, bronze and faience rings and necklaces, a glass perfume bottle, and three clay letters from the king of Jerusalem in Akkadian cuneiform script, begging for military assistance.

I thought of the Egyptian king Amenhotep IV, from the fourteenth century B.C., who was the first to reject the powerful god Amun and devote himself solely to Aton, the sun disc god, rather than the other two forms of the sun god: Re and Khepri.

Osiris, the god of the dead and the underworld, was more or less forgotten while Echnaton did his best to eradicate the name of Amun and his wife: Mut. His devotion to monotheism however didn't survive his death.

Close by were white models of the northern part of the city of Tanis and its royal cemetery, with two obelisks in front of its main entrance.

Near them was a basalt sphinx figure of King Osorkon I, nearby the figure of Nimlot, son of Scheschonq I, a former Libyan mercenary who made himself king in the tenth century B.C., figures made of gold, glass and lapis lazuli, faience tablets, gold rings, limestone weights, copper alloy figures of king Mutnedjmet, lids of coffins, calcite canopic coffinettes and steatite amulets.

I thought of Tanis that, between the eleventh and eighth centuries B.C., had been so powerful but about which so little is known.

I thought of its demise, due to changing ecological conditions, and its eventual abandonment. At the end of the day it was considered only useful as a quarry.

In the next room was a white model of the north western part of Ninive, with its North Palace, Nabu Temple, zikkurat, Ishtar Temple, and South western Palace, as it must have been under Sanherib in the eight century B.C..

Near it were an ivory sphinx and a griffin, a statuette of a god made of amber, limestone reliefs of soldiers and the head of a man, heads and bodies made of faience, and clay fragments of the Gilgamesh tale.

I thought of Sanherib, the builder of the city, and how his father Sargon II had died in battle. I thought of how he'd consolidated the empire, which spanned from Egypt to Anatolia, with eight campaigns, and how he'd failed to capture Jerusalem.

I thought of how the Assyrians believed that the cosmos was the creation of the gods and how Sanherib had been their representative on earth and priest of Assur, the god of all gods.

I thought of how Ishtar, mother of kings, had been both goddess of war and physical love, and how she was reputed to create order out of chaos. It was her voice that prophesied victory or defeat.

I thought of Shamash, the god of sun and justice, Shin, the god of the moon, and Nabu, the god of writing whose duty it was to write the fate of the universe.

For the Assyrians, I reflected, there was no life after death. They believed that moral behaviour was rewarded in this world and not the next.

I thought of how Ninive was destroyed by the Babylonians and Medes in the seventh century B.C..

In the next room was a white model of the eastern half of Babylon, the Gate of the Gods, as it was in the late seventh and early sixth century B.C., with its Temple and zikkurat of Marduk, and its Temples of Ishtar, Nin-mah and Ninutta.

Near it were reliefs of lions, bricks and slabs from the street of processions with the inscription of the name of Nebukadnezar II, descriptions of the building of the Ninurta-Temple, building deeds, inscriptions from the temple of Ishtar in praise of her: "the highest, beloved of the gods, the mighty, goddess of war," seals, statuettes of naked women, phials, and vessels.

I thought of how Babylon had forty-three cult centres for its great gods, fifty-five podiums for Marduk, two mighty walls that encircled the city, three rivers, eight city gates, three hundred cult centres devoted to Igigi, six hundred podiums devoted to Anunnaki, a hundred and eighty shrines devoted to Ishtar, a hundred and eighty pedestals devoted to Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea, twelve pedestals devoted to the seven divinities, a hundred and eighty pedestals devoted to Kubu, four pedestals devoted to the rainbows, two pedestals devoted to evil gods, and two pedestals devoted to the guardians of the city.

Yet all these gods and its powerful fortifications couldn't prevent the city falling to the Persian king, Cyrus, with the help of Babylon's priesthood, in 539 B.C.. Cyrus, who freed the Jews from captivity, was followed by his son: Cambyses. His early death in turn cleared the path for Darius to become king.

Close by was a white model of the palace of Darius on the Apadana hill in the city of Susa, which had been founded four thousand years before Christ. At the time it became a capital it was of very little significance indeed. The palace itself was begun in 521 B.C. but was incomplete when Darius died in 486 B.C.. It was left to his son: Xerxes, to finish it.

Next to it were limestone relief figures of a Persian servant and a bearded man, an alabaster flagon and a vase of calcite with inscriptions by Darius, a silver figure of a Persian aristocrat, a golden dagger handle, a silver vessel for incense, cups of bronze, seals made of chalcedony and quartz, colliers of gold and agate and earrings of gold.

I thought of how Darius furthered Zoroastrianism. He was tolerant toward other religions as long as they respected Ahura Mazda, the highest divinity of the Old Iranian religion. He had even gone as far as to fund the rebuilding of temples in Jerusalem and Egypt.

Yet for all his tolerance and piety: he still ruled an empire that encompassed West Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, parts of the Balkans, portions of north and northeast Africa, eastern Libya, Sudan, Eritrea as well as most of Pakistan, the Aegean Islands and northern Greece.

His rule was met with revolts, some successful, such as the Ionian rebellion, and others less so, such as that of Babylon, and died a broken man.

In the final room was a white model of Jerusalem, as it might have been in 600 B.C., with its City of David and Temple Mount. Next to it was a cult object in the form of a golden pomegranate, a clay cooking pot with two handles, a bowl, an oil lamp, and a faience amulet of the lion goddess Sekhmet.

I thought of how the city had been captured countless times and twice destroyed.

As I sat in Cafe Imperial the memories of the past made me acutely aware of the sufferings of the present. I thought about Gaza and the horror of Operation Cast Lead, which had only just recently ended. It had been an example of hell on earth, the Schopenhauerian hell Bernhard had so often evoked. Horror had been piled upon horror.

I thought of the forty-eight police cadets instantly killed when three missiles struck a yard where they were graduating.

I thought of 10-year old Kamelia al-Burdini, crushed to death when a wall collapsed.

I thought of Abd al-Hakim Rajab Muhammad Mansi and his son Uday Hakim Mansi who were struck down at a fruit and vegetable market on Salah ad-Din Street.

I thought of the eight students who were annihilated outside a training center when a missile struck the road.

I thought of Allam, 18, his brother Hisham, 24, and their cousin Abdallah, 20, who perished while standing in front of their grocery shop.

I thought of Beber Vaknin, a 58-year-old metal worker from Netivot, who was hit by shrapnel from a rocket.

I thought of Hani al-Mahdi, a 27-year-old construction worker, who was killed when a missile exploded at a construction site in Ashkelon.

I thought of Irit Sheetrit, a 39-year-old mother of four, who died when a projectile detonated next to her car.

When the 'Imad 'Aqel Mosque was bombed five sisters from the Ba'alusha family — Jawaher, Dina, Samar, Ikram and Tahrir—were crushed to death.

When their mother sent five-year old Lama Talal Hamdan, her sister Haya, twelve, and their brother Isma'il, eight, to carry rubbish bags to a dump their lives were cut short by missiles.

I thought of two-year-old Naama, who was thrown onto the roof of an adjacent house when his home was bombed. His mother, 41-year-old Afaf, was left in a coma while her other children: Sidqi, aged four, Ahmad, 10, and Muhammad, 12 didn't survive.

Prayers had ended and the sermon was just beginning at the al-Maqadmah mosque, near the northwest outskirts of Jabaliyah camp, close to Beit Lahia, when an explosion blew off one of the wooden doors, killing 15 and wounding 40. The missile hit a boy who'd been sitting at the entrance. His legs were later found on the roof of the mosque.

When three paramedics — Anas Fadhel Na'im, Yaser Kamal Shbeir and Raf'at Abd al-'Al — walked towards wounded in Gaza City missiles shredded them to pieces.

When an ambulance picked up some injured in Beit Lahia it was hit by a shell. Arafa Hani 'Abd al-Dayem, a father of four and a science teacher, fell, badly injured and the head and legs of his patient were blown off.

When 22-year-old Ahmad Abu Halima was chatting a phosphorous shell came through the ceiling and decapitated his father.

His brother's wife and daughter, Ghada and Farah, ran down in flames, their clothes melting on their backs.

The survivors tried to call an ambulance but were told it couldn't come. They placed the injured on a tractor-trailer. When they reached the crossroads next to the Omar Bin Khattab school in al-Atatra, soldiers ordered them to stop.

Muhammad Hekmat, Matar, Ali, Nabila and Matar got down and stood beside the tractor.

One of the soldiers opened fire and Muhammad Hekmat Abu Halima was hit in the chest and Matar Abu Halima in the abdomen.

Ali, Omar and Nabila Abu Halima fled. Omar was shot in the arm but eventually reached Kamal Idwan hospital.

The remaining family members were ordered to abandon the tractor and walk. They weren't permitted to take the bodies of the dead boys or the remains of Shahid Abu Halima.

Ghada Abu Halima was eventually picked up and taken to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.

Abir Hajji heard a loud explosion in the middle of the night. It shook the house and shattered the windows. She got up and left the room to look for her mobile. A second explosion followed. This time the house itself was hit. Her children screamed "Dad!" but her husband didn't reply. When she found him he was wounded on one side of his head.

The next day she found herself with a group of Hajji and Arafat family members, carrying white flags and walking down an alley to al-Sekka Street.

One of the soldiers standing on a rooftop ordered the families to turn south and walk towards Rafah. The families asked to be allowed to go to Gaza City.

Without warning, the soldiers opened fire. Ola Masood Arafat, a 28-year-old woman, was struck by a bullet and died on the spot. Mrs. Hajji was wounded in her right arm. Her three-year-old daughter Shahd was shot in the chest.

Soldiers threw a grenade as they entered Ateya al-Samouni's house. In the midst of the smoke, fire and noise, Ateya al-Samouni stepped forward, his arms raised, and declared that he was the owner of the house. He was promptly shot dead. The soldiers then opened fire on the room in which his family had gathered.

In Zeitoun, Salah al-Sammouni made the mistake of thinking that if his extended family stayed in their house they'd be all right. When the soldiers came his father spoke to them in Hebrew. He explained to them: "These are my children, my family, there are no terrorists here". The soldiers told them to leave their house and go to Wa'el's house across the road. They obeyed.

They stayed there all day and all night. They had hardly any food in the house and the children were hungry.

The following morning Salah and three of his cousins left to get some tomatoes from their walled garden and some wood to make a fire. As soon as they did so they were shelled. Muhammad and Hamdi were killed while Wa'el and Salah were injured. The single-storey house was then shelled and the roof brought down. Of the 100 inside 25 were killed and most of the others injured.

The survivors walked in the direction of Gaza City but were stopped by soldiers and the men handcuffed. On Salah ad-Din Street, just a few meters north of al-Samouni Street and in front of the Juha family house, soldiers positioned on the roofs of the houses opened fire. Iyad was struck in the leg and fell to the ground. Muhammad Asaad al-Samouni, who was walking immediately behind him, moved to help him, but a soldier on a rooftop ordered him to walk on. When he saw the red point of a laser beam on his body and understood that a soldier had taken aim at him, he desisted. The soldiers also fired warning shots at Muhammad Asaad al-Samouni's father to prevent him from assisting Iyad. Iyad al-Samouni's wife and children were prevented from helping him by further warning shots.

Iyad al-Samouni lay on the ground, his hands shackled with white plastic handcuffs, blood pouring from the wounds in his legs and begged for help. Fawzi Arafat yelled at a soldier "we want to evacuate the wounded man". The soldier, however, pointed his gun at Iyad's wife and children and ordered them to move on without him.

Mudallala Jouha and Mou'in Jouha, an agricultural engineer, put the latter's mother in a small cart because she couldn't walk. Mou'in Jouha pushed the cart and their son, Ibrahim, 14, walked next to him with a white flag.

Despite this precaution soldiers shot Ibrahim in the chest. Mudallala Jouha and Mou'in Jouha carried Ibrahim back to their garage and called an ambulance but the army didn't allow one to come. They stayed in the garage all day and all night. Mudallala Jouha held Ibrahim in her lap and tried to keep him warm but he died.

Amal Zaki 'Eilewa, a forty-year-old mother of eight, was in the kitchen of her house when a tank shell came through the bedroom window, smashed through the wall into the kitchen, and exploded.

Amal, her ten-year-old daughter Lana, and three of her sons, Mu'tasem, Mu'min and Isma'il, aged fourteen, twelve and seven were killed.

Sabah Abu Halima, a mother of ten, was at home when three white phosphorus artillery shells crashed through her roof. Everything caught fire. Her husband and four of her children burned alive in front of her eyes. Her baby girl, Shahed, melted in her arms.

The al-Daya family had dinner on the ground floor, and listened to a battery-powered radio, as there was no electricity. They then went to sleep, the sons and their wives and children in their apartments on the upper floors and the parents and the unmarried children on the ground floor.

Before dawn the father and one of the sons, Mohammed, went to pray at the nearby mosque and returned home as air strikes had once again resumed.

The father entered the house shortly before the strike. Mohammed was trailing behind and was approaching the house when a missile struck.

His pregnant wife, Tazal, and their three daughters and one son, all aged less than seven, were killed, along with his parents, Fayez and Kawkab.

Afaf Mohammed Dhmeida, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of five, was hanging the laundry on the roof terrace of her home when a tank round cut her body in two. The top half was flung off the roof, bounced off the roof of a lower building across a yard and landed in a parking lot across from the house.

Her five-year-old daughter had just reached the top of the stairs when this happened. Three weeks after the incident, the girl was still not speaking.

Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad, nine, Samar, five and Amal, three, and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flags. Close to the door was a tank and two soldiers were sitting on top eating chocolate and chips.

The family stood still, waiting for orders. Without warning, a third soldier emerged and shot at the three girls and their grandmother.

Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm. Khalid and Kawthar Abd Rabbo carried their three daughters and mother back inside the house.

Dr. 'Aouni al-Jaru, a thirty-seven-year-old medical doctor, was working at his desk in his study and his thirty-six-year-old wife, Albina Vladimir, from the Ukraine, was in the kitchen when a tank shell was fired into their home.

He ran out of the study and his wife ran out of the kitchen, towards the children's room, at the other end of the house. As she crossed the living room she was struck by a second shell, which cut her in two. She was holding their baby Yousuf and he too was killed.

When a missile hit the roof of their home in the middle of the night ten-year old Rouba and nine-year-old Rasha scrambled to get out. Their mother, siblings and aunt only managed to get to the bottom of the stairs when the house collapsed.

An artillery shell, after having discharged white phosphorus, crashed through the roof of the house of forty-seven-year-old Hanan al-Najjar, a mother of four.

It travelled through two rooms and exploded in the hall. A large fragment hit Hanan in the chest, severing the upper part of her body. She died in front of her children and relatives, most of whom were injured. Her four children all sustained burns.

Forty-seven-year-old Rouhiyah al-Najjar gave people white cloths to make flags. She also had a white flag and was at the front of a group of women and children who were trying to escape the shelling.

The women held up babies and shouted "We have children!" The group of women and children started moving down a straight alley, about six or seven meters wide, flanked on both sides by houses. At the other end of the alley, a little more than 200 meters away, was the house of Faris al-Najjar, which had been occupied by numerous soldiers.

When Rouhiyah al-Najjar was about 200 meters from Faris al-Najjar's house, a shot hit her in the temple. She had just turned her head towards her neighbour next to her to encourage her.

When the home of Tal'at As'ad Sa'adi Hammouda, fifty-three, a director in the Ministry of Social Affairs, and his wife, Intisar Abd al-Wahhab Ibrahim Hammouda, thirty-eight, was struck by tank shells, their children: Muhammad, fifteen, and Faris, aged three, were injured. Ambulances were not allowed to rescue them and they died of their wounds.

Izzeddin Wahid Mousa, his wife Samira, their fourteen-year-old daughter Nour and their three sons, aged between twenty-three and twenty-eight, were in the yard of their house listening to the news about negotiations when a missile from a drone hit, killing four of them.

Seven hundred civilians were taking shelter in a compound in the southern Rimal area of Gaza City when it was attacked. Three 155mm high explosive and seven white phosphorous shells hit a workshop and a warehouse. There were clouds of black smoke and the smell was terrible.

The compound contained a substantial fuel depot. Its underground storage facility had 120,000 liters of fuel while fuel tankers above ground had 49,000 liters. The compound also stored medical supplies, food, clothing and blankets.

A burning fragment landed under one of the trucks. Scott Anderson ran out together with a colleague. They couldn't put the burning fragment out with fire extinguishers so they batted it away from under the truck with sticks.

The fuel trucks were then driven 800 meters down the road to an empty lot that had already been shelled.

The al-Haddad family waited in their home on Islamic University Street until 11 a.m., when a ceasefire was announced. Uday al-Haddad, fifty-five, branch manager for the Palestine Bank, his wife Ihsan, forty-four, and their children: Hatim, twenty-four, an accounting student at the Islamic University, Mohammad al-Haddad, twenty-five and, Ala'a, fourteen, then got into their grey 1996 Volkswagen Golf.

They had just reached the intersection at the end of their road when they were hit.

The explosion threw Mohammad al-Haddad out of the car. At first he lost consciousness but then tried to push his way into the burning vehicle. He fell down, himself on fire.

Fifty-five-year-old Muhammad al-Sharif, a paint factory owner, dragged him to an alley and tried to talk to him but he couldn't speak. One of his eyes had burned away and he was horribly injured.

The elementary school in Beit Lahiya housed one thousand, six hundred people when it was attacked. A white phosphorus shell landed in a classroom on the top floor. Two young brothers, Bilal al-Ashqar and Muhammad al-Ashqar, died instantly and their mother Nujud, twenty-eight, was severely wounded.

It was followed by four white phosphorus shells, and one, which destroyed the market next to the school. Dozens of burning wedges landed in the courtyard and a classroom on the second floor was soon in flames.

The smoke was a mixture of white and yellow and the odour was quite awful. Some of those who had sought refuge in the school caught fire and their bodies melted away. It was a scene from a Dantean nightmare.

My thoughts returned to Café Imperial, where I was actually sitting. I looked up at the stained mirror and reddish orange roses, carefully placed on each table, the white orchids in the elaborate silver vessel, on a marble table with gilded legs, with its winged female figure holding a bunch of grapes.

I became aware of the animated discussion in the adjoining room. Two, attractive, young, Arab ladies with beige and black head scarfs were talking loudly and passionately to a balding, middle-aged man in an elegant grey sports jacket. He seemed to reel under the assault of their voices. With each new verbal attack he merely nodded uncomfortable agreement and shrank in his chair.

Close by a red-faced, heavily set businessman with a dark blue jacket and tie was talking to a rather haggard looking middle-aged, blonde lady who was replying to his statements in a hoarse voice. She was flanked by a man who listened attentively but didn't say a word.

"The Arabs are very conservative. One mustn't underestimate them," the businessman was telling the other two.

"What is acceptable for an investor? I don't have any security. Zero security," the lady responded.

"There is one other possibility."

"No, no. It has to be secure. The yield has to be secure."

"There are contracts, in which everything is determined."

"I can't believe what is not confirmed. The investor has to be careful."

"To be realistic..."

The sums being invested exceeded $150m.

What a contrast, I couldn't help but think, to the time of Schnitzler when Mahler, Reinhardt and Hofmannsthal had been in this self-same room. How different the discussions must have been! What a sad comedown in comparison.

### Palais Lichtenstein

I was curious to see where my half-brother had worked and consequently went with Heinrich to Palais Lichtenstein in the Fuerstengasse, in Vienna's ninth district.

Designed by Domenico Martinelli, built between 1691 and 1704, with a ceiling fresco in the grand salon by Andrea Pozzo, it was a perfectly charming yet at one and the same time imposing Baroque palace. When my half-brother worked there it had been the Museum of Modern Art.

I remembered meeting the prince, who seemed perfectly charming, in London. He told me that in his youth he'd wanted to study art history. His father had told him that the family couldn't afford it and he'd subsequently been forced to study business and law instead.

When it came to selecting art he employed an advisory team of art historians but ultimately trusted his own judgement in the matter.

Now Palais Liechtenstein houses a collection more in keeping with its Baroque style. Instead of the Moderns it houses the likes of Rubens, Bordone, Raffael, Salviati, Cosimo, Sarto, and Mantegna.

"Gone is the patch of grass in front of the palace and, of course, the sculpture by Susana Solano" Heinrich said.

In its place was an expanse of pebble stones, and, to its right, a restaurant with sail-like awning, which was also new, Heinrich told me.

As we entered the Sala Terrana, Heinrich told me that he found himself in a different world to the one of his memory. Gone were the sleepy days of yore.

The tanned, young man, with moustache, crew cut and elegant, black uniform, who personally opened the door for us, was more in keeping with a first class hotel than a museum.

The ceilings were white and the frescos looked newly scrubbed. As he peered up at them Heinrich was not sure whether the effort had been worthwhile. The windows, in the past always dark and grimy, along with the marble-like floor, were now squeaky clean.

Where the rooms of the warders had once been was now a shop and in the centre of the foyer was a gilded coach. "How different it was before!" Heinrich said. "How wonderful the opening parties, which were once celebrated in this self-same foyer, which was once so dark and so poetic! Now they are barely imaginable."

To his surprise Heinrich found himself in a rather airless library, lit by lamps. He'd never even suspected its existence, let alone heard of it, he told me.

He was agreeably surprised. The classical library, originally created between 1788 and 1792, had been transferred from the Herrengasse between 1912 and 1914. It comprised some 100,000 volumes ranging from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Neither of us had heard of the vast majority of the titles.

Yet there were some familiar names, not only on the spines of the books but also on the numerous busts, which were dotted around the rooms: Shakespeare, Voltaire, the sublime Corneille, the brilliant Leibniz.

Heinrich spent little time in the collection: the works were not terribly interesting, he told me, however valuable they might be, and only displayed evidence of the pedantry of the minds which had collected them.

He was impatient to see the garden, the plans for the development of which fascinated him. Every style had, on paper at least, been tried out. Which, Heinrich wondered, had actually been realised?

In the past the garden had been a hidden world, a world he'd always been curious to explore. That there were some stunning interiors hidden in close proximity to the palace was nothing new. They hadn't interested him in the slightest, but the garden, for some reason or other, always had.

He remembered sitting or standing in part of it on long summer nights and wondering what exactly was beyond the wall in the rest of it. Now he'd finally find out.

To his surprise it turned out to be something of a compromise between Baroque and English styles. This created a rather curious, but by no means displeasing, impression.

It was as if the organic nature of history had left its imprint for all to see. Overlapping and, at times, contradictory styles were compressed in a relatively tight space. The garden was by no means huge; but it was of agreeable size. The nearer he got to the Lustschloss, the various designs for which he'd studied with great care in the library, the more "English" the garden became.

Much to his disappointment nothing remained of the Lustschloss built by Johann Fischer von Erlach at the close of the seventeenth century. In its place was one by Heinrich von Ferstel, built after 1873. It was interesting but undoubtedly lacked the charm the original must have had, Heinrich surmised.

As we walked slowly back along the winding paths, growing straighter and straighter the closer we got to the palace, I reflected on my half-brother's vexed career there.

At first it had been fun. He'd been well paid and hadn't had much to do. Indeed he'd been paid for guided tours he'd never even given. This rather privileged treatment aroused the envy and ill will of the warders working there and he was told, from one day to the next, that he'd been dismissed.

The ostensible reason had been the difficulty of calculating how much insurance he should pay but in reality there had been other motives at work.

When my half-brother started working for a company that leased students to museums he'd soon encountered difficulties at Palais Liechtenstein.

He'd wandered around on the second floor with its works by Constantin Brancusi, Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, Rudolf Belling, Julio Gonzalez, Henri Laurens, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, Louise Bourgeois, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lamm, Max Ernst etc. and had felt like a kid in a candy store.

He'd even written long letters about Ernesto Tatafiore's concern for order, depth, and concentration, Sandro Chia's interest in the "interior memory of things of the spirit", Mimmo Paladino's emphasis on looking within oneself, A.R. Penk's interest in universals, Georg Baselitz's freeing of representation from content, Kokoschka's "visions within ourselves", Ernst Barlach's construction, joining and organization, Kolomon Moser's harmony, André Derain's art games, Johannes Itten's symbols for the soul, Lajos d'Ebneth's rhythm, time and movement, Marcel Broodthaers' secrets, Guenter Brus' tangible processes, Rudolf Schwarzkogler's conditions for painting, Louis Bourgeois' sublimation of the subconscious, Andre Masson's unification with the universe, Amedee Ozenfant's cleansing of cubism, Otto Gutfreund's "mirroring surfaces of life", Man Ray's interest in amusing, bewildering and annoying, Paul Klee's concern for making the invisible visible, Alberto Giacometti's emphasis on condemning and defending, Jackson Pollock's interest in the energy and motion of the forces within, Robert Motherwell's visual equivalences of feeling, Pierre Soulages' emphasis on limited means and expression, Nam June Paik's "humanized technology", and Christo's "transformation of familiar objects".

One night my half-brother had been asked to accompany a teenage model home. Her boyfriend had failed to turn up and he agreed to act as her bodyguard.

The young girl was boring as hell and my half-brother had spent one of the most miserable nights of his life on the U-Bahn travelling out to Huetteldorf at a time when he was still living in Waehring, at the other end of town.

The whole, depressing, operation had taken forever and he had nearly missed the last tram home. The next day he'd been completely exhausted.

For some reason or other he expected those who'd asked him to perform this onerous task to be grateful. They were not; on the contrary.

While standing in the room, which housed the Constantin Brancusi, the Willi Baumeister, the Raymond Duchamp Villon, Oskar Schlemmer and Rudolf Belling he was told that a fashion show was being prepared in the Herculeum Saal, the main hall, which was close by. He finally understood what the model had been doing there the night before.

Racks with dresses were pushed into the room and a whole army of men and women set to work preparing the show.

When my half-brother came back from a break he nearly got a heart attack. The priceless sculptures were being used as racks for clothes. The warder, who was from the permanent staff, didn't seem to care in the least. That was, my half-brother confessed, somewhat typical for their cavalier attitude. They not only had no relationship whatsoever to the work they were guarding, they more often than not hated it. They not only hated the work, they hated the whole museum. There was, not a few believed, no future for either it or them. Some were tormented souls, who gave vent to their spleen, others wandered around like zombies and never uttered a sound.

An exception to the rule was a highly intelligent Kurd. He'd been involved in the war against Iraq fought by the Kurds between 1972 and 1975. The war had been sponsored by the CIA and had cost thousands of lives and millions of taxpayer's dollars. It had also created 200,000 refugees. It was later revealed that the war was never intended to be won in the first place. It was just a cynical ploy to bring Iraq to the bargaining table over a border dispute with Iran. About this fact the Kurds had been left in the dark.

When the ploy worked and Iran and Iraq made peace the Kurds had been forced to flee. At the time Kissinger cynically said, when he was reprimanded on the way he'd betrayed his former allies: "Covert action shouldn't be confused with missionary work."

When the Kurd arrived in Austria he was, although a trained engineer, sent off to work as a warder.

Many of the warders had been trained for other jobs and not a few lamented the fact that they proved unable to exercise their skills. Whole branches of industry, trades and crafts had simply disappeared. They'd been left stranded to cope the best they could.

