In Vienna, where lack of consideration and impudence towards thinkers and artists has always been greater than anywhere else, and which can assuredly be called the graveyard of imagination and ideas, and where thousands more geniuses go to the dogs and are destroyed than actually come to light and achieve fame and international fame, a man was found dead in a hotel in the inner city who with complete lucidity had written a note stating the reason for his suicide and had pinned this note to his jacket. For decades, he wrote, he had pursued an idea and was actually able to realize and bring this idea—in the nature of things a philosophical one—to a conclusion in a moderately long work, but his powers had finally been completely devoured by the idea. The appreciation he had nonetheless expected was not forthcoming. Although he had finally begged to be appreciated, the institutions and people competent to give him this appreciation had denied it him. His pointing to the immensity of his work had done no good. It was not only his colleagues’ jealousy but the whole anti-intellectual atmosphere that pervaded the city—its mindless lack of humanity—that had driven him to his death. However, as he did not wish to betray his own character, he had burned his opus before he died, he had burned his life’s work and actually reduced it to nothing within the space of a few minutes after taking decades to bring it to fruition, but he had not wanted to leave it to a posterity that was in no way worthy of it. The terrible idea that he, like so many of his fellows, would be appreciated only after his death and would thus be exploited and become famous was what had caused him to destroy what he had achieved, which was really of much greater value than anything that had been thought of or written in his field. The city of Vienna, and this is how he ended what he had written in the note, has lived since its founding on the works of its geniuses who have committed suicide; he was not minded to become another link in this chain of geniuses.

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