Kinski reading Herzog’s version

‘Never believe anyone from the Balkans.’

– Robert Perišić, Naš čovjek na terenu

Born Werner Stipetić to a Croatian mother in 1942, Werner Herzog with his hypnotic voice remains a peculiar mixture of the German lack of knowing when to stop and the Balkan love of westerns (i.e. tall tales). When he remade F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) with Klaus Kinski in 1979, he could not shoot in Wismar, which was in East Germany, so he moved the production to Delft. The authorities there refused to let him release 11,000 rats in the city but in nearby Schiedam they weren’t so fussy. Biologist Maarten ’t Hart was hired by Herzog as rat adviser but, as the Dutchman told the story in Granta magazine in July 2004, he got a bad feeling about it on the way to the engagement.

Starving white rats were imported from Hungary and they started to cannibalize each other on the way. Herzog then insisted that the vermin had to be dyed grey for cinematic effect. This meant dunking them in cages into hot, coloured water, which killed half the creatures. The survivors then licked off the dye, as the biologist had predicted, so, in the (apart from Kinski) soporific finished product, the rats look kind of beige, at most. By the mass makeover, Maarten ’t Hart no longer wished to be involved. He later implied in Granta that the other, more cuddly animals used in the production were also treated cruelly.

Herzog made five (mostly jungle) films with Kinski, who was undoubtedly a headcase. After the latter died in 1991, it didn’t take Herzog even a decade to spin his revenge, which is of the shoulda, woulda, coulda killed Kinski variety. Nevertheless his documentary Mein liebster Feind (1999), which translates as ‘My Best Enemy’, didn’t convince every critic. It has been the subject of at least two screen parodies, the more astute of those being a fly-on-the-wall-style episode of the US comedy series Childrens Hospital in which the director explores his troubled relationship with one of the cast. Thereby it gradually becomes obvious that the insane director is responsible for many of the actor’s troubles.

The South American jungle masochism of Herzog is immortal thanks to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) but it also recalls a very different German who appeared in a 1993 documentary by Britain’s Channel 4. Therein, Charles Nicholl follows the path of Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, along the Orinoco. Upriver he encounters this man with a German accent, who, when asked what he is doing there, explains what Venezuela means for him.

I can realize myself. I could shoot somebody in the street and I would get out of jail because this is a country you can really do anything you want. You just have to have the right connections, maybe a little bit of money and you can do what you want.

Stressing that he was not an explorer or a survival nut, though, he answered another question, about the space and the “mind or… the mood of the place” [sic].

The land is immense but maybe the people don’t want to live in the jungle. I think the Venezuelans, they don’t, they prefer to live in the city, they prefer the comfort we always had in Europe, eh, the electricity, the television… I don’t go into jungle to get bitten by a snake. I have enough bugs at home.

This German (“Lobo”) appears after 16:39

Notes by Olivia de Havilland

Photo (c) Mirrorpix Getty Images

Of lasting value to qualitative research in sociology and anthropology, this selection from Olivia de Havilland’s Every Frenchman Has One (1962) covers French law, union rights, rules of the road, hairdressing and medicine.

The ‘mystery’ French practice discussed at length below involved suppositories, which are, to be fair, named on an earlier page by the no-nonsense Olivia.

It furthermore sketches the California convent background – in which her sister Joan Fontaine played a starring role – to the ecumenical attitude of the great actress to French religion.

Noël Coward’s Diaries

2022

27 September, Tuesday 

Wet day. Still in the Forties in Noël Coward’s bizarre diaries. A lot of the lunches and dinners should have been cut. England may have been dreary then but that didn’t apply to his plate. Luxury abounds, and arse-licking the royals, and playing the piano for such bigwigs when the dinner conversation dies. 

The mention of the 1946 death of David Niven’s wife, who fell into a Hollywood basement in a game of hide-and-seek, recalled Hurd Hatfield telling me these people were not sophisticated (Hurd hung around with “the musicals crowd” instead, at the time). His point is backed by a passage from the autobiography of Oleg Cassini (Jackie Kennedy’s frock fancier), who was at the fatal dinner party. 

