The Torch in my Ear, page 28
There was one person who was more than near and dear to him. They were bound by a navel cord, which may not have been so secret, but which you did not notice for a long time, because the two men were as different as if they had come from separate planets: John Heartfield, his brother, who was five years older than he. Wieland was soft and easily moved. You might have regarded him as sentimental, but he was sentimental only intermittently. He had various tempi at his disposition, all of them natural to him; and only one tempo, the emotional one, was gradual. Heartfield was always swift. His reactions were so spontaneous that they got the better of him. He was skinny and very short, and if an idea struck him, he would leap into the air. He uttered his sentences vehemently as if attacking you with his leap. He would angrily hum around you like a wasp. I first experienced this on Kurfürstendamm. Walking along unsuspectingly between him and Wieland, I was asked about termites by the latter and I tried to explain: “They’re completely blind and they move only in underground corridors.” John Heartfield leaped up at my side and hissed at me, as though I were responsible for the blindness of termites, perhaps also as though I were putting them down for their blindness: “You termite, you! You’re a termite yourself!” And from then on, he never called me anything but “termite.” At the time, I was frightened: I thought I had insulted him, I did not know how. After all, I had not called him a termite. It took me a while to realize that this was how he reacted to everything that was new to him. It was his way of learning: he could only learn aggressively; and I believe one could show that this is the secret of his montages. He brought things together, he confronted things after first leaping up at them, and the tension of these leaps is preserved in his montages.
John, I feel, was the most thoughtless of men. He consisted of spontaneous and vehement moments. He thought only when he was busy doing a montage. Since he was not always calculating away at something like other people, he remained fresh and choleric. His reaction was a kind of anger, but it was no selfish anger. He learned only from things that he regarded as attacks; and in order to experience something new, he had to see it as an attack. Other people let new things glide off them or swallowed them like syrup. John had to shake new things furiously in order to hold them without enfeebling them.
Only gradually did it dawn on me how indispensable these two brothers were to one another. Wieland never criticized John for anything. He did not excuse his brother’s unusual behavior, nor did he seek to explain it. He took it for granted; and it was only when he spoke of his childhood that I understood the bond between them. They were four orphans—two brothers and two sisters—and had been taken in by foster parents in Aigen, near Salzburg. Wieland was lucky with his foster parents. The elder brother, Helmut (this was John’s name before he changed it to his English name), had a harder time. The two brothers were always aware that they did not have their real parents, and they became very close to one another. Wieland’s true strength was his bond with John. Together, they gained a foothold in Berlin. Helmut had officially changed his name to John Heartfield in protest against the war. This took courage, since he did so before the war ended.
George Grosz, whom they met during that period, became equally good friends with both of them. When the Malik publishing house was started, John quite naturally designed the dust jackets. Each brother had his own family, his own home. They never pressed or pestered one another; but they were both there at the same time; they were both together in the turbulent and incredibly active life of Berlin.
Brecht
The first thing that struck me about Brecht was his disguise. I was taken to lunch at Schlichter, the restaurant in which the intellectual Berlin hung out. In particular, many actors came there. They were pointed out; you recognized them on the spot: the illustrated magazines made them part of your image of public things. However, one must admit that there was not very much theater in their outer appearance, in their greetings and order, in the way they bolted down their food, swallowed, paid. It was a colorful picture, but without the colorfulness of the stage. The only one I noticed among them all—and because of his proletarian disguise—was Brecht. He was very emaciated. He had a hungry face, which looked askew because of his cap. His words came out wooden and choppy. When he gazed at you, you felt like an object of value that he, the pawnbroker, with his piercing black eyes, was appraising as something that had no value. He was a man of few words; you learned nothing about the results of his appraisal. It seemed incredible that he was only thirty. He did not look as if he had aged prematurely, but as if he had always been old.
The notion of an old pawnbroker haunted me during those weeks. I could not shake it off, if only because it seemed so absurd. It was nourished by the fact that Brecht prized nothing so much as usefulness, and he let on, in every way he could, how greatly he despised “lofty” convictions. What he meant was a practical, a solid usefulness, and in this respect there was something Anglo-Saxon about him, in its American variety. The cult of America had already taken root in Berlin, especially among left-wing artists. Berlin emulated New York with neon lights and cars. There was nothing Brecht felt so tender about as his car. Upton Sinclair’s books, those exposés of abuses, had a two-edged effect. People shared his attitude about scourging these abuses; but at the same time, they absorbed the American substratum from which those abuses had sprung; they assimilated it like food and pinned their hopes on its expansion and extension. Chaplin happened to be in Hollywood, and, even in this atmosphere, one could applaud his success with a clear conscience.
One of the contradictions about Brecht was that his outer appearance had something ascetic to it. Hunger could also seem like fasting, as though he were deliberately forgoing the object of his greed. He was no pleasure-seeker: he did not find satisfaction in the moment and did not spread out in the moment. Anything he took (and he took anything that might be useful to him from right and left, from behind him and before him) had to be utilized instantly: it was his raw material, and he produced things with it incessantly. Thus, he was a man who manufactured something all the time, and that was his true goal.
