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choral singing, which is bound to repel the pupils. Thus the teachers from the very outset block their pupils from access to art. The teachers do not know what art is, and therefore cannot explain to their pupils or teach them what art is, and they lead them not towards art but push them away from art into their revolting, sentimental vocal and instrumental applied art, which is bound to repel their pupils. There is no cheaper artistic taste than that of teachers. Right from primary school, teachers ruin the pupils' artistic taste, they drive all art out of their pupils from the start, instead of elucidating art, and especially music, to them and making it a lifelong joy. But then the teachers are preventers and destroyers not only in matters of art, the teachers have always, all in all, been the preventers of life and existence, instead of teaching young people how to live, of deciphering life for them, of making life for them into a truly inexhaustible wealth of their nature, they kill it in them, they do everything to kill it in them. Most of our teachers are miserable creatures whose mission in life seems to consist of barricading life to the young people and eventually and finally making it into a terrible disillusionment. After all, it is only the sentimental and perverse small minds from the lower middle class which push their way into the teaching profession. The teachers are the henchmen of the state, and seeing that this Austrian state today is a spiritually and morally totally crippled state, one which teaches nothing but brutalization and corruption and dangerous chaos, the teachers, quite naturally, are also spiritually and morally deformed and brutalized and corrupt and chaotic. This Catholic state has no understanding of art and hence the teachers of this state have none, or are supposed to have none, that is what is so depressing. These teachers teach what this Catholic state is and instructs them to teach: narrowmindedness and brutality, vileness and meanness, depravity and chaos. There is nothing the pupils can expect from these teachers other than the mendacity of the Catholic state and of the Catholic state's power, I reflected while observing Reger and simultaneously, through Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, gazing into my childhood. I myself had these dreadful unscrupulous teachers, first rural teachers then urban teachers, and again, in turn, urban teachers and rural teachers, and I was ruined by them well into mid-life; they ruined me for decades to come, did my teachers, I reflected. They gave me and my generation nothing but the hideousness of the state and of a world spoilt and destroyed by that state. They gave me and my generation nothing but the repulsiveness of the state and of a world marked by that state. They gave me, just as the young people of today, nothing but their unreason, their incompetence, their dull-wittedness, their brainlessness. My teachers have given me nothing but their incompetence, I consider. They have taught me nothing other than chaos. For decades ahead they have, with the utmost ruthlessness, destroyed in me everything that had originally been in me to be developed, with all the potential of my intelligence, for the sake of my world. I myself had these appalling, narrow-minded, degraded teachers who have a thoroughly low opinion of human beings and of the human world, the lowest opinion decreed by the state, namely that nature must always and regardlessly be suppressed in the new young people and eventually killed for the purposes of the state. I too had those teachers with their perverse recorder playing and their perverse guitar strumming, who forced me to learn a sixteen-stanza Schiller poem by heart, which I always felt to be one of the most terrible punishments. I too had those teachers with their secret contempt of humanity as a method vis-à-vis their powerless pupils, those sentimentally grandiloquent henchmen of the state with their raised forefinger. I too had