The problem was that everyone was in the same line of work, a very insular business. They worked very hard, all the successful ones, and there wasn’t time to know much beyond industry gossip. And so, when conversation waned, we often engaged in party games, especially at smaller dinners: charades, hide-and-seek, anything to pass the time. 

29 September, Thursday 

The story of the connection between Noël Coward and Peter Collinson is touching. A lost boy of twelve finds a father figure who sticks by him and with whom he reunites twenty years later to make a classic film, The Italian Job. 

14 October, Friday 

Noël Coward – usually sensible, often wise but only rarely deep (e.g. on Churchill and Beaverbrook as old men). He was on this earth to enjoy himself. Of his posse, it’s clear Marlene Dietrich was best appreciated in small doses. 

16 October, Sunday 

Very wintry. I was thinking of W. S. Maugham in the South Seas and the contrast with Coward. What sticks in my mind about A Writer’s Notebook is the appearance of so many marooned white men drinking themselves to death and/or retirement, whereas Noël was only out there to enjoy himself. A few pages later it becomes clear how Coward in the early Sixties grew to despise Maugham and his legal antics v. his only child, despite the old man having already appeared occasionally as a benign old codger. It inspires N. C. to reread Cakes and Ale (“Much malice and no heart”). 

23 October, Sunday 

In my first remarks on Coward’s diaries, I used the word “bizarre” and that has returned with a bang in two places after six hundred pages. In 1965, he was in for a minor spot of plastic surgery but his surgeon collapsed and died after it. Twenty pages later he discovers he died himself, on the table, for forty-five seconds, a most unpleasant period in what was left of the surgeon’s time on earth. Noël even imagines the embarrassing headlines that must have gone through the poor man’s mind as those seconds ticked by. 

24 October, Monday 

N. C. found success early, in his mid-twenties, and on New Year’s Day in 1961 he concedes he’s had “a wonderful life” but it’s strange that there is just a single mention (the same number devoted to his father) to any struggle or hardship involved up to the point of making it. (Having been a child actor, he had known enough of “bedbugs and cheap digs and squalor”.) As a man always keen to avoid literary and actual squalor, he must have wanted not to reflect on that too much, not to mind write about it.  

13 November, Sunday 

I forgot to note his 1964 note about Nureyev’s table manners. He actually bit me during dinner, but it was only on the finger and didn’t draw blood. 

P.S.

What is also worth keeping here is a passage from a letter he wrote in late 1959, which acts as a preface for that year.

As one gets older one doesn’t feel quite so strongly any more, one discovers that everything is always going to be exactly the same with different hats on… Looking back… my personality only really changed once, and that was when I was twenty-four and I became a star and a privileged person.

The Angel of Godot

Photo (c) Marie Claire

The French expression “un ange passe” is used when the conversation in a gathering suddenly ceases, not by any interruption but for example when all ideas are exhausted.

In late 1952 the most famous play of the twentieth century was marooned at a little theatre that was going broke. The actors had recently got a grant to rehearse and keep paddling but there was no sight of land.

Delphine Seyrig was only twenty when she gave an inheritance from an uncle to Jean-Marie Serreau at the Théâtre de Babylone. With this unexpected contribution, Serreau then had enough money to stage the first run of Waiting for Godot, which opened on 3 January 1953.

After famous films such as Last Year at Marienbad (1961), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Day of the Jackal (1973), Seyrig reunited with Beckett for a final collaboration in the spring of 1978.

It was a production of Footfalls in Paris. Beckett let it be known, to others at least, that he was very fond of Seyrig and admired her talent, but it seems she was intimidated even then by his reputation and by his persona, as a man of few words.

As if she was still twenty, she thought she might have done more with her part, had it not been so, but, in the context, just who should have been in awe of whom?

The Visit

Dr. John Flynn

Photo sources (above): montazsmagazin.hu and kino.de

In 2008, an Austro-German co-production of a TV film version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play Der Besuch der alten Dame (‘The Visit of the Old Lady’) shifted the setting from Switzerland to Austria. There the filming took place in Styria. Most importantly they picked a very good ‘Claire Zachanassian’ in Christiane Hörbiger, niece of the porter in The Third Man and aunt of Falco’s manager in the biopic Verdammt, wir leben noch.

