“Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?”

Joseph Roth.

When I return to Vienna in March I’ll likely spend an hour or two at the Kaisergruft, the Capuchin Crypt wherein lie the remains of “150 Habsburg personalities,” as the web site has it. It will be my third visit over the years, and wandering the crypt, chilly and low-lit, encourages a certain amount of historical contemplation. Some of this contemplation leads to a comparison of the old Empire with our own world.

It certainly did for Joseph Roth, whose 1938 novella The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by Michael Hofmann and published by New Directions) has just found its way out of my hands and onto my bookshelf. Die Kapuzinergruft, to give the book its original German title, is often characterized as a sequel to Roth’s epic 1932 The Radetzky March — I briefly wrote about that novel here — but is actually more of an epilogue, a completion of the Trotta family chronicle that began with the earlier book. That novel’s timespan reached from the 1859 Battle of Solferino, in which the young Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the blundering emperor Franz Joseph, to the 1914 Battle of Krasne-Busk, at which Trotta’s grandson is killed.

The Radetzky March poetically and majestically explores the slow descent and dissipation of the Empire through three generations. There’s another Trotta at the Battle of Krasne-Busk, though — a cousin, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, who enlists in the Austro-Hungarian Army after a rather misspent and dissolute youth. His story — fragmented and told, unlike The Radetzky March, in the first person — reaches from 1913 through the 1938 Anschluss, a story of rapid personal, cultural, and political decline. Like the first novel, the second also reaches from Vienna to Galicia and back again, from the skeptical and mildly corrupt but mannered and polite 19th-century Empire through the seemingly progressive and modern but vulgar and cynical 20th-century Europe, from the polyglot multicultural Empire to the nationalistic, ethnocentric, and brazenly antisemitic [Sounds familiar. -Ed.] Central and Eastern Europe of the long war between 1914 and 1945. The same theme informed another film of the period, Jean Renoir’s 1937 Grand Illusion, also set in the First World War and a melancholic elegy for a lost world.

I expect to meet the Trottas’ ghosts during my next visit to the Kaisergruft, as well as other ghosts of that long-defunct Empire, perhaps even a few of my own family’s. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Emperor’s Tomb as well as The Radetzky March, which remain timely reminders of a lost and perhaps more civilized world.

One character who appears in both novels is Count Chojnicki, a minor Galician noble skeptical of European progress. In his brief appearances, he, perhaps speaking for Roth himself, delivers monologues that emphasize the virtues of a world which is rapidly being lost. In The Radetzky March, Chojnicki wittily condemns the nationalism which is leading to the First World War (“Here’s to my countrymen, wherever they happen to hail from!” is his generous and all-embracing toast); in The Emperor’s Tomb he argues with Trotta and his friends the benefits of the Church, which in Vienna means the Catholic Church. (Roth, a Galician Jew, flirted with Catholicism through his life.) He says:

The Church of Rome … is the only brace in this rotten world. The only giver and maintainer of form. By enshrining the traditional element “handed down” in its dogmas, as in an icy palace, it obtains and bestows upon its children the licence to play round about this icy palace, which has spacious grounds, to indulge irresponsibility, even to pardon the forbidden, or to enact it. By instituting sin, it forgives sins. It sees that there is no man without flaw: that is the wonderfully humane thing about it. Its flawless children become saints. By that alone, it concedes the flawed nature of mankind. It concedes sinfulness to such a degree even that it refuses to see beings as human if they are not sinful: they will be sainted or holy. In so doing the Church of Rome shows its most exalted tendency, namely to forgive. There is no nobler tendency than forgiveness. And by the same token, there is none more vulgar than to seek revenge. There is no nobility without generosity, just as there is no vengefulness without vulgarity.

Metaphysical stocking stuffers

If you’re still looking for a few gifts for the pessimistic metaphysician on your Christmas list and have around $750.00 lying around, here are a few presents you might consider shoving under the tree.

The Georg Solti Ring cycle recorded for Decca in the 1950s and 1960s and produced by the great John Culshaw was a landmark in stereo technology, still considered one of the best recordings ever made. (I have the original releases and can vouch for that.) It’s never been out of print, but a few years ago Decca remastered the original recordings and issued them on both SACD — whatever that is — and vinyl. Except for Das Rheingold, the new remasters are still in print (and I hope Decca is smart enough to repress Das Rheingold too). You can find them all here for the price of a mid-level audiophile system, appropriately enough. Surely there’s a middle ground between this and streaming it over Apple Music, but what the hell. It’s Christmas. Decca has a pretty compelling argument a little down this page.

