The Torch in my Ear, page 27
It is certain that this locality kept alive my interest in my project, even when I concentrated on other things. It was a loud nourishment that I received in this way, at intervals that were not too large. In my isolation at the edge of the city, an isolation that I had had good reasons for seeking and to which I owe what little my years in Vienna produced, I remained in contact—even unwillingly—with that most urgent, most unsettled, most enigmatic phenomenon. At times that I did not choose myself, it talked away at me, forcing me back to my project, which I might have escaped by seeking refuge in more comfortable problems.
Starting in autumn, I went to the Chemical Laboratory again every day, to work on my dissertation, which did not interest me at all. I thought of it as a secondary occupation, something I did because I had already begun it. To finish anything I had begun was an inexplicable principle of my character: even chemistry, which I admitted I despised, was something I could not break off, since I had gone so far with it. My attitude involved a secret respect that I had never owned up to: the knowledge of poisons. Since Backenroth’s death, they were constantly on my mind; I never entered the laboratory without thinking how easily each of us could get hold of cyanide.
In the laboratory, there were students who, if not quite openly, then at least unmistakably, were of the opinion that wars are inevitable. This opinion was by no means restricted to people already sympathizing with the National Socialists. There were many such sympathizers, but none of those we knew in close proximity in the laboratory were aggressive or hostile to anyone. In this daily work environment, they almost never voiced their opinions. I personally caught, at best, a certain restraint, which, however, sometimes turned into cordiality when they noticed my disgust at any pecuniary mentality. There were rustic figures among our students, utterly thrifty people, who could not otherwise have attended the university; they were beside themselves with happiness whenever you gave them some object or other without expecting payment. I enjoyed the stunned face of a country boy who scarcely knew me and who expected me—notwithstanding all outer appearances—to have the well-camouflaged character of a livestock dealer.
However, I also met students whose openness and innocence I still recall with amazement today. At one lecture, I met a boy whom I instantly noticed in the crowd because of his radiant gaze and his powerful and yet cautious way of moving. We got into a conversation and then occasionally met again. He was the son of a judge, and, unlike his father, as he told me, he trusted in Hitler. He had his own reasons for this faith, which he advocated with complete openness—I might almost say, with grace: He said there should never be war again; war was the worst thing that could happen to mankind, and the only man who could save the world from war was Hitler. When I advocated the opposite conviction, he insisted that he had heard Hitler speak, and Hitler had said so himself. That was the reason he supported him, he said, and no one would ever talk him out of it. I was so flabbergasted that I saw him again for that very reason, continuing the same conversation several times. He would then come out with the same or even lovelier statements about peace. I can see him before me, his glowing face of peace, the countenance of an apostle, and I hope that he did not have to pay for his faith with his life.
I lived so intensely next to chemistry that I cannot think back to those days without recalling faces and conversations that have nothing to do with chemistry. Perhaps I showed up punctually at the laboratory, attended the lectures regularly, because I came together with so many young people whom I did not have to seek out deliberately: they were simply there. I thus got to know all the attitudes of the period, naturally and on the side, without making much ado about it. Generally, no one really thought about war back then; or if someone did think about it, then only about the past war. It is horrifying to recall how remote people felt back then, in 1928, from any new war. The fact that war could suddenly exist again, and as a faith, was connected with the nature of a crowd; and it was no false instinct that led me to find out the tricks of this nature. I did not realize how much I learned in the laboratory from seemingly absurd or insignificant conversations. I encountered advocates of all opinions that were affecting the world. And had I been open to all concrete things (as I mistakenly imagined myself to be), I might have gained a good number of important insights from these supposedly trivial conversations. But my respect for books was still too great, and I had barely set out on the road to the true book: each individual human being, bound in himself.
