The strudlhof steps, p.1
The Strudlhof Steps, page 1
HEIMITO VON DODERER (1896–1966) was born into a wealthy Austrian family, the youngest of six children. His father was an architect and engineer; his maternal grandfather a successful building contractor in Germany; his ancestors included the poet Nikolaus Lenau. Doderer studied law at the University of Vienna before enlisting in the Austro-Hungarian Army and serving as a dragoon in World War I. Taken prisoner by the Russians, he was sent to Siberia, and it was in prison camp that he began to write. Only in 1920 did he make his way back to Austria, and over the course of the next decade he published a collection of poetry and a novel, neither of which attracted attention, and earned a doctorate in history. In 1933, Doderer joined the Nazi Party, outlawed at the time in Austria, but his enthusiasm for National Socialism waned with time, and in 1940, influenced by his reading of Thomas Aquinas, he converted to Catholicism. Called up by the Wehrmacht in 1940, Doderer was stationed in France, where he began work on The Strudlhof Steps. Denazification prevented publication of the book until 1951, but when it did come out it proved an unexpected best seller, making its author a literary celebrity. The Demons, a sequel of sorts to The Strudlhof Steps, came out in 1956, and in 1963 Doderer published The Waterfalls of Slunj, the first volume of a projected four-volume work called simply Novel 7, after Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The second volume, The Grenzwald, was left unfinished at the time of his death.
VINCENT KLING is a translator and scholar of German literature who teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has translated fiction, poetry, and criticism by Heimito von Doderer, Heimrad Bäcker, Andreas Pittler, Gert Jonke, Gerhard Fritsch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Aglaja Veteranyi. He was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2013 for his translation of Veteranyi’s Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta. He has also published several essays on the craft of literary translation.
DANIEL KEHLMANN is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. His most recent novel, Tyll, was short-listed for the 2020 International Booker Prize. He lives in New York.
THE STRUDLHOF STEPS
or, Melzer and the Depth of the Years
HEIMITO VON DODERER
Translated from the German by
VINCENT KLING
Afterword by
DANIEL KEHLMANN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1986 by Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, Munich
Translation copyright © 2021 by Vincent Kling
Afterword copyright © 2021 by Daniel Kehlmann
English translation of afterword copyright © 2021 by Ross Benjamin
All rights reserved.
First published in the German language in 1951 by Biederstein Verlag.
Published here by arrangement with Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, Munich.
The translation of this book was supported by the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sports of the Republic of Austria; Department of Literature, Publishing, and Libraries.
Cover illustration by Christiana Spens
Cover design by Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Doderer, Heimito von, 1896–1966, author. | Kling, Vincent, 1942– translator. | Kehlmann, Daniel, 1975– other.
Title: The Strudlhof steps: the depth of the years / by Heimito von Doderer; translated by Vincent Kling; introduction by Daniel Kehlmann.
Other titles: Strudlhofstiege oder Melzer und die Tiefe der Jahre. English
Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2021] | Series: New York Review Books classics | Translated into English from German.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047206 (print) | LCCN 2020047207 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375274 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375281 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PT2607.O3 S713 2021 (print) | LCC PT2607.O3 (ebook) | DDC 833/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047206
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047207
ISBN 978-1-68137-528-1
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Afterword
IN MEMORIAM
Johannis Th. Jæger
Senatoris Viennensis
Qui Scalam Construxit
Cuius Nomen Libello
Inscribitur
ON THE STRUDLHOF STEPS IN VIENNA
When the leaves upon the steps are lying,
from the old stairs is heard an autumn sighing
of all that’s gone across them in the past.
A moon in which a couple, holding fast,
embraces, lightweight shoes and heavy footfall,
the mossed urn at the middle, in the wall,
survived the years between the wars and dying.
Much is now past and gone, to our dismay,
And beauty shows the frailest power to stay.
PART ONE
When Mary K.’s husband, a man named Oscar, was still alive and she was still walking around on both her beautiful legs—the right one was severed above the knee on September 21, 1925, not far from her apartment, when a streetcar ran over it—a certain Dr. Negria turned up, a young Romanian physician undergoing further training at the well-known medical school here, as a resident at the Vienna General Hospital. These kinds of Romanians and Bulgarians have been around Vienna forever, mostly in the areas close to the university and the conservatory. They were a familiar feature, with their manner of speaking, which became gradually more infused with Austrian German; the thick shocks of hair over their foreheads; their fondness for always living in the choicest residential neighborhoods, since all of these young gentlemen from Bucharest or Sofia were well-to-do or had well-to-do fathers. They remained obvious foreigners (ones to whom immense packages filled with their delicious ethnic foods were constantly being shipped)—not so deep-dyed in their foreignness as North Germans, admittedly, but a more local kind of institution, as it were, and yet Balkaneers all the same, because they never lost that characteristic intonation of their speech. Viennese ladies who were thinking of renting out a room or two in their apartment or villa were always on the lookout for a “Bulgarian or Romanian student”; they could then be sure of having their names passed along, for in the numerous cafés around the university, or around the various clinics, cohesion among compatriots was the rule.
