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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The inspiring, meditative classic autobiography of a pioneering nineteenth-century autodidact and writer, in English for the first time Over the 29 years of his short life, Franz Michael Felder worked with furious productivity to better himself and the lives of those around him. From his humble origins in the Austrian village of Schoppernau, he went on to found workers' cooperatives, a political party and even a public library in his own home, while also writing many literary works. A Life in the Making is both the culmination of this extraordinary career and a chronicle of its development. It is a story of early hardship and fortitude, of Felder's relentless zeal for learning and his lifelong effort to reconcile his own expanding horizons with the enforced confines of the community he was born to. Unfolding in prose of limpid beauty, A Life in the Making becomes a deeply moving tribute to Felder's wife Nanni, and to his enduring belief in the possibility of a better world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Contents
I
Between six and seven o’ clock in the morning, on 13th May 1839, I arrived in the world at Schoppernau, the last village in the Bregenzerwald. What heavenly sights were to be seen, and during what phase of the moon I arrived, my father did not record. The day must have been a fine one, though, because our labourers had been sent out to perform their first task in the fields, which was muck-spreading.
My cries, however, were so pitiful, and I was obviously so unhappy to have entered the world, that everyone was seriously concerned that I wanted nothing more than to follow my brother Josef—who had been born two years earlier—up into heaven, where I too would turn into a little angel.
Even my godmother would not have liked that because, thanks to my little brother, she already had what every godmother longs for—an innocent advocate to plead her case before God.
My father, however, was even more concerned about the sickly child. He felt no desire at all to go muck-spreading. After breakfast he actually sent the labourers home with a full day’s pay, and the hard-working, stingy neighbours could say what they liked. 8
Later, when I grew and thrived and behaved like any normal child, apparently he often used to say he thought it was a bad omen that the moment I arrived, I caused so much trouble that I’d kept him away from his work and shattered his daily routine. He was afraid that I would never become a proper farmer. This would make him very unhappy. If not by farming, how else could any poor person earn a living amid these mountains in the gloomy confines of the Ach Valley?
Oral tradition has it that the Felder family is descended from a Magyar prisoner who swiftly became extremely popular during his captivity. It appears that he moved from the Swabian side of Lake Constance to the mountains, where he lived from 924 until 954, because he had fallen so deeply in love with a girl from the Black Forest that he preferred to run away with her and live under a German name, in what was then the still uninhabited Bregenzerwald, rather than share the fine fruits of hard German labour with his uncivilized fellow countrymen. Of course, evidence of all this would be difficult, if not impossible, to find.
Nevertheless, it is a strange fact that this tale alone has rooted in people’s minds the firm belief that we came originally from the Black Forest. And so even today, anyone whose shirt bears a name beginning with F—that is to say, Felder—is regarded as a peculiar outsider, a maverick from birth.
It may well be that this actually caused some Felders to become peculiar mavericks, because anyone who has been condemned or marginalized by public opinion, and who is not totally lacking in self-esteem, may all too easily try to oppose this almighty force which for so many constitutes the one and only guide for life. 9
Of the many children whose birthdays my grandfather had recorded on the last page of our 300-year-old Lives of the Saints, my father was the oldest survivor. At a very early age, he had to take over from his ailing father the difficult and physically demanding task not only of managing the large, unwieldy farm, but also of running the household. This was made all the more arduous by the fact that my grandfather was generally believed to have pawned every object he could lay his hands on. The old records appear to offer very little evidence to the contrary. The thickness of the line that my father drew through each paid-off debt suggests just how much blood, sweat and tears it cost him. On the other hand, his hard work increasingly earned him the trust of the villagers and the respect even of those who because of their financial and family status were, not unjustly, known as the “aristocracy”. And so the man who initially had been looked down on by everyone must have felt a good deal better about himself. All the same, he remained faithful to the poor, hard-working girl who had for so long remained faithful to him, and therefore it was in vain that those born with silver spoons in their mouths now smilingly invited him to enter their fine houses. He was fiercely independent, and for ten years he worked tirelessly, so that he would be able to bring his bride into a household that was fit for purpose.
This finally happened in 1836, just after Easter, when Jakob was thirty-one and my mother five years older. On the back of an old expired bond, in my father’s handwriting, is a list of all those who attended the wedding feast. There is also a note that his first child was born in 1837, but the Heavenly Father 10had quickly taken him to be one of His angels. This was all the more reason for the fearfulness with which they nursed me, and Aunt Dorothe, my godmother, has often told me how after practically every meal they would add to their prayer a special Paternoster for me.