My half-brother observed how some men had set up grey screens in the corners of the room. One of the permanent staff asked him what they were for. Foolishly he said he thought they were for the models to get dressed.

All of a sudden four members of the permanent staff entered the room and my half-brother was told to go down to the entrance hall. He agreed without questioning his instructions.

He spent the rest of the evening completely miserable, standing on the cold, hard, stone floor of the entrance hall, without the slightest idea of what he was doing there. There was nothing to actually guard.

The next day he was told that he'd not be returning to Palais Liechtenstein. He'd got a Hausverbot, he'd been disbarred from working there again. He'd not been where he was supposed to have been.

This was a frequent problem, he once told me. Decisions were arbitrary and those in charge were despots, if not worse.

Flexible labor, which had seemed so appealing at first, and which had seemed like a perfectly good idea, proved a nightmare. My half-brother might work as hard as he could, be a conscientious and devoted employee, be as dedicated as he could, even spend his free time helping out but was still treated unfairly.

There was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was at the complete mercy of arbitrary decision-making.

His experience of the Oberaufseher, the supervisors, wasn't a positive one. They were often petty, ignorant, vicious, corrupt and completely incompetent.

I thought about Greenspan's idea of the traumatized worker. A "traumatized worker" was someone "who felt job insecurity in the changing economy and so was accepting smaller wage increases. Workers were not agitating and were fearful that their skills might not be marketable if they were forced to change jobs".

Of course a warder has no skills, my half-brother told me. He was told that those of the original cadre of warders, who'd been involved at the very inception and founding of the company, had been dismissed when they'd asked for more money.

The original cadre had been highly motivated and had been loyal to the company founder. They'd thought of themselves as an elite.

Those who came later really didn't care. The quality of the service diminished as the quality of the personnel became diluted and fewer and fewer proved willing to put in the long, exhausting hours of walking for such a miserable pay and such appalling conditions.

More and more shirked the odious demands put upon them. The more rigorous the rules the more likely they were to be broken. This reflected in the company image, which suffered as a result. It came as no surprise, my half-brother told me, when he heard that the company had gone bankrupt.

Greenspan had argued that the economy's performance was "extraordinary" and "exceptional". He'd remarked that a major factor contributing to its "outstanding achievement was a heightened sense of job insecurity and, as a consequence, subdued wages".

It transpired however that flexibility of labour didn't reduce unemployment. It simply created a large number of demoralizing, poorly paid jobs, which were of no use to anyone.

In fact, not only that, it didn't help the economy as a whole at all. On the contrary: it damaged it, for very obvious reasons. A traumatized worker is a poor worker and a poor worker cannot buy either goods or services. Given the fact that 70% of the American economy is made up of consumption, this was a disaster. The notion of the traumatized worker proved to be not only morally reprehensible but utter insanity.

Heinrich told me about how the museum had been in the past. "When one ascended the stairs to the right there was Joerg Immendorf's: "Museum moderner Kunst", and on the first floor one saw Julian Schnabel's "Painting without Mercy"."

We walked up the stairs and into the first room, where there was a stunning portrait of Prospero Alessandri by Giovanni Battista Moroni from 1560, a still life by Osias Beert from 1600, and a portrait of St. Peter by Flaminio Torre (1620-1661).

"In the past there were works not from the 1660s but from the 1960s, by Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain and Jim Dine here," Heinrich told me.

We walked into the room in which there were various sculptures: a bust of Prince Joseph Wenzel I of Liechtenstein (1696-1772) by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Pope Alexander VIII, from 1691 and the Virgin Mary by Guidi Domenico from 1670.

Yet all Heinrich saw was a world which had long since vanished, an imaginary world made up of modern rather than old masters.

We walked into the next room with its works by Friederich Amerling: "Girl with a Straw Hat", 1835, Friederich Wilhelm von Shadow: "Portrait of Felix Shadow", the stepbrother of the artist, from 1830, and "The Interrupted Pilgrimage" by Ferdinand Georg Waldmueller. Again Heinrich only cast a cursory glance at the works themselves. He seemed to be living in his memories.

"Here were portraits of Mick Jagger by Andy Warhol. Of course," Heinrich told me, "it was Warhol, more than any other artist, who made contemporary art horribly commercial. He dreamed of being the richest man in the world and once said: "Buying is much more American than thinking and I'm as American as they come...What they do is buy – people, money, countries". This is the tragedy of the world and the reason it is hurtling toward destruction. Everybody and I mean everybody, can be bought. What will happen to the stunning Klimts in the Belvedere that were recently taken by the Americans? They will disappear from public view and land in the hands of the Mafia or some rich kleptocrats. Millions will lose the opportunity to be inspired by great art. Why? Because of greed and corruption. The Americans are still plundering Europe, all in the name of "restitution". Do they themselves ever consider restoring the art they have stolen? Of course not."

The vast majority of the permanent collection had been on the second floor. There were paintings by Alexij Jawlensky, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Herbert Boeckl, Oskar Kokoschka, sculptures by Otto Gutfreund, George Minne, Medardo Rosso, Pablo Picasso and André Derain, works by Johannes Itten, Henri Laurens, Albert Gleizes, Ben Nicholson, Michel Larianov, Amedee Ozenfant and Frantisek Kupka etc. etc.

"This list might sound impressive," Heinrich stated, "but the works are sadly not. The collection, which it is important to add, doesn't even belong to the state of Austria but rather to the Ludwig Foundation, is, on the whole, second rate. The reason is quite simple. As a collection of one man, a chocolate manufacturer with a passion for Picasso, it is incredible but as a collection of a nation state, whose antecedent, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had played such an instrumental role in the creation of "The Modern", it is pathetic."

That night I joined Franz and Heinrich at Umar, a fish restaurant at the Naschmarkt. It was a warm evening and we sat outside. There was a constant flow of tourists, young couples and groups passing by.

On the menu were oysters in shallot port wine, seaweed in soya sauce, arugula with parmesan, octopus with olives, tuna with avocado, salmon, sea bass and swordfish, wild prawns, monkfish, fried squid, scallops, mussels, crab and lobsters.

While Heinrich chatted to a waiter Franz turned to me and told me about his life. "When I was young I never thought I'd be an artist. I wanted to be a gallerist. I wanted to surround myself with art. I knew a couple of painters when I was young whose work was so perfect that I felt deeply discouraged."

"I could neither draw nor paint so I started to make collages. Had I known how long it would take to create one halfway decent collage, I'd never have started!"

"After that I began doing sculptural works but I had no idea about materials. I was using plaster and my works were forever falling apart! I have no talent at putting things together!"

"Forms hovered in front of my eyes but I was perfectly incapable of turning them into objects. Art is always an impetus, which one can't articulate. One wants to express something but hasn't learned how to do so. The minute one has learned how one no longer feels the impetus!"

"That led me, as I told you before, to the Academy. After the Academy, I tried to get exhibited in the Galerie naechst St. Stephan, which was very prestigious at that time."

"The problem was that they were mainly interested in concept artists. I have always been behind the times."

"At the beginning of the eighties everyone was into colour but I couldn't paint with colour. It took me ten years to learn how to do so. By that time it was out of fashion. At the end of the eighties everyone was into Marx or Heidegger. I was still reading Fichte!"

I told Franz about my desire to visit MUMOK. It didn't interest him in the least and his face expressed absolute disgust.

Heinrich explained that Franz disliked the people who ran MUMOK intensely. He literally couldn't stand them.

They were forever pestering him to exhibit there but he simply didn't want to do so. He disliked museums in general and MUMOK in particular. Above all: it would do nothing to further his career. It was, as a museum, completely irrelevant in the landscape of the art world.

Franz complained about the pressure that was being put on him and the way what he termed the retarded bureaucrats kept wasting his time. "What do I get out of it?" he lamented. He would rather spend his time painting.

The next day, while visiting Franz in his studio, he asked me whether I'd like to go to Krems to have some Marillenknoedel, apricot dumplings. It was a beautiful day and I'd planned to go swimming but on the spur of the moment I said: "Why not?"

So we drove, at considerable speed, in Franz's Maserati, to Krems. Once we arrived at the Kunsthalle and opened the doors I heard a voice screaming: "Franz! Franz!"

It was Sarah Lucas, who was exhibiting there. Franz loved her work and asked, shyly and with not a little trepidation, if it might be possible to swap one of his pieces for one of hers. She agreed without hesitation.

After that we had some sausages and apricot dumplings, which were prepared by Sarah's Portuguese chef, at a nearby house.

When we returned to Vienna Franz invited me to his spacious, central apartment, not far removed from where Adolf Loos had once lived.

As I sat on a Franz West divan at a Franz West table in Franz West's living room, with its Franz West chairs, grand piano, Turkish carpets, stereo system and CD collection and studied the works by Anselm Reyle and Christopher Wool on the walls, I couldn't help but be drawn to his bookcase. I confess it is a weakness of mine to look at bookcases. The books people have tell a story all of their own.

Franz was busy dealing with domestic issues in the kitchen, his wife had just hired a new nanny from Georgia, so I had considerable leisure to browse.

His books included: "The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Volumes 1-7", "The Life of Michelangelo", "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol", "Cy Twombly Cycles & Seasons", "Secret Knowledge" by David Hockney, "Anselm Reyle", "Kippenberger", "Letter to my Father" by Franz Kafka, "Odyssey", by Homer, "Sonnets" by Shakespeare, "On Friendship", Derrida/Montaigne, Plato: "Works", David Hume: "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", Kant: "Critique of Judgment", and texts by Hegel, Dewey, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Adorno and Habermas.

I pulled out a volume by Georg Lukacs concerning young Hegel and the republics of antiquity.

I was curious which sentences Franz had underlined. One of them was the sentence: "As free people, they obeyed laws which they themselves gave, they obeyed people who they themselves had put in power."

I don't know why I was surprised by these republican sentiments but I was. Perhaps it was due to the fact that we'd never discussed politics. Franz never talked about it. It didn't seem to interest him. He seemed aware that life beyond his little world was harsh, that there was a considerable amount of injustice in the world and that the state of the planet was dire but he didn't seem particularly interested in the question as to the why. I read on.

"In doing so, they recognized the right of everyone to have a will of their own, whether it happened to be good or evil. The good recognized the duty of being good, but, at the same time, respected the liberty of the other. They therefore didn't set up either a divine or a self-made, abstract morality, which they expected others to follow."

This very much embodied what seemed to be Franz's tolerant attitude toward others and above all: his love for personal liberty. I read further.

"The decisive moment for the young Hegel in this analysis is the unfixed. Not-for-ever-fixed objectivity. It is not intended to create a final objectivity, but only a path in the direction toward the objective and from there back into a changed, refined, subjectivity."

"In the cultural philosophy of young Hegel, this line of thought is very closely related to his purely political, purely citizen-oriented image of antiquity."

I could see how these ideas might have fascinated Franz, especially the linking of the philosophical to the cultural.

"In this period, the young Hegel draws several parallels between Jesus and Socrates. On the one hand, he notes the fetishistic element in Jesus' number of students (12), but places the main emphasis on the fact that Jesus takes his pupils out of life, out of society, isolates them from it, transforms them into human beings whose main characteristic is precisely this schooling, while in the case of Socrates the pupils remain social, what they are, and their individuality is not artificially transformed."

When I read these words I couldn't help but think of Franz's remarks. He said he wished to reduce the number of his assistants to twelve. Was there a symbolic rather than a practical need for this reduction? And did Franz regard his assistants as his disciples? Perhaps. It often seemed that he treated his assistants as his sons and daughters. He was generous, indulgent and often acted the part of a kindly father figure. The studio was very much like an extended family. This was part of its charm. Everybody who visited enjoyed being there. It was a special place.

As I flicked through the copy of "Letter to my Father" by Kafka I thought of the Mikulasska street, where Kafka was born, the buildings on the Altstaedter Ring where his family lived, his school on the Fleischmarkt, the university where he studied, the synagogues where he prayed, the Assuranci Generali where he got his first job, the Cafe Savoy where he watched theatre performances, the Marien Saeule where he'd met his friends, and the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherunganstalt, where he'd worked.

I thought of how Kafka had feared his father. His father claimed, of course, that he'd done everything on behalf of his children, and had made innumerable sacrifices on their behalf. Kafka had lived in luxury, had had complete freedom to study whatever he'd wanted, hadn't had to worry about food or anything else for that matter.

Yet, according to his father, Kafka had shown neither gratitude nor even goodwill. His father had objected to how he'd fled into eccentric ideas, to friends he'd termed crazy, and to a room of his own. Indeed Kafka lacked, according to his father, a sense of family, and took little interest in his father's business affairs. He attacked his son on account of his coldness, strangeness, ingratitude and made him feel, at every possible juncture, his bitter disappointment that he'd turned out to be a good-for-nothing.

Kafka blamed neither his father nor himself. He didn't doubt his father's goodness toward him. All he sought was peace. He was well aware that he wasn't someone after his father's heart. He was, as he freely accepted, a weak, fearful and hesitant person. He'd have been happier to have had his father as a friend, boss, uncle or grandfather but not as a father. His father was simply too strong for him.

In many respects Kafka took after his mother. His father's side of the family was strong, healthy, hungry, noisy, self-satisfied, superior, persevering, and generous. His mother's was just the opposite.

A conflict between the two was foreordained and it was inevitable that the father would try to trample down the child.

Kafka had been a frightened child, bothersome and spoilt by his mother. He had been, as he well knew, damaged by his upbringing. Above all else he'd been brought up to feel his own worthlessness.

"Why have I not married?" Kafka wrote to his father. His answer was that he was spiritually incapable of marriage. His fear, weakness and self-contempt made it quite impossible.

Kafka was caught in a dilemma, and it was this dilemma that was to prove fatal. He could either flee or attempt to remodel his prison. He couldn't do both at one and the same time. One excluded the other. It was because he stayed, voluntarily, a prisoner of his father that he died.

Of course I knew that Franz West had had similar problems just as my half-brother had had.

Is it usual to suffer at the hands of one's parents, or step-parents, I asked myself? Both Franz West and Bernhard had suffered at the hands of their stepfathers while Kafka had suffered at the hands of his father. My half-brother had suffered at the hands of both of his parents.

When I got home I found out that Anne was able to come to Vienna after all. She would be arriving within a couple of days.

I resolved to bury myself away and concentrate only on the translation.

A sentence struck me that embodied what my half-brother had always reiterated: how perverse and paradoxical people actually are.

Bernhard wrote of how people both attracted and repelled him at one and the same time.

Another idea struck me, this time an echo of what Heinrich had said: that parents have to die, before one can actually do what one wants. They invariably suppress one's passions.

This had certainly been the case of my half-brother. He had always done what his parents had wanted him to do and in return they had used him, manipulated him, fooled him and, above all else: oppressed him.

He'd never truly had the chance to do what he'd wanted. He'd been essentially crippled by his parents, both emotionally and financially.

Although it had been in their power to support him they had done their utmost to sabotage his career and to destroy his life. There had been no serious and well-founded reason for doing so. His only sin had been his refusal to follow the path his parents had marked out for him: one of banal, boring, bourgeois conformity.

He explained to me at the time that he really didn't have a choice. His childhood had been so traumatic that he had no option but to become an artist. The only other possibilities would have been to become a revolutionary, a mass murderer, a drug addict or an alcoholic.

Art had saved him. It had provided him with a cathartic outlet. He needed to do something that he himself regarded as idealistic, selfless and noble. He needed to turn what he termed bad karma into good. His father was no model to follow; on the contrary. He wanted to be the exact opposite of what his father had been. The rough and tumble of cutthroat business was not for him. He despised and hated me for working in the City. I was just a collaborator in his eyes.

"If there is a hell, and of course there is a hell, then my childhood was hell." The sentence by Bernhard could have come from my half-brother, I couldn't help but think. "People say they had a happy childhood, but it was hell. Most people don't succeed in getting out of the hole, which is their childhood. For their whole lives they remain in this hole. They don't come out and are embittered."

Another sentence by Bernhard I was not so sure about: "The thinking man is by nature an unhappy man." Was that true, I asked? Surely I was a thinking man and surely I was happy.

### Leopold

Heinrich was of the opinion that Anne might be able to help the flagging career of a friend of his: a painter named Leopold, who lived in a Schloss not far removed from Vienna. He was also thought I needed a holiday. He said I was working too hard and that the stress was beginning to show.

Anne however had other plans. She wanted to see the museums of Vienna. This was fine with me as they were places where my half-brother had worked.

We visited the Technisches Museum, Technical Museum, with its huge smelting pot for steel, dating from the 1950s, its collection of different types of steam engines, its copy of a sextant once used by Tycho Brahe, copies of telescopes used by Kepler and Galileo and copy of a gasometer once used by Lavoisier.

The first Austrian steam engine, I discovered, had been developed by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, who, among other things, had completed his father's work: the Karlskirche, at the start of the 18th century. The steam engine had been used at a Benedictine monastery called Goettweig, not far removed from Krems.

Anne had been equally fascinated by the collection of musical instruments and models showing how cembalos, clavichords and pianos actually worked.

When I told her about the collection of musical instruments in the Hofburg she was eager to see it.

The collection in the Hofburg has flutes, piccolos, oboe d'amores, bassets, English horns, double basses, valve horns, harps, violas, violins, cellos, cabinet pianos, basin drums, clarinets, brand fiddles, bowed zithers, accordions, and fortepianos.

Anne was most fascinated of all by the giraffe and pyramid pianos, the shapes of which I found absurd and not a little amusing.

It was more I on the other hand than her who wished to see the collection of armour, with its double-handed swords, swords for the cavalry and court, its tapestries, including one depicting the liberation of what was then Pressburg and what is now called Bratislava, helmets and their hoods, shields, lances, axes and partisans.

I was especially fascinated by the armour which had once belonged to Cosimo de Medici, Sebastiano Venier and the notorious Duke of Alba. I had read so much about all three. Here and now I found a direct link to the past.

We explored the Ephesus collection with the model of the ancient city. I told Anne a story my half-brother had once related to me.

Ephesus, which is in present day Turkey, was located next to the sea. It was, by modern standards, relatively small, with just 415 hectares and a population of 200,000. It was, with its baths and an amphitheater, in many respects typical for any ancient city, and was only remarkable on account of its Artemis Temple, which was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

One day a visitor came in and studied the model intently. She passed around and around it and looked at it again and again. After roughly half an hour of the greatest concentration she turned to my half-brother and asked him, in all seriousness, whether it was a model of Vienna. Another time a visitor asked him whether she was in the Academy of Art.

There was no end to the idiocy of the visitors my half-brother told me. They were forever saying or doing the most stupid things.

A day later we visited Schubert's place of birth in the Nussdorferstrasse, with its low ceiling and austere interior. The whole family had been packed into the tiny, one room apartment. Of Schubert's fourteen brothers and sisters only four survived into adulthood. Having seen the squalid conditions under which people had been forced to live it didn't surprise me in the least.

We also visited the building where he died, in the Kettenbrueckengasse. He only spent a few months there, in a tiny room, and had been sick for almost the entire time. The flat wasn't big and belonged to his brother, who'd looked after him at the very end. His death was caused by poverty.

I felt a pang of guilt. Had I neglected my half-brother? Was I responsible for his death? Could he have produced great works of art had he been allowed to do so? It all seemed such a dreadful waste.

Anne was a huge fan of Schubert and she studied all the artifacts, the reproductions of the letters, the scores and pictures with the utmost concentration.

After that we visited the Roemermuseum and found out that the principia of the original Roman fort was now the Tuchlauben, the praeterium was the Schulhof, the valetudinarium was the Salvatorgasse, the kaserne the Judenplatz, the fabrica Am Hof, the therma was Marc Aurelstrasse, and the officer's quarters were on Hohe Markt.

Half of the initially 8,000 odd inhabitants of the fort, which existed between the end of the 1st and the beginning of the 5th centuries, were civilians: relatives of officers, stable hands or merely slaves. Over time, the numbers of tradesmen and craftsmen increased and the urban settlement reached 20,000.

It was here, in Vienna, that Marcus Aurelius was said to have died. Of course, I realized, as I thought about Marcus Aurelius and his philosophical reflections, it was perfectly obvious: my half-brother lacked good examples.

The Romans were not interested in abstract philosophical questions, most of which are unanswerable anyway. They were interested in Epicure, Epictetus and practical, often mundane questions of how to cope with life, how to act, and what actually constitutes good and bad behaviour.

My half-brother often complained about existing in a moral vacuum. He was wholly disoriented. He literally didn't know right from wrong. He'd become mistrustful of not just Christianity but all religions and had been on a spiritual quest at the time of his death. His doubts, fears and uncertainties had undoubtedly played a role in his downfall. He literally didn't know what to do. He was paralyzed.

Had he had the time and the resources he might well have developed a philosophy which was peculiarly his own, in much the same way that Bernhard had done so.

Of course the most important lesson of Epicure, Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius was ultimately the same, I reflected: One has to be detached and independent from all worldly cares. One's own sense of value, happiness and peace of mind must never be dependent either upon possessions or the opinions others.

In the following days we visited the clock museum with its sundial, wall clocks, astronomical clocks, mantel clocks, sand clocks, and long case clocks, the Jewish museum on Judenplatz with its sharp, irregular stonewalls and tombstones and the State Hall, the Prunksaal of the National Bibliothek, the National Library, which had been designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and built by his son Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach. It was completed in 1723.

As we sat and studied the fresco on the ceiling by Daniel Gran, with its image of Karl VI, its figures of fame blowing trumpets, gods, figures symbolizing the arts of war, government, generosity, and the faculties of theology, philosophy, justice and medicine, we heard the echo of muffled footsteps on marble and muffled voices. Anne remarked that she felt like she was in a church.

The statues though, she noted wryly, were not of saints but rather sinners. Instead of Christ the focal point of everything was merely the emperor, who, she remarked, had most probably been a proper fool. The 200,000 odd books were simply there to disguise the fact. 15,000 of them had belonged to Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had the reputation of being an extremely free thinker. His library had cost him more than the building of the Belvedere.

Anne loved the magnificent stairwell of the Belvedere with its black, ornate, rococo lamps, squirming cherubs, martial reliefs and ornate ceilings.

She also loved the Marmor Saal, with its reddish marble, its paintings above its fireplaces, its chandeliers and its view of the city.

She positively swooned when she saw Klimt's "The Kiss", with its mosaic surface of gold, and Klimt's portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer and Fritza Riedler.

She also loved Klimt's "Avenue in front of Schloss Kammer", "Poppy Field" and "Garden with Sunflowers".

Her love of the Belvedere was almost matched by her loathing for the Albertina.

"Which idiot is responsible for all this kitsch", she demanded to know? "It's so tasteless. It's disgusting." The building had been recently renovated but the work had been done without the slightest regard for taste. We left without having even seen the exhibitions, so great was Anne's aversion to that particular building.

Anne was equally disappointed when I took her to the Wagenburg, the coach museum, which she compared to a large, ugly store room, with what she termed: perfectly ghastly neon lighting.

She took one look at a coach, which belonged to some bishop or other and let out a laugh: "It's got an onion on top!"

The only object she found of interest was the black hearse, which had once carried Sisi, in 1898.

"You know it was suicide. There was no need for her to travel to Geneva without a bodyguard. She was inviting trouble. But what is one to expect? Her husband, that pig Franz Joseph, had given her syphilis. He really didn't deserve her. She was so beautiful, and so slim."

Anne told me about her sister, Catherine, who was going through a rough patch. To my surprise she didn't have the slightest sympathy with Catherine whatsoever.

Catherine was, in her words, a "complete and utter Nazi", and was forever saying things like: "It was ever thus", when talking of the crass inequality in the world or how those forced to work under concentration camp like conditions "were lucky to have any jobs at all".

She also spouted long discredited nonsense about Adam Smith's "hidden hand" solving all our problems. She was, Anne told me, thoroughly obnoxious.

Catherine's life revolved around questions of what she should buy and where she should go on holiday but not much else.

When she talked she talked of Loewe, Rick Owens, Balmain, Chalayan, Dior, Jacquemus, Lanvin, Nehera, Aalto, Koche, Yang Li, Paule Ka, Maison Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, Oliver Theyskens, fluted sleeves, leather corset belts, raw seams and rose suede.

It was little surprise that Catherine was perfectly miserable and bought stack after stack of self-help book, all to no avail. Despite countless hours of therapy she still hadn't found herself and the sad truth was she never would. She'd even started writing but her novels, about aliens and Christ, the police and UFOs, were simply appalling!

She was horribly vain and posted photos of herself wearing stylish and expensive sunglasses on launches or sailing boats or at parties in big country houses. She was only obsessed with one thing: her health. She was a perfect hypochondriac.

It was no surprise that she started an affair, out of sheer boredom, with a country doctor, who happened to be married. The wife of the doctor, who'd known him since childhood, they'd been childhood sweethearts, had been literally devastated. Her world had fallen apart. She grew old, haggard and ugly overnight.

Catherine didn't care a jot about the lives she ruined. She simply walked away from the mess with a nonchalant air. There were consequences nonetheless.

Catherine's husband, a banker, had left her for another woman and now she was in trouble. Her husband had deliberately taken out a huge loan on their properties and had plundered their joint bank account before fleeing to America.

She was faced with imminent bankruptcy. I confessed that I couldn't sympathize with her plight. She seemed to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

Anne said that Catherine was on the verge of insanity. This was no isolated case. There was a veritable epidemic of self-harming, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic mental illness. A quarter of the population suffered from anxiety, depression, panic disorders, and phobias.

This was, according to Anne, all linked to the impoverishment of the young. Those born in the 1980s had half as much money as those born in the 1970s. The gap in income and wealth was, in Anne's eyes, ridiculous.

Those responsible for the income gap, in Anne's opinion, were also responsible for the outbreak of madness. And those who had the misfortune to be mad or to commit some silly indiscretion, "like your half-brother", she said pointedly, had been condemned to die.

It was all horribly reminiscent of the philosophy of Jack Welch, she said: get rid of the bottom 10%. That is what the government was doing, getting rid of the bottom 10%. It might be the most intelligent, the most honest, the most decent part of the population. It might be, in fact, the best part of the population, the most sensitive part of the population, but it had to go nevertheless. Only, what Anne termed, the rats, the scoundrels, the scum, the ruthless brutes survived and flourished under such circumstances.

She knew of one girl who'd been a victim of sexual abuse at the age of eight. She'd grown up surrounded by drugs and abuse. When she was sixteen she'd taken multiple overdoses but had miraculously survived. She suffered from anxiety, panic attacks and could no longer sleep.

The weight of the past kept catching up to her and drowning her present. She felt as if she were reliving her traumatic experiences, again and again. Reality seemed to slip out of her grasp and she began to think she was going mad.

One weekend we went to visit Leopold in his Schloss. It was by no means easy to reach. We had to take a train and then a bus.

When we got to the right spot we found Leopold waiting in an old, shabby car, sleeping. Heinrich had to shout his name in order to wake him. It was thankfully only a short drive to the Schloss itself.

The Schloss dated from the thirteenth century and had been built by a crusader who'd survived the wars.

Leopold took considerable pride in it and was glad to give us a guided tour. There were no corridors in the Schloss, which meant there was little privacy. One simply walked through all the private quarters, including Leopold's own. Some of the rooms were spartanly but elegantly furnished while others had been left quite empty.

