The Torch in my Ear, page 29
He showed me everything to be seen in Berlin, namely the people, as though I were he himself, coming to Berlin for the first time. And he enjoyed my astonishment without observing it too carefully, for he was concerned not so much with me but with himself, as he had been at my age. It was good for me that he never put me down; he always introduced me as his “friend and colleague.” Yet I had only known him for a few days, and I had not yet begun working. He did not ask me for any proof of my abilities; he did not want to read any of my writings. Perhaps it would have been a bother to read something of mine (it is amazing to think that he, the publisher whom I eventually knew best and most intimately, never, not even later, brought out any of my own writings). It was enough for him that we talked. He had heard some things from Ibby; I told him some things myself. Most important for him was that he could tell me, in his Berlin, about his innocent ways, his love for his youth, and that I listened. I thus gained his friendship by listening, and I cannot even say that this was cunning on my part; I enjoyed listening. I have always enjoyed listening when people speak about themselves. This seemingly quiet, passive tendency is so violent as to constitute my innermost concept of life. I will be dead when I no longer hear what a person is telling me about himself.
Why did I expect so much from Grosz? What did he mean to me? Ever since Frankfurt, when I had seen books of his displayed at the Bookstore for Young People—that is, for the past six years—I had been admiring these drawings and carrying them around in my head. Six young years are a long time. His drawings had struck me to the core at first sight. They expressed precisely what I felt after the things I saw around me during the inflation, after Herr Hungerbach’s visit, after the deaf ears of my mother, who refused to notice anything happening around us. I liked the strength and recklessness you saw in these drawings, the ruthlessness and dreadfulness. Since they were extreme, I regarded them as Truth. A truth that mediated, that weakened, that explained, that excused was no Truth for me. I knew that Grosz’s characters really existed. I had known it since my childhood in Manchester, when I had installed the ogre as my foe, which he then always remained for me. A short time after seeing Grosz’s drawings, I heard Karl Kraus in Vienna, and the effect was the same. Except that being a verbal person, I began to imitate Kraus. From him, I could learn, above all, how to hear, but also, to a certain degree (and not without some reluctance) the rhetoric of accusal. I never imitated George Grosz: drawing has always been beyond me. I did seek and find his characters in real life, but the distance to a different medium always persisted. His talent was unattainable for me: he spoke in a different language, which I understood, but which I would never be able to master for my own use. This meant that he never became a model for me—he was the object of my utmost admiration, but never a model.
The first time I entered his home, Wieland, as usual, introduced me as a “friend and colleague.” The result was that I never felt too small. It did not cross my mind that Grosz was well acquainted with all of Wieland’s friends and must have known that I was not one of them. Ibby was suddenly there; I had never been discussed; Ibby had announced that I would shortly be coming from Vienna, that was all. However, I soon managed to get over such insecurities, for Grosz began to show Wieland and me some of his works. I was close to things that had just been created. Grosz was accustomed to showing Wieland his drawings; Wieland had published them and made them renowned. They had picked them out together, and Wieland had found titles for these drawings. Now too, titles were dropped, out of habit. Wieland loved spouting them quickly. There was no discussion of them. Grosz would accept Wieland’s titles: they had brought him luck.
Grosz was dressed in tweed, he was strong and tan in contrast to Wieland, and he sucked at his pipe. He looked like a young skipper, not an English one, he talked a great deal, he seemed more American. Since he was extremely open and cordial, I did not regard his costume as a disguise. I felt free with him and I let myself go. I was enthusiastic about everything he showed us. He was delighted by my enthusiasm, as if it were very important to him. He sometimes nodded at Wieland when I said something about a graphic. I sensed that I was on target; and while I couldn’t open my mouth in front of Brecht without triggering his sarcasm, I aroused Grosz’s interest and delight. He asked me whether I knew the Ecce Homo folder. I said no; the set had been banned by law. He went over to a chest, raised the lid, and removed a folder, which he then handed me as if it were nothing special. I thought he wanted me to have a look, and I opened it up; however, I was quickly enlightened: he said I could take it home, the folder was a present. “Not just anybody can get one,” said Wieland, who knew how impulsive his friend was. But he did not need to say it. No act of magnanimity has ever eluded me, and I was overwhelmed by this one.
