StudienVerlag - Oapen

In kaum einer autobiographischen Kurznotiz hat RN bei der Darstellung der authentischen
Geschichte seines Durchbruch-Jahres 1927 auf die Erwähnung seiner Seemanns-Erfahrung
„an afrikanischen, asiatischen Küsten“ als Supercargo auf dem
holländischen Tanker Katendrecht verzichtet: Auf Grund dieses Texts (und der Briefe
dieser Monate) ist das Datum dieser Fahrt eingrenzbar: zwischen Ende Juli 1927 und
Anfang September 1927.
„Flood“ and „Mammon“ – Titel der englischen Übersetzungen von „Sintflut“ und
„Macht“.
[Ein jüdischer Vater: Wien 1928]
Aus: Journal and Memoirs of Henry …, 2 nd part, S. 48/49
DV: Typoskript mit hs. Korrekturen, ÖNB 20.893
[…] [Father] was a Jew, was he not, and almost militantly conscious of it, and proud
of it. His actions, instincts, virtues, deficiencies, the whole highly complicated functioning
of his brains: there was not a more Jewish Jew in the five continents. Then
why the hell did he manoeuvre me out of the Jewish faith? For this is what he did.
Cleverly. There was a law in Austria that a male child would follow his father’s faith
up to the seventh year of life; that between seven and fourteen he would stay put on
whatever faith he had, irrespective of his Father’s changes of religion; only later he
could choose for himself. My father, then, left the Jewish faith when I was one day
less than seven years old and became undenominational; automatically I followed
suit. Two days later, when I was seven years and one day old, he returned to the
Jewish fold; personally, alone, there was no changing back for me.
Why, I asked him as soon as I could understand. He didn’t take away my religion,
he replied with that quiet, smooth self-assurance that was his in his talks with me
(self-assured and unshakeable he was like a rock!); he didn’t take my religion from me
but only the inconvenience and indignity of compulsory religious teaching as exercised
in the Austrian schools. There is nothing more detrimental to religion than the
way they teach it, he said smoothly; especially the Vienna Jews. I know; believe me.
I believed him; but to this day I believe that he deceived himself, that he did
it because he’d hit on the ingenuous idea, on the feat of cleverness, on yet another
fencer’s feint against the Authorities. What he did not know was that he created in
me a void; an uneasiness first, then a desire. As my eyes opened, as first fears, first
hopes, longings, dreams, ambitions bore in upon me, I could have done with some
alternative to the god of cleverness.
So I started to create for me a God of my own. It was nothing thought-out, highfaluting
pantheistic, philosophic. If I look at my diaries, it does not seem to have
moved in me until about my fourteenth year, just after my return from England to
Austria; at the beginning of the span of time I am dealing with. And this is another
reason for me to call it my own time, the time of my own making.
While it was in the intellectual sphere an awakening to a certain measure of
maturity, my religious awakening (which is perhaps a too high sounding word
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