Theatregoers on planet earth would find it unendurable. For it is blood of their blood and its content derives from the contents of those unreal unthinkable years, out of sight and out of mind, inaccessible to memory and preserved only in bloodstained dreams, when operetta figures played out the tragedy of mankind. The action is likewise without heroes, fractured and improbable, as it picks its way through a hundred scenes and hells. The humour is no more than the self-reproach of an author who did not lose his mind at the thought of surviving, with his faculties intact, to bear witness to such profane events. He alone, compromised for posterity by his involvement, has a right to this humour. As for those contemporaries who allowed the things transcribed here to happen, let them subordinate the right to laugh to the duty to weep.

The most improbable actions reported here really occurred. Going beyond the realm of Schillerian tragedy, I have portrayed the deeds they merely performed.* The most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations. Sentences whose insanity is indelibly imprinted on the ear have grown into the music of time. The document takes human shape; reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials; the newspaper column has acquired a mouth that spouts monologues; platitudes stand on two legs—unlike men left with only one. An unending cacophony of sound bites engulfs a whole era and swells to a final chorale of calamitous action. Those who have lived among men, and outlived them—as actors and mouthpieces of an age that has exchanged flesh for blood and blood for ink—have been transformed into shadows and puppets and re-created as dynamic nonentities.

Spectres and wraiths, masks of the tragic carnival, necessarily have real-life names, for nothing is fortuitous in an age conditioned by chance. This gives no one the right to regard the action as a local affair. Even what occurs at the corner where Vienna’s Ringstrasse meets the Kärntnerstrasse is controlled from some point in the cosmos. Let those who have weak nerves, even if strong enough to endure those times, turn their backs on our play. One should not expect the age when such events could occur to treat this conversion of horror into words as other than a joke, especially when the most gruesome dialects resound from the depths of the homely territory it plumbs, or to think of what has just been lived through and outlived as other than an invention. An invention whose contents they despise.

Far greater than the infamy of war is that of men who want to forget that it ever took place, although they exulted in it at the time. War is no longer a live issue for those who have outlived it, and while the masks parade on Ash Wednesday, they do not want to be reminded of one another. It’s all too easy to understand the disenchantment of an epoch forever incapable of experiencing such events, or grasping what’s been experienced, compounded by the failure to be convulsed by its collapse. It is an age whose actions exclude the impulse for atonement, but it has an instinct for self-preservation that enables it to close its ears to the gramophone record of its heroic melodies, and a readiness for self-sacrifice that will enable it to strike them up again should the occasion arise. For the continuing existence of war appears least inconceivable to people whom the slogan “Now we are at war” enables to commit and endorse every possible infamy; but the reminder “Now we were at war!” disturbs the well-earned rest of the survivors.

They fancied they could conquer the world market—the goal that was their birthright—as knights in shining armour; they have to make do with a less glorious trade and sell their gear in the flea market. No wonder they can’t stop saying “Don’t mention the war”! And it is to be feared that some future age, sprung from the loins of this desolate generation, will have no greater power of understanding, despite being at a greater distance. Yet an unqualified admission of guilt at belonging to mankind, as it currently exists, must at some place and time be welcomed and valued. And “even while men’s minds are wild”, let us (echoing Shakespeare) deliver Horatio’s message to the forces of renewal as a judgment arising out of the ruins:

And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fallen on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I

Truly deliver.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Prologue

Scene 1 (p. 29)

(Vienna. At the corner where the Kärntnerstrasse meets the Ring and people take their evening stroll.)

Newspaper vendors. A passerby. His wife. Four officers. Two sales reps.