At the climax in the original play, though, the richest woman in the world does not waver an instant from her quest, which is to return and exact deadly vengeance on the man and the town that ruined her life.

Otherwise, given that Alfred Ill is still in the end murdered by the townspeople for the fortune she has promised them when he dies, it remains a good version of the classic…

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The Case of Leni Riefenstahl

Die Macht der Bilder (1993) is known in English as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. When watching this film, it is hard to ignore even the sparkling eyes of a razor-sharp old lady often condemned as a witch of Nazi propaganda, especially for what she filmed at Nuremberg.

In this documentary, she insisted that Triumph of the Will had to be seen in the context of the time, which was 1934, not 1945. At that time in the Thirties, Robert Musil was living in Berlin. His diaries show that not quite everybody was blind to what was happening. It is seen as a spell of bad weather… a police car with swastika flags and singing officers, speeding down the Kurfürstendamm. It is alarming that Germans today possess so little sense of reality… the streets are full of people – “Life goes on” – even though, each day, hundreds are killed, imprisoned, beaten up…

Riefenstahl nonetheless pointed out too that her film contained nothing about anti-Semitism or racial theory. Instead, she argued that in it she conveyed (through Hitler, you may splutter) the themes of work and peace. Her avowed goal had been artistic, once she had accepted the task on the condition that she would never have to make another film for the Nazi Party.

Riefenstahl was more than able for the unseen interviewer who asked her about the responsibility of the artist concerning those who will be affected by the work. On the issue of filming for Hitler, she pointed out that Sergei Eisenstein had worked for Stalin but her more general point was that artists cannot tell the future and that the likes of Michelangelo and Rodin had shown no grasp of politics.

The more she spoke, the harder it was not to feel a certain amount of sympathy for her position. She ridiculed Susan Sontag’s assertion that she had been attracted to photograph the Nuba people in Africa because their black skin reminded her of the SS. She pointed out that a Nazi wouldn’t think black people were even worth photographing.

In a fit of enthusiasm they later regretted, the French had given Triumph of the Will the gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 – a decision they vindictively balanced out after the war when they imprisoned its maker. This was after the Americans had decided that she had no case to answer, beyond being a fellow traveller (Mitläufer). This imprisonment also happened despite the fact that neither she nor any close family member had been a member of the Nazi Party.

Her true crime? Perhaps it was to be perceived to have done the impossible and actually produced a ‘fascist’ work of art. The Wagnerian comparisons commonly made in this case tie in with Louis Halle’s observation on Germany and Italy in The Ideological Imagination.

“What the fascist movements lacked in philosophy they made up for in theatre. It is surely no accident that the extreme of fascism was realized in the two countries most notable for their contributions to grand opera.”

– The Ideological Imagination, 1972, p.99

Though she denied she was proud of Triumph of the Will, given the trouble it had caused her, and she did not think fondly of the extended hard work, editing it and so on, there was evident glee on her part as she showed off certain camera effects she had achieved. She could even remember the geographical origins of specific contingents where they took part in particular shots.

Riefenstahl’s outlook was apolitical at the very least and the future was all there to see in Mein Kampf and so on, but the vast majority of Germans – of human beings – are not lights in the darkness like Sophie Scholl or Willy Brandt. As a boy, Leon Trotsky was suspended from school for a year for inciting his classmates to howl at a teacher who was tormenting a fellow pupil simply because he was of German descent. Trotsky saw that once the protest began the class was henceforth divided into three groups – the frank and courageous boys on the one side, the envious and the talebearers on the other and the neutral, vacillating mass in the middle. Writing about the incident from the perspective of suitably chastened adulthood, he added that these three groups never quite disappeared, even in later years.

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi expresses anger and revulsion when evaluating a statement made by Liliana Cavani, director of The Night Porter, who said that we are all victims of murderers and that we accept these roles voluntarily. Levi says that to confuse murderers with their victims is a sign of moral disease or artistic affectation, or a sinister sign of complicity rendering a precious service to the negators of truth.