It is from this aunt—my father’s youngest sister—that I have learnt most of what I know about the first years of my life. She lived with us and was my nursemaid when my mother was helping my father out in the fields. She herself suffered from a disease that affected her limbs, and so she could only do things like embroidery or very light farm work. Looking after me might well have been too much of a strain on her at times, but she always took great pleasure in whatever she was able to do. For someone who had been used to living and working in the open air, it was a real comfort to spend the seemingly endless summer days with me.
Once I had learnt to walk, she would watch each step with the anxiety of the sick person who, in the light of her own weakness, sees stress and danger in someone else’s every movement. This anxiety increased still further when my ever-watchful observer discovered that I was short-sighted. What was initially just a small white spot in my right eye began to get bigger. At first it remained a family secret. My pious mother said that only God could help, and during the sleepless nights before my birth she had offered up many a Paternoster and even whole rosaries for me. Because she had long since known that her child would become like the man from Tannberg who had been blinded by the snow. The sight of him had so terrified her that she could never forget him. 11
My father and his sister, my godmother, were more frightened by this piece of news than by what they had just seen for themselves. But soon they were fully occupied looking after my mother, who took the new development more and more to heart, and regarded it as an unforgivable matter of conscience that with such foreknowledge she was subjecting her son to a lifetime of unhappiness. Everyone reminded her that there was now a second child on the way that she must care for, and that she should not make this poor unborn creature suffer through her futile self-reproaches.
But such counsel, together with the moans of the relatives and the terrible tales they spread through the village—the consequences of which the poor woman had to endure every day from all the well-meaning souls who came to comfort her—simply made her feel worse and worse. Of course, they all brought with them loads of pious grounds for hope and plenty of good advice. This and that medication and this and that doctor were heartily recommended, and there were almost aggressive demands for immediate action, bearing in mind the sacred obligations every parent had before man and God.
The more people complained, comforted, advised and instructed, the less certain my parents became about what they should and shouldn’t do. And they were all the more dependent on public opinion because for them—as for most country folk—the powers of the doctor were regarded as halfway towards witchcraft, and so they must have been very relieved when increasing amounts of fulsome praise began to be heaped on a doctor who was born in the neighbouring village of Au, and had just moved to a village in Tyrol. 12
There has always been a kind of family togetherness among the people of the Bregenzerwald. This even extends to emigrants, provided they do not completely distance themselves from their native ways and customs. It is assumed from the very start that Bregenzerwälder have all they need to enter any profession, but they believe that nevertheless God has not earmarked them for the highest, most important offices, and especially not for scholarly learning; they and their dependents are expected to earn their place in heaven by conscientiously fulfilling their duties labouring on the land. And they will gain salvation by humbly and obediently following the path that God has laid down for them. However, if Providence decrees that someone should leave the village and his father’s land for even a slightly higher position, then it must be because scarcely one in a hundred can understand what he understands. The warmth that always enveloped him back in his true home will quickly enable his name to take on an increasing aura of greatness, which initially may bring feelings of shame to those children who have strayed from the straight and narrow, but will soon become an inspiration to them.
Of the above-mentioned doctor little more was known than the fact that he treated sick people. But everyone would have liked to be the patient of their old school friend, their fellow countryman. Well-paid messengers brought his medicines over the Arlberg and delivered them to the sick, and his reputation grew precisely because such people—they were mainly the rich—would never have consulted someone who was bad at his job. Of course, my father was not one of those who believed in and emulated the rich. But it so happened that the doctor 13was a cousin of his, and his ailing sister also had such faith in the famous man that for the sake of her health she was happy to spend the little money she had in order to be transported over the Arlberg.
Often, and always with tears in her eyes, Aunt Dorothe would later tell me what a great and wonderful, interminable and frightening day it had been when we set out from home on our way to something that would determine our whole future. A journey over the Arlberg was no small matter for us, even if it only took a day. Because of his work and his way of life, the farmer is virtually a prisoner in his own village. Although he is always on the move, he will be the last to use his leisure time in order to pay a visit to the next village.
My father had scarcely ever crossed the mountains which surround my home and the neighbouring village of Au and which virtually cut us off from the rest of the world. He spent most mornings away from the family, doing the dangerous work of pulling hay across deep chasms that had sometimes been bridged by avalanches. But this immensely strong man never flinched. Steadfastly, even cheerfully, he would look danger in the eye, so long as he was the only one threatened and his strength still enabled him to keep moving. But now he was to leave behind his weeping wife, who needed him twice or even three times as much as usual, because he had to entrust his beloved son and his sick sister to the hands of a stranger, as he himself could not do anything else to help them.
