I have been all around this great world, if you count visits to Germany and London as having been all around this great world, and soon I will be going to Vienna Austria, which Thomas Bernhard, in a speech celebrating his winning the state's highest literary prize, gaily denounced as a nightmare and a whore, which caused a riot amongst the politicians who should have expected as much from Bernhard, that dirtier of his own nest, with fat men in suits storming from the theater, shouting epitaphs, and I cannot wait to see Bernhard's grave, the final resting place of a man who saw hypocrisy everywhere he turned, this one a hypocrite and that one a hypocrite, Nazis and their Catholic collaborators claiming to have been victims of Hitler, Hitler's first victims in fact, which is a laugh because they were all hypocrites, the world is filled with hypocrites but Thomas Bernhard declined to toady up to the hypocrites that fill the world, but instead denounced his country just as we should all denounce our homelands, frauds every single one of them, it was E.M. Cioran said, "A fatherland is birdlime..."
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Sacher torte and Masochism, there you have Austria in a nutshell.
Posted by: Jan Martin Löhndorf | June 25, 2016 at 03:25 AM
Thank you for that wonderful summation of Germany's cringing neighbor!
Posted by: Mike | June 26, 2016 at 05:11 PM