I put down the folder so as not to get into comical movements of happiness, and I had not quite finished thanking him when a visitor appeared: it was the last person I would have wished for or expected: Brecht. He came with all signs of respect, slightly bent; he was bringing a present for Grosz, a pencil, a completely ordinary pencil, which he placed on the drawing table, emphatically and significantly. Grosz accepted this modest homage and transformed it into something greater. He said: “This pencil was just what I needed. I can use it.” I felt intruded on by the visit, but I enjoyed seeing Brecht from a different side. This was how he acted when he wanted to show approval; the fact that it occurred in such a restrained and economical way made it all the more impressive. I wondered how Grosz felt about him, whether he liked him. Brecht did not stay long. When he had left, Grosz said to Wieland—casually, as though it were not meant for my ears: “He’s got no time, the European stew.” It did not sound hateful or hostile, perhaps skeptical, as though he had various opinions about Brecht, conflicting ones.
Wieland and I went our separate ways after leaving Grosz: Wieland to the publishing house, I to my round table in the garret, where the work on Upton Sinclair’s documents was waiting for me. In contrast with the things he had exposed as a muckraker, Sinclair’s own life seemed boring. This was due not to the circumstances of his life (which had been hard), but to his straight and narrow views. He was Puritanical through and through. And even though I was just as Puritanical and ought to have felt a kinship with him, even though I wholeheartedly approved of his attacks against terrible conditions, against humiliation and injustice, I felt that his assaults lacked all satirical brilliance. Thus it was not surprising that I did not get right down to work that day; instead, I opened the Ecce Homo folder: it contained everything that one missed in Upton Sinclair.
The folder had been banned as obscene. There is no denying that certain things in it could appear obscene. I took it all in with an odd mixture of horror and approval. These were dreadful creatures of Berlin’s night life that you saw here, but they were here because they were viewed as dreadful. I regarded my disgust at them as the artist’s disgust. I knew very little about all this, I had been in Berlin for only about a week. Grosz was one of the first people I visited. Ibby had introduced me to Brecht at Schlichter; she regarded him, if only because he was a writer, as the most interesting thing that she could offer me in Berlin. We had gone to this restaurant every day. Brecht liked seeing Ibby, but she always dragged me along, and perhaps that was one reason why he made me the butt of his scorn. Wieland, however, was a generous man; Grosz was far more important to me than Brecht, and that was how it had come to this visit (I believe on the sixth day of my sojourn).
Now, however, I had brought home the Ecce Homo folder. It inserted itself between me and Berlin, and from then on, it colored most things for me, especially all the things I saw at night. Perhaps it would otherwise have taken these things a lot longer to penetrate me. My interest in the freedom of sexual matters was still not great. Now these unbelievably hard and ruthless depictions threw me into the sexual world, and I regarded this world as true. I would never have dreamt of doubting its truth. And just as one sees certain landscapes only through the eyes of certain painters, so too I saw Berlin through the eyes of George Grosz.
I was swept off my feet by this first viewing and also terrified, so deeply that I could not part with the folder when Ibby came by and saw the watercolors, which I had found as loose pages in the folder and spread across the table. She had never seen me with anything like this, and she found it funny: “You’ve become a Berliner very quickly,” she said. “In Vienna, you were crazy about death masks, and now…” She spread her arm over the paintings, as though I had gathered them on the table cautiously and with some deliberate plan. “You know,” she said, “Grosz likes this. When he’s drunk, he talks about ‘ass.’ He means women, and he looks at you in such a strange way. I pretend I don’t understand. But he sings a hymn to ‘ass.’”
I was beside myself: “That’s not true! He hates this! That’s why his things are so good. Do you believe I would look at them if what you said were true!”
“You don’t like that,” she said. “I know, I know. That’s why I can tell you everything. But he does like it! Wait till you see him drunk and he starts carrying on about ‘ass.’”
It was characteristic of Ibby that she could say this. She used the word ass, and there was no mistaking what she meant: Grosz, being drunk, had tried to make a pass at her and sung the praises of her physicality, an action that might have offended or at least annoyed other women like her. The word ass referred to her; she repeated it, and it sounded as if it had nothing to do with her. She remained unmoved, as if he had never gotten too close for comfort, as if all that interested her was the unvarnished report that she gave me.