Not a few were being renovated, Leopold had discovered murals that had been plastered over, while others were in a state of advanced disrepair.

No sooner was one part of the Schloss brought up to scratch than another would fall into decay. The task of maintaining it seemed Sisyphean, to say the least. I didn't envy Leopold but he regarded the task of maintenance a sacred duty.

Part of the Schloss was devoted to painting but Leopold had also built a huge, artificially lit, modern studio directly next to it.

Anne was enthusiastic about the paintings and praised them. This, I immediately realized, made a good impression on Leopold, who obviously had an eye for the ladies. He, in turn, was highly appreciative of Anne's beauty, and showed it by means of gentle caresses.

It was by no means easy to cook or wash up in the Schloss while the showers and bathrooms were in a bad state.

The courtyard, with its well in the centre, its tables, chairs and plants in each corner and the garden, which surrounded the ancient walls, with its trees, patches for growing vegetables, loosely scattered furniture and sailing boat was a delight, especially on a glorious summer's day.

I awoke to the patter of water in the courtyard, in the centre of which was an open well. It was the same sound I'd fallen asleep to. It was joined by other noises: a cock crowing and a church bell tolling.

There were no curtains on the windows, which were rimmed outside with ivory, and the weak, early morning light flooded in, making the details of the Baroque ceiling, the pictures on the walls, of plants, landscapes and a half-naked woman, the gilt framed mirror, study table and chairs, chez longue, armchair and Baroque cupboard visible. Next to the pastel green doors was a small table with flowers.

The plaster of the walls was partly cracked, partly crumbled and partly discolored, there were cobwebs everywhere and dust hung heavy in the room.

The iron bed creaked as I got up to look at the pictures more closely. One concerned snipe shooting and the other portrayed a farmer with his cows. I then walked over to the cupboard. One door was open while the other seemed locked or defective.

After retrieving a slim volume, containing the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, I walked over to the table with its faded decorations. Next to it was a lamp with red shade while underneath it was a worn, red and pink carpet.

As I walked over the broad planks of the wooden floor I realized that it had splinters.

The light at the chez longue was better than the table so I elected to read there instead.

I looked out of the window and saw the gate of the Schloss. There were bails of hay and rows of solar panelling in an adjacent farmyard.

Two cyclists, a bald man with dark glasses, dark blue T-shirt and red shorts and a woman, with light top and shorts, approached the gate of the Schloss.

I watched, undecided whether to open the window and ask what they wanted or to remain hidden and private, away from their view. I was curious whether they would actually try to get into the grounds but they stopped at the gate. The man pointed toward the Schloss and said something. After a short discussion they turned around and cycled off again.

I returned to the chez longue, brushed off the plaster, which had, in the meantime, fallen down, and resumed my reading.

Seldom have I been able to read so well. Seldom have I encountered such peace and quiet.

After a while Anne woke, we showered, got ready and went down for breakfast in the garden.

Every topic was open for discussion and every possible subject under the sun talked about.

Leopold, who was of diminutive height, was a veritable bundle of almost demonic energy. There were times when I thought him close to madness. He seemed perpetually on edge and unable to truly relax. Of course, it was no surprise when he said he was happiest when painting. He seemed not to truly enjoy anything else.

He would like to hold long monologues, while sitting in an especially comfortable wicker chair and played with his hands in a somewhat theatrical manner. Occasionally he'd lean forward or to the side as a means of emphasis. He seemed driven by passion. We all listened attentively.

"Art is, if it is art," Leopold began, "a completely spiritual matter. It deals with areas beyond common rationality. It makes the invisible visible. It is one of the most subtle and remarkable methods of the human mind to gain knowledge. It's the most extraordinary intellectual activity the human mind is capable of. Of course this means that art rarely happens. There are few individuals in whom the greatest possibilities are manifested. And even they rarely attain their highest and best. Vincent van Gogh is one of the few exceptions to the rule."

"Art is order. It is an attempt, in a chaotic, completely incomprehensible world, to understand by means of ordering, because we are all filled with anxiety."

"I regard this as an indescribable intellectual achievement: that one first recognizes the problem, that one recognizes ones' fears and tries, by means of ordering, to understand the world. Otherwise one cannot possibly understand it. This is a means one has been given of coping with life. Of course there are other methods. There is religion. There are philosophical systems. There are shamanistic systems. All of which are attempts to cope with the trials of life."

"I am delighted by the triumph of the spirit. It all sounds horribly pathetic because language has become so appallingly corrupted. The spirit is what sets us apart. It is what distinguishes us and gives us distinction. It tells us what to do."

"My medium, for which I am perhaps best suited, because my brain is oriented in a certain manner, is the image. But by image I don't mean merely a canvas or a drawing. Image is the medium by which art is created. Even the word art is very difficult to comprehend."

"It can be in any form if the result is that which can be termed, in our human capacity for knowledge and in our human capacity for language, art. The means and material used are unimportant. This has nothing to do with an open concept of art, which I consider to be humbug."

"These are all ideas from people who've never entered the reactor. I consider myself to be a fuel rod in a reactor, and what I see are the observers of the fuel rod."

"They watch using a monitor on which an abstraction takes place and they can only understand a part of what is actually going on. But they aren't fuel rods and the reality of the fuel rod is completely different from that of the observer."

"I would say that being an artist is like being a tennis player. I use this comparison merely as a metaphor. There are certain rules and, within these rules, everything is allowed. There are only a few requirements that must be met. Otherwise one can do whatever one pleases. Only the exceptional have the co-ordination necessary to ensure incredible results."

"One must firstly have the potential and everything else is the exhaustion of this potential. One has to work hard, be fanatical, etc. Now art is infinitely more difficult than this, that's clear."

"An extraordinary spiritual power may be evoked for seemingly no reason. But this only seems to be the case. We never know exactly what is really going on. We never know what we record and then consciously reproduce."

"The accumulator within us must have a certain capacity. Perhaps it is in each and every one of us. I don't know. I assume so. Perhaps not everyone feels the need to tap into their memory."

"This probably depends on certain basic orientations of the individual. In my case it seems to be enough, like a sculptor, to explore what makes the appearance and form of mankind possible, what makes me possible. I find it inexhaustible and it seems to satisfy me."

"I use all means that seem right and fitting to communicate. I don't want to communicate. I'm just the medium through which the communication takes place. I'm not speaking about my ego. That's not what I mean at all."

"One must be clear that we are currently confronted with an inflation of so-called art. Art takes place very rarely. This is not a question of injustice."

"Every idiot has an opinion and every idiot is creative. The Nazis had an absurd idea: bringing art to the people. The problem is, and I won't make myself very popular when I say this (I repeat only what is common knowledge among the natural sciences), they say that, if one is very generous, innovation occurs in 3% of the population. Others say: this is absurdly many, one can perhaps say 0.9%, but I'd like to be generous. This means that only a very small percentage of the population is critically receptive to good work. Everybody else falls by the wayside."

"Geneticists call it, which is very bad in my eyes, genetic mass. I don't want to endorse this term. I have a slightly different opinion. I think people have certain duties within existence. In this respect, each is equal. Only the chances are different."

"In my case I have certain possibilities over which I haven't the slightest control. This is a genetic gift. Is it a coincidence? We don't know. According to the latest Quantum research there is chance but that chance is hope. Otherwise we'd be completely predestined. Then everything would be predetermined."

"How can I evaluate what might be art? How do I rate art? What's the value? It has no value in the usual sense of the term."

"The real value is that it is a manifestation of human energy. That is the only thing that it is."

"What value does a canvas, which is stretched on a wooden frame, have? If one converts it to a caloric value then one can warm oneself for perhaps twenty minutes in winter. This has a value of perhaps $3.50 but what is bought is really my human energy. The whole energy of my life, which has gone into it. How does one evaluate this? This I would very much like to know."

"We have a civilization, one can no longer speak of a culture, and we also have a religion. We have a highly fanatical religion. This religion is, just like in the Old Testament: the golden calf. This is our religion. 99.9% are true believers. It is frightening in itself. One can hardly say anything about creation any more."

"The great fictional funds which have been produced no longer have a material value and these funds can no longer be invested. They would prefer to invest in production sites but they can't. So some resourceful guys came up with the idea that one could make big business out of art and they have done so. Wonderful! Now money is invested in art."

"The interests of commerce dictate the fact that a wonderful thing rarely or next to never actually takes place. That's not new. The interests of Rembrandt didn't correlate with those of the art market."

"When Rembrandt came to conclusions, which made him the artist we know today, he got into considerable difficulties. He fell by the wayside. Nobody bought his work. It was the end. The works which satisfied his customers had nothing to do with the essence of art."

"Who can compare to the integrity of Paul Cezanne, who spent his life trying to understand? A greater feat cannot be expected from anyone. Was it not the same with Vincent Van Gogh? He shot himself out of severe financial hardship. He didn't know how to go on."

"Who are the Power Groups behind the creative forces? If the Power Group is good the creative potential might be perfectly miserable. By means of some constellation an artist enjoys the support of a Power Group. The product itself is of no importance. We are now in the world of commodities, the world of commerce. Just a product is produced. No one needs the soap X because there are already three hundred others."

"Now we make a soap and we tell people that this soap is something that has never been made before. There has absolutely never been any soap other than this soap. If one does this well, with plenty of capital, it will work. This can be done with art too."

Anne explained that there was a time when auction houses refused to sell art that was less than two years old. They didn't wish to antagonize or compete with dealers. They also lacked the expertise of dealers. "Those times are over," she said.

"Now art has become a commodity, just like any other commodity. It has become an asset, a lot, a property and is subject to evaluation; it might attain a high price at auction or it might be bought in."

"Of course Sotheby's and Christie's dominate. They represent roughly 80% of the market, and in the world of contemporary art, they generate over half of total art sales at auction: roughly $800 million."

"There's also Beijing Poly International Auction Co., China Guardian Auctions and Bonhams. The auction houses have the advantage that they have powerful marketing departments and have a global reach."

"It's funny to think that Sotheby's was founded as a book auctioneer while Christie's specialized in furniture."

"Until the late twentieth century there were roughly a hundred buyers of works of art, which fetched prices over $5m. Now there are roughly a thousand. This is all due to globalization and liberalization."

"The marketing machines of the big auction houses enabled them to penetrate these new markets highly effectively. China has become the biggest market for art in the world. Once the auction houses realized that the supply of Old Masters, Impressionists and Post Impressionists were drying up they switched to contemporary art. Today Christie's sells $2 billion worth of contemporary art, Sotheby's $1.4 billion."

"Many don't like the way primary dealers only sell to certain collectors. They prefer open competition and above all else the appearance of a free market the auction house represents. Not that auctions involve truly open competition or free markets. There are many treacherous undercurrents few are aware of. Many collectors deliberately overbid in order to keep up the price of their own collections. Others sell overvalued works whose prices are too high and buy others, which they consider undervalued. Works by increasingly unfashionable artists might be sold off before they lose their value altogether. Many collectors deny that they sell at all."

"The art world has become merely an extension of fashion. It's part of a lifestyle. People want to go to the Basel and Frieze art fairs, the Venice Biennale and the evening auctions in New York. Collecting art has become like buying clothes. Art that sells has to have an immediate appeal. Or collectors buy futures options on a work's cultural significance."

"It might be true that a few collectors collect out of a love of art, simple curiosity or a philanthropic desire to help artists while some are simply shopaholic addicts, but most do so as an expression and extension of their wealth and status. They are forever boasting of the millions they spend, the works they own or loan, and of the museum acquisition committees they sit on. They think it nothing to devoting their minutes, hours and days to managing the arrival and departures of their works or dealing with questions of insurance and conservation. They worry whether they should choose between an A- or a B- work and whether their foundations have as much prestige as a competing museum."

"Gallerists on the other hand are concerned with selling their works to the most prestigious buyer possible. They are forever talking of how the Tate, Moma and Moca are running after their pieces. Who one is associated with can create but also bury a career."

"For some dealers their primary role is to choose, mentor and curate the artist. The better their stable the greater their chance of success. Others trade in art objects and like to speculate or gamble. Some are artist-oriented, others collector-focused and others still pseudo-intellectual curator-dealers."

"A good dealer has to have the ability to recognize intelligence, originality and drive in an artist. He has also to have a good business sense and be able to create persuasive narratives."

"Art is sold as much with the tongue as with the eye. In the past it was the museum committees who created canons of taste, now it is the dealers and curators."

"There are roughly 300,000 art dealers in the world but only 10% of them account for 60% of the market. Only 1% make sales of over $70m each year while 90% have an annual turnover of less than $1.4m."

"Many make between a third and three quarters of their annual turnover at fairs. In some cases it can be as high as 90%."

"There are roughly 200 art fairs in the world: Kunstmarkt, Basel, Art Actuel, Bologna, Fiac etc. etc."

"An average size booth costs $50,000 at Art Basel and if one includes the costs of accommodation, shipping, entertaining etc. the average cost is $122,000."

"Of course there is a lot of bullshit spoken about art, about the presence and absence of dialectical relationships in a pluralism of postmodernism visibilities, dynamos of community, the logic of visibility, and the legitimation for production."

"And there is a lot of bullshit produced. There is a lot of diluted art. A lot of genericism is being driven by the market. There are a lot of speculator-collectors who prey on wealthy friends and get them to buy some look-alike art."

"Risk-averse buyers want ersatz art, which fundamentally looks like other art."

"Modest Abstraction, Neo-Modernism, Abstraction, Dropcloth Abstraction, Zombie Formalism and Crapstraction have become the new diseases of our times."

"There are literally millions of these nice, pretty, harmless, decorator-friendly, reductivist canvases, which simply mimic the past."

"They are all simply regurgitated forms of Suprematism, colour-field painting, minimalism, post-minimalism, Arte Povera, etc. and they all remind one of Polke, Richter, Warhol, Wool, Kippenberger, Oehlen etc."

"They are all simply a wink and a nod to the esotericism cultivated at art school and to the art studied there: of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s."

"Of course this visual Muzak has to look hip, cerebral and flatter the collector while blending in at one and the same time. It doesn't matter if the colours are pale, arrangements uninventive or if they ape digital media."

"Self-conscious comments on art, recycling, sustainability, appropriation, and processes of abstraction, are almost invariably involved."

"This copycat mediocrity and mechanical art employs a vocabulary of smudges, stains, spray paint, flecks, spills, splotches, monochromatic fields, silk-screening, or stenciling and it is almost invariably commenting on commodity culture, climate change, social oppression or art history."

"Trade marks of this non-style are geometric, or biomorphic compositions, irregular grids, lattice and moiré patterns, ovular shapes or stripes."

"This so-called art is, above all else, easy to consume, having no complex structures, no surprises, no unique visual iconographies or any incongruities."

### Naples

One night at a Japanese restaurant Franz asked us if we wanted to go to Naples the next day. In high spirits we said yes, without bothering to ask for how long or why. Nor did we find out when I tried to phone him. He simply didn't return my call. We packed for a week and hoped for the best.

In the morning we were picked up by a black limousine and whisked off to an airport, not far removed from the main one at Schwechat. There, without too much waiting and without further ado we were ushered onto a private jet.

A couple of hours later we found ourselves at the main airport in Naples. There we were taken by a second black limousine to Franz's apartment in the Via San Maria di Constantinopoli.

Franz had rented two apartments, one in the Via Broggia and a bigger one in the Via San Maria di Constantinopoli, which he used as a studio.

The apartment, which was close to the Art Academy, was located on a main thoroughfare. The traffic was so noisy that it was impossible to either open a window or to sleep at night.

Franz had recreated his own environment and had brought two truckloads of his own furniture: lamps, beds, tables, chairs as well as numerous artworks from Vienna.

He'd also made a number of changes, installed a bath and a shower and was involved in a heated dispute with the owner, who wanted these improvements reversed.

There were two bedrooms in the flat, both with double beds, and we were assigned one of them.

Franz spent his days walking, working, relaxing in cafes, meeting gallerists, buying clothes at expensive boutiques and going to charming restaurants.

One of the most delightful was Ostaria Il Garum on Piazza Monteoliveto with its simple tables and chairs, walls adorned with pictures of actors and photos of Naples, cupboards, clocks, lamps, copper pots, pans, bottles of wine, pewter jugs, small statues and barrels upon which puppets and weighing machines had been placed.

Garum was once universally used in Roman cuisine, Anne explained. It was a sauce, made from fermented fish, such as mackerels, which could, depending on its quality, command outrageous prices and was often, at the time, deplored as a decadent and unhealthy luxury.

The choice of meals at the restaurant was not huge: stuffed squid, octopus, tuna, shrimp, or shellfish but the quality was extraordinary.

Anne suggested that we go to the Nitsch Museum in the Vico Lungo Pontecorvo, which was not far removed from the Via Broggia. Franz was less than enthused.

"Oh, these stinking Nitsch events," he said, "and these rapes by Muehl! That was all well and good for idiots, but it was awful!"

"Nitsch was so unappetizing with his lamb carcasses! I always found these scenes of violence horrifying! This talk of cesspool like souls and purification! It was all so Catholic!"

"One has to be perverse or a fool to think these events are of any use. I didn't like them at any rate."

"I spent ten years oppressed by Viennese Actionism. If one turned up at one of their events one was either kicked out or permitted to wallow in their shit. Actionism was simply destructive."

"Viennese Actionism was the after shock of the Nazis. It was the ideas of Kafka and Freud returning to haunt Vienna in the guise of Artaud, Bunuel, Picasso and Dali."

"Nitsch sees himself as a master! He has built up an authoritarian system and expects his students to imitate him. He's ridiculous. I find these master figures and idols disgusting!"

"This way of thinking in terms of masters is redundant. It's a very bourgeois way of thinking. The artist has to stand outside of bourgeois society."

Another of our favourite restaurants was Osteria Da Carmela, in the via Conte di Ruvo, with its elegant, square tables, high-backed chairs and shelves of red wine, high ceiling, pastel walls and burnt umbre floor.

There we had Carpaccio di baccala: thin slices of stockfish served with rocket, red pepper, olive oil and lemons, Risotto alla pescatora: rice with tomato sauce, wine, squid, cuttlefish, mussels, clams and parsley and Ragu con parmigiana di melanzane: beef with wine, oil, garlic, basil, salt, aubergine, eggs, flower, parmesan and mozzarella cheese.

"I always imagined art as part of life," Franz stated, "not institutionalized, orderly life, but pre-institutionalized life, the good life."

"Art has to do with idleness and the muse. Man is a slave to a prescribed daily life. Few have the leisure to detach themselves from its obligations. The free man differs from the slave. Sometimes he has a little leisure."

"The beauty of making sculptures is its mode of production, its autonomy. One can find material everywhere. One need only leave the house, look around for half an hour and then one has the material necessary for a sculpture – if one wants it. One isn't dependent on private or public institutions. One doesn't need any apparatus or to develop any film."

The cafe Franz seemed to prefer most of all was Intra Moenia Caffè Letterario, on Piazza Bellini with its green, cane chairs, and pale, coffee-colored, mock marble tables. One seemed to be shielded from the square itself by large, beige umbrellas, a cluster of bushes and a palm tree.

We watched two young men, one tall, pale and skinny, in long, blue training top and hood and grey training pants the other small, bearded, in black leather jacket. They seemed to be on the prowl, like two stray dogs.

I couldn't help but think of how Franz had once told me about his time as a drug dealer in Istanbul, a far from glamorous period in his life that he preferred to forget.

Young and old passed by in leisurely fashion. I studied the graffiti smeared statue of Bellini. Next to it was an old lamppost, which had been desecrated by red paint. Posters fluttered in a light breeze.

"Wittgenstein saw art as being something very simple and that's how I see it too," Franz told us. "One shouldn't obsess about where something comes from or why. One should simply forget about all these questions and make that which one enjoys making. One must ignore all these manifestos about sculpture having to have no base, and painting being obsolete. This is all nonsense, which some idiots have thought out. These so-called art critics are just perverse megalomaniacs."

"When I was young life wasn't much fun. I wasn't successful, I wasn't handsome, I wasn't rich and I had no background. The world wasn't a pretty place. What could I do? I could have an ugly wife, watch stupid television and have ugly furniture or I could make collages. So I made collages. The first ones were awful."

"The collages were ironic, satirical and self-critical. Their humour was harsh. They were in the tradition of Cabaret Voltaire and Punk."

"Of course I loved Hamilton. His early collages are really very funny, Superman with a vacuum cleaner! They are like caricatures, but Dadaist caricatures."

Franz also liked Gran Caffe Gambrinus in the Via Chiaia, with its art nouveau lamps, mirrors, inlaid pictures, grey, marble-like walls, doors with golden handles, frescoes, white statues, pale, cream tablecloths, white floral decorations and red cushioned chairs.

"Happily, I don't notice success," he said to us. "Except when I go out in the evening, but this is rare. I went out every night for 15 years but the minute I was successful I couldn't go to the places I'd frequented before. People were either nasty or obsequious."

"I used to go to artist's cafes but I can't go to them anymore. One is either an object of attention or people say stupid things."

"People look maliciously if I get a bad review. It's embarrassing. It's no longer possible to sit in crowded places and talk to someone. People always expect that one has something special to say."

I thought of how a man once blocked Franz's path when he'd wanted to go to the bathroom at a gala dinner, held in Franz's honor. The man hadn't said a word. He obviously didn't have anything to say. At the same time he showed not the slightest consideration toward Franz, and his obvious disabilities. He simply want to be close to fame. I'd admired Franz's patience at the time.

On another occasion Franz told me about how he'd been disbarred from Hawelka a dozen times. He had no desire to visit that particular cafe ever again.

In the mornings, when Franz was still asleep or working, Anne and I explored the city.

We went to the Castel Nuovo, with its gallery of paintings devoted to the history of the city, such as the 1848 uprising, Palazzo Reale, with its magnificent staircase, its scalone d'onore, its sala diplomatica with its red walls, chandeliers, mirrors and fresco on its ceiling, seconda anticamera with its blue walls, vases, candelabras and paintings, terza anticamera, with its tapestries, golden clocks, pink chairs and sofas, sala del trono, with its red walls, green ceiling, chandeliers, portraits, red chairs, marble floor and throne, and its statues of Roger II of Sicily, Frederick II, Charles I of Anjou, Alfonso I of Naples, Charles I of Spain, Charles of Bourbon and Murat.

We also went to the church of Santa Chiari, mentioned by Rilke and visited by Stravinsky, which dates from the 14th century, and the Duomo, the Cattedrale di San Gennaro, which was built in the 13th century. Anne told me that this is where a vial of the blood of Saint Januarius is said to liquify twice a year, in May and September.

After that came Museo Capodimonte with its Titians, El Grecos, Parmigianinos, Carravaggios and Raphaels.

Equally extraordinary was Museo Archeologico, with its busts of Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Claudius, Vespasian, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Solon, Euripides and Seneca, its dancing faun, Mercurius-Priapus, "Fallo in tempietto", "Tre Grazie", "Amore e Psiche", "Sodomia fra due atleti", "Arpocrate con enorme fallo", "Satiri con fallo enorme", "Pan and the goat", its mosaics: "Musicians on the street", "Actors before a play", "Cat and parrots", "Masks and fruits" and "Battle of Issus".

For Franz walking too far was simply out of the question, which is why he didn't go to the museums himself. He only went to the odd gallery.

I was surprised at how quiet he'd become. He hardly said a word and seemed half in a trance. He seemed to be meditating on his own ideas and to be drawing inspiration from the city. He loved more than anything else to be driven around in a tiny Fiat Uno, sometimes with up to five people in the car, with a child-like look of wonder on his face. All he'd say would be: "Wie schoen!" How beautiful!

One day Anne and I took a funiculare to Castel d'Elmo, where we had a wonderful view of the city, before catching a metro to Materdei. There we went to Pizzeria Starita in the Via Materdei with its narrow rooms, low ceilings, walls filled with photos and framed newspaper clippings, bright lights and tables packed tightly together.

The next morning we took the painfully slow Circumvisuviana to Pompeii. On our way Anne explained that the city had been found by a farmer, who, after part of his vineyard had caved in, had discovered some marble sculptures.

Soon the pioneer corps had arrived. It commenced digging through the six-meter thick layer of pumice stone and lapilli. Only a few years later did it dawn on anybody that Pompeii lay underneath.

After the unification of Italy a more systematic approach to the excavation work was possible. Graffiti, consisting of rhyming poetry, ironic commentaries, curses, obscene remarks and professions of love came to light while plaster was poured into holes, revealing the forms of unfortunates who'd been caught by the lava and fumes.

The city, essentially a fortified market, specializing in fish, cereals, vegetables and cattle, came to sell oil and wine all over the Mediterranean. It was founded in the 6th century B.C. and had originally been roughly sixteen hectares. Its name derives from the word for pump.

After being captured by Sulla, in 89 B.C., it was colonized by Roman veterans. An amphitheatre, which was used for gladiatorial battles, and a roofed theater, which was used for competitions between musicians, actors and poets, were built.

The city expanded to sixty-six hectares, the population grew to reach 10,000 and mercantile ties with Alexandria developed. This led to the importing of the cult of Isis to join the already existing ones of Minerva and Hercules.

In 62 A.D. Pompeii was hit by an earthquake. Water pipes, temples and houses were destroyed but it was nothing compared to the eruption of the volcano on the 24th of August 79 A.D., which literally buried the city.

When we got to Pompeii we passed through the main gate: Porta Marina, passed the temple of Venus, the Basilica and the temple of Apollo, who was worshipped as the god of the city.

Anne explained that the conquest by Rome meant that, in addition to Apollo, the god of music and truth, Jupiter, the king of the gods, Juno, the goddess of fecundity, and Minerva, the goddess of the arts, were also worshipped. Their temple was on the north side of the forum.

Anne said that the Basilica had housed courts as well as rooms in which business was done.

Pompeii was ruled, she told me, by an imperially appointed council called ordo decurionium, together with four magistrates, who were each annually elected. They were responsible for the administration of justice and the upkeep of the city. There was also a popular assembly, which elected the magistrates.

The popular assembly in turn was divided into factions of washers, mule drivers, goldsmiths, colonialists, students, former slaves, adherents of Isis, nighthawks, petty thieves and simple citizens.

After pausing at the forum we passed the temple of Jupiter. Then we turned right and found our way to the house of the faun with its storefront shops, Tuscan atrium, service rooms and corridors. Close by was the house of the vettii, with its life-sized Priapus weighing his erection against a bag of gold.

The former was named after a bronze statue of a dancing faun while the latter was named after two freed men: Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus.

There were three house gods of import, Anne told me: the Penates, who guarded the household's food, wine and oil, the Lares, ancestor-deities, who guarded the hearth, and the genii, who looked after the individuals in the house.

For a while we wandered somewhat aimlessly through the streets before heading toward the theatre. From there it wasn't far to the Stabian baths, with its laconicum, sweat baths, destricatarium for cleansing the body and its vaulted ceilings, decorated with polychrome stuccoes featuring rosettes, cupids, trophies and bacchic figures.

We studied the apodyterium, the changing rooms, the frigidarium, with cold water, the tepidarium, the transition room, the laconicum, the warm air bath and the caldarium with its hot bath. Temperatures of up to sixty degree centigrade could be reached, Anne told me.