Today the cinematic glorification of serial killers earns vast amounts of money but, in that context, an important distinction can be made between The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, to take two key examples of the genre. In the former, Hannibal Lecter is a satanic figure in the artistic sense of the term, as a snaky embodiment of temptation. He gets all the best lines, his feats are superhuman and, at the end of his satirical quest, he ends up like a guardian angel.

In Seven, the Kevin Spacey character is a grudge-filled little vigilante who trots out his banal motives behind gruesome tortures and murders which have been carefully and cleverly rendered by those behind the camera. Which of these films is a sign of moral disease, a form of sinister complicity?

In the same real world where a gangster like John Gotti gets life without parole, despite never having ordered the carpet-bombing of a Third World country, which of the following pair of even more famous cinema examples answers the same question? Is it Apocalypse Now with its ending that echoes the way Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War makes Pericles sound like Hitler (“It is because your resolution is weak that my policy appears to be mistaken”)?

Contrast that now with a scene from one of the Rambo films, of all things, where Richard Crenna tells it like it is to a Russian in Afghanistan. You can’t defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam. Now you’re gonna have yours. In other words, get out. Does the latter example not express the true moral of colonial war?

The application of Leni Riefenstahl’s technical brilliance was ill-advised but one could say too that she was unlucky. Too many artists to mention have buried their heads in the sand or even joined in the madness prevalent at any given time and there was no honest reason for preventing her from ever making a film again. Few others whom we think should have known better actually grasped the destination. They were often simply content to admire the parade.

PS an insider’s account of a 1939 encounter between Riefenstahl and Hitler is hysterical in more ways than one.

Qualtinger: the Joker of Vienna

In one sense immortal after the dramatic monologue Der Herr Karl (1961), Helmut Qualtinger died in 1986 soon after giving a memorable film performance as the heretical monk Remigio da Varagine in The Name of the Rose. Apart from his career as writer, actor and cabaret singer, though, he was also a genius mimic and hoaxer, sometimes at a serious personal cost, at least before he developed his art of mischief.

One thing he craved professionally as an adult was to be taken seriously as a writer. His case echoes in part the jailing of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton in 1962 for their campaign of altering London library books with funny collages and false blurbs. Reports on their trial included a banner headline in the Daily Mirror (“Gorilla in the Roses” referred to a monkey’s head pasted to the cover of the Collins Guide to Roses) and news of it even made it as far as the pages of the Reader’s Digest. As Orton’s biographer John Lahr wrote

Rejected by the literary world, they made a spectacle of published books and the public that evaded them. They turned the library into a little theatre where they watched people reacting to their productions. It was one way of getting into print and making their statement.

Qualtinger’s desire to turn the world into his playground began much sooner. Quasi, as he was later known, was a lonely child but he got a puppet theatre as a present and entertained other kids with it while on holiday in Styria. There he’d perform fairy tales but, like the anarchist he already was, he omitted the moral lessons at his own whim. Back in Vienna, some envious classmates ambushed him on the street, smashed the lot and broke his hand in the struggle, having earlier warned him not to bring it to school anymore.

Not yet seventeen, he made his first real public appearance in Vienna in May 1945. He wore a large red star pinned to his chest and a red armband with Cyrillic letters sewn onto it. This was part of an attempt to pass himself off as a ‘culture kommissar’ while improvising Russian-sounding gibberish and carrying a poorly forged letter of recommendation. He was still only sixteen, after all, and was soon imprisoned for three months for commandeering a villa in the suburb of Währing as a base for his proposed communist theatre. By the time his mother returned to Vienna and got him out, his weight had dropped to seven and a half stone.

Nonetheless he wasn’t finished pretending to be a Russian. When a friend couldn’t get paid by a newspaper editor, Quasi ‘borrowed’ a Russian officer’s uniform and marched boldly through the American sector of Vienna towards his quarry. Improvising more Russian mutterings, he confronted the editor in his office. The guy quickly grasped the mentions of Siberia before paying up on the spot.