* * *
The road to Veza was long, now that I lived on Hagenberggasse; all Vienna, in its greatest extension, lay between us. On Sundays, she came out to my place in the early afternoon, and we went to the Lainz Park. The tone of our conversations never changed; I still handed her every new poem of mine; she preserved all of them carefully in a small straw handbag. During the week, she wrote me lovely letters about them, letters which I preserved no less carefully. There was a great deal of air between us, and we actually developed a tree cult in the park. The park had splendid examples of trees. We sought them out with the faces of connoisseurs and settled at their feet.
One of these trees played an unusual role. I had gotten to know death masks through Ibby Gordon, the cheeriest of people. I was so preoccupied with these masks that I gave Veza a copy of the book. I failed to realize how tactless this was, for everything connected to death was part of Veza’s province. When I brought her the book, which I had told her about, she made a nasty face and angrily threw the book on the ground. I picked it up, she threw it down again, refusing to open it. She said it didn’t belong to her, it belonged to that other woman, who claimed to be a poet and was always grinning; she was the one who had introduced me to these masks. She really did say “grinning.” Veza did not know Ibby personally, but I had told her about Ibby’s merriment; and since merriment was the thing that Veza lacked most, she thought that Ibby’s merriment was my only reason for regarding her as a poet. Now Veza could not get over the fact that Ibby had interloped with these death masks.
I took the book along again; she threatened to hurl it out the window, and she would have done so. I liked her jealousy, which I had never experienced. I told her everything: I was completely open with her; she knew and believed that all I had with Ibby was conversations. But during these conversations, Ibby would recite her poems to me in Hungarian. One day, I had come to Veza full of enthusiasm, carrying on about the beauties of the Hungarian language, even though I had not liked the sound of it earlier. I said that it was beyond any doubt one of the most beautiful languages, and then I told Veza about Ibby’s attempts to translate her poems into her comical German. I had put some order into this impossible German, which was bristling with mistakes, and Ibby had then written down the corrected versions. They were very funny poems, I said, by no means wild and frenzied like my own, always cool and witty, each one composed in terms of a specific, always different voice. Veza listened attentively. And though I made it clear that—in terms of my truth back then—I could not regard these pieces as poetry, anyone could tell how much I enjoyed listening to them and correcting them.
This had gone on for a while, until the outburst over the death masks; it is not easy for me to report on what happened next. I would have to tell how Veza once came to Hagenberggasse and went up to my room (I was out). She took all her letters (she knew where I kept them) and then went to the Lainz Park. She had to walk quite a while until she found a defective spot in the wall, which she could climb across with no great effort. She then looked for a tree that forked approximately at the level of her eyes and had a hollow space; she stuck the large package of letters inside. She then returned to Hagenberggasse. I was home by now. I saw that she was terribly upset and I soon wormed it out of her: her letters were gone, and she admitted carrying them off. She said she had thrown them away in the forest. Panicking, I begged her to show me the spot. I was sure no one had been there. The park was closed on that day; we could surely find her letters and save them. My panic was beneficial for her, it was obvious how important the letters were to me; so she relented and, at my urging, she took me back along the rather lengthy path to the park. We climbed over the wall, she found the tree, which she had noted carefully, she told me to reach into the fork. I did so, and my finger struck paper. I instantly knew that these were her letters. I pulled them out; I hugged and kissed them. I danced with them over the wall and back to Hagenberggasse. Veza came along, but was unheeded, all my attention focused on the retrieved letters. I held the package in my arms like a child, I leaped up the steps to my room, and I placed the package in its drawer. Veza was very moved by my actions, her jealousy was gone. She believed how much I loved her.