The words I annoyed Brecht with, especially the demand that one could write only out of conviction and never for money, must have sounded downright laughable in the Berlin of those days. He knew precisely what he wanted, and was so driven by his goal that it made no difference whatsoever whether he got money for it or not. On the contrary: after a period of straitened circumstances, it was a sign of success if he did receive money. He had great respect for money; the only important thing was who received it and not where it came from. He was certain that nothing could make him swerve from his path. Anyone who helped him was on his side (or else cutting into his own flesh). Berlin was teeming with patrons: they were part of the scenery. He used them without falling prey to them.
The things that I said to him, and that annoyed him, weighed less than a thread against all that. I rarely saw him alone. Ibby was always present; typically he regarded her wit as cynicism. He noticed that she treated me respectfully; she never took sides with him. He loved terrifying me or showering me with scorn when she asked me for information in his presence. Sometimes, he made a mistake in some trivial matter; she would not be put off. She accepted my information, included it definitively in the conversation without batting an eyelash, but also without mocking Brecht. The fact that she did not make fun of him to his face should have indicated that she was not indifferent to being with him. In her own way, she had surrendered to the pervasive avant-garde atmosphere around him.
He did not care much for people, but he put up with them; he respected those who were persistently useful to him; he noticed others only to the extent that they corroborated his somewhat monotonous view of the world. It was this view that increasingly determined the character of his plays, while, in his poems, he started out far more vividly than anyone else in his day; later on, with the help of the Chinese (but this does not belong here), he found his way to something like wisdom.
It must sound surprising when I say how much I owe him, despite all my hostility toward him. During the period of our (almost daily) brief collisions, I was reading his Manual of Piety. I was enchanted by these poems, I took them up in one swoop without thinking of him. There were some that cut me to the quick, for instance “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” or “Against Seduction,” and others: “Memory of Marie A.,” “Poor B.B.” Many things, most of the volume, struck me deeply. My own writings crumbled into dust. It would be too much to say that I was ashamed of them; they simply no longer existed; nothing was left of them, not even shame.
For three years, my ego had been feeding on the poems I wrote. I had shown them to no one outside of Veza, but I showed her almost everything. I had taken her encouragement seriously, trusted her opinion. Some of my poems had filled me so intensely that I felt as vast as the universe. I had written all sorts of other things, not just poems; but the poems were what counted for me—along with the plan to write a book on crowds. This was still a plan, however; it could take years. And for the moment, at least, almost nothing existed of it: a few notes and preliminary jottings, things I had learned for the book. For the time being, however, the things I learned were not yet my own; this was still to come. My own things, I had thought, were the many completed pieces, short and long poems. And now, everything had been shattered at one blow. I had no pity for all my stuff, I swept it away with no regret: garbage and rubbish. Nor did I praise the man who had written the real poems; everything about him repelled me, from his compulsive disguise to his wooden speech. But I admired, I loved, his poems.
I was so repulsed by him personally that I said nothing about the poems when I saw him. Every time I saw him, and especially every time I heard him speak, I felt furious. I did not let on about my fury any more than about my enthusiasm for the Manual of Piety. No sooner had he uttered a cynical sentence than I replied with a severe and highly moral sentence. Once—it must have sounded funny in Berlin—I said that a true writer has to isolate himself in order to accomplish anything. I said he needed periods in the world and periods outside the world, contrasting strongly with one another. Brecht said his telephone was always on his desk, and he could write only if it rang often. A huge map of the world hung in front of him on the wall, he said, and he looked at the map so as never to be outside the world. I would not give in and, shattered as I was by realizing the futile wretchedness of my verse, I insisted on my advice, facing the man who wrote the best poems. Morality was one thing and matter was another, and when I dealt with this man, who cared only about matter, then nothing but morality counted for me. I railed against the advertisements contaminating Berlin. They did not bother him; on the contrary, he said, advertisements had their good points: he had written a poem about Steyr Automobiles and been given a car for it. For me, these were words from the devil’s own mouth. His boastful confession floored me. I was dumbstruck. No sooner had we left him than Ibby said: “He likes riding in his car,” as though it were nothing. But I—crazy as I was—saw him as a murderer. I had “The Legend of the Dead Soldier” on my mind, and he had entered a contest for Steyr Automobiles! “He flatters his car even now,” said Ibby. “He talks about it as if it were his girlfriend. Why shouldn’t he flatter it beforehand in order to get it?”
