The windows give onto the Danube, look out over the great river and to the hills above it, a landscape marked by woods and the onion-shaped domes of churches. In winter, with the cold sky and patches of snow, the gentle curves of the hills and the river seem to lose weight and consistency, become the feather-light lines of a drawing, an elegantly heraldic kind of melancholy. Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, was the city Hitler loved more than any other, and wanted to transform into the most grandiose metropolis on the Danube. Speer, architect to the Third Reich, has described those unrealized plans for vast, pharaonic buildings in which Hitler, as Canetti has written, gave proof of his feverish need to surpass the dimensions ever achieved by any other builder, his competitive obsession with beating all records.
Linz, the tranquil city which in so many snatches of verse is made to rhyme with “Provinz”, a province, is today the industrial capital of Austria, has a moderate rate of nervous diseases amongst the young and, according to an inquiry carried out a few years ago, a population particularly suspicious of the system of justice obtaining in the country. The religious devotion of the people, which struck English travellers during the eighteenth century, does not seem to have died out: in the main square, before the Column of the Trinity – one of those columns which rise in squares throughout Central Europe, to commemorate plagues survived and glorify the majesty of creation – a group of people is praying out loud on this freezing, snowy evening. A pugnacious diocesan newspaper demands solidarity with the workmen sacked from factories in Styria, takes up arms against the managements, incites people to boycott the South African government on account of its racist policies and to bombard its embassy with demands for the liberation of Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, an arrested black priest.
In the Führer’s dreams, the cyclopean Linz he wanted to build was to have been the refuge of his old age, the place he yearned to retire to after finally consolidating the Reich that was to last a thousand years and handing it over to some worthy successor. Like many pitiless tyrants, the murderer of millions and would-be exterminator of entire peoples, Hitler was a sentimentalist, whose emotions were touched by thoughts about himself and who cradled himself in idyllic fantasies. From time to time he confided to his intimates that in Linz he would live quite divorced from power but, like a benevolent grandfather, prepared to dispense advice to his heirs when they came to visit him. But perhaps, he would say – flirting with the possibility of his being dethroned, something he was resolved not to permit at any price – perhaps no one would come and visit him at all.
In Linz, where he had spent happy years, this bloody-handed despot had daydreams of rediscovering a kind of childhood, a season free from projects and ambitions. He probably thought nostalgically about that empty future, in which he would enjoy all the security of one who has already lived his life, who has already fought for the dominion of the world and won, who has already realized his dreams, which shall never more be frustrated. When he imagined that future, maybe he felt tormented by the craving to reach his objectives soon, and gnawed by the fear of not being able to achieve them. He wanted the time to pass quickly, so as quickly to be sure of having won; in other words, he desired death, and in Linz he dreamt of living in a sweet security similar to death, sheltered from the surprises and setbacks of life.
The windows of that house overlooking the Danube, and which now has the address 6 Untere Donaulände, could have shown him another way to live, a sense of moderation and a style which he, however, would never have been able to learn. The house belonged, and still belongs, to the Danube Steam Navigation Company, and it witnessed twenty years of the silent life, and also the tragic death, of Adalbert Stifter, one of the most elusive Austrian writers of the nineteenth century, a retiring person who aspired to stem the chaos of life by the modest, impersonal repetition of simple everyday gestures.
From 1848 to 1868, that is, until his death, Stifter looked down from his windows at the Danube, the much-loved Austrian landscape which seemed to him to contain centuries of history transformed into nature, empires and traditions absorbed by the soil like crumbled leaves and trees. That well-known landscape, devoid of strong colours or glaring effects, taught him respect for the things that are, reverent attention to those small events in which life reveals its essence more than in vast upheavals and garish prodigies; it taught him the subjugation of paltry ambitions and personal passions to the great objective law of nature, of the generations, of history.
In his novels, and even more in his short stories, many of which were written in these rooms, Stifter with restless mastery inquires into the secret of moderation, of that acceptance of limits which enables the individual to subordinate his own vanity to a value above the merely personal, to open himself to sociability and to dialogue with others – an affectionate neighbourliness based above all on discretion, on respect for the independence of other people and their need to keep their distance.