Again we simply wandered freely through the streets before visiting the The House of the Tragic Poet, with its elaborate mosaic floors and frescoes depicting Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida, The Judgement of Paris and Achilles releasing Briseis.

After that we visited the so-called Villa dei Misteri, Villa of the Mysteries, which dates from the second century B.C.. I found the frescoes to be truly amazing.

I studied with care the matron-like figure with her head-scarf, the dull-eyed lady clutching a rolled-up parchment while her naked son read another, a woman with myrtle in her hair carrying a dish piled high with cakes, two women pouring water onto the hands of a third, an old satyr playing a lyre, two pan pipe playing youths guarding goats, and a woman dramatically raising a purple cloak above her head.

On our way back I told Anne about what Livy wrote: that Rome's decline was due to its failure to honor frugality and its empire. "In these latter years," Livy lamented, "wealth has brought avarice in its train, and the unlimited command of pleasure has created in men a passion for ruining themselves and everything else through self-indulgence and licentiousness." He'd written his history to demonstrate how Rome had been built on self-sacrifice, a sense of responsibility and humility. If Rome had fallen it was on account of its corruption.

Wealth had accumulated in only a few hands, which meant that money didn't circulate. Property became highly concentrated, which meant fewer and fewer were actually free. Debts grew, which meant that the population was enslaved. Taxes crippled the populace while inflation increased the gap between rich and poor. The middle-classes were destroyed while the farmers were turned into serfs.

The wealthy preferred huge estates with slave labour to a large number of private freeholders tilling the land, who gradually disappeared.

The empire was discredited. Fewer believed in it and more and more stood to gain from its demise. Most importantly: fewer were willing to die for it. It turned its own citizens into slaves and then plundered them.

The empire was forced to depend upon mercenaries rather than its own citizen-army. It was these mercenaries who were to play a key role in the sack of Rome.

The process of decision-making was also fatally corrupted by lucre. Private and not public interests dominated, which meant that the military was fatally undermined and began to fall apart. The accumulation of wealth also became a tempting target for the barbarians and its concentration made it all too easy to plunder.

Heinrich was of the opinion that the American Empire was also going to fall, I told Anne, and for much the same reason. The sins of America were like those of Rome: cupidity and usury. According to him history was going to repeat itself in the none too distant future. We were facing, in his words: the end of civilization as we knew it.

The following day we caught a hydrofoil, which only takes forty minutes, to Capri. The hydrofoil slowly moved out of the port and passed a mole upon which fishermen sat. Waves started spreading out behind us and gusts of grey exhaust wafted past as it picked up speed. Water was churned up and flung out as the sea got increasingly rough. White spray dissolved into air. In the distance Palazzo Reale and Sant Elmo were still distinctly visible among the pale, yellow buildings. Not far removed one could see Mount Vesuvius. As the hydrofoil plunged through the sea, churning up water, which flew off on either side, the coast was turned into a grey silhouette against a pale blue sky. Soon I could hardly look out of the window, on account of the blinding sunlight, and had to shield my eyes from the diamond brightness of the waves. Passengers chatted, typed into their phones, read newspapers or slept.

On Capri we visited Villa Jovis, the villa of Jupiter, from where Tiberius had ruled the Roman Empire for ten years.

Anne told me that Tiberius was attracted by the island's limited access, which was confined to one, small beach. The rest of its coast consists of massive cliffs plunging sheer into deep water.

Once ensconced on the island he abandoned all affairs of state, failed to appoint military tribunes, prefects, or provincial governors and allowed the Parthians to overrun Armenia, the Dacians to ravage Moesia and the Germans to attack Gaul.

Instead of attending to matters he staged threesomes, where girls and young men were selected for their inventiveness in unnatural practices.

The palace itself was adorned with lascivious paintings and sculptures should any performer require an illustration of a prescribed position.

The whole island became known as Caprineum, The Old Goat's Garden, on account of the fact that boys and girls were forced to act the parts of Pans and Nymphs in the woods and glades. Tiberius was also a pedophile and rapist.

Not only was he perverted but miserly too. He refused to pay his staff a salary and had no qualms about killing those around him in order to acquire their wealth. He confiscated the property of leading provincials in Spain, Gaul, Syria and Greece. He accused many of simply holding suspiciously large amounts of cash. He deprived others of their immunities, mineral rights and taxation powers and stole the treasure of Vonones, the Parthian king, who he then had executed. The older he got the greedier, crueler and the more murderous.

We peered down the cliff, which is known as Tiberio Salto, where the victims of Tiberius were thrown down to their deaths. A party of marines was stationed below. It waited with boathooks and oars, to "thrash their bodies and break the bones, lest any vestige of life remain". The day Tiberius died the entire city of Rome erupted in joy.

As we sat at Bar Tiberio, snugly tucked in behind a church and a florist's, on the Piazza Umberto, with its one storey, sandy coloured buildings, its municipality, its charming tower, boutiques, bank, Gran Caffe, Al Piccolo Bar, Bar Caso and view of the cliffs, I told Anne that in Heinrich's opinion nothing had changed. If anything the state of the ruling elite had got considerably worse.

The secret elites, as he termed them, were just as depraved, perverse, sick, miserly, cruel and murderous as Tiberius had once been. We simply didn't know as much about them as the Romans did. The government and the media, Heinrich asserted, cover everything up much more effectively than the Romans ever did. Those who dare speak the truth are simply murdered or their reputations tarnished.

After Naples we flew on to Venice, also with a private jet, where Franz was due to be awarded the Golden Lion.

### Venice

In Venice we bumped into Sarah Lucas, who I knew, and Tracey Emin, who Anne knew. The former was representing Britain at the Biennale. Neither had lost their girlish ebullience and vivacity and they were great company.

Sarah talked about her attachment to Franz, who never passed judgement, and who was always willing to accept. She loved his ability to create magical constellations of works by different artists. In this respect he was, in her words, a wizard. He was also, in her eyes, a bit of a Don Juan. She laughed.

I considered the matter less amusing. I thought about the chaos currently being created. Franz's wife, Tamuna, a beautiful artist from Georgia, hadn't wanted to come to Venice, precisely because Franz acted this way.

One of the reasons for Tamuna's anger was her jealousy regarding a recent trip made by Franz. He'd taken a pretty friend of hers to Ischia. There'd been talk of divorce. When the pretty friend returned she in turn complained of the misery of the trip.

Franz and Tamuna seemed to live in a world of emotional chaos and continual turmoil. This had an appalling effect on their children, who had the misfortune of living in an atmosphere of tension, strife and animosity.

Franz was also extremely ambivalent about Tamuna's affair with her lover, while the lover himself suffered from pangs of guilt. On the one hand Franz was grateful that he was no longer forced to satisfy her sexual demands on the other he was extremely jealous.

They both alternated between extremes. Frequent flarings of electrical storms were followed by relatively short periods of harmonious calm.

I didn't envy them. Franz and Tamuna seemed to be perpetually arguing. At one and the same time they were intensely devoted to one another and Franz was forever phoning Tamuna to lament his ill health or to ask her advice. They were completely dependent upon one another but at one and the same time they simply didn't get on.

Tamuna refused to travel to Venice in order to punish Franz. She then changed her mind. Franz told her that it was by now too late. She could no longer come. The flights and hotels had all been booked, the arrangements all made.

Then he, in turn, changed his mind and wanted her to come after all, by which time it really was too late. They seemed to be in a perpetual battle of wills. Each wanted to demonstrate that they were the stronger. I couldn't help but think how fortunate I was by comparison.

What was love, I asked myself? Of course Stendhal was right. There are many different forms of love. There is passionate love, mannered love, physical love, and love as vanity, to name but a few.

At the start there is admiration, hope, desire, the joy of seeing and touching, a kindling of the imagination followed by the fear of humiliation and an anxiety at being hurt.

At one and the same time, and seemingly paradoxically, Voltaire is also right. Friendship and respect enter into love in the same way that a metal amalgamates with gold.

Without tenderness and affection, a sense of benevolence toward one's partner, a desire for the good of the other, there can't possibly be any hope of a serious, stable, long-term relationship.

Beauty is also highly subjective. A male toad, as Voltaire rightly pointed out, thinks highly of a female toad and vice versa.

Both Anne and I resemble one another. The resemblance is so startling that many think us related. Yet the resemblance is not merely physical. We think in much the same way and our personalities are much alike. We share the same basic value structures, have the same interests and the same ambitions. At one and the same time we complement one another. When I am with Anne I feel whole and when I am not I feel incomplete.

When I think of Anne and myself I cannot help but think of Plato's "Symposium" and the idea that there were once, in primal times, entities that had double bodies, with faces and limbs turned away from one another. These were spherical creatures, which wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels. According to legend there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the androgynous, which was half male, half female. The males were said to be descended from the sun, the females from the earth and the androgynous from the moon. Zeus decided to cripple them by chopping them in half after they had the temerity of scaling the heights of Olympus. Ever since people run around looking for their other half. They are forever trying to recover their primal nature.

I also thought of the Pythagorean magic number of three, the combination of male: one and female: two. For the Pythagoreans three was the number of balance and harmony.

I often chastised my half-brother for chasing girls who were ill-suited to him. He never had anything in common with them at all. On the contrary, they were completely different. For a time he had a girlfriend from Ethiopia, then one from Hong Kong followed by one from Albania of all places.

They might all have been sexy and cool, beautiful and passionate lovers, he especially waxed lyrical about the skin of the Ethiopian girl, but there never was even the semblance of a hope of any long-term, stable, serious relationship. He seemed more obsessed with sex than love.

What, I asked him, did I care if one of his lovers bit his arm until it was purple with bruises? What did I care if he had great sex with the Albanian girl? He seemed more interested in presenting his girlfriends to the world and displaying them as trophies than actually living with them. His seemed very much a love of vanity and sensuality.

When not satisfying his desires he went to the opposite extreme. He seemed to be chasing merely romantic notions. He was running after phantoms, not real girls, projections of what he thought was his ideal, juvenile fantasies, which bore no relationship whatsoever to reality.

He had very definite ideas about what his girlfriend should be like. He swore he'd never compromise yet invariably, for superficial reasons, he did so.

Either he was arrogant, and expected all the girls to come at his beck and call or he was abject and not a little pathetic. He seemed to lack all sense of pride and persistently chased after girls long after all hope had long been lost. In this respect he was delusional and not a little ridiculous.

I told him again and again: if it doesn't work out at the very beginning it never will. He seemed to have the foolish notion that the more he loved a girl the more interested she'd be in him. The very opposite proved almost invariably to be the case.

Of course, I reflected, the truth was that my half-brother, traumatized by his parent's separation and by his mother's ill treatment had had a profound mistrust of women.

He mistrusted females and always expected relationships to end in doom. This proved to be, almost invariably, a self-fulfilling prophecy. He also had a profound mistrust and contempt toward himself. He hated himself. He hated mankind. He understood Thomas Bernhard perfectly well when he said that it was a crime to procreate. Life itself was hateful to him, as were both children and families.

I also couldn't help but think of Thomas Bernhard, who, I'd been told, was bisexual. He'd never found the right partner, whether male or female, though his asexual relationship with Hedwig Stavianicek, who was more of a mother figure, had been extremely close.

Surely his early death, I couldn't help but think, was due as much to this misfortune as to his poor health. Without a partner, an intimate friend and lover, life is all the more difficult to bear. For many it is simply not worth living. This was certainly the case of my half-brother.

Tracey talked about how she was planning to do an exhibition in Vienna, juxtaposing her work with that of Schiele. She'd loved Schiele since she was fourteen, she told us.

Seeing Schiele in a book had literally changed her life. This was long before she'd discovered either Picasso or Warhol. As she put it: "This is my heart, torture, torment, passion, sex. This is what art should look like. This I understand."

For her Schiele challenged and redefined the moral compass in art. Schiele resonated, was poetic, magical, and was a rollercoaster of dreams. She loved his intensity and vulnerability. Above all else he made one think, which was, in her opinion, what art was supposed to do.

She complained that her work was always accused of being narcissistic but it wasn't at all. It was the very opposite. It was cathartic.

It might be true that she was overexposing herself. It might be true that her work used herself and started with herself but it went out into the world. This is why people were able to identify with it.

"The more solitude I have the happier I am," she told us. She needed to be cut off from the compliments and ego. She was her own worst critic. She lived in France, which isolated her. She didn't speak French and her phone didn't work.

"I love nature, animals, they make me feel complete. I'd love to become nature, to become the earth," she stated emphatically.

"I don't want either marriage or children. I prefer distant love. Being in love," she said, "makes one feel safe. Being alone means one can love whoever one wants."

She liked the story of a lady whose lover got frozen just before they were about to meet. Even at eighty she was still in love with him.

"I'm at a certain stage of my life where I like acting out my ideas," she told us. "They might be dark or even demonic but they're implanted in my head. It's always the same subject matter, which recurs again and again. I have this absolute feeling of being isolated, outside of myself."

She looked half accusingly at Anne, who I suspected she regarded as a bourgeois academic and artist manqué and said: "If you don't give yourself completely you're not an artist. I have never done anything other than art. If I don't make art I'm ill. I need to be creative. If you need to cry you need to cry. You need a release. If I don't make art I don't know who I am. There is no meaning for me. I need art like I need God. I have a vast faith in all things and that all things are connected, like in Spinoza."

"The inside is important, where it's leading me. I listen to my inner self. It's not external. But I always have my doubts. I always need to re-evaluate."

I thought about her book "Strangeland" with its elementary themes of life and death. It began with the words: "When I was born, they thought I was dead."

The themes of romantic and emotional chaos were all too familiar: "Mum was married, Dad was married, but not to each other". She had grown up, together with her twin brother Paul, in Margate, in her father's hotel. She too had attempted suicide.

I thought about what a miracle it was that she was here, sitting opposite me, and how it was by sheer accident that my half-brother wasn't. There seemed such a thin line between life and death. All of a sudden everything in life seemed coincidence.

Franz was staying on the Giudecca, an island that had once had shipyards, factories and even a film studio. He was staying at the Hotel Cipriani, which has beautiful gardens, a swimming pool and a charming restaurant.

The Cipriani also has its own launch, which picked us up from our charming hotel: Danieli, and took us to Franz.

As we sat in Franz's room, with its stunning view of Santa Maria della Salute, its crystal chandelier, baroque commode, and black and white tiled floor, he chatted about his work.

"Originally my impetus was to create spaces which enabled a different kind of daily routine. Art shouldn't be anything special, it should be a part of life. Art shouldn't be something respectable. It shouldn't be just something one looks at. It has to be lived."

"The adaptives, for example, permit a direct participation in the process of art. Art is not a utopia or a sham, but real, a physical concept. Art is not a question of learning but rather one of attitude. There is no shortage of bad art, as one can see. Most is miserable but once it is trapped and suffocated in a museum it becomes even less interesting. Art should be on the street. This is its ideal location."

Franz was in a garrulous mood and, while sitting by the pool and watching the swimmers pass by, he chatted about his work.

"I liked Baudelaire in my youth. He compared art with prostitution. Baudelaire made possible the escape from my petit bourgeois school world. The escape into art and prostitution."

Had Franz been a prostitute, as he had once intimated to me? In the case of Franz anything was possible, I couldn't help but think. Given his poverty, and the fact that he'd lived like a down and out, it was highly probable. What a contrast to his later, jet- setting, Concorde-flying lifestyle!

Yet in his eyes he'd always had enough money to survive. He'd always managed, somehow. Franz was a born survivor, I couldn't help but think. He'd endured appalling poverty, had been knocked down by a car and very nearly killed, yet he'd triumphed over everything and still retained both his sense of humour and his sense of humanity. For him life was a comedy and he always sought to enjoy it at every given opportunity.

"Sometimes life is bland, and one makes bland art, or life is impulsive, and one makes impulsive art," he told us. "The reverse can also be true."

"The early collages are an expression of a great depression, but also of mockery, which is why they're light and serene."

"I could never take Freud seriously with his claim that sex was the cause of everything, that each door handle is phallic. The collages make fun of these ideas."

"At the same time Freud's claim that the hatred of the father is universal came as a considerable relief. Before that I thought it was just myself and my unique deformation of character. I had really appalling conflicts with my father and really hated him."

"When I started working on the collages I had no idea about colour but that changed with time. I slowly developed a sense of colour, which only comes from experience. The works were very critical and created from a nihilistic standpoint because I was very nihilistic."

"I used porn magazines. At that time I had a very sceptical attitude, a sceptical worldview – also toward porn. I didn't find the images very sexy. I didn't like porn. I mocked it."

"I didn't like the advertising that landed in my house either. I didn't like the images of life it presented me with. I sought to attack these images."

"I sought to construct a different reality, the opposite of the one created by advertising. And what added insult to injury was my amateurish technique. I denigrated and destroyed in a somewhat unsavory fashion. But this was unintentional."

"What I wanted was to turn the construction of reality or the representation of reality found in advertising on its head."

After visiting Franz we went to the Biennale, starting with the Arsenale and then moving swiftly on to the Giardini and saw the works of James Turrell, Christoph Schlingensief, Omar Fast and Chiharu Shiota, whose "Key in the Hand" impressed me immensely.

In the evening we met up at a restaurant, Osteria Bifora, on Campo de Margaretha.

While I ate a smoked swordfish carpaccio and drank a sauvignon I studied the crystal chandeliers hanging from the wooden ceiling, urns, kettles, metal pots, bottles on shelves, marble clad walls, grandfather clock, columns with Romanesque capitals, figures holding books, miniature triumphal arch, worn tables, odd assortment of chairs and stone, checkered floor, and listened to Franz.

"I had a very long depressive phase. I went out every night – sometimes to artist's cafés – and there I drank as much as I could afford. That's how I got through my days. And sometimes I finished my collages, which were commentaries on life as I saw it, or more exactly commentaries, which were still tolerable. I am rarely happy, at most a few days in the year."

The next day we went to the exhibition by Sean Scully in Palazzo Falier. It overlooks the Grand Canal between Ca 'del Duca and Palazzo Giustiniani Lolin and is renowned for its mirrors and gilded stucco in its dining room.

I stood in one of the liagòs, a covered and glassed balcony protruding from the front of the building, and studied the busy traffic on the Grand Canal before turning my attention to the paintings inside.

Anne told me about the artist. Sean Scully, who happened to be there and who is extremely nice, was born in Dublin in 1945 but, as he puts it: dragged up in London, where his father was a barber.

He entered Croydon College of Art in 1965, continued at Newcastle University and completed a Harvard fellowship in 1973. His move to America was not coincidental.

In 1967 he discovered Mark Rothko. He was still at Newcastle when he realized that Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock had found a new way of putting things together. "The energy runs right off the edges of the canvas" he told us. "I wanted that openness, but I also wanted the plastic clarity of Mondrian."

In 1975 he moved to New York. When he committed himself to coming to America, his reaction was extreme. When he arrived, he had had somewhat of a career and somewhat of an image as an artist. He decided that instead of trying to hold onto that, and play what he termed a kind of in-between game, he'd start with tabula rasa.

He got rid of everything in his work except the one thing that was just before, what he termed: ground zero, and that was a stripe.

At that time his art was somber and minimalistic. He was very interested in all Minimalists at that time. And he thought that was the most interesting art. That was, in his eyes, much more interesting than colour field, because colour field moved towards a kind of academic decoration. However, Minimalism was also, in his eyes: academic.

It had the economy of Rothko or Newman, but it didn't have the same level of ambition. Above all: It didn't have their mysticism or emotional range. It was, in his opinion, art for puritans. At least though it had the advantage of being visually edgy, of having a kind of austerity, so the austerity gave, from his point of view: an ethical, moral edge.

He was, by that stage, no longer a disciple of the Minimalist ethic. On the contrary, the work that he subsequently did was a direct attack upon it.

The switch came at the beginning of the eighties. He had a complete change of heart about the kind of art that he wanted to make, and about what art should be doing. Earlier he was trying to cut down the size of his audience. Now he wanted to make work that was more generous, more obviously available, that wasn't so exclusive, wasn't so austere.

As he put it: "It simply wasn't an exciting enough painting. And I think that the idea of the painting was stronger than the painting. So what had to happen was that the painting had to overcome its idea with a reason for being."

A new element entered the equation: Henri Matisse. As Sean Scully said to us: "I think if you have Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, then you've got my work."

Of course for Matisse the whole arrangement of the picture is expressive. Composition was, for him, the art of arranging, in a decorative manner, the various elements at the painter's disposal in order to the express his feelings.

This decorative element first appeared in Scully's work in the eighties. As he put it: "There is always an element in my work that could be seen as decorative."

There is also the influence of the dualism of Mondrian and the drama of Rothko. As he told us: "My paintings are very much about power relationships, or they're about things having to survive within the competition, composition...the composition is a competition for survival...It's about two elements: "this" and "that"...it's about the pressure of architectural or architectronic mass bearing down on some other element. A lot of these ideas could be seen as metaphors for human survival in an urban environment."

In the early eighties he started to deal with the idea of the double figure, the duplex, the relationship within mankind: male and female, good and evil.

For him: "Any concept of unity is false...I believe that unity has to take into account rupture, the possibility for internal discord, and I think that's a much more useful model for us to follow and to be able to understand ourselves...for me, a natural motif and a philosophical motif are the same thing, there's no difference...my work is based on structures that I believe express human nature. My work is deeply urban and it's very much about human nature. It's about trying to penetrate into these fundamental structures that we use. For me, it is a natural motif, it's what I see. But I don't just see it as a visual motif. I see it as a communication, as an expression of human nature."

In the evening we went the Osteria Enoteca Ai Artisti De Toletto. As we waited for Franz to arrive I studied the shop full of carnival masks next to the restaurant and the small bridge over the canal close by.

A garden burst over the top of a faded, red wall, which was topped with rough, white marble and held together by metal clamps.

As I devoured my clams in tomato sauce and slivers of spider crab with taglietta, octopus salad, and pasta with prawns and courgettes, all washed down by a white venetian soave, followed by chocolate mousse, mascapone & joghurt I listened to Franz.

"I always approach my work with a concept. I always try to implement a concept."

"Sometimes I use elements from other people or incorporate them into my work. Sometimes this proves to be a starting point."

"My whole life is divided up into nothing other than exhibitions. Sometimes I sit and I have no idea of what to do. I feel a great emptiness. I have no idea how to fill entire walls and I become afraid that nothing will work. But then the pressure mounts and one is forced to do something."

"The work is always a product of a sense of desperation. I always ask myself: How should I do something ever again? And what?"

"While working one mustn't think of what others might say. One must do what one feels to be right."

"I can truly, honestly, say that I can never imagine what a work will look like once it's finished. I might be able to imagine it but it always turns out differently."

"I just take the material and string it together. Forms then emerge. Sometimes I add pigment to the paper mache in order to achieve a certain effect. I'm only sure about size or format."

"Sometimes a work looks nice but mostly it's bad. Then ones stands there, and thinks: this is weak and pale. What do I do? Then one searches for sources of overflowing life. It's always a question of steering one's way through these things. I'm not really an artist in the traditional sense of the word."

"One has to simply make and then put to one side. Then one has to look at the work again at a later date. And then one says: that is alright but that and that needs to be changed. The whole thing has to work, not just one detail. This all takes a very long time."

"I don't have the slightest idea of what beauty is supposed to be. I think it has to do with certain constellations of proportions, both as regards to colour and shape. I associate it with satisfaction."

"At first one thinks a sculpture is a success and one is satisfied for a minute or two but soon this feeling vanishes, which is a good thing."

"There is always the danger of becoming too established, of just working on commission, of doing what others want and not what oneself wants, of fulfilling orders and nothing else. There is always the danger of losing one's freedom, of becoming cozy, fat and horribly boring. Freedom means living in fear and worry but I prefer freedom to death."

The next day we went to the Gallerie dell'Accademia, which is housed in what was once the Scuola della Carita on the south bank of the Grand Canal.

The Scuola della Carita, which dated from the thirteenth century, was one of the few outlets for non-noble Venetian citizens to control important institutions.

Its activities included the organization of processions, the sponsorship of festivities, the distribution of money, food and clothing to poorer members, the provision of dowries to daughters, the burial of paupers, and the supervision of hospitals. It is perhaps hardly surprising that it was closed down and turned into a museum.

We studied the "Processione in Piazza San Marco" by Gentile Bellini, "Cena a Casa Levi" by Paolo Veronese and "La tempesta" by Giorgione.

After that we crossed the bridge linking the Dorsoduro and the sestiere of San Marco and met Franz in the Bar Il Caravellino in the Calle Largo XII Marza, with its comfortable, tan leather chairs, in vaguely Roman style, reddish marble tables and grey, marble floor, coats of arms on its ceiling, clocks, ship's steering wheel, drink cabinets, models of boats, metal statues, bells, metal flasks and ropes.

It had once been Ciro's Piano Bar, where Sartre & de Beauvoir had hung out. Franz was surprised to hear this.

"I once thought that philosophy could say something about life," he told us. "Then I came across Wittgenstein and realized that philosophy doesn't even touch life."

"Philosophy transforms the unknowable into the incomprehensible. Philosophers have always metamorphized something one can't really understand into gibberish. Yet they see themselves as semi-divine nevertheless, as the highest and the best."

"Lacan once said that the only way out of our contemporary impasse was to become involved in scholarship. So I began to read, but it was all very difficult if one didn't have the background: linguistics, Heidegger etc. I liked Karl Kraus. He was satirical and cynical. I liked Nietzsche less."

The next day we went to the Peggy Gugenheim Museum in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which is one of my favourite museums in Venice. It is located on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro Sesterie and dates from the eighteenth century. It was bought by Peggy Guggenheim in 1949 and turned into a museum after her death in 1979.

Anne and I marvelled at the pieces by Miro, Picasso, Braque, Klee, Ernst, Gorky, Kandinsky and Magritte, to name but a few. After the museum we joined Franz for lunch at the Osteria Al Vechio Forner, which is just around the corner from the Gugenheim.

It is a small Osteria, with red checkered table cloths on tiny tables, and simple, elegant chairs. Its walls and even its ceiling are crammed with photographs, paintings, glasses, a mask of stone, and bottles with candles of different colours: blue, orange, pink, black, and white.

Anne and I were hungry and so we had quite a meal: Venetian appetizers of octopus, celery, prawns, meatballs, marinated paprika, grilled courgettes, aubergines, polenta, sausage, tomatoes and herring. This was followed by stuffed squid and polenta, which was then washed down by red wine.

Our desserts were equally delicious: tiramisu, profiterol, and a light, yellow cake with whipped cream, together with two expressi.

The wizened, philosophical waiter with red glasses & blue apron seemed to guess our every wish.

Franz seemed in a good mood. "It was very difficult to colour the sculptures at first," he told us. "I didn't know what to do. I was always secure with forms but never with colours. The longer one deals with colour, the harder it gets. With colours one depends a lot on one's momentary moods. Sometimes one applies a colour, thinks it a success and the next day one realizes: "Oh my God!" It is a delight if one succeeds though. One feels really high afterwards."

"My primary colours are ocher and pink. I associate pink with the undergarments worn by women when I was young. If one looked under the skirts, one saw pink. I also lived in a dental practice. There was a glass box full of dentures. I associate pink with happiness and dentures. Ocher is the colour of the skin coloured stockings. Later I became interested in yellow, which is, for me, a symbol of the affirmation of life."