In our tiny village, where the 500 inhabitants all knew everything about everyone else, our departure was a great event in which they all took a lively interest. My godmother told me that 14friends, neighbours and relatives had all gathered outside the house, and it was just as if the dead body of a loved one was being taken away to be buried. People were even crying, and my father had completely lost his usual composure, so when they started loading the luggage and his one-and-a-half-year-old son on his back, he asked in a trembling voice: “Should we or shouldn’t we?” Then, since everybody was too full of emotion to say anything one way or the other, he looked up agonizingly into the deep-blue heavens and cried: “Dear God, why won’t you send us a message, a sign to tell us what to do with this, our burden, which you have thrust upon us?”
My mother, who was usually the most helpless of all, suddenly became the most courageous. “We must all do what we can—that is the sign from heaven, which does not burden anyone with more than they can and must bear if they are to be saved by the grace of God,” she said as she carefully covered me up. Meanwhile, Aunt Dorothe had mounted a mule with the help of the guide. My father quickly packed all the delicacies that had been handed to me from all sides, and then we set out through the narrow Ach Valley, across the Lech to Stuben, and from there up and over the Arlberg.
And so it was in a foreign land among foreign people that I first learnt to say the word “father”, although the person addressed did not hear it. He carried me into the doctor’s house and then—without allowing himself more than a single night’s rest—hastened back to my mother. No matter how much he would have liked to stay, he was driven by his concern that his hard-working wife might try to find some diversion from her condition and overexert herself by helping the labourers, who 15had just started the haymaking. It was only by means of letters—which in those days took weeks or even months to reach their destination—that he was able to get occasional news from us. But these letters were not so much reports concerning how we were, what treatments we were having and whether they were working, as pious words of comfort to the effect that with God’s help everything might still go well. The last of these letters, dated September 1840, asks my father to come and fetch the two patients before the cold season sets in, and it informs him that my left eye—not the one that required treatment—has become infected and is now lost for ever. The first consequence of this letter was the premature birth of my younger brother, who entered this world only in order to experience a Christian burial. Not until my father felt that it was safe to leave my mother did he hurry to us, whereupon he learnt from his sister that there had been no improvement in her own condition, and that I would be returning in a far worse state than when I had left. If only the doctor had listened to her good advice and her desperate pleas! It appeared that he had come home in a disgraceful state of inebriation but, in spite of all her attempts to dissuade him, had immediately started work on my eyes. To her horror, she had watched the drunkard proceed to do such dangerous things that she had had to leave the room in order—as she often told me later—not to fly into a rage. The following day my left eye, which until then had been fine and healthy, was disfigured and destroyed.
The day of our homecoming, according to my godmother, was the saddest of her life, despite all the pain she herself had to endure in the years that followed.
II
The fact that an event which would have a major effect on my future happened so early in my life is something that I have never been able to lament in the company of my friends and relatives. Of course, it is sad if a person’s fate is determined before he has done anything to deserve it, and many possible paths through life are cut off in advance. But is that not the case for all of us in the context of our social conditions? Are we not all affected by the circumstances, prejudices and mistakes of those who raise us, and does not our environment already determine our fate? Each of us is subject to such influences, and my situation was far from being the worst. It is certain that very few children could have had such a loving father, such a gentle caring mother and such a circle of kind relatives to support him. Difficult and at times dangerous work and the grinding worries of daily life have hardened the hearts of many parents, so that the child’s upbringing has the one aim of getting him to earn as much money during the second decade of his life as his upbringing—or, to be more precise, his training—has cost in time during the first decade. If my parents had thought and acted according to those principles, then I 17would have had a difficult childhood. But they did not count the cost, and their concern was what was best for me, their only child. They raised me to be a chubby-cheeked mother’s boy, and treated me with what perhaps was even too much loving care.
It was comparatively easy for me to accept my condition because I knew so little about any alternative, and it was only after this misfortune that I began to use my powers in accordance with the needs of my character. I remember that there were times when I thought my nose was not in the middle of my face, as it should have been, but was somewhat to one side, where it prevented me from having a proper view of things. However, it didn’t take me long to get used to that, and it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me that there was something not quite right had it not been for the fact that my parents, and especially my mother, kept reminding me every day and practically every hour that I had a disability. She used to watch with horror when—even before I put on my first pair of trousers—I would be the first and fastest to climb every tree or hill. No other child of my age would have dared to do what I did. Indeed, there were some fathers of stronger boys who resented the fact that I was the bravest and nimblest of them all. My parents, who were delighted to talk about their Franz Michael’s heroic deeds, were bombarded with comments along the lines that I actually couldn’t see the dangers and so I didn’t know what risks I was taking, even if my father and mother didn’t have any objections to what I was doing. Of course that was hurtful, and once again added to the worries of my poor parents, while the effect of such remarks on me was so profound 18that even ten years later I could not look at the people concerned without remembering what they had said.