This defensive feeling is not without its consequences in Stifter’s art. His novel The Late Summer describes the difficult maturing of his protagonist, Heinrich, whose developing personality is threatened by a prosaic world, by the objective barriers which modern life throws up in the path of the harmonious, complete and “classical” evolution of the individual. The price which Heinrich pays for his development is a partial renunciation of the world, an aristocratic solitude rejecting the prosaic disorder of things as they are. Schorske has pointed out that for Flaubert’s heroes the prose of the world has already entered their souls; it does not rear up before them as an enemy, but has already, far more insidiously, become a structure of their personalities, a part of their natures. Hence it is that in Education sentimentale the disappointment of Frédéric Moreau, immersed as he is in the present moment of life and history, and undermined by these, is far more bitter and intense than the ceremonial by which Heinrich, hero of The Late Summer, keeps modern vulgarity at arm’s length, deluding himself that his inner self can remain immune to it. Flaubert depicts us as we are, while Stifter seems to insist on rubbing off the sharp edges and framing the break-up within a feudal idyll, even if his oleograph is animated by an impassioned effort to avoid the abysses of reality.
Stifter was not unaware of these abysses, the confusion and irrationality of fate, or its sudden, insensate blows, as for example is shown by his tragic tale about the destiny of the Jews, Abdias. He did not shut his eyes in the face of tragedy, but he refused to be enraptured by it, and he rejected that cult of the tragic, the passional and the abnormal which he saw spreading throughout European culture, especially by way of late Romanticism. In his stories we find melancholy, renunciation, solitude, but above all a fierce condemnation of all cults of solitude and unhappiness. In The Recluse an old woman tells a young man, who has declared his inability to take delight in things, that such words are totally mistaken, and that it is absolutely impermissible to say that nothing gives us pleasure any longer.
Stifter seeks for this joy in apparent monotony, in day by day repetition. At home he would write, look after his plants (especially cacti), restore and polish furniture, including the desk still to be seen in his room today. He would paint, and go for methodical walks; he would praise the succession of days and of weeks, he would listen to the murmur of the river and feel its peaceful rhythm flowing in the cadence of his style and of his life. That gentle scansion, rich in ever-fresh nuances, seemed to him to be happiness, and he longed for that present moment not to pass.
As for happiness, he had precious little of it: in those Danube waters his adopted daughter drowned herself, while he himself, in a crisis of hypochondria and physical pain, hastened his end with a slash from a razor. But for this very reason, his unhappiness, he had understood that what is exceptional, abnormal, dramatic, the cynosure of those who crave a heroic destiny, brings with it all the misery of suffering and nothing else. His characters are nearly always engrossed in cleaning up, stacking the clean linen, tidying drawers, pruning roses; their aims in life are conversation, marriage, the family. Against the bombast of transgression, which loves flashy, blood-curdling effects, Stifter sets up the epic quality of the family, the hard-won originality of orderliness and continuity, the ability to keep one’s sufferings to oneself.
In this sense he is rooted in the conservative Austrian tradition, in loyalty to an age-old spiritual harmony, to a long period of time that takes little account of short-term changes and the sensational effects of the stop-press news. The protagonist of another great Austrian writer, Stifter’s contemporary Grillparzer, is the “poor street-musician” who is amazed when they ask him to tell his story, because he doesn’t think he has a story; he can’t believe that the sequence of his days – however abundant in hidden meanings – is anything special. These characters love life, the simple present of their humble but satisfying hours, and therefore have no wish to play a leading part in grand, spectacular events, either personal or historical. If possible, indeed, they fight shy of important happenings. As Musil later wrote, when the rest of the world thought that it had experienced something staggering, in Old Austria they preferred to say nonchalantly, “well, it so happened that …” When Stifter died the choir at his funeral was conducted by a man who was in a sense “without a history”, as he was. This was Anton Bruckner, a great modern musician who was organist in the cathedral of Linz and did not think so much about being an Artist as (and above all) doing a decent job and performing a religious duty.
Stifter’s domestic order is a far more mysterious thing than the monumental buildings dreamt of by Hitler. In Stifter’s rooms, which now house a literary institute called after him, I look for traces of that order, the key to that spick-and-span mystery. Meanwhile, on the telephone, a number of functionaries of the institute are having an animated discussion about the obituary for an influential person who has died the previous day. The question is, whether to use the adjective “unforgotten” or the adjective “unforgettable”. The debate becomes heated, several dictionaries are consulted and read aloud, someone makes an appeal to precedents … When I have to leave, the debate is still in progress. This conscientiousness about keeping to the most precise rules of rhetoric and propriety are not inappropriate to death, to its formal demands. Moreover the comic side, arising from that pedantic search for an adequate expression of solemnity, cuts even death down to size, makes it step down from the pedestal and take its place among good, solid everyday things. “Only when you can laugh again,” says a poster on the door of Linz cathedral, “have you really forgiven. Don’t drag anything behind you!”