The Eternal Philistine Read online

  PRAISE FOR ÖDÖN VON HORVÁTH

  “Horváth had turned his back on the mournful realism of the émigrés, with their passion for easy caricature and their desire for revenge. He had realized with extraordinary acuteness that to meet the horror of reality with a horror literature was no longer possible or useful; that the reality of Fascism was in fact so overwhelming and catastrophic that no realism, particularly the agonized naturalism of the twentieth century, could do it justice.”

  —ALFRED KAZIN

  “Ödön von Horváth was a brilliant German writer.… He makes the truth irresistible.”

  —EDMUND WILSON

  “The most gifted writer of his generation.”

  —STEFAN ZWEIG

  “Horváth is better than Brecht.”

  —PETER HANDKE

  “One of the best Austrian writers … In every line of his prose there is an unmistakable hatred for the kind of German philistinism that made the German murder, the Third Reich, possible.”

  —JOSEPH ROTH

  THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE

  ÖDÖN VON HORVÁTH (1901–1939) was born near Trieste, the son of a Hungarian diplomat who moved the family constantly. Horváth would subsequently say of himself, “I am a mélange of Old Austria; Hungarian, Croat, Czech, German; alas, nothing Semitic.” Although his first language was Hungarian, he went to high school in Vienna and college in Munich, and began writing plays in German. Leaving school, he settled in Berlin, where in 1931 his play Italian Night debuted to rave reviews—except from the Nazi press, which reviled him. His next play, Tales from the Vienna Woods, starring Peter Lorre, drew an even stronger, equally divided response. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he relocated to Vienna, but on the day of the Anschluss—March 13, 1938—he fled to Budapest. From there, he soon moved to Paris, but on June 1, 1938, he was killed in a freak accident when, caught in a rainstorm coming out of a theater on the Champs-Élysées, he took shelter under a tree that was hit by lightning; von Horváth was struck by a falling tree limb and killed instantly. He was 36 years old and had published 21 plays and three novels—The Age of the Fish, A Child of Our Time, and The Eternal Philistine.

  BENJAMIN DORVEL has worked as a lexicographer and editor for Langenscheidt. He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University.

  SHALOM AUSLANDER is the author of Foreskin’s Lament, Beware of God, and the forthcoming novel Hope: A Tragedy. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, New York magazine, and elsewhere, and he is a regular commentator on the NPR program This American Life.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE

  Originally published in German as Der ewige Spießer by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1930

  Copyright © 1974 by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main

  Translation © Benjamin Dorvel, 2011 (text follows Vol. III, Ödön von Horváth, Gesammelte Werke; Suhrkamp, 1970)

  “Einsamkeit” by Rainer Maria Rilke (1902) translated by Andrew Brown, © 2012

  First Melville House printing: February 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows: Horváth, Ödön von, 1901-1938.

  [Ewige Spiesser. English]

  The eternal philistine : a novel / Ödön von Horváth; translated by Benjamin Dorvel.

  p. cm. -- (Neversink)

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-74-5

  I. Dorvel, Bejamin. II. Title.

  PT2617.O865E813 2011

  833′.912–dc22

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  by Shalom Auslander

  Dedication

  THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE

  1 Herr Kobler Becomes a Pan-European

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  2 Fräulein Pollinger Becomes Practical

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  3 Herr Reithofer Becomes Altruistic

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  INTRODUCTION:

  TRUTH AND FURY AND OBSCURITY

  BY SHALOM AUSLANDER

  What is comedy without truth and fury?

  —Nikolai Gogol

  The novel you hold in your hands is, unfortunately, funny. In some places, I am loath to admit, it’s hilarious. There are prostitutes, whorehouses, cheaters, liars, radicals, pointless journeys, empty philosophies, anti-Semites, more prostitutes, hypocrites, fools, nose-pickers, semen-wipers, adulterers, xenophobes, and, briefly, a World’s Fair (which only leads to more adultery). It is full of truth and fury, and you’ll want to tell your friends about it, but because the book is funny, I can tell you right now that they are not going to be very impressed.

  “Is it funny?” they’ll ask.

  “Hilarious,” you’ll reply.

  “Oh,” they’ll say with an air of disapproval—not just with the book, which they’ll immediately reject, but with you for even suggesting it. “We’re reading X,” they will say, the serious book of the moment written by the serious author of the moment, which will weigh in at a minimum of four pounds and tell a miserable tale of spiritual sadness and unfulfilled longing no one will understand or care to try. It will be about a man lying in bed. The review will call it hilarious. It won’t be. It will win many awards.

