The Play of the Eyes, page 28
I wish everyone could have heard that last story. Twelve years after Kafka’s death, I was hearing the very words that he had heard, from the same lips. When he had finished, we both fell silent, for we both realized that we had lived a new variation of the same story. Then Hardt said: “Would you care to hear what Kafka said about that?” and went on without waiting for my answer: “Kafka said: ‘That’s the most wonderful story in all the world.’” I had thought so myself and always will. But it was unusual to hear such a superlative from Kafka, and, what’s more, quoted by a man who after reciting this story had been honored with the gift of his Treasure Chest. As everyone knows, Kafka’s superlatives are numbered.
After that, my relationship with Ludwig Hardt changed. It took on an intimacy such as I have known with few people. From then on, whenever he was in Vienna, he came straight to our house. He spent many hours on Himmelstrasse, reciting almost uninterruptedly. His repertory was inexhaustible and I couldn’t get enough of it. It was all stored up in his head and he no doubt had more in his head than I ever heard. My memory of that first recitation of Hebel has never paled. Sometimes, when his recitations put us into too solemn a mood, we went to Veza’s paneled room, where he recited other things that Veza too was fond of, plenty of Goethe and always Lenz’s Sesenheim poem “Love in the Country,” which has Goethe in it and might have been written by Goethe. Then we talked enthusiastically about Lenz, whose life moved him no less than it did me. Once when I remarked that this poem was full of what Goethe had done to Lenz and that Lenz, like Friederike, was always waiting for Goethe, who couldn’t bear it and for that reason destroyed him, Hardt jumped up and embraced me. For Veza and for me as well, he recited Heine, of whose worth he had convinced me in Berlin; just for Veza he recited Wedekind and Peter Altenberg.
We never let him go without reciting two poems, both by Claudius, “War Song”—
They’ve gone to war, O heavenly angel,
Oh stop them in God’s name.
They’ve gone to war, and I must hope
That I am not to blame.
each of whose six stanzas I would like to copy out today—and the “Letter of a Hunted Stag to the Prince Who Was Hunting Him.”
The recitation ended with the miracle of transformation that I can still call to mind, the transformation of Ludwig into a dying stag. If I had doubted that of all man’s gifts transformation is the best, that after all the crimes he has committed it is his justification and crowning glory, I would have discovered it then. Hardt was the dying stag. When he had breathed his last, he came to life and was Ludwig Hardt again. I couldn’t get over it. And though he enjoyed our amazement, the death of the hunted animal was always authentic, overwhelming, because the stag was also a human being, and a human being I loved because he was human.
The Spanish Civil War
Two years of my friendship with Sonne coincided with the Spanish Civil War. It was the main subject of our daily talks. All my friends sided with the Republicans. Our sympathies with the Spanish government were unconcealed and expressed with passion.
For the most part we simply discussed what we had read in the papers that day. It was only in my conversations with Sonne that we looked more deeply into what was happening in Spain and considered its consequences for the future of Europe. Sonne proved to be well versed in Spanish history. He had studied every phase of the centuries-long war between Christianity and Islam, of the Moorish period and the Reconquista. He was as familiar with the country’s three cultures as if he had grown up in all of them, as though they still existed and were accessible through a knowledge of the three languages, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew, and of the corresponding literatures. From him I learned something about Arabic literature. He translated Moorish poems of the time as easily as if he had been translating from the Bible, and explained their influence on the European Middle Ages. Though he never for a moment claimed to know Arabic, it came out quite incidentally that he was fluent in that language.
When I tried to explain certain events in the recent and past history of Spain by the particular type of mass movements specific to the Iberian peninsula, he listened and did not try to discourage me. I had the impression that if he expressed no reaction it was because he realized my ideas were still fluid and that it would be better for their future development if they were not yet solidified by discussion.
It was only natural at that time that we should think of Goya and his Horrors of War engravings. For it was his experience of the cruel reality of his time that made this first and greatest of modern artists what he was. “He didn’t look the other way,” said Sonne. Those words were spoken from the heart. How shattering to contrast the rococo style of Goya’s early works with these engravings and the late paintings. Goya had his opinions, he was partisan; how could a man who saw the royal family with his eyes have failed to be partisan? But he saw what was happening as if he belonged to both camps, because his knowledge was a human knowledge. He detested war, more passionately perhaps than anyone before him or even today, for he knew that there is no such thing as a good war, since every war perpetuates the most evil and dangerous of human traditions. War cannot be abolished by war, which merely consolidates what is most detestable in man. Goya’s value as a witness exceeded his partisanship; what he saw was monstrous, it was more than he had any desire to see. Since Grünewald’s Christ no one had depicted horror as he did, no whit better than it was—sickening, crushing, cutting deeper than any promise of redemption—yet without succumbing to it. The pressure he put on the viewer, the undeviating direction he gave to his gaze, was the ultimate in hope, though no one would have dared call it by that name.
