Originally published in German in 1980 as Die Ausgesperrten
Translated by Michael Hulse
ONE NIGHT AT the end of the fifties an assault is committedin the Vienna municipal park. The following persons all grab hold of one solitary man out walking: Rainer Maria Witkowski and his twin sister Anna Wit-kowski, Sophie Pachhofen (formerly von Pachhofen), and Hans Sepp. Rainer Maria Witkowski was named after Rainer Maria Rilke. All of them are about eighteen, Hans Sepp is a year or so older than the others, though he too is without a trace of maturity. Of the two girls, Anna is the more ferocious, which can be seen in the fact that she pays most attention to the face of the subject. Particular courage is required if you are to scratch a man's face while he is looking full in your own (though he cannot see much since it is dark) or indeed try to scratch his eyes out. For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for.
Anna (of all people) really ought to leave this fellow alone, because his character is better than hers. Because he is a victim. Anna is one of those who perpetrate wrongs. The victim is always better because he is innocent. At this time, of course, there are still a good many innocent perpetrators. With their wartime memories, their souvenirs, they stand gazing into the audience from windows bright with flowers, all friendliness, waving, or else they are in high office. With geraniums. Forgive and forget the whole lot, is what they say, so a completely new start can be made.
Later (when everyone always knows better) it turns out that the victim was an attorney working for a medium-sized company. The victim was a man who felt totally at home in a household that was kept neat and orderly down to the very last detail, which is something Anna reserves a particular contempt for. Cleanliness goes against her grain. By nature she is extremely unclean both within and without.
The youngsters appropriate the man's wallet. This notwithstanding, he is badly beaten up.
Anna bashes away regardless, thinking: How good to find somewhere to get rid of this powerful hatred of mine at last without having to turn it upon myself, which would be quite the wrong place for it. The money is useful too. I hope there's a lot in the wallet (it turned out to be on the average side). Hans also punches away with those fists of his, fists accustomed to manual work. As a man, he keeps to male ways of playing the game of violence: punches and treacherous, pile-driving headbutts. He leaves the universally notorious kick in the shins to Sophie, who avails herself of it time and again. Like two pistons of a complicated machine, thrusting alternately. It looked as if you just didn't want to get your fingers dirty and were leaving it to your feet, Rainer tells her later, taking her tenderly in his arms. Only to recoil promptly with a smothered, poisonous cry when she kicks him in the kneecap. She won't have that kind of thing.
Rainer, who sees himself as Sophie's one and only boyfriend (which was why he took her in his arms, after all), claws at the victim's clothing in quest of the wallet and cannot find it at first (but eventually does). Then he drives his knee into the belly of the man, who is hardly putting up any defence any more, and there is a gurgle and some slobber dribbles from the mouth. There was no blood to be seen because it was too dark.
That's brutal violence against a defenceless person, and quite unnecessary, declares Sophie, and she pulls with an audible tearing sound at the hair of the man lying in an untidy heap on the ground.
What's unnecessary is best of all, says Rainer, who wants to go on fighting. We agreed on that. What's unnecessary-that rather than anything else-is the principle at stake. But I think what's necessary is even better, says Hans, who (oddly enough) loves money, and he eyes the wallet. Money is unimportant, snaps Rainer, spraying the wallet with spittle, what do you think, are those notes hundreds or thousands?
Money isn't our guiding principle, says Sophie in her shimmering fashion. Her parents have a great deal of it, and prosperity has made her wayward.
Hans, the sweat flying from him, is still pounding away at the victim like some mindless machine that destroys the spirit in others. That is how the brother and sister see him: as a machine. Anna has been feeling all along that it's a beautiful machine, and Sophie will soon be thinking so too. There may be a seed of discord in this. Hans's fists thump down like hammers and only draw for further blows. Ouch, groans the victim softly, but hardly has the strength to say even that. And then: Police! But no one's listening. Anna takes this as a reason to kick him in the balls, since she is against the police on principle, as anarchists always are. The man maintains a frightened silence, curls up, and rocks about a little till at last he lies motionless and stays that way. Anyway, they've already got the money.
