79. A Memorial

One politician has called the life of Austrian Germans in the present day a churchyard in which a myriad of hopes lie buried. It will be difficult for an outsider to form an idea of the reasons that have determined the fate of the Germans of the Danube and Alpine country in recent decades. But anyone who, like me, spent the first thirty years of his life in Austria, especially those who spent their academic years in Vienna at the beginning of the 1980s, will hardly find anything incomprehensible in the course of Austria's development. For he has seen the individual fates of numerous personalities unfold, which are nothing more than a repetition of that development process on a small scale. And in these individual cases, everything is understandable if one considers the character, the temperament of the Austrian German and, in relation to this, the peculiarities of intellectual life in his state.

I would like to use the example of a student friend to show how easily talents can perish in Austria, which under other circumstances would probably have been very fruitful. I began my studies at the Vienna University of Technology in the eighties. It was a time when a lot was happening in Austria. Liberalism, which had experienced a brief heyday after the defeat of Königgrätz because authoritative circles hoped that it would save the state, which had been brought into complete confusion by the bureaucracy, had lost its prestige. He had lost the leadership of the empire, partly out of weakness and partly because he had been given too short a time to realize his intentions. We young people of that time no longer expected anything significant from him. We devoted ourselves all the more enthusiastically to the up-and-coming German nationalist movement. Its leaders cared little for what had previously been called the "Austrian idea of the state". They saw it as an abstract concept that was hostile to reality. An Austrian state that took no account of the diversity of its national cultures, but instead wanted to resign itself to a democracy that took account of all kinds of inherited prejudices and rights on the basis of quite moderate progress, seemed an absurdity to the younger generation. The younger Germans believed they could look to the future with all the more hope if they emphasized their own nationality, if they immersed themselves in their national culture and cultivated the connection with the course of intellectual life in Germany. The young German academics of the eighties settled into such ideals. They did not notice that the development of real events was taking a direction in which only endeavors that rested on much cruder premises than their own had any prospect of success. The great effect achieved soon afterwards by Georg von Schönerer, who replaced the idealistic German nationalist tendencies with the racial standpoint of anti-Semitism, could not cause us to convert. Rarely do idealists do anything other than complain about the misjudgment of their justified aspirations in such a case. In Austria at that time, these idealists had the rug pulled out from under their feet, so to speak. Their activities were paralyzed by a public spirit whose aspirations they wanted no part of. These words could be used to describe the fate of a large number of personalities who devoted themselves to their studies during the period described. Only a few of them took it upon themselves to seek satisfaction in professions that were remote from the public life of Austria; many fell into a dull philistine life of unpleasant resignation; quite a few, however, were completely shipwrecked in life.

I would like to pay tribute to one of the latter with these lines. His name is Rudolf Ronsperger. In the fullest sense of the word, he was one of the idealists just mentioned. He showed a promising poetic talent to those who, like me, became friends with him during his student years. The German nationalist idea was the soil on which such talents developed. In Ronsperger's case, in addition to the shipwreck we experienced with this idea, there was something else that is no less characteristic of Austrian circumstances. He had not graduated from a grammar school, but from an upper secondary school. To a certain extent, these Austrian upper secondary schools are models of modern educational institutions. There, without Latin and Greek, one is brought to an educational level that is completely equal to that of the Gymnasium in every other respect; the only difference is that their pupils lack knowledge of Latin and Greek. This is why they are denied access to university. These secondary schools are a loud and clear testimony to the half-measures that are indigenous to Austria in all areas. Almost everywhere, one remains stuck in the beginnings of legitimate goals. In most cases, there is a lack of resilience for the final consequences. This was the case with secondary schools. They were set up in such a way that the pupils received a modern-humanistic education; and then the more idealistically inclined among them were barred the way to a profession which, according to their previous education, they alone could wish for. Countless personalities fell victim to this half-measure in the organization of the education system. Ronsperger was one of them. Due to the nature of his talent and the direction this talent had taken within the Realschule, he was completely unsuitable for a technical profession. He did not have the energy to catch up later on what would have opened the doors to university for him. In this he was quite Austrian himself. He remained stuck in half measures. The course of his life is the understandable consequence of his Austrian character and the Austrian circumstances described above. He and I lived through many things together as students; later life led us apart. In friendly intercourse he communicated to me many a pleasant poem and some dramatic achievements, including a drama "Hannibal", about which Heinrich Laube later spoke not without praise. I then only heard that he had become a railroad official. - A few months ago, his sister, the wife of a respected writer living in Berlin, gave me the estate of his friend from university. After all hope had faded, he ended his life at the age of thirty-eight.