Now the admiration had given way to a mixture of pity and blame whenever I wanted to show that I was not short-sighted. My relationship with my playmates changed: until then my character and behaviour had been such that they thought as little as I did about my disability. But now they were taught by their parents to pity me and to treat me like an invalid. Whenever I wanted to chase around as they were all doing—and I had more courage and lust for life than three of them put together—the boys would put on expressions of painful concern and push me into the arms of the girls, who then took great pleasure in mothering me. They picked the sweetest berries just for me, and these dear souls would then almost burst into tears if, instead of thanking them, I would protest that I did not want to be treated like a six-month-old baby and was perfectly capable of helping myself. I was well aware that I was hurting the feelings of these gentle, well-meaning girls very deeply, but, faced with such a situation, I simply couldn’t control my own feelings.
The little girls, however, resolved not to show me that I had hurt and offended them, and they became masters at finding indirect ways of fulfilling their good intentions. And the fact is that when I noticed the tender and affectionate things they were doing while trying to conceal their motherly motives, I actually began to enjoy it, couldn’t resist it, and let them do whatever they wanted. I began to take a more and more active part in their games. I carved cradles for their dolls, built miniature kitchens for them, and was ready and willing to provide whatever manly skills and strengths were necessary for them to 19run their imaginary households. I soon felt far more at home in their company than in that of the boys, who continued to treat me as a kind of outcast. Sometimes the role of family father or odd-job man became almost too quiet and peaceful for me, but this situation was soon to be eased by a stroke of luck.
One particular girl needed a cow for her miniature home. Normally when we were playing these games, reddish-brown fir cones were used for cows—we actually called them fir cows—and since we were very close to the lovely little forest behind the village, I immediately hurried off to climb one of the proud pine trees, though there was scarcely a single solid branch until quite some way up. When the girls saw the risky business I was about to undertake, they screamed and came running across to stop me, in such a rush that one or two of them knocked over the little houses they’d built between the mossy stones. But even that did not deter them in their desperate haste to bring me back down to God’s terra firma. Nevertheless, they arrived too late because I’d already climbed up like a wild cat, and instead of my responding to their pleas and prayers, their threats and entreaties, the only thing that did descend was the pair of heavy, uncomfortable clogs I’d had on my feet. Then, after half a minute of noise—very loud noise—down came a veritable shower of fresh fir cows, and from these shaken fruits there spread a powerful scent of the forest which perfumed the air all around us. The girls gathered up the cones with squeals of delight, and the scolding only began again when I climbed down and teasingly reminded them of their fears for my safety. But the scolding was now very different from before: I could sense the admiration behind it, and this gave me the feeling 20that my inner being was quite different from theirs. My female playmates now stood round me in a circle, almost shyly, looking at me with wide eyes, and they must have been experiencing similar feelings.
Suddenly I stood up straight and proud, laughed, clenched my fist, and imagined myself to be I don’t know what. Then three of the boys came storming into the forest and tried to snatch the fir cows I’d collected for the girls, but I threw two of them to the ground with a strength and skill that left me even more surprised than everyone else.
From that day onwards my relationship with all my contemporaries—male as well as female—underwent a radical change. Now the boys tried in vain to keep me away from their more daring exploits, and if I preferred the quiet and gentle company of the girls, that was only because I found the wild, coarse behaviour of the boys quite repugnant, and felt that all their nasty pranks were deliberately meant to offend me. It goes without saying that I was subjected to much abuse on this account. As I was by no means insensitive, the nickname ‘Cissy’ by which some of the older boys called me could spoil my enjoyment of the girls’ company for weeks on end.
The vicious games the boys played with their wooden horses and cows—the only toys their parents and relatives ever gave them—didn’t interest me at all. I was in fact so afraid of real, live horses that I could not even see the carved and painted ones without inwardly shuddering. I preferred the cows, which were made from alder wood and had udders that were at least as big as their stomachs. But again I was disgusted by the way the boys played with these animals, no matter how natural it must have 21seemed to native Bregenzerwälder. Among our mountains one rarely sees a fruit tree, and there are no crops that can really flourish. The cow is the most important tool for everyone. It is only through the cow that the blessings of our fields and hills can be translated into money. Even in modern times their milk, turned into butter and cheese, has been the only commodity available to the isolated Ach Valley and its 17,000 inhabitants.
The boys also treated their wooden cows only as tools, and that upset me too. I couldn’t stand seeing even the crude image of the animal being “killed” and then cut to pieces with a sharp knife as soon as someone said that it was not producing enough milk. This character trait—peculiar to boys—of wanting to damage or destroy things, which here found its expression in the brutal dismembering of wooden cows and horses, was what first drew my attention to the sufferings of real cows and to their relationship with humans.