Yesterday I wrote about Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom most of us my age became familiar through the classic E.F.J. Payne translation from Dover Publications. More recently, though, Cambridge University Press issued new translations of all of Schopenhauer’s work under the editorship of Christopher Janaway. Sandra Shapshay of Indiana University reviewed the first volume of Cambridge’s The World as Will and Representation shortly after its 2010 publication. It will be hard to give up Payne’s remarkable rendering, but after reading through Professor Shapshay’s evaluation, I admit she must be right: the Cambridge is the keeper. You can get the lot in paperback for $300.00 or so, and unlike the new Solti Ring releases, they all seem to remain in print.

Café Schopenhauer

I’m not sure how I managed to avoid it on my previous visits to Vienna, but next time I’m in town I’ll be sure to stop by the Café Schopenhauer in the 18th District. Named for the 19th century German philosopher with a nod to his enjoyment of comfort, the cafe also features a bookshop — quite delightful, and off the tourist path.

Though his home was in German lands further north and Schopenhauer visited Vienna only once or twice during his lifetime, his work became a central part of Vienna’s intellectual and cultural life after his death. “[Of] all the post-Kantian philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer — with the epigrammatic punch and elegant literary style which set him off from his academic and professional colleagues in philosophy — was the most widely read and influential in the Vienna of the  1890s,” Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin observe in their Wittgenstein’s Vienna, leaving his mark on the work of Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schönberg, Karl Kraus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among so many others — even Gustav Klimt. (He also more recently left his mark on Thomas Bernhard, so the influence continues.)

I am now at that age at which wisdom is radiating from me like heat from a stove, as H.L. Mencken once put it, and part of that wisdom I think is the ability to look back at the enthusiasms of youth to see which of these remain comforts of what can laughingly be called my maturity. Somehow these all seem to coalesce — or, perhaps more accurately, coagulate — into my affinity for Austria’s capital city. So Schopenhauer and Vienna are two of these enthusiasms; music and the art of fin de siècle Vienna another. And, more recently, a home in religion. I might even suggest that this last is a seemingly logical home, given the enthusiasms that came before, especially when I consider my more recent enthusiasm for sacred music of the 17th and 18th century German-speaking lands (an enthusiasm which has led to many pleasurable hours listening to radio klassik Stephansdom). I doubt that monotheistic religion and Schopenhauer’s philosophy can readily be reconciled intellectually, but reason isn’t the only game in town.

Schopenhauer’s own position that Christianity is one of the most appropriate symbolic expressions of his philosophy does suggest an affinity. Certainly, compassion as the highest ethical value and ascetic resignation as the most appropriate posture with which to face the world resonate with both Christianity and pessimism. The idea that music is the art form which provides through an abstract contemplation of the will a temporary respite from suffering, too, gathers up a few relevant threads. Therefore my affection for Bach and Richard Wagner.

Schopenhauer did get a few things wrong. It seems that he believed instrumental music was the highest form of the art because of its mathematical abstraction, words acting as a distraction from the form; I find that only the addition of the human voice completes music’s emotional and spiritual possibilities. And if Christianity is a symbol of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, it’s worthwhile to consider whether reversing these polarities isn’t an appropriate approach to both.

The old man has been generating some interest lately apart from my own armchair musings. David Bather Woods, who contributed a brief introduction to Schopenhauer to Five Books a few years ago, is the author of a new biography, Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, published by the University of Chicago Press just last month; Professor Woods also co-edited a new volume of essays, The Schopenhauerian Mind, released by Routledge last June. Two books does not represent a groundswell of global enthusiasm, of course. But it does appear that Schopenhauer is now emerging from behind Friedrich Nietzsche’s reputation as a laudable alternative, and it may be about time. Over the past few years I’ve had just about as much as I can take of Nietzsche’s Übermenschen, their transcendence of morality and dismissal of Christianity as a “slave religion.” Bad enough when it’s in the academy; worse when they’re actually in positions of power.

So where does that leave wisdom? Wisdom prevents me from suggesting that I’ll follow this post up with others of a similar nature. If you want to make an unwise gesture that may encourage that foolishness, you can leave a comment or “like” this post below. That leaves me with Voltaire, I’m afraid, and so the obvious wisdom is to tend my own garden, and I think Schopenhauer would say the same. I continue to learn my German — perhaps one day I’ll be able to read some of this in the original and better understand what I hear on radio klassik Stephansdom. It’s not unlikely I’m listening as you read this. Until then, time to bring down the Payne translation from the shelf and look forward to listening to this new recording of Parsifal. And soon, I hope, to wander on over to Staudgasse 1 in Vienna and order up a Zweigelt or three. I’ll see you there.

Recommended: Bryan Magee is an ideal guide through both Schopenhauer and Wagner, especially in the 2000 book The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. (The original British title, if you’re playing along at home, was the simpler Wagner and Philosophy.) Magee is also the author of what is still the best introductory book about Wagner, Aspects of Wagner, a wonder of concision and insight at a mere 102 readable pages.