  I’m going to be honest with you—I don’t like your friends. They’re shallow assholes desperate for external validation who fear the very mirror that reflects them most faithfully, frankly, but I don’t blame them; reading is difficult, and books don’t have a touch screen or downloadable apps (yet), so the only real reason to suffer through them is to impress other people. Of course this book is a foreign translation, it does have that going for it, and the author is not only dead, but he died young—both of which shou
ld give the book a certain literary respectability, but not enough, sadly, to overcome the fact that it is (there’s just no getting away from this) funny. If satire, as they say in the theater, is what closes on Saturday night, humor in literature is what gets belittled by reviewers, ignored by the award committees, goes out of print and is never spoken about again. Comedy bravely stands up, speaks the harsh truth, attempts to show things the way they are, to teach us to see and laugh at our own shortcomings and failures. For that it is dismissed. The fate of humor in literature, one could say, is utterly tragic, but then one would be saying something funny, and one would be ignored.

  I was born on 9th December, 1901, and it was in Fiume, on the Adriatic, at 4:45 in the afternoon (4:30 according to another report). When I weighed twenty-pounds I left Fiume and loafed about partly in Venice and partly in the Balkans, and experienced all sorts of things, among others the murder of H.M. King Alexander of Serbia along with his better half. When I was four foot tall I moved to Budapest and lived there for half an inch. There I was a keen visitor to numerous children’s playgrounds and was conspicuous in a rather disagreeable way because of my dreamy and mischievous personality. When I grew to a height of about 5’0” Eros awoke in me, but initially without causing me any bother … My interest in art, especially in the classics of literature, stirred relatively late (at a height of about 5’7.5”) but it only became an urge from about 5’11.5”, not, it is true, an irresistible one, but there all the same. When the first World War broke out I was already 5’6”, and when it ended I was 6’ (I shot up very quickly during the war). At 5’7” I had my first proper sexual experience—and today, now that I have long since stopped growing (6’1”), I think back with tender nostalgia to those portentous days.

  —Ödön von Horváth

  Hungarian by birth, Ödön von Horváth lived and wrote in Berlin during the tense and tumultuous years between the First and Second World Wars. The Eternal Philistine was his first novel, a form he returned to later in his life after a successful career as a playwright.

  “I have attempted,” Horváth once wrote of his work, “to be as disrespectful as possible towards stupidity and lies.”

  That is the noble mission of comedy, perhaps the noblest mission of all, and one at which Horváth was very, very good. He was so good at it, in fact, that today, nobody’s ever heard of him. Brecht, on the other hand, dealt with many of the same subjects and themes in a dreadfully serious manner, and look at him: almost a century later, and I don’t even have to use his first name.

  So what can we do to help, you ask? How can we make sure that The Eternal Philistine at last acquires the audience and recognition it so rightly deserves?

  One of the easiest ways, as I demonstrated earlier, is to quote Nikolai Gogol. Gogol was Russian, and everyone in the West respects Russian writers, even if they’re crap. Trust me, with friends like yours, you cannot go wrong quoting Gogol. Nikolai, incidentally, was also hilariously funny (before he came down with an incurable case of Lord-itis), but somehow he managed to be taken seriously. Are there lessons to be learned from his example? There are, and these are them:

  1) Be Russian.

  2) Die crazy.

  Just to be safe, I will also, somewhere in this introduction, try to work in a mention of Voltaire (who is practically God by now), and of Kafka (who actually is God), both of whom were also funny writers your friends probably claim to read but probably don’t.

  Jesus Christ, I really hate your friends.

  I’ll shoot for Samuel Beckett as well, but I’m not promising anything.

  The best thing you can do, however, while I’m busy name-dropping, is to not tell anyone that this book is “funny.” There’s no reason to frighten them away. What can you tell them, then, to make them read it? To make them respect it? To keep this work alive?

  It’s called “spin.”

  1. IT’S NOT FUNNY; IT’S DARK.

  Dark comedy is, according to Wikipedia, a subgenre of comedy whose themes “include murder, suicide, depression, abuse, mutilation, war, barbarism, drug abuse, terminal illness, domestic violence, sexual violence, pedophilia, insanity, nightmare, disease, racism, disability (both physical and mental), chauvinism, corruption, and crime.”

  Unless I’m forgetting something, that’s pretty much all the funny things in the world, so I’m not sure what the point of the label is (cannibalism isn’t there, but I’d file that under mutilation, which everyone knows is funny). It may well be a pointless distinction, but it serves our purposes well, because for some reason, the literary gatekeepers who determined that funny isn’t serious determined, at the same smoke-filled, clandestine meeting, that dark is.

  Funny is fatuous.

  Dark is deep.

  Funny is frivolous.

