he was as ashamed as I was of the rigid demand for recognition, the jealously alert, distrustful class arrogance and cultural hauteur with which we looked down on the “trash,” the “little people,” the proletarians and semi-proletarians from the back courtyard and basement holes. We, the educated ones, strictly brought up with so-called good manners (“Would you please stand up, you ass, when a lady enters the room!”), as poor as church mice but clean (“Did you wash your neck? Show me your fingernails!”), bypassed by Fortune, step-children of life, scared of a hundred taboos but proud. Uncle Helmuth, a native of Thuringia, the son of a pastor with innumerable children, respectably starving as he worked his way through college, getting his degree in electrical engineering and occupying a low industrial position only because research was paid even more poorly. And Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma, the stiff-necked soldier’s children, born somewhere between Przemyśl and Udine, the daughters of a Lieutenant Colonel Subicz, who (successfully emulated by Cousin Wolfgang a quarter century later) promptly died in action in Galicia in November 1914 and strangely enough also turned into a myth. A myth, to be sure, that no one beyond our four walls cared a fig about and of which no other token was left but a yellow photograph showing a waxed mustache over a uniform collar, a saber with a thickly knitted gold-thread sword knot, and a medal earned by a legendary saber scar across the forehead. That was all that remained, or could be learned, of Lieutenant Colonel Subicz. But his spouse, who likewise had died prematurely, was a von Jaentsch, and that sufficed to give Cousin Wolfgang his rigid spine and his scorn for trolley conductors, and Aunt Hertha her occasionally breezy but normally wry and caustic complacence, and Aunt Selma the bewitchment in her old-maid boniness; and it never let any of them forget what a disgrace it was that the third daughter, born in Dornbirn of Lieutenant Colonel Subicz and his spouse née von Jaentsch, beautiful Ilse (who characteristically called herself Maud!), went astray and perished by her own hand, leaving behind a bastard as a stain on their clan: humble me.

My brother Cousin Wolfgang had all these things in his blood just as I did—like a disease, a wasting toxin (which, however, if you overcame it, made you especially robust and immune to susceptibilities). For him too, it would have meant salvation to leave all these things behind and manage to forget them. For him too, then, the temptation to switch his world out for another must have been irresistible. But no: Cousin Wolfgang was one of those people who prefer to change the world—lock, stock, and barrel. He did not live in life, he lived in ideas and convictions. And suffered because a sharp-toothed doubt gnawed on the most sublime ideas, the firmest of his convictions—

and it would be idle, invalid, to perceive in this doubt some possibility of hauling him into my camp: for the camps are long since indeterminable, the fronts vague, shifting; everyone is entangled in everyone else, no matter what ideas or convictions a person was once moved by—