Lost Son. Hermann Broch

       5.

      HERMANN TO ARMAND

      SPINNFABRIK “TEESDORF”

      Telephone 64-2-96

      Austrian Postal Savings Bank Acct No. 10235

      Telegraph address: SPINTEES WIEN

      Factory: Teesdorf, Lower Austria,

      Mail: Tattendorf, Lower Austria.

      Telephone: Leobersdorf 13

      Vienna, 30. January 1925

       1., Gonzagagasse 7 No. 4

       Hello, old boy,

       I see from today’s telegram that you are (I hope) doing much better already. This is good news of course; I am less happy to learn that Willy Hofmann’s book is apparently not among your things. I ask you to look around again carefully for it, and let me know the answer right away.

       I am not surprised at your difficulties in Latin and mathematics: you came back home with the best of intentions, you were meaning to complete your work in both subjects with Willy, or me, and with Nowak, and it would surely have been possible for you to have returned to school splendidly prepared. One of the things I have never been able to comprehend about the time you spent here in Vienna is your mulish resistance to even that little bit of studying that you originally wished to do and for which I gave you every opportunity. So now if I bring up this business with Group B and C once more with Dedet, I will only look ridiculous; I won’t reproach you further now, but I do think you have enough character to draw your own conclusions about this situation. Besides, to change your group in the middle of the school year seems to me to be quite impossible.

       In addition to that, I am afraid I must, in all seriousness, forbid you putting your greetings to your grandparents in quotation marks. It is an absolute requirement that you know what one can write and what one cannot write. Witless jokes such as these, with their aggressive, petulant tone make a poor and tasteless impression. You must know what tone you may use in writing and speaking: if you paid more attention to such things, you would have avoided nearly all those scenes. What you seem to lack in your more intimate dealings with people is a certain tasteful gentility. You seem rather to prefer a certain tasteless nastiness. I will not lightly put up with this kind of thing. The tone you use with partly defenseless people such as delivery men is perhaps the best example of this. Generally this is called tactless and since I usually suspect that behind a tactless person there lurks a person without a good heart, to observe this in you is of course painful for me.

       Perhaps you think that in life you don’t need to have a good heart, and that the tough and the bad person can find pleasures more easily and more often than the good person: but I am convinced that the bad person is also the more unhappy person. Because only the good man is intelligent and only the wise man has the capability of being kind. To be oafish doesn’t require any intelligence: every idiot can manage that. And I have always found, and still do, that so-called bad men were extraordinarily stupid and unhappy fellows. You lament the brevity and meaningless of life: but it requires a rather large measure of intelligence to prevail against this apparent meaninglessness. What is generally known as human culture is really nothing other than the total efforts of humanity to take control of this meaninglessness and to invest life with a sense of order, meaning, and value. But whoever doesn’t subordinate himself to this idea of culture, whoever doesn’t work at developing himself in this culture, or whoever is incapable of it, such a person is just too stupid, too uncultured and tactless, and his life is simply a miserable fading off into nothingness with the fear of death in the background. But the man who gives a cultural value to his life must treat his fellow man with kindness and social responsibility: for all civilization is based on this commonality and is directed towards a culture belonging to all humanity.

       With this in mind, you will discover two bars of Heller chocolate in the package of books which was sent to you.

       Warmest greetings, P.

      NOWAK: unknown

      HELLER CHOCOLATE: well-known brand of the Viennese confectioner Manner, founded just before World War I by Josef Manner