Later that night we attended a dinner in Franz's honour at Palazzo Papadopoli, a Baroque-style palace located on the Canal Grande between Palazzo Giustinian Businello and Palazzo Donà a Sant'Aponal in the Sestiere of San Polo.

The palace, which was designed by Guglielmo dei Grigi and completed in 1570, had once belonged to the Tiepolo family.

As I studied the frescoes of "The charlatan" and "The Minuette" in the piano nobile by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo the various luminaries began to appear: Jeff Koons, who Franz found to be, like his art: "zu aufdringlich", too brash, Claes Oldenburg, who Franz thought: "zu agil", too agile, Takashi Murakami and Andreas Gursky.

For Takashi Murakami, Anne explained, an artist is a necromancer, someone who talks to the spirits of the dead. He has a company called Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd. and has ninety employees in and around Tokyo and New York.

Not only does he make art, Anne told me, he designs merchandise, manages a number of artists, runs an art fair, and works for TV, fashion, and the music industry. The main painting studio is in Saitama while his design headquarters is in Motoazabu. There is also a painting studio in New York.

Of course this was nothing compared to Koons, Anne said, who has 120 assistants and 1,500 square meters in New York's Chelsea district or Zhang Huang who has 200 assistants in Shanghai or Ai Weiwei who employed 1,600 workers to make 100 million hand-painted seed husks.

I couldn't help but think how small Franz's studio was by comparison, with just a dozen assistants on six hundred square meters.

Yet, for all his bitching and backbiting, Franz felt very much at home. He enjoyed the attention. He was the honoured guest and the whole event was a celebration of him.

We were sitting alone at a table and were drinking champagne when Anne received a call. Her sister, who'd always been ambitious, who'd amassed a small fortune by means of property speculation, whose husband had recently left her for another woman, and who'd been on medication, especially anti-depressives, had committed suicide.

It had all been too much. Wealth had not been the answer to her prayers. On the contrary: it had proven a dead end. She was completely and utterly exhausted and disillusioned with what she'd first thought of as a glamorous life-style. She'd never had time to come to terms with her problems. She'd worked incessantly and had never had a day's rest.

Now, all of a sudden, the weight, the negative energy and, above all else: the vast dimensions of her accumulated unhappiness hit her. It was like a plastic bag full of puss, which had suddenly burst, and she drowned in her own emotion.

She'd always had to perform, be successful, work hard, be disciplined and fight hard to survive. Now she was tired and had given up all hopes of happiness. Material well-being, money and property hadn't proven enough.

Anne immediately booked a flight home. There would be a lot of arrangements that needed to be made for her sister's funeral. The next day I flew back to Vienna with Franz.

### Salzburg

I caught the 8.55 train to Salzburg, with destination Bregenz. My compartment had six, blue seats, which could be pulled out, six blue headrests, whose height could be adjusted, and four armrests, which could be folded back. Above the headrests were long, elongated mirrors, racks for luggage and a light on the ceiling, which gave off a dull glow in the bright sunlight.

I slept for a while and awoke in Amstetten, where I observed a family in brightly coloured clothes gathered around their luggage, a man in checkered shirt and back-pack phoning, one with green cap and purple shirt and a third, in a red top, wheeling a bike.

Trains were parked next to the open platforms. On either side were empty buildings with empty, dead windows while a high-tech metal construction held up the roof of the platform.

Once the train moved off trees and buildings passed by, followed by shiny wagons for liquid transport, a farmyard full of construction material, a furniture store, a row of buses, a lumber yard, cranes against slight, thin clouds in the sky, and fields with yellow, furrowed lines.

I thought about "Wittgensteins Neffe", "Wittgenstein's Nephew". I'd already bought a ticket for Hermann Beil's reading in the Salzburger Landestheater.

"Wittgensteins Neffe" begins with Bernhard lying in Pavillion Hermann, now Pavillion 18, on the Baumgartnerhoehe otherwise known as Steinhof, in Vienna's fourteenth district.

It is a red brick building, dating from the turn of the century, not far removed from the theatre and the church, and resembles a barracks.

Bernhard was lying there in the summer of 1967, the summer in which my half-brother was born. It was also the summer of the Six Day War.

It is not far from where my half-brother stayed, in Pavillion 10. One can still see the sick behind the wire and it currently houses a joinery.

The huge medical facility of Steinhof, designed by Otto Wagner, includes sixty pavilions and was opened in 1907. Its tasks include looking after the old, the sick, those with pulmonary disorders, such as Bernhard, and the mentally ill, such as Paul Wittgenstein. It is also where Bernhard's Lebensmensch, Hedwig Stavianicek, died at the age of 87.

Steinhof is the site of one of the more gruesome crimes of the Second World War. Over 800 handicapped children were experimented on and murdered. The authorities falsified the documentation and lied about the real cause of death.

The doctor in charge: Heinrich Gross, who was born in 1915, hid for two years before being caught. He was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to two years but only served one. The Supreme Court ruled that no insidious or unintentional death could occur to a mentally handicapped person. This is obviously nonsense.

Dr. Gross was allowed to resume his research and became the head of Steinhof while an institute was created so that he could continue his study of the abnormalities of the nervous system. His expertise was sought after by courts of law, he gave lectures at universities and he was honoured by the state for his services rendered. In 1997 he was investigated for nine counts of murder but was deemed unfit for trial. He was never prosecuted and died in 2005.

Steinhof is also where I was told that a daughter of one of Austria's most distinguished aristocratic families was sent when she refused to marry Hitler.

Steinhof has become, in modern parlance, synonymous with a lunatic asylum.

Heinrich told me that it is currently being coveted by developers and its survival is very much in doubt. "The lunatics", he said, "have very much taken over the asylum".

The first part of "Wittgensteins Neffe" begins with a nun laying a copy of Bernhard's book: "Verstoerung", "Disturbance", which he'd written in Brussels a year before, on a table next to his bed. The place of writing and the subject of the book were not coincidental, I reflected. The insomniac Prince Saurau was inspired, to a large degree, by Bernhard's host in Brussels: Alexander Uexkuell.

Alexander Uexkuell was born in 1909 and died in 1999. He was the son of Nikolaus "Nux" von Uexkuell-Gyllenband who died on September 14th, 1944, in Berlin-Ploetzensee, Germany.

Nikolaus "Nux" von Uexkuell-Gyllenband had been involved in the July 20th plot and had been hung from a meat hook on orders from Hitler. Hitler had let the whole scene be filmed for his own delectation.

Nikolaus "Nux" von Uexkuell-Gyllenband was also the uncle of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. He, together with Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenberg, had tried to win Stauffenberg over to a coup d'état against Hitler in 1939.

Born in Hungary and a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army, Nikolaus "Nux" von Uexkuell-Gyllenband had little time for the Nazi notions of racial purity nor had he cared for concentration camps. It was the atrocities perpetrated there that had persuaded him of the necessity of revolt.

I thought of how Alexander Uexkuell had, in turn, regarded Bernhard, who he'd termed stimulating, sympathetic and funny but nevertheless: lonely and a loner.

This was, in part, due to the fact that Bernhard was highly sensitive and easily offended. Behind his polite restraint, there was always a profound shyness. Above all else Bernhard needed absolute autonomy and independence. He could radically turn away from people and head off in a completely different direction.

Bernhard's novel "Verstoerung", "Disturbance", was a commercial flop. This was due, according to Siegfried Unseld, to the unfortunate title, according to Bernhard, to the lack of promotion on the part of Unseld.

The failure was undoubtedly the principle reason for Bernhard's falling sick and getting Boeck's disease, the disease which ultimately killed him. I thought of my half-brother. He too had contracted the same disease and he too had died.

It was the failure of Unseld to adequately support Bernhard in his period of adversity that had ultimately led to Bernhard's death. He himself had killed the goose that lay the golden egg.

Bernhard had seen him for what he was: a business man, albeit one who was a bit more enlightened, knowledgeable, liberal-minded and leftwing than average, but a businessman nevertheless.

In "Wittgensteins Neffe" Bernhard began with the exposition of the first subject: his sickness. Doctors had cut a tumor the size of a fist out of his thorax. He'd taken cortisone and as a consequence his face had swollen.

I thought about my half-brother. He too had been operated on and he too had born the scar on his throat. The doctors had needed to ascertain what exactly he was suffering from: Boeck's disease or something more deadly. In the event it was Boeck's disease, which was then treated with cortisone. He was told that he would put on weight, and he did. The cortisone treatment meant that he felt a permanent hunger.

Bernhard then turned to his second subject: the doctors, especially Professor Salzer, a famous specialist whose fame seemed incapable of preventing most of his patients from dying under his scalpel.

Bernhard's third subject was the patients themselves, such as the spoilt and selfish theology student and the unfortunate policeman: Immervoll.

The fourth and main subject was Bernhard's friendship with Paul Wittgenstein. Bernhard wrote that he'd got to know him in the flat of a mutual friend of theirs: Irina, in the Blumenstockgasse, when Bernhard had intruded on a discussion about the "Haffner Symphony".

Paul Wittgenstein and Bernhard shared a profound passion for music. What separated them was Paul's fanatism for opera, which Bernhard regarded as pathological.

He was dreaded and feared in the opera, where his response was often vehement and decisive in determining whether a production would be a success or a flop. He loved the Viennese opera. It was, in his eyes, simply the best. "The Met is nothing. Covent Garden is nothing. The Scala is nothing. All of them are nothing compared to Vienna. But of course," he said, "the Viennese opera is only really good once a year." This was after he'd spent three years travelling the globe from one opera house to the next.

I thought about my visits to the opera with Franz West. We'd sat alternately in the proscenium boxes, the middle box and the seventh row. It was always a problem finding a seat for Franz on account of his bad knee. He always had to sit on the end of a row.

I also remembered my tour given by Heinrich. Heinrich had shown me the elevating podium, which can carry between 13,500 and 27,000 kilos, depending on its position.

I looked down at the splits in the floor and then up at the main stage, which is huge. The backstage, where large lumps of set were scattered, is equally vast.

I studied the rows of lights above and the individual units, with names such as Desisti Monet 210, 1000W, Niethammer, 1,200W, F2015 Strand Lighting System, 2,000W, Pollux 280, 5,000W and Arri Compact HMI, 4000W.

Pieces of scenery hung from metal bars while there were rows of ropes on either side of the stage.

To one side were drawers with objects called Puegelemente, Dachpappenstift, Kleine Keile, Schrauben and Stifte. Below them were clamps, pieces of wood and 30 kilo weights. Close by were artificial flowers and sockets for electricity.

On either side of the stage were video screens in both colour and black and white. The reason both were used, Heinrich explained, was that black and white was more suitable for seeing in the dark while colour was extremely useful when checking if the lighting was appropriate.

Next to the stage was a small cabin for the stage manager. The technical cues, which were developed in the course of the rehearsal, were stored in the computer and recalled on the night of the performance.

I thought about my half-brother's experience as a stage manager at Max Reinhardt Seminar. He'd been told that if he'd do the job he'd travel with the company to Moscow.

He spent hours and hours helping out with the production, even sacrificing his own luggage, which was subsequently lost. Yet at a crucial stage a girl, with whom he was befriended, had put him under pressure to help her with her film project, which had gone awry. He helped her, created a screenplay, and neglected the crucial stage of the appallingly bad production, when he should have been noting the technical cues. As a consequence he had no idea when to give the cues and suffered the most appalling stress. It was one of the worst experiences of his entire life. He didn't go to Moscow while the girl he'd created the screenplay for didn't even mention him in the credits. It had been a bitter time.

Heinrich explained that the stage itself was divided into six parts, each of which could rise to the level of six meters and sink to the level of twelve. The sets themselves, which were on auxiliary carriages, were manually pushed back and forth. There were occasional accidents, Heinrich told me, and stagehands could get either badly hurt or even killed.

There were also occasional errors and misunderstandings. Singers could miss their cues. They might be sitting in the canteen when they should be on stage, singing.

Heinrich told me that he'd experienced one production in which the lead singer had fallen ill. The understudy had had an accident while the second and third replacement had also been indisposed.

A singer had been hauled from the slopes while on a skiing holiday and had been flown in at the very last minute. Unable to rehearse properly he suffered the indignity of having the curtain fall on his head.

That such accidents didn't happen more frequently, Heinrich told me, bordered on a miracle. Singers were flown in, rehearsed once in the morning and performed the very same night. Everything depended on each part of the well-oiled machine functioning perfectly.

Heinrich showed me the poky, Spartanic dressing rooms next to the stage for the stars, with little in them other than a mirror, a chair and a brown chez longue, the dressing rooms for the chorus, on the second floor, and the rooms for the ballet, on the third.

I thought of my first visit to the opera together with Franz West. We walked into the foyer, with its clusters of lights, which only seemed capable of producing a dull glow, gilded ceilings, columns, statues, metal lampstands and stone reliefs.

We continued up the stairs with its green carpet, flanked on either side by lamps and statues, and opened a door. We then passed through the low ceilinged passage before arriving at our box, with its coat rack, red seats, mirror and umbrella stand. There were a number of seats and I was initially unsure which was mine. The box was next to the stage. Directly below us was the orchestra.

During the break I accompanied Franz to the Schwindfoyer with its bust of Gustav Mahler, who'd been the director of the opera between 1897 and 1907. There were also busts lining the walls of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, Spohr and Spontini to name but a few.

We walked out on the balcony and passed the plaque commemorating the architects of the building: Eduard van der Null and August Sicard von Sicardsburg. The opera itself was built between 1861 and 1868.

I discussed with Franz the opera: "The Makropoulos Affair" by Leos Janacek, which was directed by Peter Stein. Stein had little time, I explained to Franz, for what is sometimes termed Regietheater, in which the director has a creative roll of his own. Stein simply aimed to understand, with the help of the conductor, what had been written. He did a lot of research, in this case about Karel Capek, upon whose play the libretto was based, and his life in Prague. Stein then passed on this knowledge to the singers and orchestra, who in turn passed it on to the audience.

Stein had refused to direct the opera unless he got the cast he'd wanted. He'd been forced to break his contract for "Jenufa" because the main roles had repeatedly been changed without consulting him.

I explained to Franz that when it came to opera, as well as theatre and film, casting was everything. This is what I'd learned from my half-brother.

Stein also had to be patient when waiting for a conductor who was suitably prepared. It took him a year before he could start working with Jakub Hrusa.

Even then, Stein complained, the playing of the Wiener Philharmoniker was much too loud.

Of course it was rare, I explained to Franz, that a director could determine so much on his own. As a rule he or she had to compromise, which explained the poor quality of most productions. The same applied to conductors, who Stein complained, simply didn't have the time to prepare properly.

I explained to Franz that it was Karel Capek who'd helped popularize the term robot, which he'd used in his play: "R.U.R.", (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1921. The play was about cyborgs and their revolt against their condition of slavery. After their rebellion was successful they exterminated the human race.

In the case of "The Makropoulos Affair" what Leos Janacek had done was to take Karel Capek's play, radically edit it and emphasize the psychology, I explained to Franz. For Leos Janacek psychology, especially female psychology, was everything.

When Janacek married Zdenka Schulzova she'd merely been fifteen and throughout his life he had difficult, complex and often tormented relationships with a number of women. It was these relationships, and his knowledge of female psychology, I explained to Franz, which informed operas such as "Katya Kabanova" and "The Makropoulos Affair".

I thought about a passage from "Wittgensteins Neffe" which applied very much to my half-brother: "Like Paul I had, I must confess, once more overreached, overestimated and thus over-exploited my own existence. Like Paul I had exploited myself with a pathological ruthlessness. This had destroyed Paul and one day it shall destroy me. In the same way that Paul was destroyed by his pathological overestimation of his self and the world so I shall similarly be destroyed, in the short or long term, by my pathological overestimation of myself and the world."

"In the same way that Paul had come close to death in his madness so I too had come close to death in mine. In the same way that Paul, again and again, had landed in an asylum so I, again and again, had landed in a pulmonary institution. In the same way that Paul had rebelled against himself and his environment, and had been admitted to a mental hospital, so I too had rebelled against myself and my environment, and had been admitted to a pulmonary institution."

Paul Wittgenstein, according to Bernhard, squandered his dirty millions to help and save the "pure people". He literally threw his money away.

According to Bernhard the Wittgensteins had produced arms before they produced Ludwig and Paul. It was hardly surprising that the family had such a bad conscience or that so many had a habit of committing suicide.

When living in Traunstein Paul would visit Bernhard in Nathal and request that he play music: "a Mozart please, a Strauss please, a Beethoven please".

When in Vienna they both went to cafes together, preferably Sacher, which, as Paul put it, was at the arse of the opera. Once Bernhard and Paul had both, while still in the country, wanted to read an essay about Mozart's "Zaide" in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung. They drove to Salzburg, which was 80km away, but didn't find it there. They travelled on to Bad Reichenhall but had no luck there either. They then continued on to Bad Hall and, after that too disappointed, on to Wels, where, there too, no NZZ was to be had. The fact that they'd driven in the cold in an open car meant that both were sick for a week.

When Paul became seriously ill and it was clear he'd die Bernhard, much to his shame, avoided him. He wanted nothing more to do with his former friend.

A field of corn, each ear the same, uniform height, passed by, followed by a farmyard surrounded by trees, a dairy produce factory, with uniform, pale, grey buildings and shiny, grey vats, a brilliant, green meadow, a white-walled farmyard, a wood next to a yellow field, a brown field, trees scattered among a field of corn, and red and white electricity pylons.

I resumed work on the translation. I was fascinated by Bernhard's observation that: "For the Austrians their leisure time is in reality their busiest time. Most Austrians don't know what to do with themselves when they have a moment's rest and they consequently labour on in a dull fashion."

This chimed in with Heinrich's theory that the Austrians were slaves. They were, in his eyes, a product of centuries of serfdom. They liked, as a consequence, to pretend to be working when, in reality, they knew it was of little consequence. What really mattered was the private sphere.

For many culture was a means of escape from everyday reality, which was appallingly dull. They fled, en mass, into the realm of fantasy.

At their best, in Heinrich's eyes, Austrians were peasants. They might live in a palace, but they were peasants, they might run multi-national companies but they were peasants, they might amass vast fortunes, but they still remained peasants. In Bernhard's eyes, the Austrians had simply escaped into uniforms but remained peasants nevertheless.

Irrsigler was lucky to escape into the Kunsthistorische Museum because there were rarely openings for employment. This happened only when a warder retired or died.

I thought how things had changed in the meantime. Now there was simply serial exploitation, chronic fear, anxiety and insufferable insecurity.

Outside was a turquoise industrial complex, with grey silos next to ordinary homes, followed by a pile of wood next to a tennis court, trees growing on an embankment, and a farm next to a wooden barn.

I was prevented from working by the sound of a boisterous group. The noise however failed to wake the pale, old man in my compartment, with his chunky watch, rings on his fingers, striped polo shirt, pale blue jeans, which were barely able to contain his large, protruding belly, glasses and perfectly trimmed, grey hair. Even when asleep his expression remained doleful.

I resumed the translation. One of the more amusing themes in the book was Bernhard's essay on toilets.

In Vienna, Bernhard wrote, toilets are neglected like in no other city. It was rare to find a toilet where one didn't have to hold one's nose if one didn't want to turn one's stomach.

"Viennese toilets are a scandal", he wrote. "Even in the lower reaches of the Balkans one won't find such neglected toilets."

"Vienna has no toilet culture", he continued, "Vienna is a complete and utter toilet scandal. Even the most famous hotels have scandalous toilets. The most hideous privies can be found in Vienna, more hideous than in any other city."

"Vienna is superficially famous for its opera but feared and loathed on account of its scandalous toilets. The Viennese, and indeed the Austrians as a whole, have no toilet culture. One cannot find such dirty and malodorous lavatories in the whole wide world. Having to go to a toilet in Vienna is usually a disaster. One has to be an acrobat to avoid getting oneself dirty while one's clothes stink for weeks afterwards as a result of the overwhelming stench."

Outside a pile of logs at the side of a road passed by, followed by an old wagon with graffiti, green barriers, rows of almost identical houses, piles of gravel, a Romanesque tower, modern buildings, a huge, sprawling factory with cranes, silos, big, grey buildings, piles of stones, masts for mobiles, pylons, a station for relaying electricity, grey and brown transport wagons, and a lake, in the centre of which was a blue, floating platform with metal rails.

In the distance were clouds of white smoke. Brown, graffiti covered transport wagons were followed by bright orange and blue containers, piles of earth, the curve of a motorway, a scattering of high rises, cranes above buildings and a wall of apartments with bright, green walls.

I resumed the translation. Bernhard believed that the "cultural hunger of civilized humanity is enormous".

He also believed that, although culture was commonly associated with Vienna, little culture was left in the city. The little there was would soon be extinguished. Austrian governments, each more stupid than the next, would guarantee the triumph of the philistines.

The atmosphere in Austria was hostile to culture, which meant that it was merely a question of time before it became a cultural wasteland. The prevalent dullness and stupor would soon extinguish the light of culture.

I reflected on what Heinrich had told me. On one occasion the funds for supporting young artists had been plundered in order to finance a ridiculous project by an established painter, the result of which was hideous, while on another occasion the Austrian film industry had been starved of funds; public resources had been diverted to a trite and mindless TV show instead. Companies essential to film went bankrupt while the industry hemorrhaged skilled talent. People literally didn't have enough money to eat.

The neglect of the arts and the absence of any serious private funding were the main reasons my half-brother had died.

At Linz an excavator worked on the tracks, while the train passed a medley of old and modern buildings. Once the train stopped at Linz it was flanked by two others: one modern and one old. Rail employees with fluorescent, orange jackets pushed trolleys. In one of them was a man in a wheelchair, watching like a king. A pale faced, emaciated, lanky-framed youth with cap and T-shirt passed by.

Soon the train started again. Blue, red and green cargo containers were followed by buildings with glass, flashing in the sunlight, an embankment with foliage, a row of buildings, a solid row of pale apartment blocks, green creepers on concrete, a sloping field, a medley of commercial buildings in different colours and styles, a car-park with tightly regimented trees, a fallow field, factories, grey logistic facilities with bright yellow vans, a row of squat, square houses, a huge, bright red contraption for lifting and transferring containers, and row after row of multi-coloured containers.

"I don't find anything of value left in this world, anything that's of value to me, he said, everything in this world is vacuous."

Bernhard's words echoed how my half-brother felt. The world and humanity had reached a degree of stupidity, which was simply insufferable. Humanity had become brutalized and jaded to such a degree as to have once seemed impossible. Humanity now found itself in a living hell. This was quite unprecedented.

The contemporary world was "full of vulgarity, malice, lies and betrayal. Mankind has never before been so shamelessly perfidious."

The old man got off at Wels. Middle-aged men with backpacks and bikes ran to the end of the train, where the carriage for bikes was situated. After a while the only one on the platform was a lone woman with striped turquoise top and trolley case.

"We have the most disgusting government imaginable, the most hypocritical, the most evil, the meanest and most stupid." It was hardly surprising that the Austrian chancellor wanted to lock Bernhard up, I couldn't help but think. The only comfort, if it is a comfort, was to know that "other countries are equally mendacious, hypocritical and contemptible."

I couldn't help but think about how the American journalist Ben had mocked governments on the one hand and how Heinrich had ranted and raged against them on the other. In many respects both hardly differed from Bernhard. Both were conservative anarchists.

"Not only is the government mendacious, hypocritical, mean and beneath contempt, the Parliament is too, Reger said, and sometimes I get the impression that Parliament is much more hypocritical and mendacious than the government."

"How mendacious and villainous is the judiciary in this country and the press in this country and finally the culture in this country and finally everything in this country."

I couldn't help but think of the stories Heinrich had told me: Judges in Austria were not especially renowned for being especially honest or especially fair. This meant that it was conceivable for human rights activists to be tried and condemned as drug dealers while animal rights activists could be tried and condemned as terrorists. Trials, Heinrich claimed, could be rigged for political reasons while, he asserted, it was sometimes necessary to lie and steal to become a minister.

In this respect Austria hardly differed from other countries, I considered. The first thing one invariably has to ask is: what did he or she do to get this job or: what do the powers that be have on somebody?

Nearly every prominent politician was subject to blackmail of some form or other, according to Ben, and the most common form was peadophilia. What did that say about our political class, our kleptocracy, Ben had remarked?

I thought too of what my mad, conspiracy theorist, half-brother had claimed about the New World Order and One World Government. There were mafia-like families, he asserted, hiding in the shadows who were out to enslave us all. Every financial transaction, every seed planted, and every thought would be controlled. Eventually everybody would be implanted with electronic chips. The whole world would become, my mad half-brother claimed, one big concentration camp. Then the process of population reduction would begin in earnest.

It was these families, he claimed, who controlled finance, oil, the arms industry and the media. It was these families who started war after war in their mad scramble for resources, money and power. It was these families who were involved in drug smuggling and terrorism. Terrorism was used as a means of denuding the public of its rights while drugs guaranteed, for the families and the families alone, vast profits. It was these families, he claimed, who had created Marxism as a means of destroying anarchism, which was their real enemy. It was these families who had created both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, both of whom had followed an extremely pro-business agenda. Reagan, Thatcher and so-called neoliberalism were simply later manifestations of the same phenomenon, or so he claimed.

According to him there was a Council of 300, made up largely, but not exclusively, of the black nobility, which ruled the world. Their agenda was clear: total, Orwellian control, de-industrialization and population reduction. Of course he was perfectly mad, I reflected. Who could possibly believe such nonsense?

I passed a long train transporting goods. Some wagons were empty, some flat, some cylindrical, and others rectangular. In the corridor passengers holding maps and carrying luggage passed by.

Old, discoloured, discarded wagons, were followed by a big, silver, metal, shiny plant for dairy products, houses surrounded by trees, blocks of flats, masts, shiny tankers and commercial buildings.

"This country is now at an all time low, Reger said, and it will soon give up its purpose and its spirit. And everywhere all this nauseating drivel about democracy!"

"Every day one cannot believe one's eyes and ears, he said. Every day one experiences with horror the decline of this country, this corrupt state and this stultified people. And the people in this country and in this state don't mind, Reger said, that's what's so tormenting. The people see and feel how this state sinks lower and lower, but they don't mind."

A row of trees passed by, followed by bright meadows, rows of blue mountains, old, decaying industrial complexes, piles of old metal, buildings with frozen Austrian flags, clusters of old houses with wooden balconies, glittering windows of parked cars, industrial buildings, shiny, metallic vats, old storehouses, coniferous and deciduous trees, sheds for wood, grey warehouses, electricity relay stations, old churches, and solid, heavy buildings.

Once in Salzburg I caught a taxi to a somewhat poky apartment in Salzburg's Old Town belonging to a friend of my publisher. It had low, curved ceilings and a curious assemblage of Baroque and modern furniture. There were pewter dishes on delicate Baroque tables and IKEA lamps below austere, metallic chandeliers and rather hideous, brown, Turkish carpets next to a brown, IKEA bed.

The big problem was that I was charged with looking after a dog, a delightful and affectionate Labrador who, whenever I arrived grew so excited that she invariably urinated all over the Turkish carpets. I soon understood why they had attained their hideous color.

