Read Online Klingsor's Last Summer by Hermann Hesse - Free Book Online Page B

holes within himself. Nothing came to him, while once again he was overwhelmed by the feeling that he might have forgotten the one most important thing. He poked and probed around inside himself like a nervous traveler who fumbles through all his pockets and suitcases for his ticket, which he possibly has tucked into his hat, or is even holding in his hand. But what good did that “possibly” do?
    Earlier, perhaps an hour or more ago, had he not had an insight, made a find? What had it been? What? It was gone; he could not locate it again. Despairingly, he struck his forehead with his fist. God in heaven, let me find the key! Let me not die this way, so wretchedly, so stupidly, so sadly! Torn to tatters like drifting clouds in a storm, his whole past flew by him, millions of images tangled and intertwined, unrecognizable and mocking, yet each one reminding him of something. Of what, of what?
    Suddenly he found the name “Wagner” on his lips. As if unconscious he spoke it aloud: “Wagner—Wagner.” Where did the name come from? From what shaft within himself? What was it driving at? Who was Wagner? Wagner?
    He hung on to the name. He had a task, a problem, and that was better than floating in formlessness. All right: Who is Wagner? What concern of mine is Wagner? Why are my lips, these twisted lips in my criminal’s face, murmuring the name Wagner here in the middle of the night? He pulled himself together. All sorts of notions came into his mind. He thought of Lohengrin, and then of his somewhat ambiguous feelings about the composer Richard Wagner. At the age of twenty he had been wild about him. Later he had grown wary, and in time had accumulated a number of reservations and doubts on the subject. He had done a great deal of criticizing of Wagner, and perhaps these criticisms were directed less toward Richard Wagner than to his own former love for the composer’s music? Ha, had he caught himself again? Had he uncovered another fraud, a small lie, a minor crime? Oh yes, one thing after another was coming to light. In the irreproachable life of Friedrich Klein, husband and civil servant, things had not at all been so irreproachable, not at all so clear. There was a skeleton hidden in every closet. Yes, of course, that was the case with Wagner too. Friedrich Klein had taken a very strong line against the composer Richard Wagner. Why? Because Friedrich Klein could not forgive himself for having raved about this same Wagner as a young man. In Wagner he was persecuting his own youthful enthusiasm, his own youth, his own love. Why? Because youth and artistic enthusiasm and Wagner and all the rest reminded him painfully of things he had lost, because he had let himself be married by a woman he did not love, or at any rate not in the right way, not sufficiently. Oh yes, and as he behaved toward Wagner he had in his official capacity behaved toward many persons and things. He was such a decent fellow, Herr Klein, and behind his decency he was concealing nothing but filth and iniquity. If he had tried to be honest—how many secret thoughts had he hidden from himself? How many glances at pretty girls in the street, how much envy of loving couples whom he encountered in the evenings when he walked home from his office? And then the thoughts of murder. And had he not turned the hatred which he should have directed toward himself against that schoolteacher—
    He started suddenly. One more connection! The schoolteacher and murderer had—why, of course, his name had been Wagner. So there was the crux of it. Wagner—that was the name of that madman who had killed his whole family. Hadn’t his entire life for years been somehow connected with this man Wagner? Hadn’t that evil shadow pursued him everywhere?
    Well, thank God he had found the thread again. Oh yes, and once upon a time, in long-past, better days, he had savagely denounced this man Wagner and called down the cruelest