Anna prises Hans (who is thrashing about wildly) off the attorney and drags him away. It is time to make their getaway. People out for a walk can be heard approaching. What are they doing here at this late hour? The very same thing will happen to them one day.
The mouths of the grammar school kids and the worker are producing whistling sounds as they turn at a trot into Johannesgasse and hurry past the Vienna conservatoire, where a flurry of wind and string can be heard (and where Anna takes piano lessons). Orchestra rehearsals, which are always scheduled late so that people who work can take part are in progress. The Kartnerstrasse will be best now, with its busy multitudes, pants Sophie, so we can hide amidst the crowd of nighttime people that one finds there. There isn't a crowd on earth that we can hide in (Anna), because we stand out from the masses wherever we may be. The point isn't to hide but to do it openly, because that way we assert our principles of random violence to all comers (Rainer). Jerk (Hans).
Anna does not say anything else. Instead she thoughtfully licks salt from the victim's sweat and blood from the scratches scored by the victim in her right hand, the hand that was doing the hitting, and Rainer gives her an approving look, Sophie is mildly revolted, and Hans is impelled to slap her fingers. Scumbag.
There is so much pent-up rage in Anna (probably resulting from problems caused by the generation gap) that what she would like best of all would be to smash the bright windows along Vienna 's shopping boulevard. She would absolutely adore having the things in those shop windows but her pocket money won't run to it. Which is why you have to earn a little extra in this way. She is invariably consumed with envy if one of the other girls at school turns up wearing a new two-piece outfit with a white blouse, or new heels. All she says, however, is: It makes me want to throw up when I see those bints tarted up like that. Look at them in their half-wit togs, superficial, not two thoughts to rub together. She herself only wears dirty jeans and outsize men's pullovers, to make a statement about her attitude. The psychiatrist she has to see on account of a recurring inability to speak (an inability which afflicts her out of the blue and then vanishes without trace) is forever asking: Tell me, my dear girl, why don't you get something nice to wear and have your hair in curls, basically you're a pretty lass and you ought to be taking dancing classes. Just look at you, you give a young lad the creeps.
As for Anna, everything gives her the creeps.
No matter. These four depraved young characters contrast sharply with the cheerful people out on the town, looking for a fun night out and generally not finding it because this isn't the city for it. Of course fresh vitality is normally the hallmark of youth. But not of these four. And if youngsters deliberately reject freshness there is nothing to be done about it. These four are not looking for fun any more because they have already had theirs. Presently, so as not to be conspicuous, they stop running and change to an ostentatiously innocuous saunter. Rainer takes Sophie's arm. Sophie is trying to tidy her hair-do, using the dark window panes to their left and right. She gives the impression of being the most unmoved of the four, which is in fact the case, and indeed she always looks as though she were wearing white gloves. A man finds this provocative and tempting, but it never affords him any satisfaction. That is why you have to think up assaults like this. Because you don't get any satisfaction from Sophie. But there are a lot of other reasons as well. For instance: Rainer inclines to be the brain of the gang, Hans the hands, Sophie tends to be a kind of voyeuse, and Anna is angry at the whole of mankind, which is bad, since it clouds the vision and makes it difficult to get at anything. True, Anna finds it hard to get at the beautiful things you see around anyway, because you need money to buy them. Anna does not know that you cannot buy inner worth. The unfortunate drawback with inner worth is that it is hidden away where no one can see it. Anna wants things that are visible on the outside too, but she won't admit as much. People should not be beaten up for reasons of hatred but for no reason at all, it should be an end in itself, admonishes her brother Rainer. All that counts is beating them up, whether I hate them or not (Anna). You haven't understood a single thing, Rainer tells her in a superior tone.
Shit (Hans). What he means by this vulgar expression is that he has torn his shirt. There'll be hell to pay with the old woman again. We'll find some dark hallway and divvy up in a minute, says Anna, then you can buy a new one tomorrow.
