Desperate but Not Serious

‘In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious.” This quip was heard around Central Europe in the closing days of both world wars, but certainly predates 1918. Political scientist Paul Gottfried, my go-to guy on matters Mitteleuropäisch, thinks it originated with one of the late-Habsburg Hungarian statesmen — Andrássy or Tisza. The point of the quip is to show the different outlooks of Prussians and Austrians: the first soldiering on to the end in dogged hope, the second in fatalistic acknowledgment that while the curtain may indeed be about to fall, there is no point forgoing life’s normal pleasures in the interim.

“Desperate but not serious” seems apt for the fiscal situation of the Western world. Everything I read seems to tell me that things are dire, if not terminal, at all political levels: nations, regions, states, cities. Here’s a headline from the New York Times, February 27: “To Pay New York Pension Fund, Cities Borrow from It First.”