In 1951 Qualtinger pilfered some stationery from the Austrian branch of the international writers’ association PEN. On it, he notified the press and radio about the imminent arrival in Vienna of the famous Eskimo author Kobuk, whose Greenland trilogy Nordlicht über Iviktut was being filmed by MGM as Of Ice and Men.

On the rest of Kobuk’s impressive CV, it is something of a pity that the masterpiece sometimes rendered as The Burning Igloo was actually two separate classics. These were Brennende Arktis (‘Burning Arctic’) and Einsames Iglu (‘Lonesome Igloo’) but how nobody in Vienna copped on to the incongruity of the title of Kobuk’s drama, The Republic of the Penguins, remains a mystery.

At any rate, a crowd of reporters gathered on 3 July 1951 at Vienna’s Westbahnhof. Instead of the great Kobuk, it was Quasi himself, concealed by a fur jacket, a fur cap and sunglasses, who got off the train. Asked for his first impression of Vienna, he broke the spell by answering the throng in Viennese dialect. “Haaß is’!” (‘It’s hot!’).

Perhaps his most god-like prank played out over thirty years later in America. Quasi, still in Vienna, phoned the celebrated Austrian psychiatrist Friedrich Hacker, who spent most of his time in California. Pretending to be Ronald Reagan’s private secretary, Helene von Damm, who was also Austrian, he told Hacker that the President had suddenly gone mad and needed his help. Hacker got on the next plane to Washington and reported to a mystified Frau von Damm at the White House.

Our last anarchic moment does not really involve Quasi at all, except that he got on the phone to God about it afterwards, in total admiration. It concerns the aftermath of an evening at the Gutruf bar, when his friend Otto Kobalek turned up at a performance of Waiting for Godot. In the theatre Kobalek suddenly appeared on stage, with a plastic bag in his hand. It held a copy of an old futuristic novel, set in that same year. The future had finally become the present.

Waving the contents of the bag, he addressed the astonished actors and audience. Godot ist da. Sie müssen nicht mehr warten (‘Godot is here. You mustn’t wait any longer.’) Then he vanished back into the wings. A tickled Qualtinger called Samuel Beckett himself in Paris with the news. Beckett turned out to be very happy to hear it and sent his warm regards, as he too had always been waiting for this to happen.

PS

Der Herr Karl, a begrudger’s guide

Major Hitchcock darns a sock

The photos are from the scene in I’m All Right Jack (1959) in which the personnel manager (Terry-Thomas) visits the shop steward (Peter Sellers) in order to reconcile capital and labour.

Major Hitchcock darns a sock – YouTube

Dublin

26 June 2002

M. called here at 9.30 and we went to the Employment Appeals Tribunal on Adelaide Road. There we trawled through five years of unfair dismissals cases. He’s doing some diploma in human resources to accredit his hatchet-man role with Dell. Some of the stuff was hilarious.

There were two cases of “very serious” fighting in the workplace. One chap had a broken collarbone after the unwise use of an unwanted nickname, while another comedian got chased through a factory by a colleague with an iron bar.

Then there was the young barman whose troubles began when in his wages he received a dud twenty with his name (“Carl”) written on it.

Overall, there was no empirical slant for the ideologies of right or left. In other words, there was probably an even split between injustices and employees simply taking the piss.

The company that figured more than any other in the cases was Dunnes Stores.*

*Irish chain of department stores

Planet of the Naked Stranger

…the Sixties trip viewed through the prism of three period classics: The Naked Ape (1967); Planet of the Apes (1968); and Naked Came the Stranger (1969). That two of the texts have a Taylor only adds to the minor challenge of quote attribution.

“You don’t seem too cut up about it…
It’s too late for a wake. She’s been dead nearly a year.”

“Ah, yes – the young ape with a shovel.”

“When a wife smashes a vase on the floor it is, of course, really her husband’s head that lies there, broken into small pieces.”

“Dammit, Taylor, if you break my chair,” he roared. But they didn’t hear him. For a moment Taylor lay there. “In a wheelchair,” his boss said softly. “That’s something, Taylor.”