Brecht liked Ibby; he put up with her witty, unsentimental ways, which contrasted so greatly with her radiant country looks. Nor did she disturb him with any demands. She never competed with anyone. She had surfaced in Berlin as Pomona and could vanish any moment. But it was different with me: I came from Vienna with lofty tones, devoted to the purity and rigor of Karl Kraus, more in thrall to him than ever before because of his Fifteenth of July poster. Nor did I keep his fortifying pomp to myself: I had to blurt it out. It was only two or three years since I had escaped the domestic money talk; it still had an effect on me: I never once saw Brecht without expressing my disdain for money. I had to hoist my flag and reveal my colors: one did not write for newspapers, one did not write for money; one was committed heart and soul to every word one wrote. This irritated Brecht for more than one reason: I had published nothing; he had never heard of me; my words had no substance for this man, who so greatly valued concrete realities. Since no one had offered me anything, I had refused nothing. No newspaper had asked me to write for it, so I had not resisted any newspaper. “I write only for money,” he said drily and hatefully. “I wrote a poem about Steyr Automobiles and I got a car for it.” There it was again; it popped up frequently. He was proud of this Steyr car, which he drove into the ground. After an accident, he managed to wangle a new one by means of an advertising trick.
However, my situation was a lot more complicated than one might assume from what has been said so far. For the man who was faith and conviction for me, whom I venerated more than anyone else in the world, without whose wrath and zeal I wouldn’t have cared to live, whom I had never dared to approach (only one single time: after July 15, I had addressed a prayer to him, not a plea, a prayer of gratitude, and I did not even assume that he paid it any heed)—Karl Kraus—was in Berlin at this time and friendly with Brecht. He saw Brecht frequently, and it was through Brecht that I met him, several weeks before the premiere of The Threepenny Opera. I did not see Kraus alone, only together with Brecht and other people who were interested in this production. I did not say a word to Kraus. I was afraid to show him how much he meant to me. I had attended every one of his readings since spring 1924, when I arrived in Vienna. But he didn’t know this. And even if Brecht (who certainly guessed my state of mind) had made some joking remark about it to him (which wasn’t very likely), Kraus let nothing on. He had ignored my exuberant letter of thanks for his poster after July 15; my name meant nothing to him: he must have received countless such letters and thrown them all away.
I much preferred his knowing nothing about me. I sat next to Ibby in the round and kept quiet. I was oppressed by the thought of sitting at the table of a god. I felt unsure of myself, as though I had sneaked in. He was altogether different from the way I knew him at lectures. He hurled no lightning bolts, he damned no one. Of all the people sitting there—some ten or twelve—he was the most polite. He treated each person as if he or she were an unusual creature, and he sounded solicitous, as if assuring that person of his special protection. One felt that nobody escaped his notice; thus he lost nothing of the omniscience attributed to him. However, he deliberately stepped back behind the others, an equal among equals, peaceful, concerned with their sensitivities. His smile was so relaxed, I felt as if he were concealing himself. Given the countless parts I had heard him play, I knew how easily he could conceal himself. However, the role I saw him in now was the one I would never have expected; and he carried it off: he remained the same for an hour or more. I expected something tremendous from him, and what came were cordialities. He treated everyone at the table with tenderness; however, he treated Brecht with love, as though Brecht were his son, the young genius—his chosen son.
The people at the table were talking about The Threepenny Opera, which did not have this title as yet; they were trying to hit on a name. Many suggestions were made. Brecht listened quietly, in no way as if it were his play. You could not tell that the ultimate decision was his. There were so many suggestions that I can no longer remember who said what. Karl Kraus had a suggestion, which he advocated without getting domineering; he tossed it into the debate, skeptically, as though doubting it. His suggestion was instantly superseded by another, a better one. I do not know from whom the title finally came. It was Brecht who presented it, but perhaps he had gotten it from someone not present and wanted to hear what these people thought about it. In his work he was astonishingly free with demarcations and property lines.
Ecce Homo
“We’re visiting Grosz,” said Wieland. I did not quite believe that one could go there just like that. Wieland wanted to get something he needed for his publishing house, but he also wanted to impress me, for he had instantly noticed that there was one figure in Berlin whom I was dying to meet. Wieland enjoyed showing me everything that Berlin had to offer. He sort of liked my inexperience. It reminded him of his own when he had first come here. He was not domineering like Brecht, who was always surrounded by adepts. Brecht wanted people to think him hard-boiled, and he must have started at an early age. Be older than you are, just don’t appear young. Innocence was despicable to him: he hated innocence, equating it with stupidity. He wanted to be nobody’s fool; and long after there was nothing more to prove, he flaunted his precocity, a schoolboy smoking his first cigar and gathering others whom he is trying to cheer-lead. Wieland, however, was in love with the innocence of his own childhood, seeing it as an idyll. He managed to hold his own in the cynicism of Berlin. By no means was he defenseless: he knew all the tricks of the trade, and he demonstrated his capabilities in the so-called struggle of life, which requires hardness, but above all, indifference. However, he managed to hold his own purely by sticking to the image of the innocent orphan boy that he had been. He could speak about it as if he still were that orphan boy. While working, we sometimes got into these conversations; and, as hurried as life in Berlin may have been, when we sat at the round table in that room in his garret, we often wandered away from Upton Sinclair, the object of our work, and turned to the younger Wieland. This present Wieland was no more than thirty-two, but it seemed like a huge leap to the Wieland of fifteen years earlier.