Rainer hates his parents but is afraid of them too. They were his progenitors and now they provide his keep, while he keeps himself occupied with poetry. Fear is a component of hatred (thus Anna, who could write a doctoral thesis on the subject of hate), if one feared nothing there would be no point in hatred, and all that would remain would be empty indifference. It'd be better to be dead. Philistines are unacquainted with hatred of this kind. If we had no powerful feelings we'd be mere objects, or we'd be dead, which we will be soon enough in any case. I love most forms of art.
I hate nothing, says Sophie, because there is nothing in my life that's worth hating. But the one and only feeling you do have is your love of me, says Rainer. If both of us jab our fingers into a victim's eyes, the bond between us is firmer than marriage could ever be. We're against marriage.
I've got to go now, says Sophie, who always has to be going somewhere or other.
You can't leave me alone now because I need someone now to explain everything to, says Rainer. You've got two others anyway, says Sophie, unmoved by this outburst, you can explain it all to them. I have to go home now. What about your share? You can give it to me in school tomorrow. Hans is already reaching his claws out towards the money, a thread of saliva at the corner of his mouth discreetly suggesting greed. To which Rainer responds: Take it easy.
You look real good when you're beating someone up, Anna tells the young worker ingratiatingly, and strokes the muscles of his upper arms. His mother would never stroke his upper arms like that. It wouldn't occur to her to stroke his arms at all. There is a certain suggestiveness about Anna's stroking which makes the gesture mean more than it seems to.
I think you're great (Anna to Hans). Bye (Hans to Rainer and Anna). See you tomorrow.
With the tension ebbing away, the twins walk home to the eighth district, where many petits bourgeois live, mostly white-collar workers and pensioners. These two are themselves as much a part of the lower middle class as the core is a part of an apple, and they feel at home in it. This is their home, and they climb the stairs of the gloomy tenement building, without touching anything (to avoid being contaminated by the squalor). Soon they have reached the summit: that is to say, the fourth floor. They have arrived. And as their unfriendly home appears before them, so too does weariness, and reluctantly it opens the door to the tension, because that tension still has a thing or two planned for today, things it can't use the brother and sister for. The two re-enter their everyday life and lock the door behind them.
THERE IT IS. The apartment. And there are the parents too. A uniform tranquillity prevails before and after the assaults. Imperceptibly the children have slipped out of the child's role into the role of an adult with responsibilities. Neither of them fulfils those responsibilities.
All around the shabby old apartment tower the innumerable substandard dwellings of the old imperial city tower. Ugly and unprepossessing people, many of them old as well, slink about in these blocks, carrying chamber pots and pitchers to the toilets and water pipes in the corridors and back again. This produces a constant to-and-fro without any productive side to it.
From time to time a genius will flourish in their midst. The soil that nourishes this genius will frequently be filth, and madness will mark the bounds. The genius will want to escape the filth at all costs, but will not always succeed in eluding the madness. The Witkowskis have no notion that their oppressive fug has already brought forth a genius: Rainer. He has already got clear as far as his hips of his native mire and is now trying to haul one leg free and establish a tentative footing, though in the process he repeatedly sinks back in again, like a rhinoceros stuck in the mud. He saw that once on TV in The Living Desert. The head where the unlovely worm of his literary talent has taken up residence is up in the air, at any rate, gazing across a sea of fusty old underpants, battered furniture, tattered newspapers, dog-eared books, piled-up detergent boxes, dishcloths with coffee grounds with a growth of mould, dishcloth with coffee grounds without the mould, tea-cups with some unidentifiable encrustation, breadcrumbs, pencil stubs, grubby eraser rubbings, filled-in crossword puzzles and sweaty socks, gazing involuntarily across into the realm of Art, the one realm that is wide open to you as long as you have a little luck.
Today, though, Rainer and Anna are at school, the grammar school which unfortunately they have to go to every day till they take their school-leaving exams.