I had two weeks to work on my translation in Salzburg. My publisher said the change of scenery would do me good. He said that I'd like Salzburg and it was necessary for me to see the city if I were to understand Bernhard. He told me to visit the places where Bernhard had once lived and worked.

The first place I visited was the Radetzkystrasse. It was here that the fourteen-year-old Bernhard had been holed up for 14 days in 1945. He did so in order to prevent the four-room apartment being occupied by another family. Every time relatives came to supply him with bread he had to pull the furniture away from the door. He'd barricaded himself in out of fear.

As I stood and looked at the building, with its grey walls, white, wooden balcony, curved, glass roof above the porch, venetian blinds, green shutters, French window, neat, little garden with roses and well-trimmed hedge it was difficult for me to imagine the desperation Bernhard must have felt then.

Mixed with the sounds of cutlery on plates and low conversations was the noise of planes taking off from the nearby airport. In the courtyard were washing lines, a birdhouse, black BMWs, Citroens and Hondas, their doors and boots wide open.

After his parents came from Traunstein, more and more relatives moved into the apartment until, eventually, thirteen people were housed in four rooms. Bernhard's bedstead was subsequently moved to the hall.

Due to the fact that his Uncle Farald had to get up at four clock each morning Bernhard was never able to get any proper sleep. It was hardly surprising that he made a poor and inattentive pupil and his grades were so appalling.

One morning, in 1947, he told his mother that he no longer wished to go to school. He wanted to become an apprentice in order to satisfy his hunger. The same day he entered an apprenticeship in a grocery store.

"My guardian felt nothing but relief, and his reaction was understandable. The situation had grown chaotic and he, upon whose shoulders the sole burden of responsibility rested, had lost control."

Bernhard's grandfather on the other hand was disappointed. He'd hoped that his grandson would go to university. Yet, Bernhard reflected, was not his grandfather responsible for his failure in Salzburg? It was, after all, he who'd taught his grandson to rebel.

The grocery store was in one of five housing projects built between 1925 and 1931. It served as housing for the industrial workers of the nearby factories and was called the Scherzhausersiedlung.

The collapse of the Austrian economy in 1931, and the subsequent closing of the factories, meant that the 1,200 inhabitants of the Scherzhausersiedlung were condemned to lives of unemployment, alcoholism and crime.

For some the Scherzhausersiedlung might have been hell on earth but not for Bernhard. Years later he was to write: "I was free, and I felt free". He felt geborgen, secure. At school he'd felt at the mercy of a tyrannical system. Now he felt as though his life had meaning. "I wanted, from the beginning, to be useful. I was useful, and my usefulness was acknowledged."

I walked past a huge mall complex, a part of which poked out like the head of a bird, with a curving wing above a restaurant. After that I passed a Baptist church with huge concrete cross, before reaching the Scherzhausersiedlung, which is no longer isolated and peripheral but rather embedded in the fabric of the city.

As I sat on the bench in the Scherzhausersiedlung, close to Thomas Bernhardstrasse, I thought about Bernhard's words: "The Scherzhausersiedlung was a terrible blemish on the image of the city, which it was confronted with on a daily basis in the form of court transcripts and government reports."

"Here life atrophied and was merely a continuous death while not far removed was a perverse factory of pleasure and prosperity."

As I sat in the middle of a courtyard, with its sculpture made of two, big, roughly hewn stones, its bushes, trees, benches, bins, swings, sand boxes, yellow slide, bikes, stroller and rotary clothesline, upon which a black T-shirt with the words: Born To Sleep hung, listened to an old lady speaking loudly in Serbo-Croatian and watched as a woman with a fully laden shopping cart rattled through the courtyard, I couldn't help but think the proximity of the two worlds quite surreal.

On the one hand there were the rich and famous, carefully guarded by the police, ferried to the Felsenreitschule in a cavalcade of taxis, and not so far removed was this.

Undoubtedly the condition of the people in the Scherzhausersiedlung had improved immeasurably. There was more material prosperity than seventy years before. Yet the whole place had an air of poverty and desolation nevertheless. Inequality had taken on a different shape and form yet its degree was greater than ever.

I couldn't help but understand the anger of both Bernhard and my half-brother at this palpable injustice, which was perhaps more obvious in Salzburg than anywhere else in the world.

It was curious, I reflected, that the resuscitation of the morality play of "Jedermann", "Everyman", by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt, the founders of the Salzburger Festival, in 1920, had had so little effect. Its performance every year had become a central part of the social and cultural life of the international elite.

The central aim of the play was to point out that the lifestyle of this self-same elite was not merely foolish, vain and thoroughly worthless but reprehensible too. Yet they came, watched and didn't learn, year after year after year. It was literally impossible to get tickets.

As I left the vast, dark, and oppressive cathedral, the Dom, and looked at the simple tribune, with wooden planks, and grey, simple stage, seemingly unchanged since 1920, I couldn't help but think that the international elite certainly didn't come to productions of "Everyman" on account of the comfort.

I walked through the Alter Markt, Old Market, passed the Residenz, with its huge arches, heavy architecture and studied the fountain, with its statues of horses rising out of its waters. The water from the fountain was transformed into a spray, whipped up like dust and flung toward the tourists in their carriages.

I walked toward Waageplatz, the birthplace of Georg Trakl, with its heavy, metal doors. I thought not only about Bernhard but also Georg Trakl, another son of the city.

What Bernhard wrote was, I reflected, first and foremost poetry. All of his work, with its tight, rigorous discipline and economy, has to be understood as such. Above all else Trakl and Bernhard shared a dark view of life. And this dark view was, to a large extent, a product of living in Salzburg.

Trakl had come from a business family and had been emotionally starved as a consequence. His only comforts had been poetry, drugs and the incestuous relationship he enjoyed with his sister. He literally didn't care about anything else.

I thought of how Wittgenstein, on von Ficker's advice, had deposited a large amount in a bank for Trakl to pick up. Rilke, who received a similar sum, took the money with complete sang-froid but Trakl, although desperately needy, had been simply too nervous to actually do so.

Trakl had been ill equipped to endure the outbreak of war and its barbarities, especially the Austrian habit of stringing up innocents for no good reason. These outrageous acts of barbarity had shocked him to the core.

He retreated into drugs and overdosed one day before Wittgenstein arrived in Cracow to visit him. He was a victim of the hell of war as were innumerable other artists and poets.

As I walked through the traffic congested streets I thought of Trakl's poem: "Lament"

Sleep and Death, the dark eagle

Swirls around my head in the night:

Man's golden image

Engulfed by the icy wave

By eternity. The purple body shatters

On horrible reefs

And the dark voice laments

Over the sea.

Sister of stormy melancholy

Watch while a fearful boat sinks

Under stars,

The silent face of the night.

I walked through the Getreidegasse, packed full of shops: Louis Vuitton, H&M, Zara, Claire's, Benetton etc. with its hordes of tourists, its fancy restaurants and Chinese takeaways, ice cream shops and pasta joints, its Mozart Kugels next to Mozart's place of birth, its guild signs and its baroque facades.

As I sat in Cafe Tomaselli, with its gilded, baroque, framed mirrors, inlaid wood with abstract shapes, Biedermeier benches, Thonet chairs, wood columns, with hooks for coats, portraits on its walls, waiters in white shirts and black bow ties, and waitresses in black uniforms, I thought about how little must have changed since Trakl's time.

The cafe was packed with people. To my left were a French couple, casually dressed, he with glasses in a blue T-shirt and jeans, with bright orange backpack, she with short, cropped, dark hair, denim skirt and sneakers and to my right a bourgeois extended family, with two small daughters, the husband with greying hair and glasses, blue, pale shirt and dark, blue Bermuda shorts, the ladies in white and the old man, the patriarch of the family, with striped blue shirt and white trousers.

I compared Trakl to Rilke. It was something of a miracle that Rilke had survived the war. He'd suffered from the most appalling depression and had come close to suicide.

I knew that Franz preferred the latter. Trakl was, to his mind, zu laendlich, too rustic. I thought of the first Duineser Elegy.

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels' orders?

And even if one suddenly were to take me to its heart:

I would perish through its stronger existence.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we barely abide,

and we admire it because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

Every angel is terrible.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call of dark sobbing.

Oh, who do we need?

Not angels, not people, and shrewd animals realize

we're not reliably at home in the interpreted world.

Perhaps some tree on a hillside, which we daily see, remains,

the road from yesterday remains,

and the warped loyalty of a habit

that once pleased us, and so stayed and never left.

O and the night, the night, when the wind full of universe gnaws at our faces–,

for whom doesn't she stay, the desired one–

the gently disappointing one, who, for the single heart, is so difficult.

Is it easier for lovers?

Oh, they only cover each other up with their lot.

Do you know it yet? Throw out of your arms the emptiness

to the spaces we breathe,

perhaps birds feel expanded air with more passionate wing.

Yes, Spring needed you.

Some stars divined that you felt them.

A wave rose in the past and,

when you walked by an open window,

a violin yielded. All this was purpose.

But did you master it? Weren't you always

distracted by expectation, as if everything were

announced by a lover? (Where will you hide,

since the large, strange thoughts

come and go and often stay nights.)

If you desire it, sing of the lovers,

by far not immortal enough their famous feeling.

Those, you almost envy them, the deserted, whom you

found so much more loving than the satisfied. Begin

again and again to sing the never-attainable praise,

think: the hero saved himself; even his downfall was

just a pretext to be: his final rebirth.

Exhausted nature takes back the lovers,

as if there weren't enough power to repeat the feat.

Did you think of Gaspara Stampa,

that any girl, who a lover escapes,

feels for this heightened example: that I would be like her?

Shouldn't these oldest sufferings be more fruitful?

Is it not time to lovingly liberate ourselves from our lovers

and quivering stand: as the arrow endures the string,

collected in jumping be more than oneself.

There is nowhere to stay.

Voices, voices. Hear my heart, as only

saints hear the gigantic call that

lifts them from the floor; they however knelt,

impossible ones, and paid no attention:

Thus they heard. Not that you

could endure God's voice. But listen to the fluttering one and

the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

The young dead murmur to you.

Wherever you enter, in churches

in Rome and Naples do they not quietly

talk of their destiny?

Or an inscription,

like the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa, serenely strikes you.

What do they want from me? Quietly I have to

dispose of the appearance of wrong,

which sometimes hinders the spirit's pure movement.

Of course it is strange no longer to inhabit the earth,

no longer to use newly learned customs,

not to give roses and other promising things

the meaning of human future;

no longer to be that which one was in infinitely anxious hands;

to discard even one's own name like a broken toy.

Strange no longer to desire one's own desires.

Strange to see everything fluttering in space.

Death is a bore

and full of catching up, till one gradually

feels eternity.– But all the living make the mistake

of seeing a difference.

Angels (they say) often don't know if they're among

the living or the dead. The everlasting flow

passes through both realms, dragging both young and old

and drowns them in both.

Those called away early no longer need us, one gives up the earth softly

like gentle weaning from one's mother's breast.

But we, who need such great secrets, from whose grief

blessed progress comes:

could we be without them?

Is the legend in vain, that once Linos' lament

penetrated barren numbness with daring music;

that only in startled space, which an almost divine youth

for ever relinquished, the emptiness

vibrates, charms, comforts and helps us.

I was in no mood to work and so resolved to go to an opening of an exhibition by Tony Cragg. Tony Cragg's no-nonsense, down to earth, northern manner and his ability to explain clearly why he prefers certain materials over others is extremely appealing. Bronze for example is more malleable than steel but is not as strong, which is why he chooses steel for his bigger sculptures.

Those attending the opening: a small, old man in a striped shirt, grey trousers with a walking stick, a middle-aged lady with flowery shirt and white slacks, a plump man with a bright pink shirt and green trousers, a girl in a short blue dress, and a young fellow with a light blue jacket, white shirt and blue jeans, all seemed extremely interested in the works, which were of wood, stone, steel and bronze. They spent at least an hour studying them intently and touching their smooth surfaces.

Tony Cragg reminds me more of a northern scientist, with his balding pate, white hair and glasses, elegant tweed jacket, striped shirt, black trousers and black shoes, than anything else. His manner is easy and relaxed, and he doesn't have the slightest trace of affectation.

I remembered what Anne had told me about him. He was born not far from Liverpool in 1949. His grandfather was a farmer and his father was an electrical engineer who'd designed electrical parts for aircraft.

His father belonged to a generation who believed that science and technology would solve all their problems. He grew up with the same attitude and started working in a laboratory at the age of eighteen.

Realizing that working in a laboratory "is a sort of boring life" he started to make drawings. He became aware he was quite miserable working in the laboratory and decided to do something completely different.

He attended art school in the West of England, which was "a fantastic experience".

He did a general course for a year, and at the end of the course had a job working in a foundry near Bristol, which made casting parts for electrical motors. This was also "a fantastic experience". It was a job that he very much liked doing, "a very physical job with a lot of excitement about it".

After that he did a painting course in Wimbledon but "felt very uncomfortable". He "felt too fit, too energetic, too unrestful to just stand behind an easel". In other words: he quickly grew bored.

He started to make his first objects inspired by his memory of the factory and wanted to recreate the energy and dynamism he'd experienced there.

After having spent seven years at art school and having been influenced by Arte Povera and minimal art he started to produce pieces that were more his own.

In 1977 he moved to Wuppertal and started to make a series of works, using, partly for economic reasons, found material such as plastic fragments. One piece, inspired by Richard Long, consisted of plastic fragments collected from the bank of the Rhine. It was a simple spectrum, which went from blue to red.

He started to travel in Europe and went to the United States. Most of the exhibitions he did were made on the basis of "going somewhere with no ideas, no material, simply looking at the space, looking at the town, trying to understand a little about the structure of the town and then making the work for the exhibition. For him it was a fantastic time".

After a while of doing this he became extremely tired. He realized that he'd have to start working in a studio. He had a crisis.

Slowly his personal themes emerged: "the objects and materials we produce, that mankind has produced. His aim was to try to find out something about our relationship with these materials and objects".

According to him we haven't had the time to develop a meaningful relationship with these materials. Trying to give these things "more meaning, mythology and poetry is the clear predicate of art in this century".

For him the fruits of industrial society have had "an aesthetic impact and offered themselves to be carriers of complex and important information, ideas and emotions...Looked at in a general way, one can see this development as the naming of possibilities, a process of nomination...after a hundred years of nomination, we can use almost anything to make sculpture with".

For Tony Cragg any material can be used as the carrier of important information. All the materials and techniques that have been discovered so far form an alphabet that one can use to form a new visual language, which can be used to describe the complex world we exist in. In describing and making things more understandable, we are able to arrive at new knowledge.

For him trying to understand the physical world and use it as a language is really a sign of loving respect for the material we exist in and are made of. His aim is to make natural materials and man-made materials have equal value.

Anything that has larger associative connotations is of interest to him. There are two parts of an object: the physical material and any quality ascribed by us to that material. By this he means: "it's metaphysical existence. For instance, the moon exists as a physical entity but has a history, a mythology, a science, a language and a meaning".

Thanks to the advent of the Ready-Made, industrial objects were used, from the beginning of the twentieth century, as carriers of artistic information. An artist can now use anything to carry important information in the way that Warhol took the soup can and gave it its own mythology and aesthetic world.

All sculpture is a good discipline for learning about and discovering the physical world we live in and our position within it. Sculpture, for him, "as a discipline only really started to live up to its potential this century. Now it is at a threshold where artists of the future will be able to create new physical and psychological extensions into space".

After the exhibition by Tony Cragg I visited the museum for modern art, a heavy, concrete bunker built into the Moenchsberg, filled with memories of Salzburg: Kokoschka, Schoenberg, Max Reinhardt and modern art: Brus, Franz West etc.

Only the works by Franz West were any good. It was, especially after seeing the pieces by Tony Cragg, disappointing, to say the least.

As I walked around the museum I thought about what Bernhard wrote. In Bernhard's opinion contemporary art was worthless while Austrian contemporary art "didn't even deserve our shame"."For decades, Austrian artists have only produced kitschy manure, which, in my opinion belongs on the dunghill...The painters paint rubbish, the composers compose rubbish, the writers write crap...The Austrian sculptors produce the biggest amount of crap. The Austrian sculptors produce rubbish and harvest the greatest recognition, which is characteristic for the stupidity of the time...Austria's composers are nothing but petit-bourgeois idiots whose dung stinks to high heaven...Austrian writers have nothing to say. They aren't even capable of writing about the fact that they've nothing to say".Their books are merely derivative and hypocritical. All these books were merely "disgusting" and "opportunistic"..."every line in them is stolen, every word looted. They were merely written and published out of a craving for admiration. The books of these people don't belong in the bookstores but straight on the dunghill". For half a century Austria had produced merely mediocrity. It was depressing, to say the least.

It hardly came as a surprise when I found in one of the rooms a large piece of excrement. A visitor had expressed himself more forcefully than usual. Perhaps they'd been inspired by the exhibits of Viennese Actionism.

As I sat at the museum's cafe I listened to the bells ringing in the distance. The sound was intermingled with different languages spoken while there was an appalling stink of cheap perfume. Above me a red helicopter flew at low altitude.

I looked at the hills, with buildings and forests scattered on their sides. The parts that were denuded of trees reminded me of bare wounds.

Nestled among the hills was the city itself, with its church towers, green cranes, Dom, Festung, white, green and red buses, pedestrians streaming across the bridges, and the Salzach, with its green mass of water.

I looked around me and listened to the various voices. Two women with German accents, one well-tanned, with dark blue top and light jeans, the other pale, blonde, with a striped dress, chatted about who to invite to a party. A German lady and her son discussed the tourist sights they hadn't as yet seen, such as Mozart's place of birth. A mother and daughter discussed the latter's plan to travel to Bali for Christmas.

Two girls, who could have been models, with tanned skin, regular features and perfect figures, both wearing white tops, black trousers and styled shoes, chatted.

"What car does Michi drive?"

"I couldn't tell you. I know nothing about cars."

"With all this stress about leaving I'm close to a nervous breakdown. The people. The powerful emotions. It's simply too much."

"You don't have to invite everyone to the party. Just a few people. Otherwise you'll be exhausted."

"But I want them to enjoy the Salzburg experience."

"You'll probably never see half of them ever again. Who cares? Anyway: a toast to your beautiful styling!"

As I sat in Cafe Bazar with its dark, wood paneling, large windows, brass hat stands, leather seats, red Thonet chairs and gilt framed mirrors, I thought about Stefan Zweig who'd lived close by, in the Paschinger Schloessl, which dated from the seventeenth century. He'd frequented the cafe on a daily basis and had liked to play chess there.

In the same way that Max Reinhardt had rescued Schloss Leopoldskron Stefan Zweig had rescued the Paschinger Schloessl and had invested a small fortune in it.

Both Reinhardt and Zweig chose to flee the Nazis. It would have been easy for the former to compromise, Hitler had been a fan, but more difficult for the latter, and both perished not long after. Stefan Zweig committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 while Reinhardt died, impoverished, in New York, in 1944.

Both Schloss Leopoldskron and the Paschinger Schloessl had subsequently been bought for a pittance by strangers.

I thought of the guests at the Paschinger Schloessl: James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Werfel, Hermann Bahr, Carl Zuckmayer and Richard Strauss.

I thought of Zweig's "Welt von Gestern", "The World of Yesterday", finished shortly before he'd committed suicide. In it Zweig reflected on the world of his father and grandfather.

"They each lived their lives in a unity of form. A single life from beginning to end, without rises, without falls, without convulsions and dangers, a life with small tensions, imperceptible transitions; in the same rhythm, leisurely and quietly, they carried the wave of time from cradle to the grave. They lived in the same country, in the same city, and almost always in the same house; what happened in the world outside happened only in the newspapers and didn't come knocking on their doors. Some war was going on somewhere, but only a minor one, measured by the dimensions of today, and it was taking place far from the frontier. They didn't hear the guns, and after a few months the war was over, a dry leaf of history, and the same, old life began anew."

"It was the golden age of security. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed to be founded on the long term, and the state itself was the supreme guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were guaranteed by Parliament, the freely elected representatives of the people, and every duty was strictly limited."

"Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in shining gold pieces, thus guaranteeing its invariability. Everyone knew how much they owned or how much they owed, what was allowed and what forbidden."

"Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. He who had a fortune could calculate precisely how much interest he'd receive, while the bureaucrat and officer knew when they'd be promoted and retire."

For the most part I spent the mornings working on the translation. In the afternoons I explored the city and in the evenings I visited the various productions of the Salzburg Festival.

I made the mistake of attending all three productions of the Da Ponte operas, which I love quite profoundly: "Cosi Fan Tutte" in the Felsenreitschule, "Le nozze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" in the clumsily designed Haus fuer Mozart, only to discover that one was more mediocre than the next.

I toyed with the idea of attending performances of Thomas Ades' "The Exterminating Angel", based upon Luis Bunuel's "El angel exterminador", Richard Strauss' "Die Liebe der Danae", and Charles Gounod's "Faust", but thought better of it.

Of course I had no option but to attend the latest production of Bernhard's "Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige", in the Salzburger Landestheater, with its plaque recording the fact that it was here that the premiers of "Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige", 1972, "Die Macht der Gewohnheit", 1974, "Am Ziel", 1981, "Der Theatermacher", 1985 and "Ritter, Dene, Voss", 1986 had been staged, but was so appalled that I left after just ten minutes. I was so disappointed that I threw away my ticket for Friederike Mayroecker's "Requiem fuer Ernst Jandl", which was undoubtedly a mistake. Much better was the production of Beckett's "Endspiel" (Endgame) directed by one of Bernhard's favorite directors: Dieter Dorn.

The high point of the Festival was undoubtedly Hermann Beil's brilliant reading of "Wittgensteins Neffe", also in the Salzburger Landestheater.

If the operas and theatre productions were something of a let down at least there were excellent concerts given by the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Mariss Jansons (Mozart, "Konzert fuer Klavier und Orchester Es-Dur KV 482" and Bruckner's "Symphonie Nr. 6 A-Dur WAB 106") and Ricardo Muti (Strauss, "Der Buerger als Edelmann – Orchestersuite op. 60" and Bruckner's "Symphonie Nr. 2 c-Moll WAB 102"), which took place in the somewhat stuffy and airless Grosses Festspielhaus.

As I sat in a rather dull rendition of Beethoven and Schubert I couldn't help but think of Bernhard's lines. "I listen to Beethoven for a while, for example, to the Eroica. I listen attentively. For a long time I find myself in a philosophical-mathematical state of mind, Reger said, until I suddenly see the creator of the Eroica. Everything falls apart because in the work of Beethoven everything marches."

"How splendid is Schubert's music if we don't actually see it being performed, if we don't see these abysmal, imbecilic and vain musicians but we see them, naturally, if we're in a concert hall and everything becomes embarrassing, ridiculous and disastrous."

### Innsbruck

As I sat in the stuffy train compartment at Westbahnhof I thought about Bernhard's relationship to his publisher. In private Bernhard complained that Dr. Unseld was "just a dry businessman who understood nothing about literature". Worst of all: "he had no idea" about Bernhard's work. Whenever he wrote to Unseld it was "only for money".

Bernhard's problem was that he needed an awful lot of it. He hadn't paid for his house but didn't want to leave it either. He expected Unseld to pick up the bill, which he duly did.

Unseld agreed to give Bernhard an interest-free loan of 25,000 DM, which covered a large part of the cost of the house itself (30,000 DM or 200,000 Schillings, which is roughly equivalent to $170,000 today).

He also paid him 15,000 DM for his new novel "Die Verstoerung". At the time Bernhard was also working on a new play: "Ein Fest fuer Boris", "A Feast for Boris", which was due to be produced in Salzburg in 1966.

This financial support allowed Bernhard to become a full-time writer and he was enthusiastic about the fact. For the first time he could "lead the existence of a writer".

While a girl next to the window, with dark hair and black T-shirt, looked up from her lap-top to make a call, telling her boyfriend jokingly to behave himself in her absence, another passenger entered the compartment: a pale, gawky, pregnant girl, in light summer wear.

Without a word she shifted my bag from one rack to the other so that she could fit her suitcase onto it. Soon after that a boy, tanned, with wrap-round shades, in white T-shirt and pebble-grey Bermuda shorts arrived and swung his trolley suitcase up too.

By this time the racks were pretty much full and his case hung somewhat perilously, jutting halfway out, above our heads.

The gawky girl expressed her displeasure at this and a low-key yet disagreeable argument ensued.

I resolved the issue by reorganizing all the bags and cases on the racks until everyone was satisfied. A moment later the train moved off. Nobody looked out of the window.

The red-nosed, grey trains, the yellow-façaded houses, the pink and white blocks of flats all passed obliviously by.

Outside the trees grew thicker and the houses fewer. Now that the door was closed and the air-conditioning kicked in the oppressive heat abated. The first tunnel plunged everyone into darkness and I felt the pressure on my ears.

As the train emerged into the light a haze settled onto a small valley. It was quickly replaced by another scene: houses scattered across a hillock. The odd factory and warehouse passed by. A large building from the nineteenth century nestled on a hillside. As the train tilted a valley opened up. This picturesque scene was soon replaced by farmland.

In September 1965 Bernhard wrote to Unseld that he wanted to free himself from the novel he was working on by the end of the year. Increasingly he was returning to his old idea: "that the best state of affairs is to have nothing other than a crazy head". He wasn't happy with his house and was thinking of selling it. It had become a nuisance to him. It had "reduced him to the status of an "Austrian citizen"" and that was something he didn't want to be.

Part of the reason was an accident he'd witnessed in Italy: three cars, which had shortly before overtaken him, had been hurled into an abyss. Five people had died. "This comedy", he lamented to Unseld, "in which one has to act, although soaked to the skin, stinks".

On the horizon windmills generated electricity and pylons transported it away, while the girl with the laptop stared, absent-mindedly, out of the window into the distance, scratched her neck and neglected her typing.

Bernhard wrote to Unseld: "I now see, with the terrible clarity of the born egoist, that my work is my only pleasure, my only joy, my greatest perversion".

After arriving in St Poelten I watched the upper torsos of those passing and couldn't help but think that they were choreographed, so uniform was their leisurely motion, so theatrical the red engine behind.

A young girl rushed past: "Es ist alles voll da" (It's all full) she exclaimed to unseen interlocutors behind. She was followed by a young soldier and a group of weary travellers.

Once the train was in motion small structures appeared and disappeared within the blink of an eye.

Two supermarkets materialized in the middle of a field. A huge building with the word "Quarzwerk" emerged and next to it: a quarry.

I reflected on Bernhard's words. Bernhard had written to Unseld: "In poetry economy is essential, in the realm of the imagination: reality, in the world of beauty: cruelty, ugliness and terror".

"Die Fahrscheine, bitte" (The tickets, please). It was the conductor in blue uniform, tall, boyish-looking, with stubble for hair, black pouch and holster around his waist, from which two silver hooks hung.

In January 1966 Bernhard was lamenting: "there are periods when one suddenly hangs in the air over a terrible chasm, with a large audience, clapping uninterrupted applause, watching with glistening eyes, making one deaf, with its (perfidious) admiration, but not one who is willing to span a net where one can fall." Without such a net, he complained, one merely ends up as a pathetically comic and rather ridiculous corpse.

I couldn't help but think of my half-brother. When it had come to the crunch no one had stepped in to help him. Had I neglected my duty? Ought I feel guilty? Should I have a bad conscience?