At that time, though, I cared nothing about business and trade. What hurt me was seeing humans apparently free to treat live, sentient creatures in whatever way they wished, even to the point of determining whether they lived or died. I still remember how bitterly I wept when one day my father told me that our yellow whitefoot would have to be sold at the next market. This kind animal had given us her sweet milk all through the summer. She would be grazing behind our house at the foot of the fir-crowned mountain, her little bell ringing, but as soon as I called her she would leave the other cows and come towards me, to the gate in the wall that separated the communal pasture from the hayfields. She would happily let herself be led into the stable, tied to her chain and milked. But 22now that there was less milk and there were no more calves, her reward was to be sold? “No, my dear innocent Franz Michael,” said my father gently and soothingly, “that is not why your whitefoot has to be sold. That is why I’ve given her the finest food all through the summer in the high pasture.”
“The food grows of its own accord,” I mumbled.
“But I have masses of interest, taxes and fees to pay, so that I can use the pasture.”
“I can pay for it!” I said proudly, and hurried away to fetch my moneybox.
With a smile my father counted the money I had saved. Then he said: “We would need ten times as much. You see, I would have to make a whole wagon for that amount of money—it would take at least a week.”
In whatever spare time he had, my father also worked as a wainwright, and during the long winter months and on rainy summer days he earned quite a few gulden with this particular craft. I often used to stand beside him at his workbench, and I would watch him closely, so that if he tested my attentiveness by deliberately putting a tool back in the wrong place, I would notice immediately. It obviously gave him great pleasure when I caught him apparently making a mistake. He was even happier with all the questions I asked him, for instance why other people didn’t make their own wagons. Eventually I learnt how and why the tailor made clothes, the baker baked bread and the wainwright built wagons for everybody else. This made it much easier for me to understand when he linked all this to his reasons for having to sell the cow, and when he later came home from the market with a load of pears—which are a rarity 23here—and a new hat just for me, I was more than satisfied, at least for the time being.
After a while, however, when the last of the delicious fruits had been devoured, something began to trouble me, and it would not be wrong to say that these were my first pangs of conscience. It was unjust that our pleasure should allow us callously to forget the faithful animal that had been sacrificed for it, because the fact was that my father had bought my pears and hat out of the money he had made at the market. This thought kept running through my head for weeks on end, and was especially disturbing because I had to keep it to myself. I simply didn’t dare mention it to my father, as I felt that he would take it as a criticism, and I didn’t confide in my mother either, as I was accustomed to thinking of them as a single unit. Our other cows had now come back from the alpine pasture which was jointly run by my father, his brother Johann Josef and his married sister Serafine. But now I no longer felt like accompanying my father to the stable. In the evening, when my mother put the freshly dug potatoes on the fire, I would have supper with my godmother in the living room, where she would teach me the Catholic Creed and the Paternoster. One day, after a short introduction—I rarely broached any subject without an introduction—I got round to discussing the sale of my beloved cow. I made everything so clear to her, told her all the good things the poor creature had done for us and how heavily the terrible injustice of her fate lay upon my soul, that the smile of my otherwise so sensitive aunt brought tears to my eyes. And that in turn made her weep as well. Her gentle hand pulled me towards her and wiped the tears from my cheeks, and 24then with unusual earnestness she said: “My dear, good-hearted child! All of us have had to go through this phase. I remember well how Jakob, your father, went for the first time to the cattle market with his favourite cow. They had grown up together. He looked very pale and was trembling so much that he could hardly manage to take the reluctant animal.”
“So why did he go on?”
“Oh dear God, our father was ill, and we needed the money to pay the doctor and to buy clothes for me and my brothers and sisters, to see us through the cold winter.”
“That must have been hard, godmother, and so of course the cow had to help you.”
“Yes, just as we had looked after her for years—better than we could look after ourselves.”
We spent many evenings talking about similar cases, and eventually I was able to understand that a farmer’s animals are his tools, and that the needs of his family, the struggle for daily bread, can make even the best of men do the harshest things to them. What was even clearer, and for me even more unbearable, was seeing in winter how my father had to tend to our six cows with all the fearful subservience that one would show towards some eccentric benefactor, like a rich old relative. Sickness, calving and other such events were of vital importance to the whole house, and for days and weeks on end would rob my parents of their sleep. I would see them trembling with the fear of losing all that they had achieved through years of blood, sweat and tears.