  Dark is meaningful.

  While Funny is in the kitchen with a fake arrow through its head, Dark is in the basement with its weirdo Goth friends, smoking cigarettes and making jokes about killing itself. Or cannibalism.

  The Eternal Philistine, you can confidently tell your friends, is dark. It’s about as dark as it gets. It’s Candide dark. It’s Catch-22 dark. The Eternal Philistine is an inversion of the traditional “journey” novel, wherein the protagonist, due to some “inciting incident,” forced into a strange new world, whereupon he learns many lessons, whereupon he returns to the original world a better, changed person. While the basic story elements may be consistent, every writer approaches these elements in their own particular way; in Voltaire’s Candide, for example, the inciting incident occurs when the eponymous hero is discovered kissing his truly beloved. In The Eternal Philistine, it occurs when the hero, a used-car salesman named Kobler, is caught by his employers taking prostitutes for, uh, “test-drives.”

  Horváth: 1. Voltaire: 0.

  The story takes place in Munich, in the dark years following World War I. The German economy is depressed, and so are the people. The citizenry is struggling with the question of whether, through rapprochement, to join the greater Pan-Europe, or whether to go it alone (I think you know how that story ends). Nobody in this novel is particularly moral, or bright, or kind, or wise, least of all Kobler himself. After losing his job, defrauding a customer and impertinently ripping off the car’s real owner, Kobler decides, on the suggestion of his bitter xenophobic landlady, to go the World’s Fair in Barcelona. His goal, incidentally, is not to gain a greater understanding of other cultures:

  [… She] had convinced him that a considerably larger assortment of Egyptian women could be found at an exhibition of the entire world than in the most luxurious of luxury hotels.

  Kobler’s got a thing for the Egyptian ladies, you see.

  The thing he has for them is their money.

  “ ‘I’ll combine business with utility,’ he said to himself.”

  The journey goes poorly. Everyone is angry, stupid, greedy, and selfish, while Kobler can’t seem to get his mind off Egyptians. Or prostitutes. Prostitutes are never far from anyone’s mind in this novel (one character decides to become one); a deep political discussion between Kobler and his traveling companion Mr. Schmitz on the contentious issue of retaking lost German colonies ends with an impassioned question from Schmitz:

  “… [if we didn’t retake them] what would be left of our occidental culture?”

  “I’m not sure,” answered Kobler, shooting a bored glance at his watch. “When are we going to the brothel district?” he asked anxiously.

  At last, Kobler finds some prostitutes at a stopover in Marseille, but they are diseased and disappointing.

  “Everybody’s diseased around here,” [said Schmitz.]

  “I’ve never caught anything,” said Kobler, which was a lie.

  “I’ve never caught anything either,” said Schmitz, which was also a lie.

  Later, at the fair, Kobler finally meets his dreamed-of Egyptian, who isn’t actually Egyptian, but at least she’s rich. She’s also beautiful. And available. And a Nazi:

  “Yes
, the Jews are making the workers really nasty,” [her] voice sounded once again. “No, I can’t stand the Jews. I find them too nauseatingly carnal—they’ve got their hands in everything!

  This anti-Semitic strain doesn’t concern our hero too much; she is, after all, rich. Schmitz takes offense at Kobler’s hypocrisy, but Kobler is unfazed:

  “And by the way, Herr Schmitz,” he went on, “I shall now ask you to kindly leave me in peace while I work my way up the social ladder. I’ve already got a plan worked out. I’m going to debauch that lady in Barcelona, then I’ll accompany her back to Duisburg, where I’ll debauch her again, and then I’ll marry into daddy’s company. And Pan-Europe doesn’t give a crap whether or not that lady in there is for or against her!”

  “That’s the same damn excuse everybody makes!” said Schmitz, and then walked off.

  The journey tale is an old and revered one; we readers hurry along with our hero as quickly as we can, anxious to see if our hero will survive, if he will return home, and what the greater purpose of his journey was in the first place. What has he learned? we wonder. What wisdom has he gained? In Candide, for example, the lesson of the journey seems to be that while the world is ugly, we can do well if we just “tend to our gardens.” The lesson of the journey in The Eternal Philistine is best summed up by Mr. Reithofer, the only semidecent character in the whole story:

  “If all the shitheads went and helped each other out, then every shithead would be better off.”

  Horváth: 2. Voltaire: 0.

  “Is it funny?” your friends will ask.

  “It’s not funny,” you will reply. “It’s dark.”

  Then quote Gogol:

  “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”

  I have not, by the way, forgotten about Kafka.

  2. IT’S NOT FUNNY; IT’S SOCIOPOLITICAL COMMENTARY.