Letters from Vienna #29
On this the 21st of February, W. H. Auden’s birthday, I think it fitting to reflect on the question of how he’d have been affected by and reacted to the current crisis. Of course, he died, in Vienna, nearly fifty years ago: on the 28th of September 1973. Nevertheless, he was a bon viveur, was wary and not a little skeptical of the establishment and tried to live as freely as humanly possible. Above all else: he’d have posed the question: what have we done to deserve this?
Auden moved to Kirchstetten, in Lower Austria, in the 1950s because the countryside reminded him of England, he loved the opera and enjoyed good wine. He was able to attend mass at the local church, where he was fond of singing loudly and, although the locals knew of his sexual inclinations, he was a respected and cherished member of the community.
What must also have appealed to him was that Austria was something of a backwater. Many would say: it remains one. It was a radical contrast to progressive, upbeat and sophisticated New York, where he spent the other half of his year: the cooler one.
Vienna, which is roughly 40 kilometres from Kirchstetten, was and is above all else: a Mecca for music and the likes of Böhm, Bernstein and Karajan would, in the 1950s and 1960s, regularly appear here. Its temples, to name but a few, include: Musikverein, Konzerthaus and the State Opera. Auden not only loved music (he spent his evenings in Kirchstetten listening to classical recordings together with his partner: Chester Kallman), he was, on account of his activity as a librettist: part of its history.
One of the worst aspects of the first lockdown was that one couldn’t move freely from one province to the next. Thus, my friends couldn’t spend weekends in their country retreat in Lower Austria (they’d bought a house close to where Ferdinand Raimund had once lived) where they desperately needed to recover.
Even today I’m wary of travelling to the country and an acquaintance who has a mask exemption was fined for failing to wear a face nappy on a train; she is still contesting. The joke is: one doesn’t actually have to show an exemption. On the contrary: that is privileged information. All one has to do is be persuasive. Sadly, either she failed in that regard or the conductor behaved badly.
Of course, Auden drove a white Beetle but I have little doubt that he’d have refused both test and jab, being, as he was very much aware of scientific developments. Yet he’d undoubtedly have felt very isolated in the country.
He’d most probably have done his best to leave Austria as quickly as possible, just as he left England in 1939 when he realised what was coming: a war sparked by greed and a brutal lust for power on the part of what is today known as the “Deep State”. He was too well informed and knew too many Germans and had spent too much time in Germany to apportion all blame to that particular country or to Hitler alone.
The problem Auden would have today would be that he couldn’t return to New York, where the tyrannical and fascist restrictions are nearly as bad as they are in Austria. And he couldn’t go off to China in the way he did in the 1930s for much the same reason.
When Auden’s weekend lover used his Beetle to start a spate of robberies Auden didn’t blame him at all. Rather he asked himself: what have I done myself to provoke this? So, when the weekend lover/rent boy emerged from prison Auden paid a considerable sum of money to help him learn a trade. In his particular case: he became an auto-mechanic.
In the present instance the question is more complicated. Those, the members of the Global Oligarchy and Global Deep State who have planned and are currently executing the ongoing Scamdemic and Genocide by Jab won’t be so easily handled. Sending them off on courses where they’ll learn how to become human beings or do something useful with their lives will take considerably more effort on our part. Yet it is a task which needs to be done.
Of course, Auden, who regarded himself as a comic poet and joked about his own death, wouldn’t have taken the current crisis and all the nonsense about the “New Normal” or “Great Reset” all too seriously. He’d have simply written some poems or an essay or have listened to some classical music: most probably Wagner, of whom he was extremely fond. In this age of “Weltuntergang” and “Götterdämmerung” it is time to dig up our Wagner recordings once more. Perhaps we shall need them.