Those who had not forgotten the teachings of the First World War were in a state of grave spiritual torment. Sonne recognized the nature of the Spanish Civil War and knew what it would lead to. Though he hated war, he thought it necessary and indispensable that the Spanish Republic should defend itself. With Argus eyes he followed every move of the Western powers that were trying to prevent the war from spreading to Europe. He groaned to see the democratic powers reducing themselves to impotence with their nonintervention policy and knowingly letting the Fascists pull the wool over their eyes. He knew this weakness had its source in a dread of war, which he shared with them, but it also revealed ignorance of the enemy and terrifying shortsightedness. The pusillanimity of the Western powers encouraged Hitler, who was testing their reactions, trying to find out how far he could go; his enemies’ dread of war confirmed him in his warlike plans. Sonne was convinced that nothing could be done to change Hitler’s determination to make war, that it was his basic principle (derived from his experience of war), the principle by which he lived and through which he had come to power. Sonne regarded all attempts to influence Hitler as futile. But it was necessary to break off the chain of his successes before all anti-war sentiment had been suppressed in Germany. This sentiment could be encouraged only by unequivocal action outside of Germany. Hitler’s triumphal march was a deadly threat to all, the Germans included. With his fanatical sense of historic mission Hitler was bound in the end to drag the whole world into this war, and how could Germany hope to defeat all the rest of the world?
Sonne’s opinions were far in advance of the times. Politicians were staggering from one makeshift solution to the next. Though he saw the coming catastrophe more and more clearly, he took an interest in every least detail of the Spanish conflict. For to his lucid mind, oddly enough, nothing could be regarded as settled once and for all; an unforeseen event, however unimportant at first sight, could give rise to a new hope—and such hopes must not be overlooked, everything must be borne in mind, nothing was unimportant.
In the course of the civil war, Spanish names came up, the names of places to which some historical or literary memory attached. Sonne would speak to me of these memories and it will always be a source of amazement to me how late and with what a sense of urgency I became acquainted with Spain.
Up until then something had deterred me from taking a closer look at the Spanish Middle Ages. I had not forgotten the songs and sayings of my childhood, but they had led to nothing more, they had stuck fast inside me, congealed by the arrogance of my family, who claimed a right to all things Spanish, insofar as they served their caste pride. I knew Sephardic Jews who lived in Oriental sloth, outstripped in mental development by anyone who had gone to school in Vienna, asking nothing more of life than the right to feel superior to other Jews. Nor was I doing my mother an injustice when I observed that she was well read in all the literatures of Europe but knew next to nothing of Spanish literature. She had seen plays by Calderón at the Burgtheater, but it would never have occurred to her to read them in the original. To her, Spanish was not a literary language. What it had given her was the memory of a glorious medieval past and perhaps it was of value only because it was a spoken language and was the source of a certain disdain for the people around her. She could not provide me with an introduction to Spanish literature. There was something uncommonly Spanish about her pride, yet she derived her models for it from Shakespeare, in particular Coriolanus. Vienna, not her origins, had been the dominant influence in her upper-class education.
I was thirty when I was introduced to the poets who created what has remained of those early years in Spain. I heard about them from Sonne, a “Todesco”1—his family hailed from Austrian Galicia—to whom my mother would have denied any right to “our poets,” whom she did not know at all. He translated them to me orally from the Hebrew and explained them, and sometimes on the same afternoon he would translate Moorish poems from Arabic and explain them. Since he showed me an overall picture, not something torn out of its temporal context for reasons of absurd vainglory, I put away my distrust of Ladino culture and viewed it with respect.
These were strange conversations. They started from news items about the war in Spain. How expertly Sonne dealt with the situation, the relative strength of the opposing forces, the length of time it would take for expected help to reach them, the effect of a Republican retreat on foreign opinion—would it result in more aid or less?—the changes taking place in the Republican government, the increasing influence of one party, the role of regional autonomistic tendencies. Nothing was omitted, nothing forgotten. Often I had the impression of talking with a man who held the threads of history in his hands. But it was also quite evident that he was trying to give me the feeling that all these events were taking place in a country that should be familiar to me, and that he was therefore doing his utmost to make it familiar to me. With few words he transported me to the cultural spheres which, no less than this terrible war, were Spain.
I still remember how I was led to one work or another. The occasion was often a name that had come up in the news. The shock of a news item entered into such a book and it no longer existed by itself alone. The present events gave rise to a secret nucleus, its second, immutable structure.
It was then that Quevedo’s Dreams came my way. Along with Swift and Aristophanes, Quevedo was one of my ancestors. A writer needs ancestors. He must know some of them by name. When he thinks he is going to choke on his own name, which he cannot get rid of, he harks back to ancestors, who bear happy, deathless names of their own. They may smile at his importunity, but they do not rebuff him. They too need others, in their case descendants. They have passed through thousands of hands; no one can hurt them; that’s why they have become ancestors, because they have succeeded without a struggle in defending themselves against the weak. By giving strength to others, they grow stronger. But there are also ancestors who feel the need of resting awhile. They go to sleep for a century or two. They get woken, you can rely on that; all of a sudden they ring out like trumpets, only to yearn again for their forsaken slumbers.
