Die Männer waren vollauf damit beschäftigt

"Die Männer waren vollauf damit beschäftigt, Geld zu verdienen, den sozialen Aufsteig der Familie zu betreiben und gegebenenfalls für einen aus der Art geschlagenen Sohn oder Neffen zu sorgen, der sich irgendeiner künstlerischen oder sonstwie brotlosen Laufbahn verschrieben hatte." — Friedrich Torberg, in Die Tante Jolesch.

The men were very busy trying to make money, improve on the family's social standing, and, where appropriate, support those stricken sons or nephews who were dedicated to artistic or otherwise unprofitable careers.

Happy in a different way

At the end of Chapter 5 of the first part of The Idiot, the Prince says in response to being quizzed as to whether he had in Switzerland been in love: "я... был счастлив иначе" ... "I ... was happy in a different way".

Prince Myshkin embodies certain spiritual values, and the divide that Dostoevsky explored with his juxtaposition of the Prince with the hectic and dysfunctional world of St Petersburg society is a divide with which we still are confronted. Friedrich Torberg, talking of the decline suffered by European culture through the course of two world wars, states at the outset of the first Tante Jolesch book: "Ich denke vielmehr an ein Untergangssymptom, welches sich darin äußert, daß in unsrer technokratischen Welt, in unsrer materialistischen Kommerz- und Konsumgesellschaft die Käuze und Originale aussterben müssen." ... Kauz is a wonderful word, it refers to a certain awkward and reclusive species of owl - it is this bird that is an omen of death, whereas the more elegant Eule is an emblem of wisdom; here Käuze means eccentrics or oddballs: "I concentrate rather on one symptom of decline, namely that in our technocratic world, in our materialistic consumer society, eccentrics and originals are bound for extinction."

In The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes two twins who had been diagnosed as autistic and retarted but communicated with each other sharing very large prime numbers which they appeared to savour for their beauty and delight, primes in fact so large that at the time Dr Sacks was unable to verify that the longest of them were indeed primes. Sacks goes on to describe how the twins were separated "for their own good" but questions the outcome: "Deprived of their numberical 'communion' with each other, and of time and opportunity for any 'contemplation' or 'communion' at all - they are always being hurried and jostled from one job to another - they seem to have lost their strange numerical power, and with this the chief joy and sense of their lives."

Sacks goes on to mention an autistic girl with a phenomenal gift for drawing, who was "subjected to a therapeutic regime 'to find ways in which her potentialities in other directions could be maximized'. The net effect was that she started talking - and stopped drawing." Sacks quotes Nigel Dennis: "We are left with a genius who has had her genius removed, leaving nothing behind but a general defectiveness. What are we supposed to think about such a curious cure?".

Tante Jolesch

"Die Tante Jolesch ober Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten" ... what a superb title! ... "Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes" Tante Jolesch, Torberg assures us, did in fact exist, but "war, um mit Christian Morgenstern zu sprechen, keine 'Person im konventionellen Eigen-Sinn'" - "was not, to quote Christian Morgenstern, 'a person per se, in the conventional sense'".