Dr. Negria took umbrage at Mary’s marriage. He could not believe, he was purely and simply incapable of believing, that Mary’s marital fidelity might have a solid basis. His irritation at her fidelity knew no bounds, and that irritation manifested itself at just about the same time as his first stirrings of desire. (The author Kajetan von S. would no doubt have written here, “He desired her out of abysmal malice”—and among people of his type there might really exist such basically innocent foolishness that becomes twisted in this bizarre way.) The vexing thing about the fishhook Dr. Negria had swallowed, though, was that this irreproachable woman’s fidelity was not the least bit unconscious. She was not naive enough for that; her heart had become fully aware, as early as her girlhood days—even at fourteen, her feelings had been like those of a grown woman—of various layers. She had later unfolded each of those layers and maturely smoothed them out, doing so, moreover, on that level for the attainment of which all persons are responsible who do not travel their path in life between unbroken walls of innocence, a road with no vista, like the one that led from ancient Athens to Piraeus. That said, Mary had been a virgin when she entered into marriage with her Oscar. On the other hand, her faithfulness now was not a state that remained in effect owing merely to the emergence inside her of a stable equilibrium grounded in an irrevocable decision and to a conversion, if one will, to her duties as wife and mother—as the mother of two attractive children, a girl and a boy, the girl having reddish-blond hair like her father, the boy with dark, titian-red hair like his mother.
The whole matter presented itself to Dr. Negria (not to Mary) between the baselines just sketched, and the construction he chose to put upon this existing set of circumstances conformed by and large to reality. He slid a hot griddle underneath the situation, but this piece of cookware, though completely unable to resolve the built-in standoff, at least enabled him to keep his irritation sizzling.
There is a kind of fidelity that is nothing more than a hankering for superior character traits, a quality of greed which wants to preen itself in the forefront, no matter what title deeds it may already hold. This kind of fidelity, being merely meritorious in nature, as it were—although meritum also has a meaning connected with a person’s just deserts—forms a handy little stairstep to haughtiness, and the person possessing it gets into the habit of ascending it with pleasure, as though to a seat in a bay window from which one can look down upon the ordinary people passing by on the street below. Fidelity of this kind is not stable in its equilibrium and does not really deserve its name; it does not merit it, for the simple reason that it is merely meritorious. Even so, it is given up only with a great struggle under certain circumstances, and when thes
That’s what irked Dr. Negria, and he made it his firm resolve, strongly incorporating it into his whole being without the slightest bit of critical deliberation, to achieve a breakthrough here. And he was very much a breaker-through, through and through. A man with a challenging, now-see-here, arms-akimbo temperament, an interventionist, one who was always trying to shove aside quickly whatever bothered him and who indignantly regarded anything that tried to curb him as outrageous.
It was in connection with this “interventionism” that the doctor’s name would later on assume the force of a proverb or a catchphrase in a closely related group; that is how there came into being the “Negria Organization,” which ended up crowning its derring-do with a campaign against the Berlin automobile dealer Helmut Biese (this is all completely out of place here, though!), overseen by Höpfner, a verse-monger or poet of advertising jingles, who was personally acquainted with Mary’s Romanian admirer, by the way. But with whom was Höpfner not acquainted? He was an address book, a complete one-man business and social topography of Vienna (a trait he shared with Cavalry Captain Eulenfeld, whose official rank was Rittmeister, or master of horse). During the crucial time, Dr. Negria—from time to time knocking back a glass of slivovitz with an abrupt gesture (and racing excitedly around the room between gulps)—had uttered the following up at Höpfner’s: “I can’t stand to think how the spider has her ensnared in his web.” The spider was Oscar, Mary’s husband. Sometimes Negria would also refer to him as “Oscar the Tick.”
His relationship with the K. family had started on one of the tennis courts in the Augarten, that pale park from the age of Joseph II, and then had taken a more domestic turn through the childhood illnesses of the girl and boy; Negria was on assignment in the relevant department of the Vienna General Hospital and, oddly enough, had opted to become nothing other than a pediatrician. This Romanian enjoyed the esteem and respect of his illustrious department chief, so that the great man himself had once even made a house call for Mary, to examine the children in their sickroom. From that time on, Dr. Negria had started showing up for social visits. His way of ringing the doorbell was abrupt and sharp, sounding as if someone were breaking a window or kicking a soccer ball hard from the penalty zone into the net.
