Shortly afterward I met Gerhard Fritsch, a member of the jury and my friend until then, in the Museum Café at the very table where Robert Musil used to sit, and asked him if after this disgusting business with the Industrial Association he was going to protest their behavior and step down from the jury and resign his seat. But Fritsch had no intention either of protesting or of stepping down from the jury. He had three wives and a whole bunch of children with these wives to take care of, he said, and could not indulge himself in any such protest even if it was self-evident to me, or any such self-evident resignation (self-evident to me, that is) from the Wildgans Prize jury. As a father of many children and provider for three female money-pits he felt really sorry for me and asked me to show him consideration in a tone that was repellent. The poor man, the malleable, pitiable, wretched man. Not long after this conversation Fritsch hanged himself from the hook on his apartment door, his life, which he’d bungled with no help from anybody, had closed over his head and extinguished him.

The Franz Theodor Csokor Prize