Ludwig Wittgenstein's Favorite Novel
He imagines what they think about while walking in silence behind him, and he imagines what he would do if he looked behind to find his children transformed into capercaillies.
Otto Strauss’ Das Reliquienschrein has never been translated into English. The favorite novel of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it belongs to the Wohnzimmerliteratur that flourished in fin de siècle Austria but disappeared in the Thirty Years War of 1914-1945. Wohnzimmerliteratur novels were privately printed and read aloud in the homes of Vienna’s most distinguished families. As a rule, they were never published publicly or deposited in archives or libraries.
Das Reliquienschrein can be compared to Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest in that it is also the fictional diary of a rural clergyman, but Strauss’ diary writer is a Lutheran minister, not a Catholic priest. The minister’s name is never mentioned. He serves a small Lutheran church in Todtnauberg, where he lives with his wife, whom he calls Die Fremdefrau or Schäfchen but never names, and five children: Otto, Ingrid, Hannelore, Karl, and Greta. The minister does not care much for his congregation or family. He escapes both with long walks through the Black Forest, which he describes with careful attention to the flora and fauna and the shapes of the shadows cast by sun coming through the canopy. Sometimes he begrudgingly allows Greta and Karl to follow behind him on his walks, as long as they do not speak to him. He imagines what they think about while walking in silence behind him, and he imagines what he would do if he looked behind to find his children transformed into capercaillies.
But the central event in the minister’s life—the point into which every other moment collapses—is his meeting with Simon Müller, an old seminary friend, who visits without warning one autumn Sunday and hands to the minister a small reliquary containing a relic of St. Alexios of Rome.1 Müller had been an odd duck in seminary,2 but his manner at the meeting is quiet and joyful. He walks like a man unexpectedly relieved of a debt. The minister thinks at first the reliquary is a joke, but Müller reassures him. They spend the afternoon together in a long walk through the forest, then quiet Simon leaves on foot.
From the moment Müller hands him the reliquary the minister never relinquishes it. The prose of the diary shifts to a new register, as if its author were guiding his own hand from beyond himself. He begins to refer to himself as “der Schriftsteller”. The entries pair descriptions of his walks in the forest, now daily and ever longer, with predictions or pronouncements about future events. When the events occur, one after another, he notes only: “It wrote it, and it happened.” He wonders in one entry if he is predicting events or composing them.
The final section of the novel concerns a clearing deep in the woods, where the minister finds himself one afternoon after a long walk on which he recites psalms from memory and, for once, notes neither flora nor fauna nor shadows. Nature hides, and in the customary nature place (naturort) in his mind, now cleared of nature, the divine appears. The clearing is far enough away from his home and it’s late enough in the year, that he must spend the night there; his first bivouac. He notes the cold and discomfort with fascination in what is the diary’s closest brush with giddiness. The day after the first bivouac he gathers sticks and twigs and moss and leaves and lays out in the clearing a model of Constantinople in 1452. After a day building the city in miniature he bivouacs again. The final diary entry reads: “I build. I prepare. I compose (dichten) myself. I wait for the Turks.”
St. Alexios (“the Man of God”) was a fool for Christ who fled his family’s wealth and the prospect of marriage to live as a beggar outside a church in Edessa. When the monks there recognized his holiness, he fled again. But a storm delivered him back to Rome, so he lived the rest of his life as a beggar outside the door of his parent’s home. No one recognized him, and he revealed himself only in a note discovered when he died. See also: Ida Friederike Görres’ “The Bride of St. Alexios”.
As a seminarian he embodied Thomas de Quincey’s description of George Finlay, author of History of Greece From Its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864: "Ebullient with subtlety."
"As a rule, they were never published publicly or deposited in archives or libraries." Right from the beginning, it's housed in paradox. Thanks for this one!