If initially I had bemoaned the fate of our domestic animals through their dependence on us, I now began more and more 25to bemoan the fact that we were so dependent on them. I could only enter the cowshed with a feeling of trepidation. At times I was even angry with these stupid beasts, for whose sake my father had to brave the harsh winter and risk his life to climb the highest mountains and cross the deepest chasms in order to bring home the hay so painstakingly gathered during the summer. It became more and more clear to me why all the laudable qualities of our cows amounted to nothing more than the sum of the thalers they would earn for us. And increasingly I began to view the hard life of the farmer as something painful, while at the same time I was also learning the value of money.
Suddenly all the games and escapades of the past seemed to me not only childish but also grossly unfair—an injustice that I was perpetrating on my parents, leaving them to do all the work and the worrying. Now I would smile almost scornfully as I refused the sweetest invitations from the girls who had been my playmates, and instead stayed at home to help my father and run errands for my mother. Whenever the winter kept us trapped indoors, and my father became virtually a fulltime wainwright again while my mother devoted herself to embroidery, my eagerness to serve became almost too great. I wanted to work with gimlet and saw, and my father was so afraid that I might injure myself with his sharp tools that he could hardly concentrate on his work. But he was even more worried by what I got up to outside the house, where the only supervision I had was that of my aunt. He often made me go and play with the other children. But if someone prefers not to frolic around in the freshly mown fields during the balmy days of autumn, he is hardly likely to change his mind in the winter. 26
The little boys who don’t yet go to school are really to be pitied during the cold season. All day long, for best part of six months, they must sit quietly in the living room—whose sole decoration may be some dreadful portrait of a saint—without the large assortment of cheery toys and games that are available to occupy the bodies and minds of other children. The boys would just sit there, sometimes playing cards, which many of them got to know even before they learnt their ABC. The girls, on the other hand, had already begun to practise their skills with some success on the embroideries of their older sisters or their mothers, and even did their own in order to earn a few groschen. That really appealed to me, and so I asked my father to find a nice profitable occupation for me if my godmother didn’t trust me with the embroidery. But he couldn’t think of anything until one day I made such a mess of one of her delicate creations that he had to reimburse the client for the cost of the materials. That did the trick. It’s true that the first product of my endeavours was a severe telling-off, but my father had so little confidence in the efficacy of his sermon that the search for a suitable job was now conducted in earnest. In the end, my father made a small, very simple loom for me, and an uncle in the neighbourhood who was a weaver taught me how to weave raw cotton into cloths for domestic use. It took me just half a day to complete my apprenticeship. At first there were some rather complicated things for me to do, and my blunders must have cost quite a few groschen’ worth of materials, but my father—who was otherwise very strict with money matters—would simply smile and say a few words of encouragement, then watch as I learnt from my mistakes. 27
Practice makes perfect. Soon everything was working well, except that long before the end of winter I had run out of customers willing to buy my wares. Every day I was producing between thirty and fifty ells of cloth, and nobody knew what to do with it all, even though we were selling it at ten ells for just one groschen, of which one-third went into my savings. I therefore took it upon myself to become a hawker, and proceeded to go from door to door in the village. Everyone enjoyed dealing with the little salesman, and I also took care to behave impeccably in their presence. Nobody had to put on airs with me, and so it wasn’t long before I got to know all the individual characteristics of my clients to the extent that I could even imitate the way they spoke—much to the amusement of my family. The applause that greeted my little shows served to sharpen my awareness, and my insights also proved to be more and more beneficial for myself. I had no difficulty deciding on the best way to approach people in order to get the most out of them. I had inherited too much of my father’s directness to stoop to flattery, much as I enjoyed observing and privately judging the different responses, but I knew when to keep quiet and when to say something nice without becoming obsequious. And the more I accustomed myself to judging people and to adapting myself to the differences in their characters, the more aware I became of my own individuality.
I spent many happy hours not just selling my goods but also making them. At first I only worked at home, and I felt very proud of myself when I put my little loom on the table and listened to the shuttle moving back and forth between the threads, to the accompaniment of my father’s mighty hammer 28blows. I enjoyed it most when Aunt Dorothe was also there. Then I made her tell me all about this or that person whom I’d encountered as I’d peddled my wares and who had seemed sufficiently unusual for me to want to know more about them. To this end, I memorized not only their appearance but also the position and number of their house. My godmother had a great gift for capturing the essence of someone’s character and reproducing it with a few verbal brushstrokes.
During the long summer days that she had to spend at home alone or with me, she had too much time to think about the lives of her at least outwardly more fortunate school friends, and indeed all the people she knew. But she often said also that she found comfort in observing human relations and the fact that everyone was given their own burden to bear, or made one for themselves. This taught her to endure her sufferings with patience, although it was more difficult to benefit from one’s own tribulations than from those that God had inflicted on others. It was both a pleasure and an education to listen to my loving and clear-thinking aunt talking about human nature and relationships.
