Page - 362 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Sandra Goldstein new sewing machines, etc. He knows that he needs none of these things. He reads ab- sentmindedly, taking in only enough to absorb the boredom behind the words. Some of the advertisements have come unstuck and are flapping irritatingly against the window panes. This urban experience was a source of fleeting impressions and fluid states of consciousness, irrational emotions, of tension, unease and destabilization. Coupled with the instabilities of private lives, with economic difficulties, the masses looked like the dwellers of Steinhof, the famous Viennese mental hospital. The masses live in the big lie of the metropolis. It looks like an ongoing gigan- tic circus of a Sunday at the Prater with the deafening cries and blinding lights. A roller-coaster, a merry-go-round, cheap cabarets, bars, everything was there to satisfy the tastes of the masses. “Aber hinter alldem, hinter dem Amüsierbetrieb und seiner Kundschaft, lagerte die Armut, hatten Krankheit und Leid ihren festen Wohnsitz, ja bildeten den wahren Kern der Dinge, ihre Quintessenz — das spürte Rudolf Gord- weil jetzt…“ People rush to places of amusement and dancing and bawdiness not always out of any real appetite for pleasure, but rather in the need to escape. Most of the people are unhappy, sick of their lives, unable to stand themselves. Burdened by daily cares, bore- dom, or simply fear, an obscure fear of which they are not even aware — “eine unklare Angst, die überhaupt nicht ins Bewusstsein eintritt, die stiehlt ihnen unmerklich die Ruhe, verfolgt sie ununterbrochen, hindert sie daran, mutig und aufrecht den Tumult in ihrem Seeleninneren und um sich herum zu betrachten.“ 9 The rootlessness grew even worse after the war, thinks Gordweil, so that people need a new religion capable of stopping these fleeing masses and returning them to themselves. Or as one woman remarks about the whole generation : “Alle stehen sie auf dem Sprungbrett. Alles ist ihnen egal. Entweder bringen sie andere um oder sich selbst.“ 0 The only difference Vogel tells us is that at Steinhof it is life in all its nakedness while in the metropolis the bourgeoisie is trying to cover the truth by introducing their laws. The protagonist of Married life, Gordweil, like Biberkopf, Joyce’s hero Bloom, Kafka’s Karl, embodies and exemplifies the existential anxiety underlying urban ex- istence. Gradually, anxiety is taking precedence in the central characters’ existence. Vogel conveys the confusion and the perceptual overloading of experience in the city through powerful visual images of life dominated by machines and traffic patterns. The rush of modern traffic creates lines of energy, but they seem to collide just like Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 69. 0 Ibid., p. 10.