The Eternal Philistine Read Free Page B

telling the truth. Furiously.
    “Please,” he wrote to his readers, “recognize yourself!”
    “I see now,” wrote Gogol, “what it means to be a writer of comedies. The smallest trace of truth and they are up in arms against you.”
    In the summer of 1989, the Horváth archive came up for sale at Sotheby’s.
    It failed to make its reserve.
    Hilarious.

THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE

For Ernst Weiß

The philistine is, as is generally known, an egoist who suffers from hypochondria, and this is why he seeks, like a coward, to fit in wherever he goes and to distort every new formulation of the idea by calling it his own.
    If I am not mistaken, the news has slowly spread that we, of all people, are living in between two eras. The old species of philistine no longer even deserves to be ridiculed, and whoever is still mocking him at present is at best a philistine of the future. I say “future” because the new species of philistine is still nascent, it has yet to fully emerge.
    Several contributions to the biological makeup of this nascent philistine shall now be attempted in the form of a novel. Of course, the author would not dare hope to have an influence on legitimate world affairs through these pages, but, well, all the same.

PART ONE
HERR KOBLER BECOMES A PAN-EUROPEAN
    “As long as you lack
    This ‘dying and becoming!’
    You’re but a cloudy guest
    Upon the sunny earth”
    Note: In quoting from Goethe’s “Selige Sehnsucht” Horváth has changed “the dark earth” to “the sunny earth.”

CHAPTER 1
    IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1929, HERR ALFONS KOBLER of Schellingstrasse earned six hundred Reichsmarks. There are many people who cannot even imagine that much money.
    Even Herr Kobler had never before earned so much money all at once, but this time fortune favored him. She winked at him, and all of a sudden Herr Kobler had more bounce in his gait. On the corner of Schellingstrasse he bought from the good old Frau Stanzinger a pack of eight-pfennig cigarettes imported straight from Macedonia. He loved these in particular because they were exceedingly mild and aromatic.
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” screamed the honest Frau Stanzinger. Ever since her spinster sister died, she would sit between her tobacco articles and smoking paraphernalia all alone, looking as though she were shrinking a little bit every day. “Herr Kobler, since when you smoking those eight-pfennig jobs? Where’d you get the money? You gone and killed somebody or did you make up again with the royal-opera-house-singer-lady?”
    “No,” said Herr Kobler, “I just finally sold the clunker.”
    This clunker was a beat-up six-cylinder convertible witha jump seat. It already had eighty-four thousand kilometers on it, a few dozen breakdowns, and two life-threatening injuries. A geriatric.
    And yet Kobler found a buyer. He was a cheese-merchant from Rosenheim by the name of Portschinger. A tall and enthusiastic fat man. He had already made a down payment of three hundred Reichsmarks back in mid-August, giving his word that he would come back to pick up the geriatric by mid-September at the latest, at which time he would promptly bring the remaining six hundred Reichsmarks in cash. This is how keen he was to secure this extraordinarily good bargain.
    And that is why he kept his word. In mid-September he arrived on schedule in Schellingstrasse and reported to Herr Kobler. In his company was his friend Adam Mauerer, whom he had brought along all the way from Rosenheim because, as this Adam had owned a little tax-exempt motorcycle since 1925, he regarded him as an expert. Herr Portschinger had actually only gotten his driver’s license two days before, and as he was by no means a cocky man he now realized that he was still a long way away from fully unlocking the secrets of the engine.
    After taking a really close look at the convertible the expert was simply ecstatic. “That’s a jump seat!” he screamed. “A wonderful jump seat! An upholstered jump seat!