Unfortunately, so long as she was still able to walk and to do her embroidery, she rarely stayed at home when my father was also there constructing his wagons, because the noise was so deafening that it would have given a splitting headache even to those who were in better health than she was. Embroiderers—or at least those who are married—generally prefer not to stay at home on their own. What they like best is to have a good gossip, while the expert white hand pulls the slightly whiter thread up and down through the fine tulle, and the needle and thimble 29click together in a regular rhythm. And so almost every day they take their stick or frame to the house of a neighbour—preferably one who has already had a visitor or two that day. However, the conversation is rarely about private, personal matters. Generally they like to tease one another, and although a nice bit of tittle-tattle might occasionally find its way into the conversation, for the most part the warm and cosy living room tends to nourish the finest blossoms of Bregenzerwald humour and bonhomie. My godmother spent as much time as she could in this kind of company, where she could forget her sufferings and feel that she was among her peers. Every visit was a tonic. And wherever she went, she was so welcome that she was even allowed to take me and my loom with her. However, although I enjoyed working in the company of the grown-ups and showing off my talents, I was never really at home there because I could not understand most of what they were talking about, and my questions were frequently greeted with laughter, so that I felt rather like the fifth wheel of a wagon.
I therefore began to look for houses and company that would suit me better. If I particularly liked a place where I sold my goods, I would stay a bit longer, tell the people how important my job was, and ask them if they would like to see my loom and watch me working at it. All they needed to do was give me a positive nod and, without even waiting for a proper invitation, I would promise to come back in the next few days. Then they would smile, and that was enough for me, because if they offered me a little finger, I had no scruples about taking the whole hand.
III
One particularly vivid memory I have is of an old man from the neighbourhood with whom I spent many days. Sometimes he was busy knitting. But more often than not he would be smoking his little pipe and lying stretched out beside the stove, because he was sensitive to the cold. He reckoned that during his ninety years on Earth he had done his fair share of work. Quite right too. And according to those who knew him he had a rich fund of tales to tell about all the trials and tribulations he had lived through. He had always had to struggle against extreme poverty until at long last his hard-working grandchildren had made his life a bit more comfortable. But if he did start to talk about that period, he would suddenly break off with the remark that he had spent enough years suffering—far too many to waste a minute more torturing himself with the memory. The distant days of his early childhood were still fresh in his mind. He often used to say that it did him good to be with me because I found it so easy and so enjoyable to relive his fondest memories with him, whereas others could only suppress their smiling scorn for his childish tales by yawning. In me he really did have an eager audience 31as he told his stories of how things were in those days. Of course, the picture he drew of that time was far from clear, because he had lived in such a narrow circle, and whatever judgements he passed were all confined to the perspective of the penniless worker.
But I wasn’t particularly concerned about the events and customs of a bygone age, so long as the old man was able to go on telling me his wonderful, beautiful stories. They were not tales he had read, but stories which as a boy he had heard from his mother or from other children, or which later on during rainy days, when he was working as a cooper, he would exchange with his customers. It was remarkable how fresh they were in his memory, whereas some recent major event in the village could disappear from his mind almost immediately. When one saw him telling these stories—and one had to see him and not just hear him—one could sense how he was totally wrapped up in this wonderful world. Perhaps at one time it had served to distract him from all the grim realities and to fill his lonesome workshop with brightness, and then gradually it had turned into his own private and precious inner world. He talked about his heroes as if they were people he actually knew, and so to a small boy he seemed to have lived these adventures himself. I would swiftly abandon my shuttle and my weaving, and then listen to the old man until my mother would call me to come and eat. It was through him that I first heard about “Siegfried with the horny skin”, and how he made his skin hard with the blood of a slain dragon, with just one small gap over the heart, where he finally succumbed to the pain of a small wound. What a man he was! He made me feel 32bigger and stronger, and my heart swelled within my chest when I saw him appear time after time as the great saviour, performing ever more heroic deeds. Sometimes he seemed almost too great, but the one unprotected part of his body was a constant source of concern and made me feel closer to him as a fellow human being. And so I felt almost sorry when once again he returned to the forest of the dragon in order to take more of the same blood so that he could make himself totally invincible. In the dragon’s cave he found a beautiful princess who had been disowned by her father because of her bad behaviour and was now apparently living comfortably here with her paramour in this much-feared place, eating her meals out of golden dishes. However, he soon learnt that she was still a virgin, was bored with life here, and would very much have liked to go home, had it not been that she was afraid of the people there, and especially of her father. But now a strong man stood before her, who would be able to protect her and restore her honour. It didn’t take much for Siegfried to persuade her to go with him, leaving her weak paramour to rant and rage. The two of them got married, but the princess was not happy. She could not control him as she had controlled the man in the cave. And so, when this man later visited the neighbourhood, she told him that Siegfried was not completely invincible and she named the exact spot to strike in order to kill him. Shortly afterwards, when the weary Siegfried returned from the hunt and fell asleep, his treacherous wife’s lover duly struck the fatal blow. But then, tormented by her guilty conscience, and once more stuck with her weak lover, she became twice as unhappy as before. 33Year after year she wept for Siegfried, then she delivered the assassin—the man who had first seduced her—into the hands of her angry father, and spent the rest of her life in a convent.