“Taylor, don’t treat him that way!
Why not?
It’s humiliating!
The way you humiliated me? All of you? You led me around on a leash!
That was different. We thought you were inferior.
Now you know better.”

“I’d forgotten there was more to life than mowing a lawn.”

“Well, Taylor, we’re all fugitives now.
Do you have any weapons, any guns?
The best, but we won’t need them.
I’m glad to hear it. I want one anyway.”

“A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena in all their many forms, and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the ‘religion’ of our time.”

“It lacks the element of challenge, luck and risk so essential to the hunting male.”

“There’s got to be an answer.
Don’t look for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.”

“Doctor, I’d like to kiss you goodbye.
All right, but you’re so damned ugly.”

“…faster, quicker, faster, needful… lost in immense, billowy softness and riotous colours and roaring winds; he was the sand, the sea and the star-pierced sky.”

“What will he find out there, Doctor?
His destiny.”

“It was easy enough to decipher loins, hores, bores, penny kings, panders, tapers and leapolds, but almost impossible to be certain of the species referred to as bettle twigs, the skipping worm, the otamus or the Coca Cola beast.”

“She was driving, floating actually, toward her new house, floating past the freshly butchered lawns dotted with the twisted golden butts that were the year’s first fallen leaves, past the homes built low and the swimming pools and the kempt hedges and all the trappings that went into the unincorporated village of King’s Neck.”

“The threat-faces of cars have become progressively improved and refined, imparting to their drivers a more and more aggressive image.”

“Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.”

“Her skin, the colour of India tea at summer’s end, flowed nicely over a slender frame.”

“Imagine me needing someone. Back on Earth I never did. Oh, there were women. Lots of women. Lots of lovemaking but no love. You see, that was the kind of world we’d made. So I left, because there was no one to hold me there.”

“She knew she had aroused the creature in the torn, paint-spattered T-shirt.”

“In my world, when I left it, only kids your age wore beards.”

“He simply couldn’t. (He could.)”

“It is the white colour we have to watch for here: this spells activity.”

“I’m pretty handy with this.
Of that I’m sure. All my life I’ve awaited your coming and dreaded it.”

“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

“With that he thrust Gillian back onto the bed and made a flying leap with the clear intent of pinning her down to stay. But she swerved to one side and the holy man, stiff with lust, came down standard-first on the bedpost. For a full two minutes he did not rise; he lay there, crumpled up, hissing incoherently.”

“Anti-contact behaviour enables us to keep our number of acquaintances down to the correct level for our species.”

“She stretched the tiny member to its full length, and it seemed to shrink even more in embarrassment.”

“You are right, I have always known about man. From the evidence, I believe his wisdom must walk hand and hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself.”

“Our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, is to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group”

“The pre-copulatory patterns are brief and usually consist of no more than a few facial expressions and simple vocalizations.”

“… faster and faster they communicated. Fingers on skin, teeth on skin, then great shudders of total communication, and explosions of understanding.”

“The screams were not meant for him, they were meant for the other girls in the audience.”

“If these non-stop grooming sessions are to be successful, a sufficiently large number of guests must be invited in order to prevent new contacts from running out before the party is over. This explains the mysterious minimum size that is always automatically recognized as essential for gatherings of this kind.”

“Then methodically she drained him a second time, emptied him, calmed him and gentled him.”

“On this planet, it’s easy.”

“And that completes my final report until we reach touchdown. We’re now on full automatic, in the hands of the computers. I have tucked my crew in for the long sleep and I’ll be joining them soon. In less than an hour, we’ll finish our sixth month out of Cape Kennedy. Six months in deep space – by our time, that is… the Earth has aged nearly seven hundred years since we left it, while we’ve aged hardly at all. Maybe so. This much is probably true – the men who sent us on this journey are long since dead and gone. You who are reading me now are a different breed – I hope a better one. I leave the twentieth century with no regrets.”

“She was at that moment gently massaging him at his point of greatest altitude with a bottle of pink Johnson & Johnson baby lotion.”

