True, the kingdom of the rich and richly influential has not gone under. WWII, expanding more and more icily, more and more lethally, in this heart of winter 1940, may have disrupted the overlappings of the circles of friends. But Maxi, Bully, Mutzi, Putzi, Manetti, Coco, Toto, Cloclo, or whatever their names are, they’re all still getting by. Restricted perhaps, cut off from their own kind, without galas, dinner parties, cocktail parties, treasure hunts, but certainly not in dire straits. Some of them may even die, but they have heirs to their wealth and spirit. The carnivore’s teeth have not been blunted. Once the deluge is past, they will weave themselves together again, probably tighter, tauter, finer-meshed, and richer in booty than before, with threads of interests more mercantile, more mondaine, more tightly connected and in the end more quintessentially human. Nevertheless—or rather, for that very reason—their world will never again be what it was in Uncle Ferdinand’s time. For it is already a world of shadows and will remain a world of shadows, albeit occasionally moved to become lifelike by a shadow player and evoked for the glory of the shadows’ magic.

22

That is what I would like to explain to my dead cousin Wolfgang: Uncle Ferdinand’s innocence. His eminently creative inability to act otherwise. The way he is woven into his time, his unity with the spirit of his time—an involvement so intimate that he will pass away with it, but singing of it, telling of it, like a dying swan.

My cousin Wolfgang, who as a boy once sang so charmingly in the church choir, so angel-precious, that in listening Aunt Hertha’s eyes brimmed with tears, wouldn’t be able to close his ears when he heard Uncle Ferdinand say: “When I think back over my life, naturally my youth at the imperial courts in St. Petersburg and Vienna and London was incomparably more brilliant than the period after the first great war. However, life was almost more entertaining after the war. It was like going to bed with a duchess: God knows what discretion it required, what complicated preparations you had to go through, and then all kinds of obstacles and dangers, with her having pangs of conscience that in the end she’d have to confess it all, and then when it happened it wasn’t much different than normal. That was the old world. The new world was like hopping on the Orient Express in Paris and looking around to see who else is on board and spotting a fiery female and not knowing whether she’s a cocotte or your cousin, but either way you make up your mind to spend the night in her sleeping compartment: it’s a lot more fun, a lot more adventurous, don’t you think, even if she turns out to be married to your dentist, even if you’ve once again hung around with people with whom you really shouldn’t have any personal relations; it’s irksome enough to endure her husband’s fingers in your mouth. However, this became unavoidable after the war; I mean, associating with such people. They were suddenly there like flies in summer—the snobs, you understand—and I must say, a new tone came into the world with them, of course, and thereby a new taste into life. I don’t even mean a bad taste, although this goes without saying. Yet it was somehow more enticing, more piquant . . . Now, there are two kinds of snobs, after all: one kind is sometimes even simpatico, and quite useful too—like courtiers. In our day, these are courtiers sans courts, alas, but with the same qualities: pushy and bootlicking, ambitious and groveling with their superiors and snappish with their inferiors, but always so poignantly helpful, so pleasantly assiduous . . . These are simply people who always want to be included but don’t quite have the grit for it, nor can they be alone. They’re dependent on you; you have the impression that they look up to you, like children to grownups; it breaks your heart when you have to send them off to bed . . . However, there are also very unappealing people among them; that’s the second category. You have the impression that they clamber up to you like mountain climbers, sweating terribly all the while, and so you are cold to them and treat them badly, thus taking on snobbish manners yourself without meaning to do so. Or else you feel involuntarily tickled by the thought of being something like the north face of the Eiger, you feel flattered that they would risk their necks to climb up to you, you recognize the athletic ambition.