Klaus by Allan Massie

Author:Allan Massie [Massie, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908251381
Publisher: Vagabond Voices
Published: 2014-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

Art

Life

Death

Life

Artistry

Bourgeoisie

Aesthetics

Ethics, morality

Barren, childless

Fertile, procreative

Vagabond, licentious

Bourgeois life, fidelity

Individualistic

Social

Irresponsibility

Life obedient

Pessimism

Life willing, conformist

Orgiastic liberty

Commitment, duty

Certain words in the first column flew like arrows to Klaus’s heart: death, barren, vagabond, pessimism… But in truth that column described him precisely. He’d known that for a long time. As for the qualities listed in the other column, he might lay claim only to “commitment, duty”. Surely the tenacity of his opposition to the Brown Plague and the little rat Hitler proved that entitlement?

The bus deposited him in the square in front of the railway station. Half-an-hour to wait before the next train back to Cannes. He made for the bar, quickly from old habit surveyed it, found no one to interest him, and ordered a whisky-and-soda.

The remarkable thing was that, whereas he had only despised and loathed the little rat, the Magician, while describing him as “a catastrophe, no doubt about that”, had nevertheless made the effort to understand him, declared that was “no reason to find him uninteresting as character and destiny” – as a phenomenon also, of course. Klaus had been shocked when he first read that essay and found his father calling the little rat “Brother Hitler”. How could he? Well, first because he had been able to say “Where I am, there is Germany,” and, being German, he could not deny Hitler’s Germanity. It was something we all had in common, no matter how horrifying the realisation might be. But there was more to it than that. The man was a disaster, certainly, with his unfathomable resentment and his festering vindictiveness, but he was also a failed artist, and therefore in a sense indeed his Brother. The young Hitler had been the half-baked Bohemian in his garret or Viennese dosshouse, with his basically-I’m-too-good-for-ordinarywork, and his sense of being reserved for something special, indefinable, which, if he had expressed it then, would have had those around bursting out in derisive laughter. This rejection, common to that experienced by so many young artists who feel on the cusp of greatness but are recognised by nobody, fed his rage against the world, his ferociously anxious need to justify himself, his urge to compel the world to accept him at his own valuation, to subject itself to him, to satisfy his dream of seeing those who had spurned him now prostrate before him. Lost in fear, admiration and a wild besotted love. Moreover, the Magician had insisted, Hitler’s insatiable drive for compensation for the miseries he had endured, his inability ever to be content with what he had achieved, and the need to proceed ever further and more dangerously on the path he had chosen, these too were attributes of the artist. “There is a lot of Hitler in Wagner,” the Magician had once said to Klaus during the war. “The rejection of reason and bourgeois ethics, and the incapacity for irony – irony which is the saving grace of the intellect.” If the Magician was right, Hitler was the artist’s shadowself, the dark side of the moon.

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