I got the old man to tell me this story so often and in such detail that I felt perfectly capable of reproducing the gist of it myself. On the other hand, I would probably have added a few ideas of my own to another of his stories, which I’ll reproduce here: “An altar dedicated to an evil spirit had been erected next to an oak tree. But strangely enough, whenever the altar was made ready for Mass, a piece of the oak tree would fall on to it and smash it to pieces. Then one of the town’s most prominent citizens took it upon himself to climb into the ever-expanding opening in the tree. There, to his astonishment, he saw that the darkest depths appeared to be brightly illuminated. Several ropes were knotted together so that the man could be slowly lowered on a chair right down to the bottom.” Presumably then the main focus of the story would be what the man experienced down in the realm of the lost souls, but later my imagination played around so much with all these wonders, shaping and reshaping them, that now I only dare to reproduce the ending, or rather just to summarize it. The hero came back up into the world completely changed—he was a different man. Now he was a zealous preacher of the Christian faith, the truth of which he had fully realized down in the realm of the unbaptized. On his homeward journey he taught and converted many, but when he reached home, no one recognized him and he was thrown into prison, where his own son condemned him to martyrdom. But then he revealed his identity, told so many tales about the other world and preached so well that in the end all the people were 34converted, and on the former site of the oak tree they built a large and beautiful church.
For me it was as if the old man had lifted me out of the deep, dark valley into the free and open heights. It was not only a new world that I saw, but one might almost say that it was now a different sun that illuminated everything around me in a new light. The animals, rivers, mountains and forests came alive and talked to the little boy, who could see all around him the characters from all the fairy tales in which he loved to imagine himself as the hero. Our cows were no longer mere tools. From their large, earnest eyes I thought I could see that they could talk and reveal all kinds of mysterious and important things if they wanted to, and that the superior power which for some selfish reason had condemned them to silence might somehow now be overcome. My old man had indeed told me how between midnight and one o’clock on Christmas Eve the cows talked among themselves about the future and, in particular, about the destiny of their master. A farmer who was up in the hayloft had listened in to their conversation, but instead of the expected predictions, he had heard a string of complaints about himself; only the last of the horned gossipmongers was able to comfort her fellow sufferers with the news that soon it would all be over, because before the end of the week the farmer would be lying under a cross in the graveyard. This was too much for the eavesdropper. In his fury he leapt out of his hiding place in order to beat the prophetess of doom. But in his frantic haste, and in the darkness of the cowshed, he missed his footing on the ladder, tumbled down from the hayloft, broke his neck and died on the spot. Thus was the prophecy fulfilled, and the 35farmer came to a sticky end, as will anyone who listens in to the cows’ conversation on Christmas Eve.
I can’t really say that I actually believed all these stories. At least I only believed them for the time it took to tell them. But during that time, the old man held me completely under his spell. I forgot that I was sitting in my neighbour’s smoke-blackened, low-ceiling living room. As soon as he began, the papered-over windows and the strange old icons on the walls simply disappeared, and we were out in the great wide world. Then the chickens under the pile of stones he liked to call his stove could cackle to their hearts’ content, and the old Black Forest cuckoo clock could cuckoo as many hours as it wished—or even stop ticking altogether—because I heard nothing except the voice of my storyteller. I might almost say that I didn’t even hear him, or perhaps that for all my attentiveness my ears were the least occupied of my senses. I either froze or sweated in sympathy with the heroes, and my little hand clenched itself into a fist as I repeated every movement they made, just as it does when you watch an expert artisan performing a task that you yourself have struggled with for years. When my storyteller stopped, I scarcely noticed, because these magically conjured-up figures were still in motion before my eyes—until at last the pyramid top of the Üntscherspitz appeared once more in all its majesty through the paper-patched window. What did it matter to me whether the stories were true or not? I thought they were beautiful so long as I could live them for myself, and, without really believing in them, I would always go home with new ideas running through my head, enriching my daily life although I was never unhappy with that life. 36