I do not feel compelled to share anything from the contents of this bequest, which contains lyrical and dramatic works, even though it contains a comedy in four acts, which was praised by the judges at a prize competition in Vienna for its very good dialog and only had to be rejected because the man who had been mistreated by life had painted this life as all too unreal. It is not these performances that must elicit deep sympathy for the unfortunate man, but his life. There is a document in the estate that clearly speaks for this life. It is a letter to me, written several years before Ronsperger's suicide. In this letter he wrote of his dashed hopes, of the suffering that had been imposed on him; he was trying to revive our old friendship in order to find his way back to some extent with my help. He didn't send the letter because he couldn't get my address. This fact symbolically expresses his whole fate to me. He is a representative of the many characters, especially in Austria, who go so far in all their endeavors until they are confronted with reality. And even if this reality offers obstacles of ridiculous pettiness, as in this case, - they do not enter this reality. I am convinced that countless contemporaries of Rudolf Ronsperger could characterize themselves in the same way as he has done in this letter. I am sharing some of it because I do not regard it as a random individual case, but as something typical. "Little remarkable has happened in my external circumstances. First transferred to Leitmeritz, later to Kostomlat, then back to Leitmeritz, finally for almost two years now a traffic officer in Nimburg, I am now in a position that a subaltern officer could not wish for more prestigious and pleasant... There is more to tell about the fate, or rather the changes that my inner life has undergone in recent years. Much, perhaps everything, may have changed in my views of the world and man - but one firm conviction has not been lost to me even in the five years of bitter struggle: the conviction of my poetic profession. It has remained alive to me, even though I have devoted myself to a life's work that usually takes up the whole person day and night and usually robs him of the ability to devote himself to secondary thoughts that are completely different from his official duties and almost incompatible with them. It has stayed with me in spite of the mocking smiles of all those who have learned of it by chance. And even if nothing will be heard of my writings in the wider world, I believe I can say it boldly: I am a poet after all ... . You might call that self-aggrandizement. But anyone for whom poetry has become a necessity in life as it has for me, anyone who, like me, is compelled to put all his feelings and thoughts into poetry, can justifiably claim that he is called to be a poet. Whether chosen? - That's a question I can't answer with "no", because I would be depriving myself of a good part of my hopes - and a sanguine of the first kind, as I am, doesn't do that. But I am not blind to all the faults that I possess and that have contributed to the fact that I have not yet achieved what alone could have a determining and indeed definitive effect on my professional direction: success. - Lack of energy is the first and greatest of all these faults; the lack of strength and perseverance, of that iron perseverance, that determined and victorious tenacity in the pursuit of plans once made, which are always the accompanying qualities of talent and help it to achieve a breakthrough under the most difficult circumstances. - Without being immodest, I can say that I would have done well if luck had favored me and a warm sunshine had made my ability blossom, if my inclinations had met with no resistance and my attempts had been favored by fate. I would have sailed swiftly in the direction of the wind; and I might have achieved much that others would never have attained under equally favorable circumstances. I lacked the courage and strength to sail against the wind. - I made many fainthearted attempts - and the fact that I did not fail completely and plunged headlong into the waves alone gives me hope that the wind might turn once again and drive the clumsy skipper forward who did not want to learn how to turn the sails." Unfortunately, this shift in the wind did not happen. More energy would have allowed Rudolf Ronsperger to seek his own way, away from the paths marked out by Austrian cultural conditions; less idealism and temperament would have caused him to adapt to the profession into which these conditions had brought him. He would then have buried the conviction of his profession as a poet in the dull sea of everyday life.