It is possible that I saw less of Ibby after that, but I did see her; and when we met in the coffeehouse, I asked about her new poems. She enjoyed reciting them. I always wanted to hear them in Hungarian first, and then, when I was enchanted by their sound, we attempted to translate them. “Suicide on the Bridge” was one title, or “The Sick Cannibal Chief,” “Bamboo Cradle,” “Pamela,” “Refugee on Ringstrasse,” “City Official,” “Déjà Vu,” “Girl with Mirror.” In time, Ibby had a small supply of German versions; but so long as she remained in Vienna, nothing happened with them; we were the only ones to enjoy them. If I had not first heard them in a language I had no inkling of, they might have meant nothing to me. But I liked their lack of gravity, the want of any higher or deeper demand, the parlando with light, always unexpected phrasing—things I had never associated with poetry. I was afraid to show her any of my own verse. Because of our imaginative and varied conversations, she assumed that my poems were tremendous things of which she was not quite worthy. She thought I was simply being considerate, trying to spare her, unwilling to embarrass her with them; she was grateful and entertained me with all the stories about the stupid men who courted her and uselessly pestered her.
This went on until spring of the following year. Then the situation became too much for Ibby. The two brothers especially had gotten into a conflict that was taking on serious proportions. It annoyed her because it bored her. One day, she vanished from Vienna. I didn’t hear from her for over two months. Then, when I had almost given up on her, a letter came from Berlin. She was well, the translations of her poems had brought her luck. I don’t know who had given her recommendations to people in Berlin; she never breathed a word about this even later. But all at once, she found herself among so many interesting people; she knew Brecht and Döblin, Benn and George Grosz; her poems had been accepted by Querschnitt and Die Literarische Welt and would soon be printed. She wrote me again, urging me to come to Berlin, at least for summer vacation: I would have time from July to October, she pointed out, three whole months. A friend of hers, a publisher, would like to hire me. He needed someone to help him compile material for a book. I would have an easy time getting in with the people there, and she had so much to tell me that three months wouldn’t be enough.
Her letters became more frequent and more pressing as the summer approached. Did I always have to go to the mountains? I must know them well enough by now, and what was more boring than mountains? The terrible thing about mountains was that they never changed, so they wouldn’t run away from me. But it was highly questionable whether Berlin would remain this interesting for long. And what should she do when she had no more poems? No one could translate them as well as I; it was no work whatsoever, we were simply together and talking, and all at once the poems were there. Could I really have the heart to let her starve there when she finally had the chance to live on her poems?
She probably was thinking about the translations of her poems, but I believe she cared more about our conversations. She could tell me everything she felt like, without spoiling things with her friends there. How could she possibly keep silent about such an endless number of things? Once, she wrote me that I would be reading a story in the newspapers about a silent poetess being blown up in Berlin, if I didn’t come soon.
Her letters were structured in such a way that they always conspicuously held something back: something she couldn’t write about, she would tell it to me personally in Berlin. There were exciting and peculiar things in Berlin, she said; you just couldn’t believe things you saw with your own two eyes.
My curiosity grew with each of her letters. She never mentioned anyone who wasn’t famous for something. I had read little by the writers she named, but, like anyone else, I knew who they were. However, the man who meant more to me than any writer was George Grosz. The thought of seeing him made up my mind.
On July 15, 1928, right at the end of the semester, I went to Berlin for the summer.
Part Four
The Throng of Names
Berlin 1928
The Brothers
Wieland Herzfelde had a garret apartment at 76 Kurfürstendamm. The building stood right in the middle of the hubbub, but things seemed quiet way up there; you scarcely thought about the noise. During the summer, he lived with his family by Nikolassee. Renting out part of his city garret, he left the other part for me to work in. I had a small bedroom and, right next to it, a study with a lovely round table. Here, everything I needed for work was piled up. I was thus left undisturbed, which greatly pleased me. I did not have to go to the publishing house, which was cramped and noisy. Herzfelde would come up to the garret for a few hours to discuss the project. He was planning a biography of Upton Sinclair, who was celebrating his fiftieth birthday.
The Malik house was well known for publishing the drawings of George Grosz. But it was also interested in new Russian writers—and not just the new ones. Along with a complete edition of Gorky, Malik also brought out one of Tolstoy; Malik also focused on authors who had become known since the Revolution. For me, the most important of these authors was Isaac Babel, whom I admired no less than I did George Grosz.
