Sie müssen sich nicht für Jugoslawien interessieren, Sie können Rebecca Wests Schwarzes Schaf und Grauer Falke, das nun endlich - wenn auch nicht annähernd vollständig (aber das hätte den Verlag, der ohnehin seit seinem Bestehen so tapfer ist wie wenige Verlage hierzulande, völlig überfordert - in deutscher Übersetzung erscheint, auch deswegen lesen, weil es sich um ein gigantisches, großartiges, verehrungswürdiges, leidenschaftliches, elegantes, mondänes, kluges Buch handelt.

Ein 1941 von Rebecca West selbst eingerichteter Vorabdruck in 5 Teilen ist im - ohnehin empfehlenswerten - Archiv des Atlantic Monthly zugänglich.

Elizabeth lived nine years after her son's death, as drearily as any other of the unemployed. Then, perhaps as a punishment for having turned her back on the Slav problem, the key to Eastern Europe, a Western problem slew her. For the newspaper my mother and her cousin spread in the gaslight was wrong when it said that the man who killed her, Lucheni, was a madman. It is true that he said that he had killed Elizabeth because he had vowed to kill the first royal person he could find, and that he had gone to Evian to stab the Duke of Orleans but had missed him and had come back to Geneva to get Elizabeth instead; and this is an insane avowal, for no benefit whatsoever could be derived by anybody from the death of either of these people. But, for all that, Lucheni was not mad. Many people are unable to say what they mean only because they have not been given an adequate vocabulary by their environment; and their apparently meaningless remarks may be inspired by a sane enough consciousness of real facts.

Lucheni performed his meaningless act out of his consciousness of what is perhaps the most real distress of our age. He was an Italian born in Paris of parents forced by their poverty to emigrate and trodden down into an alien criminal class: that is to say, he belonged to an urban population for which the existing forms of government made no provision, which wandered often workless and always traditionless, without power to control its destiny. It was indeed most appropriate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth, for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such a population. Its luxury was financed by an exploited peasant class bled so white that it was ready to send its boys into the factories and the girls into service on any terms. The beggars in the streets of Vienna, which the innocent suppose were put there by the Treaty of Trianon, are descendants of an army as old as the nineteenth century. Lucheni said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, 'Hey, what are you going to do with me?' He made no suggestions, but cannot be blamed for it. It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions, unable to form thoughts or design actions other than the crudest and most violent. He lived many years in prison, almost until his like had found a vocabulary and a name for themselves and had astonished the world with the farce of Fascism.