Sonne may have found it unbearable to lose himself entirely in events. He may have been repelled by his powerlessness to influence them. In any case, he never missed an opportunity to call attention to my origins, precisely because I attached so little importance to them. He felt strongly that no part of a life must be lost. What a man touched upon, he should take with him. If he forgot it, he should be reminded. What gives a man worth is that he incorporates everything he has experienced. This includes the countries where he has lived, the people whose voices he has heard. It also takes in his origins, if he can find out something about them. By this he meant not only one’s private experience but everything concerning the time and place of one’s beginnings. The words of a language one may have spoken and heard only as a child imply the literature in which it flowered. The story of a banishment must include everything that happened before it as well as the rights subsequently claimed by the victims. Others had fallen before and in different ways; they too are part of the story. It is hard to evaluate the justice of such a claim to a history. To Sonne’s mind history was eminently the area of guilt. We should know not only what happened to our fellow men in the past but also what they were capable of. We should know what we ourselves are capable of. For that, much knowledge is needed; from whatever direction, at whatever distance knowledge offers itself, one should reach out for it, keep it fresh, water it and fertilize it with new knowledge. The present civil war, which affected us even more deeply than what was happening in the city where we lived, provided Sonne with a means of entrenching me in my past, which now for the first time became real for me. It was thanks to him that when I had to leave Vienna shortly thereafter, there was more of me to go. He enabled me to take a language with me and to hold on to it so firmly that I would never under any circumstances be in danger of losing it.
I shall never forget the day when in a state of great agitation I came to meet Sonne at the Café Museum and he received me in total silence. The newspaper lay on the table in front of him, his hand lay on top of it, he didn’t lift his hand to shake mine. I forgot to pronounce a greeting; the words I was going to fire at him stuck in my throat. He had turned to stone, I was delirious with excitement. The same news—the destruction of Guernica by German bombers—had affected us in very different ways. I wanted to hear a curse from his lips, a curse in the name of all Basques, all Spaniards, all mankind. I did not want to see him turned to stone. His helplessness was more than I could bear. I felt my anger turning against him. I stood waiting for a word from him. I couldn’t sit down until he said something. He paid no attention to me. He looked drained; he looked desiccated, as though long dead. The thought passed through my head: A mummy. She’s right. He is a mummy. That’s what Veza called him when she was angry. I was sure he felt my condemnation, even if I hadn’t said anything. But that too he disregarded. He said: “I tremble for the cities.” It was hardly audible, but I knew I had heard right.
I didn’t understand. Those words were then harder to understand than they would be today. He’s befuddled, I thought, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Guernica destroyed, and he talks about cities. I couldn’t bear the thought of his being befuddled. His clarity had become the biggest thing in the world for me. Two disasters had hit me at once. A town destroyed by bombers. Sonne stricken with madness. I asked no questions. I offered no moral support. I said nothing and left. Even out on the street I felt no sympathy for him. I felt—it sickens me to say it—pity for myself. It was as though he had died in Guernica, as though I had lost everything and was trying to face up to it.
I hadn’t gone far when it suddenly occurred to me that he might be ill; he had looked frightfully pale. He couldn’t be dead, I thought, for he had spoken, I had heard his words, what had hit me so hard was the absurdity of those words. I turned back, he welcomed me with a smile, he was the same as usual. I would gladly have forgotten the incident, but he said: “You needed a breath of air. I can see that. Maybe I need one myself.” He stood up and I left the café with him. Outside, we spoke as if nothing had happened. He made no further reference to the words that had so upset me. That may be why I have never been able to forget them. Years later, in England during the war, the scales fell from my eyes. We were far apart, but he was still alive. He was in Jerusalem. We did not correspond. I thought to myself: Never has there been a more reluctant prophet. He saw what would happen to the cities. And he had seen all the rest. He had had plenty to tremble for. He didn’t justify one atrocity by another. He had left the blood feud of history behind him.
Conference on Nussdorferstrasse
Hermann Scherchen was planning a journal in four languages, to be called Ars Viva like the series of concerts he was then giving in Vienna, for which he had recruited a special orchestra. The journal was not to be devoted solely to music; literature and the plastic arts were to be represented on an equal footing. He asked me to propose possible co-editors in Vienna, and I mentioned Musil and Wotruba. Quick as usual to make up his mind, he suggested that the four of us should meet and discuss the possibility of our putting out a journal together. It was to be a private meeting, without witnesses; in those times of political pressure a café seemed too exposed for the purpose. Wotruba had left the apartment on Florianigasse to his mother and sister, and moved to one of his own on Nussdorferstrasse. That seemed the best place for our meeting, for apart from being centrally located, it was neutral ground, so to speak. Himmelstrasse in Grinzing was too far out of the way. Scherchen and his Chinese wife were staying with us, but since I had offended Musil with my tactless remark about Thomas Mann, he had been cool to me and I could not invite him to my house. Wotruba had met him at my reading at the Schwarzwald School. That had been almost two years before. Since then they had exchanged greetings, but had not become friends. Nothing had happened between them that might have prevented Musil from accepting an invitation. After consultation with me Wotruba wrote a strong but respectful letter, and Musil agreed to come.