Mary had been sitting by the tea table, her gaze going out into the barely rising dusk of a late-summer evening. Here she could look down along the street and then over the Danube Canal (which isn’t a canal at all, but a significant channel of the river, wide and deep, its current fast), to the bank. The sound of boys playing and calling out rose from the street to the fourth floor; that noise was heard every evening, a companion through the whole summer (or at least that part of it she hadn’t spent in Pörtschach or Millstatt), a sound that welcomed her back on the evening she returned from the country as something that had dependably stayed behind, belonging to this time of year and certain to last for weeks longer, since it was staying warm, if more temperately so—the best kind of weather for tennis, Oscar said, “Indian summer.” Oscar will be home in half an hour. Suddenly she thinks of Lieutenant Melzer. Back then, as a young girl, she had known for certain that he was pretty stupid. It had been in Ischl, must have been the summer of 1908 or 1909; around that time there had been some political tension with Serbia. Lieutenant Melzer’s eventually decamping—taking his stupidity along with him—had, in a manner of speaking, canceled out that stupidity and with it her own superiority, even though she was not at all in the dark as to the circumstances of his retreat and his disappearance into some military post or other far away in Bosnia, where there were still bears, as he was forever reporting. He was eager to go on a bear hunt himself. “If you bring me the bearskin, Herr Melzer, I’ll put it on the same way you’ve been putting me on.” Fourteen years had passed since then, incidentally. On occasion, her father had mentioned in Ischl that Melzer would have to resign his commission if he wanted to marry her. Oh yes, he could have had her then, no doubt about it. He’d been a very nice young man, very nice indeed, unfailingly cheerful and courteous at all times. He hadn’t a care in the world. She would have deceived him later on, and to this day she knew that too. Because of his being so even-tempered.
There was a taxi stand at the end of the street that Mary could see from her armchair. The taxis lined up in a long row on the cross street, left and right around the corner, so that off to the left the front part of one taxi and off to the right the rear part of a different taxi were always in view. Traffic regulations back then stipulated that the first taxi in the row always had to be the one taken; and since both the head and the foot of the column were fixed by definite bounds, each car moved up a space when the front one had driven off; the returning taxis then got back in line at the end. This arrangement resulted in the slow crossing over of one or more taxis from time to time; when they’d moved up, there would always be a taxi waiting to the right, of which not much more than the rear wheels could be seen, while on the left, one would move up to the corner, but only far enough to show its front end.
In Mary’s mind the unvarying movement of the taxis there at the end of the street, like beads being strung, was one of the self-evident and yet unfathomable aspects of this apartment through all the years. It was a phenomenon related on the deepest level to the dripping of water from a faucet or to the falling beads of a rosary. And because it was a considerable distance down the street to the taxi stand and the canal beyond it, the purring of the engines was totally inaudible when the windows were shut. The phenomenon was noiseless, and that constituted its essence; it was noiseless, altogether unvarying, and calm; it was monumental in its dullness and monotony, and that was what made the connection now, in Mary’s wandering thoughts, between the view from her window and her recollection of Lieutenant Melzer. She did have to admit, though, that he’d had the sweetest way of laughing. Dr. Negria’s ring at the bell fired some shooting stars into the picture, not so very different from the ones a man sees when he is punched in the eye. Negria seemed to be ringing with extra vigor today.
The maid opened the door, but he didn’t just walk in. Instead, he launched an invasion, making a deep bow and kissing Mary’s hand, already on the attack and leading the offensive; this impression stayed uppermost despite his deliberate adherence to the formalities, with proper hand-kissing and all due bowing and scraping. He looked all around the room, irately passing everything under his review, and had in a twinkling uttered a great many words soundlessly or had delivered himself of them in some fluid form. All right, then. Very well. Same old thing, I see. Still with that old Tick. Well, I’m just curious how much longer you’ll be satisfied living like this. What a pointless existence anyway, missing out on life. Preconceptions are no more than a form of inertia, and inertia is a sin against life. An object with autonomous power of motion—a living being as opposed to a mere thing, that is—simply must not yield to inertia. I just don’t believe you and the Tick are for real, anyway. Not one little bit! Out loud, teacup in hand, he was merely telling her that the Zerkovitz children had the chicken pox and that he had succeeded today for the first time in beating the Polish envoy (a Herr von Semski) in singles at the tennis club, even if the score was close. Apart from that, Dr. Negria looked, as Homer says of that unreliable dolt Ares, aglow with strength and health.
It’s totally out of the question, of course, that the flash fire she had ignited would leave Mary herself unaffected. At the very least, she was forced to become more explicitly aware of her feminine powers, and that implied an invitation to a game, an activation of strength in free play. She wasn’t the least bit afraid of Negria, for she considered him to be basically far stupider than that Lieutenant Melzer from her girlhood years.
Nor did she have any intention, not even the slightest, of turning off this high road that had already been paved, from which she was able to lower her gaze at any time down into the ravine of crushing circumstances and the waters of life, erratically coursing along, now gushing past huge boulders between which they’d been forced, now gathered in a deep, blue-green trout pool and rippling against the overhanging and hollowed-out walls of mysterious caves at its round edge. The glance downward did much good, and her contact with all that wildness—or with the small bit of it that had made its way up here and become domesticated, as it were—heightened her contentment while at the same time washing away the poison of contentment, boredom.