Herr Witkowski returned from the War with one leg, but erect. In the War he was more of a man than now, that is to say, he was intact, two-legged, and in the SS. Nowadays he is as firm about his hobby as he was then about his choice of profession. There are no bounds to his hobby, which is art photography. His one-time enemies got away through the chimneys and crematoria of Auschwitz and Treblinka or littered Slavic earth. Nowadays Rainer's father crosses the petty frontiers of today's Germany anew whenever he takes his artistic photographs. Only a philistine recognises those frontiers in his private life. In photography, the bounds are fixed by clothing. And Witkowski senior bursts the narrow confines of clothing and morality. Mother knew right away who her son was taking after in his artistic leanings: Father. Father had the eye of the amateur artist. Get undressed, Margarethe, we'll take a nude picture or two! There you go again, get undressed, it always occurs to you when I'm busy doing the cleaning. Who's the breadwinner in this family anyway, demands Herr Witkowski, who draws an invalidity pension and works as a night porter. With this disability, all I have left is my hobby, porn photography. As far as mature people are concerned there is no such thing as pornography. Pornography is for people who need to be led and influenced. And even if my children won't follow me into hobbyland, at least you will, Gretl. Now get on with it, pronto, my camera's waiting to do its duty.
Can't you take photos of me with my clothes on like other people do? No, any amateur can take pictures of people with their clothes on. Anyway, it's a twofold pleasure for me, once when I take the pictures and then secondly when I look at them and evaluate them critically. Between the two stages come the developing and enlarging. That is enjoyable too. Art is always a struggle for the desired result. Your willpower will show in the picture too, Gretl, when you've put your objections behind you. You can see an artist's talent in his eyes, partly, burning deep down within.
Right, let's go. A housewife who is being spied on by a stranger while she's washing in the kitchen tries to cover up but all she has for the purpose is (say) an inadequate ovencloth. Which doesn't even cover her vital parts, her privates, thank God. And the privates are what I want. The housewife, being clumsy into the bargain, covers the wrong part too, instead of the right part. Come on, Gretl, come on.
But now there's a shadow over the privates, you stupid cow. The cunt, I mean. But I'm doing it just the way I did it last time! Well, that's wrong, you have to do it different every time so that the effect is striking and artistic. You have to leave that to me, who's the photography expert anyway, you or me? You, Otto. See?
Mother, who has seen better days (days when SS officers' wives would meet), better days than these days as an artist's wife, tugs and adjusts but if anything she makes matters worse rather than improving things.
You have to look afraid. It's always a terrific feeling to smash down resistance, I smashed resistance quite often myself in the War and liquidated numerous persons all on my own. Nowadays I have this wretched leg to contend with, but back then the women couldn't get enough of me, it was the magical attraction of the uniform that did it. That smart uniform. I remember how we were often up to the ankles of our riding-boots in blood in Polish villages. Look, thrust your pelvis further forward, you slut, where's your pussy got to again? Ah, there it is.
Mother hums one of those melancholy songs by Koschat, which always have a birch seat in them. She is thinking of a field of wheat and a walk in the country, things that you're reluctant to expect a one-legged man to take on, it's hard to ask it of him, he'd only spoil the mood from the very start anyway. Father is thinking of a different field, the field of honour where he didn't fall. Now he keeps a careful watch on the field of family honour, by way of compensation. So his wife, the sow, doesn't have it off with men who are not disabled. You can't keep an eye on her all the time, and what does she do at the grocer's when she goes there?
Frau Witkowski says it's often necessary to have a break. Herr Witkowski says he'll break something of hers in a minute, and throws something hard that hits her shoulder and makes her start. She'll have a bruise there. Ready yet, you whore? Look, it's not too much to ask, now is it? Else I'll knock you down with my crutches. At one time I would have thrown myself on you but now it's out of the question, a man with one leg can't throw himself anywhere (or he'll have problems getting up again). It's like a fish. A fish hasn't got any legs at all but it can swim and dive gracefully. So I'm a perfect photographer. Now get your legs apart!
