The Extinction of the Mozartkugel

One day a candy will cease to exist. This fact will occur with some noticing, mildly grieving some small pleasurable confectionary that exudes naïveté and simplicity. I speak of the coming extinction of the Mozartkugel a cultural mainstay and classic chocolate with a marzipan filling. Despite being adored and consumed by tourists and natives alike, this candy, indigenous to Europe, will simply cease to be. It sensuous red foil wrapper bearing the prophet of Western classical music has been produced since 1890 and sold in shops for generations. Whether through globalization or other social and economic factors the Mozartkugel will be cut from this world. Aborted. Perhaps it will be licensed and produced in China or India bearing the same red foil wrapper. Though the outside may remain intact, those who lived long enough to experience it before will recognize the inside, the animating spirit, has changed.

In this way the extinction of the Mozartkugel serves as microcosm for Europe as macrocosm. Future generations will wander the ruins of what was. The ancient cities that served as the womb of Western culture will become walking museums, the former soul being long extracted from this world. Like its people and its candy, the spirit that has been slowly sapped over decades will have long vacated leaving carrion for predation and scavengers. Is this polemic you may ask? I would reply: in 2017 I was introduced to Mozartkugel while in the city of Vienna. Like many, I chose to go to Vienna for the experience of what was in essence a walking museum of the former seat of Hapsburg power. I walked around other great cities that year: Budapest, Dusseldorf, Prague, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Krakow, Milan, among others. Many were similar in that they had been turned into living exhibits of their glory days of art and architecture for foreigners to gawk at. I was a mercenary at the time, I went to bars around these cities. I gathered from the young people that if you weren’t in school or working simple jobs you went elsewhere to try and make a living, something I related to. Like me, these European youth seemed to wander as their hometowns offered no way forward for them. I had been given a great gift with the means to undertake this journey and experience these places. For these young people who wandered they did so out of necessity, still reeling from the migrant crisis two years earlier and globalization rendering these once great cities irrelevant. The Mozartkugel, a marzipan chocolate you can buy by the bag full will always represent this time to me.

Imperial functionary Grand Tour, 2017

This chocolate represents the old world. Before the shattering of the order of 1945, before the continent once again turned its eyes eastward towards the cossack. Before a supranational collective turned its back on its children under the auspices of safety, akin to the schoolmarm wagging her finger proclaiming she knows what is best. Did we—the generation born shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain and rise of the “indispensable nation”— live through a belle epoch and not even realize it? Since the time of Homer we have documented that man has seen himself throughout history in a constant state of decline. This is not exclusive to the West, the Hagakure of Japan or the Buddhist tantric literature of India and Tibet lament the degradation of the human spirit since the genesis of man. Accepting that things are in a constant state of entropy is a path towards liberation in the Buddhist cannon, and in my own experience somewhat freeing. However, the extinction of the Mozartkugel feels more malevolent than the abandonment of culture, rather it feels like a knife that screams as a banshee through the overcast night of our civilization and plants itself firmly into your heart. The villain who wield it, an unknowing and uncaring gollum, merely the messenger of our demise. The agent of our destruction being witting or unwitting is irrelevant—the corpse is still left cold to be picked away. Those who sent this gollum form a nebulous host of vampires who care not about the living but only the ends they desire, marked by the ashes of what came before.

When confronted with an amorphous coterie who, whether malevolent or not, will have you unceremoniously destroyed and scattered man must ask himself: is he the hypnotized rodent, ignorant of what danger stares him in the face until devoured by a serpent? Or does he possess the discernment necessary to recognize the threat to his life and meet it in struggle. It is the hypnotized rodent that accepts the verbal decrees and paper declarations as gospel produced by an endless stream of bureaucrats in some economic zone. It is the individual with discernment that disregards what is said and observes instead what is being done to him. An animal killed by traps and snares, through forces outside of its comprehension, can not see the greater forces at work agains them until gathered in a net who’s creation they complied with. These forces exist transnationally, beyond one office or an individual, they rest now within perpetually lived institutions. Like the serpent that kills the rodent, it will not go away because it is ignored, it only relents when confronted. Though not invincible, this coterie protects itself through tactics barely perceptible to anyone other than the most discerning. Incrementally, reality is altered until it is no longer recognizable, leaving only the shadow of memory reflected back somewhere in the collective unconscious. Perhaps it all starts with a delicious candy whose presence is simply absent one day.

We may try and forget or ignore that we belong to a land and a history, remembering we are not atomized particles in an accounting ledger. Nor are we a collectively identical biomass or inanimate tools of production in the same storehouse somewhere. You can not escape your homeland, for myself it is the peninsular mountain range, for you perhaps it is the the curve of the Danube, or the memory of a weathered church that had always been there in the low country. It is is the thing that exists in your unconscious and emerges in dreams you awaken from with tears in your eyes. It is that smell of the lavender plants that were taken from you, existing only in memories that leave you with a mass within your throat and a welling of your eyes. Though we may venture anywhere on this earth, the essence of the homeland, dwelling unseen, elicits something you can not control. You may escape on the back of a motorcycle somewhere in Southeast Asia, you may have experienced the frozen steppes of Eurasia, or have dwelled on an island where rum is cheaper than water among criminals and the lost, all of this would only lead you to love the land that your first conscious thoughts emanated from kept alive in memory now. And as one fades from this world in mind and body disintegrating until fully absent from collective memory, perhaps one is like the Mozartkugel and fades away or perhaps it is just a candy and it was meant exist for just the amount of time it did and no longer.

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