Der Herr Karl, a begrudger’s guide

On 15 November 1961 Austrian television broadcast an hour-long dramatic monologue set in the basement store room of a Viennese delicatessen. Therein a middle-aged character called Karl talked to an unseen younger colleague while intermittently replying to the voice of his female boss upstairs and helping himself to samples of the stock. The public response to the play was uproar but the hour had made the performer – Helmut Qualtinger – immortal.

Der Herr Karl was no invention from scratch. Another actor, Nikolaus Haenel, had worked in such a deli and with such a character just after the war. The establishment stood on the corner of Führichgasse and Tegetthofstrasse and the chap was called Max, though Haenel forgot his surname. Nevertheless he later drew a picture of a bespectacled and rather thin-faced figure, aged about fifty, with a moustache a little wider than Hitler’s. While going through the motions at work, stocking shelves and mopping the floor, this Man of the Crowd had told Haenel his life story.

Years later, Haenel became aware that Qualtinger was in search of a character with a Nazi past so he approached him with the idea of Max. Though Qualtinger was still in his early thirties and much heavier than the original, he was intrigued and the pair met in a restaurant over three or four days, wherein Haenel told him all he remembered and Qualtinger took copious notes, which he later turned into a script with his writing partner, Carl Merz.

Karl’s voice seems to have been based on that of Hannes Hoffmann, from 1947 to 1969 the owner of Qualtinger’s favourite bar, the Gutruf. Hoffmann was an interesting figure in his own right and the transcript of a lengthy interview with him from not long before his death in 1988 is included in Georg Biron’s book Quasi Herr Karl (2011).

Married three times, Karl seems amiable at first but bit by bit, in a mixture of Viennese dialect (what he really thinks) and imperfect standard German (for what he thinks his audience wants to hear), he reveals himself to be a Mitläufer (a camp follower) and opportunist who rode each wave as it came.

Until 1934 he was a socialist but it didn’t pay. He demonstrated for rent-a-crowd right-wing groups because there was a bit of money going (fünf Schilling). Karl then vividly describes the arrival of Hitler in Vienna, the rapture of the multitude on the Ring and Heldenplatz and the police all wearing swastika armbands. To Karl the intoxicating atmosphere felt like the buzz of a wine tavern. Qualtinger’s impression of the blue-eyed Führer passing close to where Karl stood and simply grunting Jaja! at him is blackly comic. Da hab i alles g’wusst, wir haben uns verstanden (‘Then I knew everything, we understood each other’).

A Jewish neighbour in his apartment block – sonst a netter Mensch (‘otherwise a nice guy’) is forced to wash the pavements. Karl describes the block’s Hausmeister laughing at this, though, as a Nazi party member, it is Karl himself who supervises the cleaning. When the neighbour (somehow) returns after the war, Karl raises his hat and greets him in a simpering fashion but the neighbour won’t even look at him. This hurts Karl’s feelings. He argues that someone had to clean the pavement. I war ein Opfer. Andere san reich worden, i war a Idealist (‘I was a victim. Others got rich, I was an idealist’).

When the Russians came, people rushed to throw their Hitler portraits on the nearest dung heap but Karl kept his on the wall and deliberately encouraged some Russian soldiers into his apartment. He tore down the picture and trampled on it and then, satisfied with this gesture, they left him alone. Karl subsequently got the chance to suck up to the Americans, whom, he notes, had good food. Wangling a job as a civilian guard, he had ample opportunity to chase away hungry compatriots now that he was a self-styled defender of the West.

An excellent introduction to Qualtinger and Der Herr Karl is available in Georg Markus’ Wenn man trotzdem lacht – Geschichten und Geschichte des österreichischen Humors (2012), which has Quasi, as he was known, as the main figure on the cover.

Both a history and compendium of Austrian humour, this book begins with a chapter on Wiener Schmäh, which Markus links to Vienna’s ethnic mix and then defines as including melancholy, sarcasm and a little malice. Nevertheless, in the very first paragraph the author makes a rather dubious claim. Das Lachen ist hierzulande von geradezu existenzieller Bedeutung und die Heiterkeit mit der anderer Völker nicht vergleichbar (‘Laughter is, in this sense, of an almost existential importance and the amusement is not comparable with that of other peoples’).

