The whole dream seems a sort of phantasy, which takes the dreamer back
to the revolutionary year 1848, the memory of which had been renewed by
the anniversary year 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau,
where I had become acquainted with Emmersdorf, a town which I wrongly
supposed to be the resting-place of the student leader Fischof, to whom
several features of the dream content might refer. The thought
associations then lead me to England, to the house of my brother, who
was accustomed jokingly to tell his wife of “Fifty years ago,” according
to the title of a poem by Lord Tennyson, whereupon the children were in
the habit of correcting: “Fifteen years ago.” This phantasy, however,
which subtilely attaches itself to the thoughts which the sight of the
Count Thun has given rise to, is only like the façade of Italian
churches which is superimposed without being organically connected with
the building behind it; unlike these façades, however, the phantasy is
filled with gaps and confused, and the parts from within break through
at many places. The first situation of the dream is concocted from
several scenes, into which I am able to separate it. The arrogant
attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at the
Gymnasium which took place in my fifteenth year. We had contrived a
conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant teacher, the leading spirit
in which was a schoolmate who seems to have taken Henry VIII. of England
as his model. It fell to me to carry out the _coup-d’état_, and a
discussion of the importance of the Danube (German _Donau_) for Austria
(Wachau!) was the occasion upon which matters came to open indignation.
A fellow-conspirator was the only aristocratic schoolmate whom we had—he
was called the “giraffe” on account of his conspicuous longitudinal
development—and he stood just like the Count in the dream, while he was
being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the Professor of the
German language. The explanation of the favourite flower and the putting
into the buttonhole of something which again must have been a flower
(which recalls the orchids, which I had brought to a lady friend on the
same day, and besides that the rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the
scene in Shakespeare’s historical plays which opens the civil wars of
the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII. has opened the
way to this reminiscence. It is not very far now from roses to red and
white carnations. Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other
Spanish, insinuate themselves into the analysis: “Roses, tulips,
carnations, all flowers fade,” and “Isabelita, no llores que se
marchitan las flores.” The Spanish is taken from _Figaro_. Here in
Vienna white carnations have become the insignia of the Anti-Semites,
the red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of
an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway trip in beautiful Saxony
(Anglo-Saxon).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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