Goods wagons in different shapes and sizes were followed by a house in blue, with roof unfinished.

Not long afterwards Bernhard wrote: "I am a victim of my rationality. I hate the idea that without rationality there is only feeling or feeling and taste".

Of course in art, as in life, there needs to be a balance, I reflected, between reason and feeling. Too much passion, especially in the wrong direction, is just as dangerous as none at all. Reason alone leads one into a wasteland yet it is, at one and the same time, an important check upon one's impulses. Ultimately though one needs to be guided by one's own experience and that of others.

My half-brother had been neglected by his father. His father had imparted nothing of any use. He hadn't even helped him to learn German. On the contrary he'd lied to him, tricked and betrayed him, with fatal consequences.

I went to the bathroom. As I approached I realized that a lady had the same intention but pretended to ignore the fact. Dimly aware of her displeasure I quickly locked the door behind me.

As the train gently rocked to and fro I undid my trouser zip and, with one hand on a handle, aimed as best as I could. Once I'd finished I pressed the yellow-lit button above the shiny metalic toilet lightly and was slightly alarmed as the effluent began to rise. In an instant it disappeared. As I washed my hands I wondered why travelling made me invariably feel so exceedingly dirty.

When I returned the girl was packing her laptop away. The train slowed. In an instant she got up, pulled her bag down from the rack, and, with a slight smile and barely audible "Auf Wiedersehen" was gone.

Within a matter of minutes I was in Linz, with its heavy, dreary, industrial architecture. As I looked across the eleven odd platforms at the dull, rusty, gold-stained cylindrical containers, boys with rucksacks on their shoulders strolled by.

A group of eleven year-old girls ran down the corridor. "Bist du noch nicht im Zug? Beeil dich doch!" (Aren't you in the train yet? Hurry up!) "Aber der Zug ist voll!" (But the train is full!)

With a lurch the train departed. Brown and orange factories were followed by white logistics buildings, with large, dark windows. Yet more heavy, rusting goods wagons, yet more large factories, were followed by yet more huge depots for supermarket chains.

After arguing that it was better to delay the publication rather than deliver a bad book, an argument Unseld readily accepted, Bernhard finally wrote the novel in just five weeks in the autumn of 1966. He was staying with the UExkuells in Brussels at the time.

He initially wanted to call the book "Die Ruhe", "The Calm". A month later he'd changed his mind and preferred the title: "Verstoerung", "Disturbance". Unseld didn't like it at all, felt that it would frighten people off and worried that it would result in an undeserved failure.

In response to the fierce reviews Bernhard wrote that critics were stupid or the extremely stupid.

Unseld was relieved that he didn't let the negative reviews affect him and kept on working. He was unhappy though about the title of the volume of short stories with the title: "Prose", which was due to appear.

The criticism and the doubts undoubtedly played a role in Bernhard's poor health. Between June and September 1967 he was in the Wiener Krankenhaus Baumgartnerhoehe. He had been diagnosed with Boeck's disease and a tumor had to be removed from his breast.

His only comfort was that Alfred A. Knopf and Gallimard had spotted the qualities of his book and had resolved to publish it.

Occasionally he wrote a letter, like a neglected lover or slighted diva, lamenting the indifference with which he was being treated. He wrote sentences like: "An author is something quite pathetic and ridiculous, as is a publisher too".

Soon after the scandal surrounding the state prize and the Anton Wildgans Prize in March 1968 Bernhard left for Lovran, Yugloslavia, where he stayed at Hotel Beograd and worked on his novel "Ungenach".

By July he was expressing his displeasure about the fact that only 1,800 copies of his work: "Verstoerung" had been sold. For him it was a question of wasting three years of work.

He was angry that he didn't have enough money to live on. He would have preferred to chop wood, which he compared favourably to the torment of writing, which merely caused "millions of disgusting cramps", but that would have meant an end to his career as a writer.

In response Unseld said that a publisher couldn't do more. The structure of his texts, his language, form and content were the real problem. Above all else he faulted Bernhard for stubbornly sticking to an unsuitable title. 90% of books were bought as presents and who, Unseld, argued, would want to give a present with such a title?

Good authors, such as Beckett, who only sold ten copies a month, just didn't sell well. That was simply the way it was. And Kafka only sold 300 copies of his first book in its first year of publication. Patience was needed. Bernhard had to trust his publisher more. He had made a name for himself and had garnered recognition. All that was needed was another book.

The pregnant girl, her legs stretched out, received a call from a gossipy friend. "Aber sie ist eine Stadtbekannte..." (But she is well-known in the city...). I didn't want to hear more and was grateful when she got up to continue the conversation in the corridor.

At Wels the two boys departed and I moved seats, taking the one next to the window. In order to avoid being forced to listen to the pregnant girl's conversation I took out my MP3 player, and, closing my eyes to the blinding sun, listened to Beethoven's sonatas, performed by Friederich Gulda.

Despite the odd shudder and bump the steady hum and rocking of the train lulled me to sleep.

After a while I woke and peered out of the dirt stained window at the plastic wrapped objects clustered in the fields. For a moment I caught sight of the reflection of my own sweaty, red face, mirrored in the glass.

Graffiti disfigured train stock was followed by a large building with a huge, dark brown advert on its façade. Old, blue and white factories passed by followed by a curious wooden construction, of beams and wires, a row of tall trees, a pink block of flats, discarded carriages, and a building with tall, black, square chimneys. A haze covered the hills in the distance. A regiment of trees was followed by an old woman tending her vegetable garden, blue chalet-like houses on a hill, a fetid pond, a Zwiebelturm, rows of red trucks, grey buildings, log piles, a power-relay station, an old Bauernhof, a river, a man mowing his lawn, tennis courts, a hill screened by the haze, a cluster of houses, and a squat church all passed by.

At Salzburg the gossipy pregnant lady departed with a cursory adieu. Beyond Salzburg the countryside gained in beauty by the minute. It was not long before the train had crossed the border and was coasting in lower Bavaria, the landscape not substantially different to that of Austria. I slept for an hour and a half. At half past eight I finally reached Innsbruck.

When I emerged from the mall-like station glowering clouds started to mass above the mountain tops. Within minutes a warm summer rain began to fall.

I hurried through the puddled streets. It didn't take me long though to find the apartment my publisher had organized on my behalf.

The next morning I was surpised at the beautiful view of the mountains from the apartment's terrace, which was protected by a huge, black umbrella.

I liked the modern kitchen, the elegant living room and most of all the bedroom with its sloping ceiling. It would prove ideal for writing.

When not visiting the Dom zu St. Jakob, the Hofkirche and most stunning of all: Schloss Ambras, with its collection of armour, curiosities and art, I worked away at the translation. I had a week before my publisher was due to arrive.

As I sat on a blue chair at a café, not far removed from government buildings, I watched the people pass by. I thought of Bernhard's lines: "The Austrians, are born opportunists, moral cowards, and live from hushing up and forgetting".

Did they have an option? I asked myself. And were they, in this particular respect, any different from anybody else? How, if one remembers every horror, can one possibly survive? That had been my half-brother's mistake. He'd dwelt too long and too obsessively on the sins of the past.

At the same time failure to confront the past and to discuss it openly, honestly and in a wider context has detrimental effects. My father had been obsessed with the past yet at one and the same time had been quite incapable of discussing it openly.

My father read innumerable books on history. He'd wanted to know, desperately, what had gone wrong. He was especially obsessed about the First World War. How had it come about? He simply didn't understand. His incomprehension tormented him. How had he become what he'd become? Who was guilty of wronging him? Who had destroyed his life?

"No political abomination, that is not forgotten within a week". In that respect Austria hardly differed from any other nation. For all the talk of "press freedom" the reality is that the press is seldom, if ever, truly free, I reflected. This I knew from my own experience. I have seen with my own two eyes how government press releases have appeared as front-page stories in all the major newspapers, without even a comma in them being changed.

"Our ministers commit horrendous crimes for decades and are covered by these opportunistic moral cowards". Again I could think of few countries that differed from Austria in this respect.

"It is a miracle if a criminal and fraudulent minister is kicked out, Reger said, because he's been accused of serious crimes. The whole affair is usually forgotten within a week because the moral cowards forget the affair". Again I could think of few countries that differed from Austria.

"The petty thief is pursued and imprisoned by the judiciary, while those who have ministerial rank and are the thieves of billions are at best pensioned off and forgotten, Reger said." I couldn't help but think of what I'd recently read in the paper. An African-American had been shot dead because he hadn't paid a parking fine while trillions had disappeared from the Federal Reserve without them being accounted for. In many respects my half-brother, although, lamentably, a conspiracy theorist, was correct. We truly are governed by a kleptocracy.

"The newspapers occasionally make assertions, complain and exaggerate but they also opportunistically annul and opportunistically forget. The newspapers are the whistleblowers and hatemongers, but they are also the oppressors and cloakers of political crimes." This is very much what my half-brother argued. It was the illusion of a "free press" that was the true evil. The illusion of freedom was a profound problem. He quoted Goethe: "No one is more of a slave than he who thinks himself free without actually being so."

Perhaps, ultimately, my half-brother preferred death to slavery and truth to lies, I reflected. I wasn't sure if his choice was such a bad one.

### Singerstrasse

Heinrich took me to see the Prater. But he didn't take me at a time when it was at its jolliest but rather at midday, when its gaudiness and vulgarity, denuded of the cover of darkness, is most evident.

I hadn't noticed in the night, for example, that the metal wheel of the Riesenrad is actually grey, nor had I noticed that all the individual compartments have only even numbers.

There was the usual collection of roller coasters, bumper-cars, and shooting galleries, with one collection of cuddly toys more ostentatious than the next. All now looked horribly vulgar. The loud, brash, tasteless pop music, which blared out into the air, was, on such a beautifully hot and sunny day, curiously incongruous.

I thought of Bernhard's words: "The Prater of today is no longer the Prater it was in my childhood, the turbulent amusement park. Today, the Prater is a nasty collection of ordinary people, a collection of criminal existences. The whole Prater stinks of beer and crime, and we encounter in it merely the brutality and shameless weakness of the vulgar Viennese. Not a day passes without the newspapers reporting either a murder or a rape in the Prater."

Most of the rides were motionless, having as yet no customers, and the few people who did wander through were tourists. I was glad when we arrived at our destination, a restaurant, which was packed with very primitive looking Austrians.

It surprised me that Heinrich was taking me there. Until I tasted the food that is. I could choose from a menu which included Wiener Saftgulasch, Cevapcici, Putenschnitzel, Hirtenspiess, Backhendel, Putenfilet, and Spiegelkarpfen, among other equally exotic sounding offerings. I chose the carp, the Karpfen, and was highly gratified with my choice.

"You see these people" Heinrich said, "none of them need to work but they don't realize the fact. None of them need ever hunger but they don't understand. None of them need to ever pay taxes but they willingly do so."

"The key word to understand is Synarchism. What is Anarchism? It is the primacy of individual liberty and society over the state. What is Synarchism? The negation of Anarchism. Synarchism is a simple idea, which arose in the nineteenth century. It is perfectly simple: in order to prevent freedom it is necessary to keep the populace occupied, with some nonsense or other, it really doesn't matter what."

"Synarchism is the negation of liberty and the individual. Synarchism is cynicism and Nihilism. We live in a nihilistic, cynical age."

"Of course some anarchists have been foolish and have indulged in violence but I strongly suspect that they were in the pay of the state. An intelligent Anarchist, a real Anarchist is a non-violent Anarchist."

"Tomorrow these people could all be free but they are slaves. They have been brainwashed by the peddlers of Synarchism."

"They have been confused with concepts they don't understand, and which are basically meaningless: like Capitalism and Communism."

"They are presented with a dialectic: one is either a Capitalist or a Communist. The whole time they don't understand: Capitalism doesn't exist, it is a figment of the imagination, while Communism was simply invented as a means of destroying Anarchism. Marx was in the pay of certain financial interests and controlled by the British government. Do you really think they'd have harboured him and let him use the British Library without a reason? He hated Proudhon and the whole of "Das Kapital" is directed against Proudhon. What was Proudhon against? The state and the banks, which for him were pretty much interchangeable, and which have become interchangeable. What did Marx champion? The state. His wrath was not directed against high finance. On the contrary. "Das Kapital" is simply a bundle of lies."

A week later I arranged to meet Heinrich in the restaurant Zum Weissen Rauchfangkehrer in the Weihburggasse, one of Bernhard's favourite restaurants. Because I'd arrived much too early I went for a coffee at Aida on Stefansplatz.

As I sat at the cafe and studied the list of coffees: espresso, double espresso, large brauner (two espressos, fluid cream & whipped cream), small brauner (espresso, fluid cream & whipped cream) aida melange (two espressos, steamed milk & whipped cream) and milchkaffee (steamed milk, water & espresso), a German lady walked up to the waitress and complained that her purse had been stolen. Soon afterwards an ambulance maneuvered its way through the hordes of Chinese tourists, travellers in T-shirts, figures in wheelchairs, youths wearing baseball caps, old women eating ice cream, young, tanned priests, parents pushing strollers, men in black suits, short skirted girls, cyclists wheeling bikes, and rickshaws. Behind me was an altercation between some American tourists, who had ordered something or other, and a waitress "I can't eat that. I have allergies. I need a new one. Is that a new one?" Eventually they simply left without paying. Clusters of tourists stood around debating which direction to take while a man sold his paintings. A child in red top, brown shorts and shoes ran around while a couple sat down at the next table to me. They spoke Arabic with a sprinkling of the odd English word such as "damage control" or "accounting" in their sentences. The man speaking Arabic switched to German to order a "Heisse Liebe" while the girl spoke in German over the phone: "Ja, es ist erst heute gekommen..." An Arab family, with the girls wearing headscarves, passed an English girl who was saying to another: "I don't know the name of the street..." A hotel employee, in beige jacket with gold buttons and black trousers, pushed a trolley packed full of luggage for a lady with two pasty looking teenage daughters. They passed a group of Japanese tourists, of uniform height and differing ages, who protected themselves from the sun with parasols.

I thought about the final pages of "Old Masters", which I'd nearly finished translating. It took place just a stone's throw away from here, in the Singerstrasse.

American tourists with backpacks talked about McDonalds, while two, old Spanish ladies used the GPS on their mobiles to find their way.

I thought about Bernhard's reflections on human nature and on how vile we all can be.

"If we have an idealistic idea, it soon becomes clear that this idea is nothing other than a nonsensical idea. The truth is that the so-called lower classes are just as mean, malicious and mendacious as the upper classes. Today's human beings are at the mercy of everything. They are totally helpless and completely defenseless subjects. One can no longer hide, there is no longer anywhere to hide, that's the terrible thing. Everything is totally transparent and thus totally defenseless."

As I sat in Zum Weissen Rauchfangkehrer, in the Weihburggasse, with its wood panelling, Biedermeier paintings, rustic lamps, and antlers on the walls, and studied the menu with its starters of pole bean salad in pumpkin seed oil, grilled king oyster mushrooms with cottage cheese, Styrian Beef Tartare with avocado, and marinated char with cucumber, its soups of watercress, beef and tomato and its main courses of minced veal patties with mashed potatoes, its Krenfleisch with chive potatoes, its chicken with chanterelles, beef with horseradish, and Viennese Schnitzel with cranberry sauce, I thought about the history of Austrian food. It goes back all the way to the Celts, who ate broad beans, barley, pork with thyme and savory, the Renaissance, when people ate fried batter pearls, rusk in wine sauce and pastry or liver paté with raisins and spices, and the Barock, with its spicy plum sweets.

I thought about the ideas of Peter Kubelka, and how the Weltanschauung, the worldview of a historical epoch, as well as the power of a regional culture, are embodied in the food. At one and the same time, the meals served are manifestations of identity, personality and the ability of the individual cook. Cooking is identical, in this respect, with music or painting.

For Kubelka the act of cooking is of equal importance with the work of a sculptor, painter, poet or musician. Cooking is creation. Cooking is created out of chaos. The model of the creator god is the cook. The whole body is involved in cooking, all the senses, the culture one has absorbed, as well as common sense.

A recipe is like a musical score. When cooking one is confronted with the elements: the ingredients, as well as time and space.

Whoever is cooking on six different hobs is working with six different processes simultaneously. No musician, actor or racer has to think quicker. And none of them are involved with all their senses in the way a cook is.

In a similar fashion that music, painting and poetry are necessary so is cooking. All of them liberate one from the banality of the everyday. The process of cooking structures time. It is simultaneously dance, communication and music.

Much to my annoyance Heinrich texted to say that he couldn't come after all. To say that I was displeased with this turn of events, is, to say the least, something of an understatement.

After Zum Weissen Rauchfangkehrer I went to Braeunerhof, Bernhard's Stammcafe, where he was known for sitting for days on end, with an exceedingly grumpy expression on his face.

A balding beggar with white, Arabian robe, black backpack and crutch was begging from a young couple, both blonde, he in grey T-shirt and jeans, she in dark blue dress, who, once the beggar left, returned to discussing whatever they were studying on their laptop.

The beggar moved on to the next pair, both middle-aged women, one in a black dress, the other in a long, cream, summer coat and white trousers. The lady in black pulled out a purse, talked to the beggar before putting it back again, having given him nothing.

The beggar moved on to the next couple, he in a grey suit, she in a blue shirt and grey skirt but got no response from them either.

Everyone at the cafe was sitting outside on the glorious summer's day. I was the only one inside.

A Fiaker with two chestnut horses, two tourists and a driver with bowler hat rolled by. It was followed by an electrically driven bus.

Tourists with cameras passed by and stared into the café. I felt on the one hand as though I were a fish in a goldfish bowl, on the other as if I were a spectator of a never-ending drama. I could understand why Bernhard had enjoyed sitting in the café. It was a perfect vantage point from which he could observe the world. Cafés are also good for avoiding loneliness.

I was sitting next to the large windows, with their wine coloured curtains. Beneath them were brown heaters. Ahead of me were seats with faded brown, patterned covers. The scene was lit by three spherical lamps, which hung from the ceiling.

Next to the seats were hat stands upon which abandoned black caps and scarves hung. When I returned, weeks later, they were still there.

Not far removed were piles of newspapers, cakes, plates and salt cellars while numerous oval and rectangular mirrors, as well as non-descript framed pictures, lined the coffee coloured walls. For some, irrational, reason I felt slighted, offended and hurt by the fact that Heinrich couldn't find time for me.

What had I done wrong, I asked myself? What had I said to offend? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he was simply bored with my company. Perhaps I wasn't as important as his other friends. Perhaps he regarded me as a bit of a loser. Was I too bourgeois for his taste? Perhaps. Did I have too little to say for myself? Was I not radical enough?

I might preach detachment to Anne but I still felt wounded and weakened by this blow to my ego, my vanity and my sense of self-worth.

Of course these feelings were perfectly ridiculous, I reflected. There was probably a good reason why he hadn't been able to come. Yet another voice said: why has he dumped me?

All of a sudden I felt horribly lonely, as if I hadn't a friend in the world.

I thought of Bernhard's words: "We can't bear to be alone. We talk ourselves into going it alone but that's a mere pipedream. We believe that we can get along without others. We even believe we can get along without a single human being. We imagine we've got only one chance: if we're left alone to our own devices, but that's a fantasy. Without others, we haven't got the slightest chance of survival".

### Carinthia

As I stared out of the window of the train destined for Silian I thought of Austria's meadows and fields with their wild mushrooms, white clover, hedge bindweed, eyebrights, yarrows, lady's mantle, bedstraw, tansies, corn poppies, campions, meadow saffrons, wild orchids, bellflowers, irises and amaranths.

I thought of how, as the earth grew warmer and the sun more intense, daisies, violets and cowslips bloomed and how, as the year approached its peak, dandelions, cardamines, buttercups, goat's beards and campions blossomed until the hay harvest put an end to their reign. Then bear's breeches and eyebrights emerged until the second harvest a month later. After that it was the turn of the meadow saffrons before the meadows and fields slowly cooled and bedded down for winter.

I thought of the wetland with its peat, water lilies, crowfoot, sundews, plantains, cotton grass, marsh marigolds, gentians, nightshades, bullrushes, swan mussels, crayfish, mayflies, sandpipers, brook trouts, and chars.

I thought of how, in the cold, oxygen rich mountain streams salmon and trout flourished while further down it was the turn of the grayling, the barbel, the breams and the flounder.

I thought of the forests with their ceps, red boletus, parasol mushrooms, amanitis, haircap moss, horsetails, bracken, ferns, anemones, wild strawberries, woodruff, lilies of the valley, spring snowflakes, touch-me-nots, foxglove, Turk's cap lilies, violets, lungwort, ivy, blueberries and belladonnas.

I thought of the fallen leaves, dead plants and animals, and how the bacteria, mushrooms, algae, and mites decomposed them. How, in spring, anemones, hepatica and cowslips blossomed until unfurling leaves deprived them of light and how clover emerged in the subsequent shadow. How wood warblers and robins made their nests on earth, blackbirds and song thrushes on branches and birds of prey on the tops of trees.

I thought of the mountains with their hellebores, anemones, saxifrages, mountain avens, edelweiss, poppies, violets, gentians, alpine roses, heather, Carthusian pinks, lilies, colombines, wolfsbane, clematis, snowbells, bellflower, sorrel, larch, dwarf pine, silver fir, alders, maples, locusts, apollos, salamanders, adders and golden eagles.

I thought of how, in the lower reaches, oak, pine and chestnut forests flourished, further up beech, maple and fir, then larch and stone pine, beyond that dwarf pines, alders and alpine roses, then shrubs and grass, before finally, in the upper regions, buttercups, moss, lichen and algae reigned supreme.

The train arrived punctually in Silian at roughly twenty to two yet, half an hour later, Heinrich and I were still trying to find our way out of the town and into the mountains.

I immediately ran into difficulties. The straps on my rucksack weren't properly adjusted, which cut off the blood to my right arm and caused considerable pain.

In addition to that I soon suffered my first blister, on the middle toe of my left foot, and I was forced to change my thick socks.

Clouds seemed to appear from nowhere and their threatening demeanour justified Heinrich's assertion that we climb faster.

The higher we climbed the more barren the landscape, the colder the wind and the more spectacular the view. We were soon forced to put on warm pullovers and jackets.

It was half past seven as, having paused to watch the frolicking and rolling horses beneath us, we reached the Silianer Huette, which stands at 2,477m. We passed through the tiled veranda, with windows looking out at the mountain peaks, on one side the Dolomites, wrapped in cloud (the names of the peaks fascinated me: croda Rossa di Sesto, Punta dei Tre Scarpar, Monte Popera and Cime di Sesto) on the other the Alps, and asked not for a room, as I'd expected, but a Matratze in a Lage, a mattress in a camp, which turned out to be a kind of dormitory.

The slanted roof and the floor were made out of Fichte, spruce, and there were six beds next to one another, which reminded me of a fairy tale, and one, long bunk bed.

To my surprise I found myself not in Carinthia, as I'd supposed but in Ost Tirol, East Tyrol. Thus Tiroler Geroestl was on the menu while the yellow shade of the lamp, which hung above the table, was patterned with flowers in Tyrolean style.

I could find little of interest in the cards being played or the book about a climber by the name of Heini Holzer and was glad to retire to bed.

I couldn't fall asleep. What was worse: the pair to my right fell to love-making (to my surprise I was to discover the next day that they were father and son) while two men opposite began to snore.

At nine o'clock the next morning, in a pair of trousers that was still soaking wet, I began, together with Heinrich, the trek along the Karnische Hoehenweg.

By ten we'd reached the Kriegerfriedhof, a war cemetery, Hochgraenten, which was surrounded by brown sheep.

A mist rose up and skirted over the tops of the ridge. We stopped and waited but the wind took a while before blowing it further.

By one, well within the four hours allotted for the stretch, we'd reached the Ostansersee Huette, which lies at 2,304m. It was not a moment too soon as the clouds had grown dark.

After pulling off my boots, I was pleased to find slippers at my disposal. We made our way to our sleeping quarters, which were similar to those we'd had the night before. A slanting ceiling, a row of mattresses, a small window, a bunk bed.

After depositing our things in the Lage we went down to the low-ceilinged Stube, which, in contrast to the previous Huette, was well heated and somewhat stuffy. I was quick to see why. There was an old iron heater, attached to the wall by an iron pipe, and a cardboard box, full of wood, in front of it.

The Stube was half full and people seemed to be continually coming and going. Between the four windows hung a glass case, on top of which was a small Madonna and an iron, a modern portrait of Christ. There were also some T-shirts with the name of the Huette emblazoned on them.

Heinrich decided to explore a cave of ice, which wasn't far removed, but I declined the offer to come along. After I'd hung out all my things to dry I wasn't sure of what to do. I returned upstairs and promptly fell asleep.

I was woken by Heinrich. He was going to take a dip in the lake in front of the Huette. By the time I came out to see him do it he was already in his warm clothes once more.

Inside the Stube Heinrich tried to teach me the rules of Uno, a card game that I thought must be for children. The whole thing seemed so trivial that I could hardly get involved.

The small size of the Stube forced us into conversation with a couple, he tall, well tanned and lanky, she tall, blonde, but pale in comparison. It turned out that they were from Linz. The couple were more than happy to join in a game of Uno and I began to wish that I'd been more attentive when listening to the adumbration of the rules.

In due time supper was served and our group stuck together, though we'd moved to another table, and waited patiently till one after the other was served.

A group came staggering in, they'd just arrived from the Porzehuette, and all the talk was of how difficult the way was. Some said it would take ten hours, some even longer.

The Wirt, host, a tall, dark-haired man with friendly, bright eyes volunteered information. He asked us what we wanted to know. I replied "Alles", everything.

He calmed my nerves, told me about how the way was clearly marked, how we wouldn't get lost, and how, although long, the way was by no means impossible. He told me about how every day he carried everything necessary up from the valley and how now and again a helicopter would supply them.

I was happy to retire for the night but found myself, despite the absence of snorers, still unable to sleep. I was unwilling, unlike Heinrich, to clamber out of bed to watch the storm in all its glory outside the window.

The storm had cleared the air but I found myself grumpy when I clambered down the stairs. I could find myself neither enthusiastic about the fact that I could see the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain, nor the Grosser Venediger, nor about the breakfast, nor even about the flirtatious smiles of the pretty waitress. I felt myself dead to the world as I stumbled out to put on my suntan lotion and find my rucksack. It was shortly before eight.

By a quarter to nine we were already on top of the Pfannspitze, 2,678m high. Shortly after ten we encountered trenches on the Austrian side and not far removed from them: yellow alpine anemones. By ten to eleven we'd reached the Filmoorhuette at 2,350m. It was small, only having fifteen beds, and we were surprised to find two, small girls, one with a hood over her head, running the show.

We ordered omelettes and apple juice gespritzt, with water, and sat, although it was cold and windy, watching the father and daughter we'd shared a room with in the last Huette, arrive.

Although they sat just one table removed neither they nor Heinrich seemed inclined to start a conversation, which I thought curious. The father and daughter were, after asking for directions, the first to leave, and I thought that we'd easily pass them by. It was nearly twelve by the time we left the Huette.