The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics (1986) is a book by Breandán Ó hEithir (1930-90) that traces the political evolution – even thirty years on from publication, development may still be too strong a word – of the Irish State and its adjoining northern statelet over sixty years, from the early 1920s to the mid-1980s. The writer defines the begrudger of the title as the most common type of Irish character. Such a person is usually cynical, snide and hungry for the next unflattering story about an official role model or public event that won’t bore anyone else in the retelling.

Ó hEithir describes most Irish people as time-serving sycophants but, to be fair, the begrudger is often justifiably cynical, as the author also points out. One may easily be short of a job, a house, regular sex… or food in Ireland: one is rarely short of a bitter belly laugh.

The book begins with an anecdote from the morning after the signing of the Treaty (1921) that partitioned the island and created the Irish Free State. A passing priest asks a blacksmith why he looks so glum.

It was the gentry that kept me going and what’s left of them will leave the country now. I’m ruined.

The priest assures him that freedom will mean the Irish will have their own gentry but this only causes the blacksmith to mutter darkly in his wake.

Our own gentry!? We will in our arse have our own gentry.

The blacksmith was right. Instead, we got opportunists, the post-colonial class whose innermost vocation Frantz Fanon saw as remaining part of the racket. The success of the Irish in America magnifies the awareness – learnt from the Brits – that electoral politics is the safest form of organised crime, where privileged access to the trough of opportunity is tolerated thanks to successful patronage. Incidentally, charity-sector fiddling has emerged in recent years as a type of scam at which the Irish in-crowd have proved themselves world-class.

In a nation of embezzlers, though, this phenomenon of camp-following and opportunism isn’t just restricted to politics and those with political connections. To give a simple example, there was a party for the elderly in one rural parish at Christmas in 1999, the year the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) had issued a national apology in the wake of the States of Fear TV series, which had documented our children’s gulag. Just imagine, the number of children in institutional ‘care’ in the Irish State between the 1930s and 1970s had been, in absolute terms, greater than that in Britain, while our population had been little more than 5% of that across the water.

Of course it became fashionable and convenient to blame the Church alone for such horrors but what of the society that gave the Church such power? In 2017 the latest such scandal is that of the mother-and-baby homes, those institutions where unwed mothers were put and where their babies – if they didn’t die and get thrown into unmarked graves – were often secretly sold for adoption. These places were never secret, the people knew the score, that’s how things were done. 2017 is also the year that Brunhilde Pomsel died. She was Goebbels’ secretary and lived to be 106.

‘The people who today say they would have done more for those poor, persecuted Jews… I really believe that they sincerely mean it,’ she said in interviews for A German Life. ‘But they wouldn’t have done it either.’

On a lighter note, the Christmas party committee had asked a relative of mine to help out at the event. The members had already gathered a lot of good food and drink in the form of donations. At the party in the parish hall, a retired nurse advised that some hot whiskey punch would be the best drink for the old people in the winter but that suggestion was shot down. Instead, the committee gave them sherry. They had plenty of sherry. Soon there was a crash. An old lady had keeled over. After that the guests only got tea and sandwiches. The wine, the chocolates, the brandy and whiskey bottles and the beautiful cakes remained untouched. Soon the old people were packed off on a bus.

What happened to the goodies? The cars reversed in, loaded up and drove away. “Never again,” said my relative. What happened to Max? According to Markus, all is known is that he got fired from the delicatessen after he was caught trying to take home some bottles of vermouth in a small case.

PS … Article 40.2.1 of the Irish Constitution says, “Titles of nobility shall not be conferred by the State.” Aristocratic titles have been banned in Austria since 1918, so Austrians have compensated for this deprivation with excessive use of academic ones. Some people even use a different calling card (e.g. one that uses “von” in the name) when dealing with Germany, where such elaboration remains legal.

PPS … For more on Qualtinger, please go to…

The Joker of Vienna