The city of Vienna invited me to attend a conference on Central Europe called "Mittel Europa."
Addicted as I am to traveling and to Vienna, I said, “Yes.” So there it was again: the always slightly embarrassing event of five or six authors climbing on a stage to do, yes, to do what acually? To speak about a subject they don’t have a clue about themselves. But each and one of them was ready, willing and able to make a few advertisements for themselves.
The best thing to do during these public discussions is to keep silent as long as possible.
There is always one colleague who will say, “I have prepared a statement on Central Europe.” And then he will read a story that goes on for twenty minutes, that has nothing to do with Central Europe but everything to do with his grandfather, and at the end, he manages to put the audience to sleep. This man (or woman) is always the savior of the event. Sleeping is harmless.
Now Central Europe, what the hell is that? It is pure nostalgia. A longing for the time when Vienna was still capital of an empire, but the apocalypse was already in the air. That time brought us the lethal but rather interesting combination of Wittgenstein, Freud, Kraus, Hitler, Weininger (one of my favourite Viennese characters), and Kokoschka, to name just a few.
It’s a longing for the “Kaffeehauskultur,” which I happen to detest. The idea of Kaffehauskultur is that an author should sit all day long in a cafe where he writes, meets his colleagues, drinks coffee and eats some delicious pastry.
There is nothing wrong with eating strudel in a cafe. Actually, it should be encouraged. But writing should be done at home, or at least in a place where nobody can watch the happless author.
The movie director István Szabó said that Central Europe was above all a sense of self-irony.
Oh no, no glamourization of self-irony.
Even politicians nowadays display self-irony.
It’s time for a manifesto: against self-irony (but in favor of self-hate).