THE LUTE AND THE SCARS Read Online Free

Slovak, German, Czech, and if I were to nose around in my genealogy and have my blood analyzed — which these days is a very popular kind of science in the world of nationalities — then I would find there, as in a stream-bed, traces of Tsintsar, Armenian, and, yes, maybe even Roma and Jewish blood. But this science of the spectral analysis of blood is one that I do not recognize. It is a science by the way of very dubious value; it ’ s dangerous and inhumane, especially nowadays and in our region where this menacing theory of Blut und Boden engenders nothing but mistrust and hatred, and where this ‘ spectral analysis of blood and origins ’ is typically carried out in a sensationalistic and primitive manner — with a knife and revolver. I ’ ve been bilingual since birth, and I wrote in Hungarian and German until I was eighteen; that was when I translated that collection by the Hungarian poet and opted for the German language, because it ’ s the nearest to my heart. I am, good sirs, a German writer; the world is my homeland. ”
    (On the basis of this text, which forms part of an interview from 1934, one gets the feeling that “ the late Feldner ” in that family photo album might have had one of those dangerous “ blood types ” that the nationalists considered inheritable, like syphilis.)
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    First and foremost, this stand of his was the product of his organic resistance to banality. For the theory of origins, of racial ones on the one hand and social ones on the other, had taken on monstrous proportions in those years and become a commonplace amid all the misunderstandings and rapprochements: the great idea of community descended upon the salons and in the marketplaces. It gathered under its banner people wise and stupid, noble spirits and the dregs of society — people, therefore, who were linked neither by any personal affinity nor by any intellectual kinship but solely by this banal, hackneyed, and dangerous theory of race and social origins. That is why in the works of Egon von N é meth, works that otherwise teem with representatives of all the social strata of Europe of that day — the nobility, the upper bourgeoisie, the middle class, intellectuals from every possible background, merchants and craftsmen, officials and functionaries, parasites and the Lumpenproletariat , workers, peasants, nationalists, soldiers, traditionalists, social democrats, revolutionaries — in these works the autobiographical elements are absent. The witness must be impartial; the grief and repentance of the one party must be as alien to him as the prejudiced thinking of the other.
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    The man without a country, the stateless one, the cosmopolitan — as he was labeled by the newspapers in his home country — traveled to Amsterdam in the middle of April, after making a long arc through Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. Along the way he wanted to visit his old, infirm father in Pest and absorb the European climate so that he would have some fresh and reliable material for his new novel Farewell to Europe . From Pest, where he took leave of his father in the awareness that he would probably never see him again, he traveled on in this way to Amsterdam, where he negotiated with his publisher, a certain van der Lange, the same man who had published his first novel a year ago, in German.
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    Mr. van der Lange was one of those young publishers who — because of some sudden resolution — reorient their love of literature, and perhaps their talents as well, from the goal of uncertain literary fame to the much more secure business of publishing the types of books, and even the very books themselves, that they would have wanted to write (and could have written?). After inheriting his father ’ s lending-library business, which was in addition part bookstore and part stationery store, Mr. van der Lange decided one day to print the books of his friends, having burned his own poems first, with a touch of regret. He was a lover of