Now the Malik publishing house not only had a good name, it was also lucky enough to be commercially successful, something it owed to its star author, Upton Sinclair. Since his exposé of the Chicago stockyards, he had become one of the most widely read American authors. He was a prolific writer, always striving to find new abuses to pillory. There was no lack of them. He was hardworking and courageous: he brought out a new book each year. His books grew thicker and thicker. Sinclair was greatly respected, particularly in Europe. By now, around his fiftieth birthday, he had written enough books to fill someone else’s life’s work in addition to his own. It has also been proved that his Chicago book led to abolishing certain abuses in the stockyards. No less important for his reputation was the fact that modern American literature, which was to conquer the world, was only just emerging. Upton Sinclair’s fame was a “material” fame, bound to America as its material. And, not insignificantly, Sinclair, who, as America’s true muckraker, attacked pretty much everything, aroused the widest interest in his country and even contributed most to the “America” fad, which was rampant in Berlin and to which Brecht, George Grosz, and others had succumbed. Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, writers of an incomparably higher rank, did not have their impact until later.
Back then, in the summer of 1928, Wieland Herzfelde could not be blamed for taking Upton Sinclair seriously and even wanting to write his biography. Kept busy by his publishing house, Herzfelde needed help for this project and had invited me, at Ibby’s recommendation, to spend the summer months in Berlin.
So here I was in Berlin, never taking more than ten steps without running into a celebrity. Wieland knew everyone and introduced me to everyone right away. I was a nobody here and quite aware of this; I had done nothing; at twenty-three, I was nothing more than hopeful. Yet it was astonishing how people treated me: not with scorn, but with curiosity, and, above all, never with condemnation. I myself, after four years under Karl Kraus’s influence, was filled with all his contempt and condemnation and acknowledged nothing that was determined by greed, selfishness, or frivolity. All objects to condemn were prescribed by Kraus. You were not even allowed to look at them; he had already taken care of that for you and made the decision. It was a sterilized intellectual life that we led in Vienna, a special kind of hygiene prohibiting any intermingling whatsoever. No sooner was something universal, no sooner had it gotten into the newspapers, than it was taboo and untouchable.
And suddenly, the very opposite came in Berlin, where contacts of any sort, incessant, were part of the very substance of living. This brand of curiosity must have agreed with me, though I did not realize it; I yielded naïvely and innocently, and just as I had strolled into the maws of tyranny right after my arrival in Vienna, where I had been kept nicely aloof from all temptations, so too, in Berlin, I was at the mercy of the hotbed of vice for several weeks. Nevertheless, I was not alone: I had two guides, and they were so different from each other that they helped me doubly: Ibby and Wieland.
Wieland knew everyone, because he had been here for such a long time. He had arrived in Berlin before the war, at the age of seventeen, and had become friends with Else Lasker-Schüler. Through her, he had met most of the writers and painters, especially the Sturm people. Wieland owed her even more: the name of his publishing house, which he had founded at the age of twenty-one with his brother and Grosz; and it is not just my opinion that the exotic name Malik helped to make the house known. To everyone’s amazement, Wieland turned out to be a good businessman. His ability contrasted so sharply with his boyish freshness that it seemed almost incredible. He was not really an adventurer, but he won over a good many people with the adventurous quality that they ascribed to him. He got close to people quickly, like a child, but never became overattached, and he detached himself easily. You never had the feeling that he fully belonged to anyone. It was as if he could get up and leave at any time. He was considered footloose, and people wondered where he got his energy from. For he was always on the go, agile and active, never burdened by superfluous knowledge, averse to traditional education, informed by “snooping,” not by zealous abstract reading. However, when he had to produce something, he was amazingly precise, suddenly as obstinate as an old man. Both attitudes, the boyish one and the old, experienced one, existed simultaneously, coming into play alternately, whenever he found either attitude suitable.
