Utz Read Free Page A

existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies – of suffocation and the public gaze – whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch. As a young child will reach out to handle the thing it names, so the passionate collector, his eye in harmony with his hand, restores to the object the life-giving touch of its maker. The collector’s enemy is the museum curator. Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned to circulation . . .’
    â€˜What’, Utz’s mother asked the family physician, ‘is this mania of Kaspar’s for porcelain?’
    â€˜A perversion,’ he answered. ‘Same as any other.’
    The sexual career of Augustus the Strong, as recounted by Von Pöllnitz in ‘La Saxe Galant’, served Utz as an exemplary model. But when, in a Viennese establishment, he aspired to imitate the conquests of that grandiose and insatiable monarch — hoping to discover in Mitzi, Suzi and Liesl the charms of an Aurora, Countess of Königsmark, a Mlle Kessel or any other goddess of the Dresden court — the girls were perplexed by the scientific seriousness of the young man’s approach, and collapsed with giggles at the minuscule scale of his equipment.
    He left, walking the wet streets alone to his hotel.
    He got a warmer welcome from the antiquaires. The sale of his Sudetenland farms, in 1932, allowed him to spend money freely. The deaths, in quick succession, of his mother and grandmother, allowed him to bid against a Rothschild.
    Politically, Utz was neutral. There was a timid side to his character that would tolerate any ideology providing it left him in peace. There was a stubborn side that refused to be bullied. He detested violence, yet welcomed the cataclysms that flung fresh works of art onto the market. ‘Wars, pogroms and revolutions’, he used to say, ‘offer excellent opportunities for the collector.’
    The Stock Market Crash had been one such opportunity. Kristallnacht was another. In the same week he hastened to Berlin to buy porcelains, in U.S. dollars, from Jewish connoisseurs who wished to emigrate. At the end of the War he would offer a similar service to aristocrats fleeing from the Soviet Army.
    As a citizen of the Reich he accepted the annexation of the Sudetenland, albeit without enthusiasm. The occupation of Prague, however, made him realise that Hitler would soon unleash a European war. He also realised, on the principle that invaders invariably come to grief, that Germany would fail to win.
    Acting on this insight, he succeeded in removing thirty-seven crates of porcelain from the family house in Dresden. These arrived at České Křížové during the summer of 1939. He did not unpack them.
    About a year later, shortly after the Blitzkrieg, he had a visit from his red-headed second cousin, Reinhold: a clever but fundamentally silly character, who, as a student, had sworn that Kropotkin’s ‘Mutual Aid’ was the greatest book ever written; who now expounded his views of racial biology with analogies culled from dog-breeding. An Utz, he insinuated, even if tainted with alien blood, should at once assume the uniform of the Wehrmacht.
    At dinner, Utz listened politely while his cousin crowed over the victories in France: but when the man prophesied that Germans would occupy Buckingham Palace before the end of the year, he felt, despite his better judgement, a surge of latent anglophilia.
    â€˜I do not believe so,’ he heard himself saying. ‘You underestimate this people. I know them. I was in England myself.’
    â€˜ Also ,’ the cousin murmured, and, with a click of the heels, marched out towards his waiting staff-car.
    Utz had indeed been to England, to learn English at the age of sixteen. During an autumn and dismal December, he had boarded at Bexhill-on-Sea with his mother’s former nanny, Miss