As always I hardly had a chance to enjoy the spectacular scenery around me, so concentrated was I on the path in front. I felt like a donkey and was not happy about it. What was more I knew very well that the faster I went and the more tired I got the greater the likelihood of making a mistake and of falling. The climb was by no means easy and fatal accidents by no means unthinkable.

I began to grow angry at Heinrich's thoughtlessness and lack of consideration. If I were to have an accident and die it was a matter of perfect indifference to him.

Once I arrived at the top I found Heinrich sunning himself, his head laid back on his rucksack. I just kept going.

At times I wasn't sure if I'd lost my path but when I sighted the father and daughter ahead I felt reassured. I clambered down the ravine like opening, sending rocks scattering ahead.

I'd learned to hold my rucksack tightly to my body when it was important to maintain balance and to hold it with my hands held behind me in order to spare my back. I'd also learned that when it came to crossing loose stones it was best to move swiftly.

At times I felt utterly exhausted and utterly in despair of ever reaching the Huette but the way, which was by no means easy and involved many a twist and turn, was clearly marked.

I looked down into the valley below and saw, to my relief, the lake with the Huette. I pressed on. All of a sudden two buildings appeared before my eyes and after at first dismissing them as insignificant I was forced to register the waving of hands from one. It was the couple from Linz.

It was twenty past two. I was two thirds within the allotted time. I left my rucksack on the terrace and dashed inside to change my shirt. After coming out I received a hero's welcome and to my surprise encountered Heinrich, kneeling by his rucksack. He was glad to find that I'd regained my equilibrium.

There seemed little point in hanging my things out to dry, the clouds looking dark and threatening, yet I did so all the same. I asked Heinrich to order a bed on my behalf and was glad to flee into the company of the pair from Linz and even that of the father and son, the former turned out to be an experienced climber, who I remembered all too well from the first Huette.

At a quarter to eight the next morning we left the Porzehuette. It would prove one of the most difficult and demanding of days. Not only were there plenty of stretches, which I hated, made up only of loose stone and where it was all too easy to tumble down, but also there was a lot of climbing involved.

I had to clamber, using cables fastened into rock, and I hung on for dear life before pulling myself up. Fortunately Heinrich's philosophy was that one should ascend slowly before descending with speed.

It was an immense relief to reach the summit but we didn't pause for very long and the descent was fast and brutal. I was ill served by my boots, whose treads were worn thin, which left me slipping and falling all too often.

It was an act of pure folly to run and I stumbled countless times but nothing approached my sense of elation and triumph when we finally arrived at the Hochweisssteinhaus at shortly before four.

After learning that there was no shower I dipped my feet in a trough of ice-cold water and let my shoulders be massaged with balsam by Heinrich.

We were now finally in Carinthia and the old joke that two Carinthians make up a chorus proved quick to be true. After a bottle of wine and venison we settled down to enjoy the singing of a group of Carinthians.

One stuck out in particular. He was young, tanned, handsome, with extremely short hair, as if he'd shaved it off the day before, and a fascinating, almost hypnotic gaze, which seemed to have one eye on his fellow performers and one, particularly sly and exhibitionist, on his audience. He was dressed in a blue jacket and seemed to jerk from one group to another at an angle.

His fellow performers were a mixed bunch, thickset men, with heavy cheekbones and wild if not a little intimidating appearances and young girls with self-assertive airs. One seemed particularly coquette, hopping from one knee to another, and I was surprised to see how pretty she actually was, a petite blonde with winning eyes and mischievous, elfish mouth.

The lead performer, who even used a tuning fork on occasion, so seriously did he take his singing, was not above behaving roguishly. He addressed a lady from Dresden, and sang one or two mildly indecent songs on her behalf, all the time play-acting the drunk. The others joined in with gusto and soon all were singing.

I had bad luck that night. My immediate neighbor snored loudly. There were occasions when it sounded almost like a chorus of snores, and I was reduced to the unenviable remedy of giving him short kicks in order to make him stop.

It was not surprising that I was a little late getting out and hurried to catch up with Heinrich, though not at the pace of one Carinthian I'd got to know, who quite literally ran. Upon catching up with Heinrich, I joked about finding another Martyrpfahl, pillory, at the top, for snorers and other malefactors.

Being at only 1868m it grew hotter quicker than before. I put on my sunglasses but was loath to wear them on account of the stunning beauty of the Italian valley, which confronted us upon reaching the top.

The early morning haze threw a veil of blue upon the mountains and the softness and lushness of the valley was a happy relief after the barren crags of the past few days.

I could hardly tear myself away from the view, most spectacular at the top, and were it not for the shady paths of the larch forest, with its running streams and lowing cows, I'd have hated the descent.

Heinrich began a hunt for Eierschwammerln, chanterelles, doubtlessly inspired by the adjoining table of the night before. They had sat around preparing them for their own supper, for what had seemed like an eternity.

We passed farmhouses and buildings of seemingly ancient make and in different degrees of dilapidation, Italian hikers, who invariably greeted with a "Buongiorno", and a farmer who called out "Willkommen in Italian", welcome to Italy.

I'd got so used to the descent into the valley that I wasn't mentally prepared for the ascent out of it. I was quickly tired and annoyed to find myself being passed by three groups, including the one from Dresden, and was quick to set out to catch them again.

We didn't pause long at the top, it being windy but took a longer break next to a small lake, just beyond its brow. Even the father and daughter from Munich were there, sunning themselves, and soon the spot seemed so crowded that it could have been a park in the midst of an urban sprawl.

As usual nearly everyone supplied me with my wants, I being so poorly prepared. I received cheese, bread, carrots, apples, and water with vitamin tablets dissolved in it, and learned how essential nourishment, and especially carbohydrates, fruit and vegetables actually were on such a hike. I cleaned my fingers, made sticky by honey I'd brought with me from the previous Huette, in the lake and then packed my things to join Heinrich on our way.

I was driven by an ambition to catch up with the Germans, both the group from Dresden and the father and daughter from Munich. There had been much talk about taking an adequate supply of water and I was soon to see why. It grew hotter and hotter.

I was rewarded for my efforts after the sudden appearance, clambering over loose rocks, of the group from Dresden, and could not suppress a cry of "The Germans!" We would have caught up with them too were it not for our decision to take a break at a farmhouse, where we received homemade buttermilk and cheese on bread.

It turned out to prove a good decision to take a break before the last slog. Although everybody said that the next Huette, the Wolayersee Huette, at 1,960m, wasn't far, the climb seemed interminable and in the increasingly hot, midday sun to be more of a torment than a pleasure. I gritted my teeth, drew on my last reserves of emotional if not physical energy, and persevered until we got there.

The Huette was located a little above a lake, which in turn was dominated by a bare, limestone rock-face. I was to learn that it was a heavily contended spot in the First World War and a monument, which looked like a red chimney commemorated the fact. My only thought though was of bathing in the lake. It was hot and I couldn't imagine that the lake was as cold as everybody said it was. It was not as cold as everybody said it was, it proved a good deal colder, and I recognised that it was mere folly to try to swim to the other side. The further I got the colder and deeper the lake, and I was quick to turn back.

Heinrich's return and enthusiasm about the view from the war memorial reawakened my senses and, more from the desire of not being left alone than anything else, I recommenced the ascent. The view of the dying sun from the monument was not as spectacular as I'd expected but what I did find fascinating were the machine-gun positions chiselled out of the hard stone. They dominated the slopes opposite.

The Italians, in turn, had carved two holes into some crags, which had served the same function.

The sight of such objects of horror among the beauty of nature triggered something within Heinrich. He began what seemed like an interminable monologue.

"One has to bear in mind that at the outbreak of hostilities Italy had an army of roughly one million men while the Austro-Hungarian army was at the time embroiled in a war with both Russia and Serbia. There were no reserves and the Austrians could only match the Italians with a quarter of their number."

"General Luigi Cadorna, the Italian commander, had basically three options: he could attack Tyrol, advance in the direction of Graz or move across the Isonzo toward Triest, Laibach and Marburg. He chose the latter."

"The Austrians wanted to deter the Italians by positioning German troops on their southern border but the Germans wanted nothing of it. They refused even to declare war on Italy."

"When the Italians entered the war, in May 1915, the commander of the Austro-Hungarian forces, Franz Conrad von Hoetzendorf, thought that they'd be in Vienna in a matter of weeks."

"On the 24th of May Cadorna crossed the border, occupied Karfreit and reached the Isonzo River. By the beginning of June the attack was already in trouble and Cadorna was forced to pause. He resumed the onslaught in July close to the Karsthochflaeche, near Redipuglia, Monte San Michele, Podgora and Monte Sabotino."

"Although the Italians had a six to one superiority the attack failed. This was despite the incompetence of the Austrian generals, who refused to let their men dig in. The karst rock, essentially limestone, splintered under the barrages and the soldiers, who weren't equipped with helmets, were killed, wounded or went mad. It was impossible to bury the dead and soon afterwards the water became infected with cholera."

"Mountains such as the Ortler, with 3,902 meters, the Koenigsspitz, with 3,859 meters, the Monte Cevedale, with 3,778 meters, became scenes of horrific battles. The Italians captured Col di Lana, lost it and a year later blew it to smithereens with a huge mine. It was a brutal war against nature."

"Robert Musil was an adjutant of the 169th Landsturm Infantry Battalion in the Mocheni Valley, fought at Isonzo between November and December 1915, and in Arabba, in the Dolomites, between February and March 1916 while Wittgenstein was on active service in and around Asiagio between March 1918 and July 1918. He was captured on the Italian front in November 1918."

"Just as one should personalize the participants and victims of the war so one should name its authors: Cecil Rhodes, William Stead, Reginald Balliol Brett, otherwise known as Lord Esher, Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, Alfred Milner, King Edward VII and his successor King George V."

"It was they who realized that the supremacy of the British Empire was under threat and it was they who resolved to do whatever was necessary to maintain it."

"It was they who went to war in South Africa and created the concentration camps in which 32,000 women and children were murdered."

"It was they who, even after Rhodes died, reformed the army, created alliances with France and Russia and turned the British public against Germany."

"It was they who recruited Asquith, Haldane, Grey, Balfour and Landsdowne in order to steer Britain toward war."

"It was they who made commitments to Belgium, which undermined its neutrality."

"It was they who, with the help of Admiral Fisher, modernized the fleet with oil-driven ships."

"It was they who recruited the Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Isvolsky to their cause, and paid him handsomely for it."

"It was they who made vast fortunes when the public clamoured for rearmament."

"It was they who approved Alfred Harmsworth as editor of The Times."

"It was they who created the Round Table in order to maintain imperial unity."

"It was they who blackmailed David Lloyd George into becoming their useful instrument and won over Churchill."

"It was they who recruited Delcasse and Poincare into working for them in France."

"It was they who tried to provoke war over Morocco in 1911 and it was they who succeeded in luring both Austria-Hungary and Germany into the quagmire of the Balkans."

"Perhaps war could have been avoided if the journalists of the day had been more honest."

"You know there is a danger in knowing too much, and staying silent. I don't know which is worse: speaking out and being accused of rape, or pedophilia or staying silent, and going slowly insane."

"I used to be contemptuous of Franz West because I thought him a whore, a pusher, a loser but it is he and not I who has become famous."

"The first time I met Franz, in Karl Marx Hof, we were neighbors, he tricked me and he's been tricking and deceiving me ever since, just as I've been tricking and deceiving myself."

"When I was young I became a journalist. A war journalist. The first time they sent me to war I was twenty: it was the Six Day War. I went there believing Israel was under threat, Israel was fighting for Western values, Israel had a moral right to exist. After all: had not the Jews had been the victims of the Holocaust? What did I find? The first day I was with an Israeli unit: they massacred their Egyptian prisoners. Did I speak out? No. I rationalized. I told myself: such things happen in war. Not only did I rationalize but I wrote glowing reports about Israel's "moral army", the most "moral army" in the world. How its bravery and efficiency in the face of overwhelming odds had led to victory. It had been a victory of David over Goliath, I, the liar, the whore, wrote then."

"Of course only later did I learn that not only had there been no need for a war, Ben Gurion had opposed it, the Occupation was a disaster, as it remains to this day, and the Israelis had tried to trick the Americans into destroying Cairo by sinking the Liberty."

"The biggest joke of all is knowing that Biblical Israel isn't in Palestine at all but in what we now call Saudi Arabia. The Israelis keep digging and digging but they never find any archaeological remains because there are no archaeological remains! The British simply wanted to create a Jewish Ulster. Why? Because of the oil: the Mosul-Haifa pipeline, which remains, to this day, the most important in the Middle East."

"Then they sent me to Rome, the Club of Rome, to Aurelio Peccei, the fascist. You know his history has been completely erased? Nowhere is there a mention of the fact that he was a fascist. What did I learn? The world is over populated, the human race is in a state of crisis. Society is in turmoil. Culture and civilization are falling apart. What was to be done? The population of the Third World had to be reduced."

"This I glowingly believed in and wrote about at the time. We were fighting for "our values", we had to be "reasonable", "responsible", we had to preserve the planet."

"Species were becoming extinct. The very world we lived in was threatened. We had to put on the harness of necessity. A sacrifice was needed. Of course I, like everyone else at the Club of Rome, knew perfectly well that we, in the West, with our industrial pollution, with our cars and waste were responsible for this mess. But we rationalized. We told ourselves that we had to be pragmatic. And so the killing began."

"The long Holocaust, that continues to this day, began. Of the 150,000 deaths each day, two thirds are easily preventable. This is no natural phenomenon. This is genocide, pure and simple. And we, you and I, are directly responsible for this state of affairs. Of course the method is more subtle, more refined than the use of gas but the effect is exactly the same. And people ask how Auschwitz was possible when Auschwitz is everywhere, and worst of all: today!"

"I watched it at close hand in Vietnam. Did you know that six million were killed? The orders came in: waste them, and they did of course. They enjoyed it. They were good at it. Even the children. They too were part of the body count. It was industrialized war, run by modern management. What was the measure of success? The body count. Every officer wanted success. Every officer wanted a high body count. So they would drum into the head of each and every soldier: the body count, the body count, the body count. And the industrialized killing began."

"At first we didn't report it. We reported each massacre as a battle, each defeat as a victory, a victory in the global war against Communism! Then, after My Lai, the taboo was broken, they were after Nixon but I didn't know that then."

"We reported that the soldiers had run amuck, discipline had broken down. Which it did of course. But that was later and that was the only reason they ended the war. The grunts refused to fight. They literally refused to go out and either get killed or murder innocents. I wonder why?"

"Maybe they guessed the truth: that Kissinger had sabotaged the peace talks in 1968. Why did he do that? Because he needed the body bags of young, helpless Americans to smuggle drugs back to the United States."

"Of course Vietnam was fought for oil and for profit. It was a curse for Vietnam that oil was discovered off its shores in 1950 as it remains a curse for so many other countries today."

"The odd thing, when reading the accounts of all those authors, was that they never mentioned the fact that they were mass murderers, that they had been ordered to commit genocide, in the same way the Germans had committed genocide in World War II."

"Yet the irony is: the information is there, in the statistics. After each Search and Destroy mission the Americans always tallied up the dead. Although the number of so-called "VC" numbered hundreds and often thousands very few weapons were ever found. Very few people, to this day, have ever asked why. And they ask how Auschwitz was possible?"

"When the grunts rebelled the establishment switched tactics. They started pumping them full of heroin. To do so they first replaced Ky with Thieu and then invaded Cambodia. But that is a long story and I won't bore you with it."

"I remember how the Cathay Pacific jet corkscrewed in for a landing. Once a colonel's wife, who'd drunk the odd martini too many, fainted the minute she stepped out into the heat of the tarmac."

"Tan Son Nhut was a mess, with broken crates and abandoned luggage strewn across the cement floor. The functionaries took an eternity looking through passports and once outside there were crowds of cabbies and cyclo drivers."

"I remember the hotels near Lam Son Square, with their flaking, grey façades, the reek of garbage and urine, the smog caused by the Hondas, the bars and massage parlours along Tu Do and Nguyen Hue, the Continental, where Graham Greene had written "The Quiet American", at a corner table on the veranda, and the beggars, who were everywhere of course."

"I remember the stories I heard. How the CIA would take three Vietnamese up in a helicopter. Two would be innocents who'd be thrown out, with detonation cord around their necks, and the third would invariably babble. How they turned VC or NVA around and sent them off on reconnaissance missions. The minute they radioed their location B-52s would be called in. None ever returned."

"Of course, we reported, how could we but? on the valiant fight against Communism, the heroism of the soldiers, the victory of modern technology, the conquest of ideas, the ascendancy of freedom, decency and humanity. We were, after all, fighting for democracy, were we not?"

"After that they sent me to Northern Ireland. I reported on the war there. Of course I couldn't tell the truth. That would aid and abet terrorism, would it not?"

"I couldn't tell people that it was British soldiers who were stealing cars and setting off car bombs."

"I couldn't write that British soldiers were killing civilians, often by mistake but more often than not deliberately."

"That British soldiers were killing the sons of doctors who dared criticise the torture of prisoners."

"That British soldiers were killing other British soldiers, dressed as civilians, that the police were shooting British soldiers, dressed as civilians, and that informers who were deemed expendable were mentioned in the British press. They invariably ended up dead."

"No, of course not. No mention could be made of Frank Kitson's ideas, about gangs and countergangs, about the dirty, shadow war, about psyops and black ops."

"It was one long war against terrorism, was it not? How could one not fight terrorism?"

"Of course, it had to be stamped out with the utmost brutality. That was the line to be followed. And I followed it. How could I do otherwise? I was well paid to do so."

"That is what I reported from Italy too. The fact that the Greeks, the Neo-Nazis in Portugal and the CIA were all involved was never mentioned."

"All the terrorism, whether from right or left, was always the responsibility of the Red Brigades. That is what I always faithfully reported, even when I knew it to be otherwise. Especially when I knew it to be otherwise."

"Did I want to end up like either Passolini or Pecorelli? Of course not. That is why I stayed silent when Aldo Moro was kidnapped."

"The same applied to Schleyer and Ponto in Germany. I knew perfectly well which game was being played you see, but, at one and the same time, I was being well paid for my silence. I was enjoying life. Why should I deny it?"

"Of course, to paraphrase David Hume: it is always the other who is cruel, perfidious and unjust, it is always we ourselves who are equitable, moderate and merciful."

"If an enemy is successful he takes pleasure in death, is treacherous and evil, if we are successful it is we who are clever, virtuous and courageous."

"I was in Buenes Aires to report on the Falklands or Malvinas War. The Argentine army, who'd been renowned as butchers of their own people, were transformed into heroes and saviours."

"To talk of human rights became treason, and dissent was punishable by death. The generals, who the people had once wanted imprisoned, became demigods."

"Everyone was in delirium and completely divorced from reality. The national press told the people that Argentina was winning the war."

"When the Argentinian forces surrendered it was as though the world had come to an end. The people went mad and I was nearly killed by a mob."

"I was only saved when they realized I was an Austrian. Excuses were rolled out. Argentina had been betrayed by its ally: America. And then people woke up, as if from a bad dream. The war was over and they went back to life as if nothing had happened."

"Soon after that I remember being in the town of Suchitoto in El Salvador. I remember being caught up in a fire fight. Cordite and dust filled the air and I clung to the dear, sweet, mother earth with all my might."

"A rebel next to me called out for his mother as he writhed in pain. I thought it was the end. Miraculously I survived. Three times the death squads of the Treasury Police tried to kill me. Three times I escaped. Once they dumped three bodies in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel in San Salvador, with death threats in their mouths. I was not writing what the CIA wanted me to write. So I began writing what the CIA wanted me to write. I didn't mention the children I saw massacred by the death squads or the piles upon piles of corpses I saw."

"I didn't write about how the death squads, with wonderful names like the Union of White Warriors and the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Brigade, started killing people indiscriminately. Not just labour leaders, human-rights workers, teachers, and activists, everybody."

"They murdered at the rate of eight hundred a month. The bodies kept piling up. They killed young women for no other reason than that they wore jeans and tennis shoes."

"They killed Archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying Mass, raped and murdered churchwomen, and assassinated the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency, as well as two of his advisers."

"They were completely out of control. Of course people started to resist. What else could they do?"

"And the Salvadoran officers bragged quite openly that they didn't take prisoners. Everybody was a terrorist. The entire population were delincuentes terroristas."

"The policy backfired. Both officers and men began to desert. Tougher measures were sought. Examples needed to be made. The army regarded Communism as a cancer, which needed to be fought with the utmost brutality. If they weren't able to kill the guerrillas themselves they at least could kill their supporters."

"Of course sometimes, such as at El Mozote, they killed out of pure blood lust, they killed for the sake of killing. They knew perfectly well that the people had no connection with the guerrillas, that the people were innocent, but they killed them nevertheless."

"They took the men to a church and beheaded them with machetes or blindfolded them and took them to the forest to be shot."

"The young women and girls – some as young as ten – were then taken up into the El Chingo and La Cruz hills. Before long their screams could be heard."

"After a while the soldiers of the infamous Atlacatl Battalion, commanded by Colonel Monterrosa, forcefully separated the women who'd remained in the village from their children, took them to a house and shot them."

"Some soldiers didn't want to kill the children but orders were orders and had to be obeyed. If they weren't killed now it was argued, they'd grow up to be guerillas."

"The sole survivor heard her children screaming that they were being cut and choked but knew she was powerless to help."

"Some children were slashed to death with machetes, others crushed by rifle butts. Some were thrown into the air and stabbed with bayonets. Others had their throats slit. Some were hung. Others were shot to death in the sacristy. Then the village was set on fire."

"Of course nobody cared about what the sole witness had to say. The truth is: nobody ever cares. Of course I joined in the chorus denouncing her as a liar and a whore. I had no choice."

"During the first Gulf War I remember the miles and miles of burnt-out cars, trucks and tanks on the "Highway of Death". The Iraqis had tried to flee Kuwait City. Most hadn't made it. Most were burnt to death."

"I remember the charred corpses, the stench, the strange postures of the soldiers, the way their limbs stuck out. Of course I wrote nothing about it. I'd signed a piece of paper saying I'd abide by the restrictions on the press and I did so."

"If I was a detached observer of the effects of modern weaponry in the Gulf I was on its receiving end in Sarajevo. Tank howitzers, 155mm rounds and Kayushas pulverized whole blocks of flats. I got to the city down a path on Mount Igman."

"The cars that had been hit could be seen below. Again I saw dozens of charred corpses, this time at a distance."

"In Sarajevo itself there was no electricity, the water had stopped running and there wasn't much to eat. Most people lived in basements. Many were dismembered, decapitated or simply mangled."

"I was lucky to get a room at the Holiday Inn. Forty-five of my colleagues had already been killed by that stage. I had no intention of joining them."

"Of course I wrote that the Serbs were the only ones responsible for the war and that American campaign of destabilization had nothing to do with it whatsoever."

"I wrote that the Markale massacre was perpetrated by the Serbs when I knew damned well that the Bosnians had massacred their own people."

"I pretended I didn't hear when I was told that Srebrenica had been selected by Clinton and that five thousand civilians needed to be sacrificed."

"The massacre was necessary to provide a pretext for American military intervention. And what did the U.N. do when it arrived? It turned the whole country into a whorehouse."

"Of course it was not difficult to write about the Serbs. They were a colourful cast of characters. The warlords were thieves, embezzlers, thugs and murderers. When not robbing and plundering Bosnians and Croats they robbed and plundered their fellow Serbs."

"I remember one particular character: a charming fellow called Milan Lukic in Visegrad. He shot Bakha Zukic in the back before spiriting her husband: Dzemo Zukic away in a red Volkswagen Passat. Dzemo was never seen again."

"Milan Lukic would tie people behind his car and drive around until they were dead. He set buildings full of Muslims on fire. He raped Jasna Ahmedspahic so badly that she jumped to her death. He threw Muslims from bridges and shot at them as they tried to swim to safety. Other times he'd simply beat them to death. Some of the bodies got caught in the undergrowth, others floated downstream. Once a man, who'd been crucified on a door, was found. Another time, a garbage bag full of heads."

"After the Balkans they sent me to Rwanda, where I covered the massacre and did interviews with the perpetrators afterwards."

"I was almost amused to hear how the perpetrators complained of the "backbreaking" work of killing, and how their legs "took a beating". While deep in the marshes they especially missed their regular lunches at noon and their naps, both of which were forbidden. Yet the effort initially cheered them as murdering was, at the start at least, "less repetitive" than sowing. Eventually however it too acquired its own monotony."

"No one went to their fields anymore. Why, they reasoned, should they bother digging in the dirt when they were harvesting without working, eating their fill without growing a thing? They became lazy and didn't bother to bury the bodies."

"It was considered a wasted effort, unless of course, a killed Tutsi created a stench and attracted dogs."

"The perpetrators roasted meat in the morning, and they roasted more in the evening. They found themselves stuffed with it day after day. Before they'd eaten meat only at weddings. In the past, when they came home from the fields, they'd found almost nothing in the cooking pot, only their usual beans or sometimes just cassava gruel."

"When they got back from the marshes, in the cabarets of Kibungo, they snapped up roast chickens, haunches of cow, and drinks to remedy their fatigue."

"They found women or children everywhere offering food to them at reasonable prices. And brochettes of goat meat, and cigarettes for those who wanted to try them."

"They overflowed with life for this new job. They weren't afraid of wearing themselves out running around in the swamps. And if they got lucky at work, they were happy. They abandoned their crops, their hoes, and talked no more of farming. Worries let go of them."

"Cutting in the marshes, although utilizing a similar motion, was more hazardous, more hectic than cutting corn or bananas."

"The fact that the Tutsi were both numerous and inactive made the job easier. If the agile ones couldn't be caught, there were always the puny ones to be had. After a while only the strong and sly survived and the task grew more difficult."

"The Tutsi had learned from the other creatures of the marsh to gather in little groups and to conceal themselves. All too often their pursuers got stuck in the mire without result. The hunters grew discouraged."

"The marshes were rotting with bodies, softening in the slime, and it was difficult to avoid stepping on the piled up, stinking corpses."

"Many of the cutters grew lazy, avoided the swamp and spent their time waiting to be called home. They complained about missing farm work but more often than not simply longed for a drink. Their new found prosperity had much diminished their motivation."

"The truth was that killing remained less wearisome than farming. Searching the marshes could take hours and nobody could tell whether they were slack at their task or not. They idled away their days chatting and sheltering from the sun. Above all the days in the marshes were shorter than those in the fields."

"Yet of all the bestiality and brutality I have witnessed one incident sticks in my mind."

"I was in Khan Younis, on the border between Gaza and Israel. The Israelis promised children chocolate if they'd come to the fence. They then swore at them and taunted them, telling them that their mothers were whores and they themselves were mere dogs. A few of the boys threw stones in the direction of the Israelis. The Israelis then told the children to run. When they did so they shot them in the back with silencers."

###  Epilogue

At the beginning of September I returned to Vienna and went to see a reading of "Holzfaellen" by a German director in the Akademietheater. I was curious to compare his skills to those of the remarkable Hermann Beil.

The German director began with the sentence: "Walking onto the Graben means nothing more than going directly into the hell of Viennese society". His reading however was so appalling that I left after just five minutes.

A few months later my translation of "Old Masters" was finally complete and I returned to London and my friends. I realized that I would never really know the real reason why my brother killed himself.

### The End