My hobby photographer's eye tells me that you've not washed your hair. Again. I ordered you to wash your hair. It's supposed to look silky and not like some straggly thornbush. You do nothing but get in the way of my personal fulfilment. I get my fulfilment from nude photography. Whenever you block off my forays into the realm of photography I could bash your skull in.
But I don't block off your forays into the realm of photography, not at all, Otti.
ANNA DESPISES TWO classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop. In her there is nothing whatsoever of a lass with a perm or a bobbing pony-tail listening to a hit in a record store and restlessly tapping her foot because the rhythm gets to her. Everybody but her is on the ice, the smooth, endless ice, and Anna kicks and shoves them in turn as she goes along. Right out to the very edge, which you cannot see but which it's to be hoped is there so that they can all be swept into the deathly-cold water. What she talks about with her brother is of a philosophical or literary nature, but what speaks from within her alone is the language of the sounds produced by the piano.
On a school trip once, the girls in her class took a photo where they were all giving a double-page pic of Peter Kraus in Bravo magazine a kiss. Eight laughing faces, all going mmmm-mmmm with their lips pursed to kiss and smiling into the camera. Anna was the only one who wouldn't purse her lips, and they jeered at her. The real derision followed soon after, when one of the girls said to Anni: Hey, Anni, get in here quick, they've got Bach on the Wurlitzer, sounds like your kind of thing. And dimwit Anna, stupid with sun, blinded by her music studies and rendered a social defective by a crazy mother, dashed in as fast as she could go, wanting her own music that nobody but her would understand and which she could explain. But what was playing on the jukebox? A hit by Elvis, Tuttifrutti, which you have to reject for educational reasons, let alone anything else. The girls rolled about on the cafe floor, their stupid schoolmate Anna imagined you'd get Bach on a Wurlitzer and not what youngsters love.
That is the kind of twisted schoolkid Anna is. Anna, who spends her spare time playing the piano.
In Anna's case it tends to be a sweeping-up job, like a street-cleaning machine. In Rainer's it is more like a flight of steps consisting of living human beings, with the young author standing on the topmost step, picked out by a light, reading out one of his own poems, a poem that embraces the whole of mankind and is mythic in character.
Apart from literature (which anyone who can speak is a master of, none more nor less than another, but which certain people have monopolised, people who can't afford a superior method to elevate them out of their surroundings), Rainer has unfortunately not managed to conquer anything else yet. But literature is well able to meet Rainer's demands.
Whenever (contrary to all expectation) the twins are invited to some wild party, they promptly say no, we don't associate with people like that, that kind of fun is stupid and pointless. But they only say it because they can't dance and can't stand not being better at something than other people. Renunciation is rarely easy for Youth, but Age finds it less of a problem since it has already been practising renunciation the whole time.
Rainer says you can take possession of a person. First of all you have to know more than he does, and then he will recognise your expert status. Hans, for instance, the young worker met at the jazz club. Rainer will explain everything to him, till he is nothing but a tool without a will of his own; this is more difficult than fashioning a literary text, since people are capable of putting up surprising resistance. Which is tiring. But it stretches you.
Art is flexible and tremendously forbearing. People are occasionally refractory, but they are receptive to explanations. Of course they think they know better anyway, but Rainer really does know better.
The kids who go to school with him are a grey flock of lambs, ignorant and immature. They say what they did with girls at the weekend, in the basements (converted for partying) of their parental homes, in their own rooms in comfortable apartments at Hietzing, in the woods while looking for mushrooms, or in a changing cubicle at the swimming baths. The girls say what they allowed to be done to them or how they refused to do it and how the boys begged. But they were adamant because they Want To Stay A Virgin. Everything that's said is a cue for something else. Rainer, have you never done it with a girl? At least when they're talking about intimate subjects like this they don't call him 'Professor' the way they usually do. Rainer promptly explains that lust is a species of ecstasy. (????) You see, in this state of ecstasy, consciousness is merely the consciousness of the body, and therefore a reflexive consciousness of physicality. As in the case of physical pain, in lust there is a kind of reflex which ensures that one is very intensely aware of one's lust. (Huh? I don't get it.)