That was why she had wanted me to come to Berlin—so she could tell me everything. She was pursued by men; wherever she appeared, they would get personal. Three or four men tried it at the same time; one had to succeed. When none of them did succeed, people found her enigmatic. They set up the most abstruse hypotheses; for instance: she was not really a woman, she only looked like one; there was something different about her—her vagina was probably closed up. One particularly distrustful man named Borchardt, who was in Brecht’s circle, declared that she was a spy: “Where does she come from? She popped up out of nowhere. Who is she? She’s everywhere and listens to everything.” Ibby laughed at his remarks and remained in high spirits. She found him ridiculous, but, so long as she was alone in Berlin, she could not say so to anyone, for these people, who saw everything as permissible, were deadly serious about sexual activity, and they would have greatly resented Ibby’s mockery (that was all she felt). She could not live without mockery. She had to, was driven to, express her mockery with wit and verbal surprises. And that was why she hadn’t rested until she finally managed to lure me to Berlin.
Common to both of us was an insatiable interest in every kind of human being. Her interest was colored by humor, and I enjoyed it when she regaled me with her accounts. But I myself did not really find human variety comical. I found it unsettling. People wriggled in every possible way to communicate. But they failed to understand one another. It was every man for himself. And even though every man did remain alone, notwithstanding all delusions, he kept on wriggling indefatigably. I listened to all the flagrant misunderstandings that Ibby told me about. I was confronted with many of them myself, but she brought special testimony into my world, things that I as a man could not experience. Beautiful and sought after as she was, she received nothing but the most absurd propositions, as though she herself did not exist, as though there were only a seemingly live statue of her to receive suggestions. Her answers, however, were not heard: they never reached the ears of those men, who cared only about having their say and, if possible, getting what they lusted after. They did not realize why they never succeeded, for they would have been utterly incapable of grasping an answer. Nor would it have interested them to find out anything about their rivals; such information, even though they all seemed to have the same goal, would have been strange and unintelligible to them. For no matter how precisely and inalterably Ibby retained their words and deeds, each man, in order to understand them, would have had to disregard himself, and this was something none of them wished to do.
Isaac Babel
A large portion of my memories of Berlin is filled with Isaac Babel. He could not have been there very long, but I feel as if I had seen him every day for weeks on end, for hours and hours, yet we never spoke very much. I was so fond of him—more than any of the countless other people I met—that he has spread out in my memory, which would like to grant him every one of the ninety days of Berlin.
He came from Paris, where his wife, a painter, was studying with André Lhote. He had stayed in various places in France. French literature was his promised land; he regarded Maupassant as his true master. Gorky had discovered Babel and watched over him; he had counseled Babel in a manner that could not have been wiser and more promising. He had perceived Babel’s possibilities and had been intent on helping him, not himself, with unselfish criticism, serious and unmocking, knowing quite well how easy it is to destroy someone younger, weaker, unknown, before the tyro can know what is in him.
Babel, after traveling abroad for a long time, had stopped off in Berlin on the way back to Russia. I think he was here in late September, actually remaining no more than two weeks. The two books that had made him famous, Red Cavalry and The Odessa Tales, had both been published in German by the Malik publishing house. I had read the latter book more than once. I could admire him without feeling all too remote from him.
I had heard about Odessa as a child. The name went back to the earliest phase of my life. I laid claim to the Black Sea, even though I had known it for only a few short weeks in Varna. The colorfulness, wildness, and energy of Babel’s Odessa stories were virtually nourished by my own childhood memories. Without realizing it, I had found the natural capital for that smaller town on the lower Danube; and I would have found it suitable if this Odessa had developed at the mouth of the Danube. Then, the famous voyage that had determined the dreams of my childhood, up the Danube and down again, would have stretched from Vienna to Odessa and from Odessa back to Vienna. And Ruschuk, which lay very far downstream, would have had a proper place on this route.
I was curious about Babel, as though he came from this region, which I only halfheartedly acknowledged as my own. I could feel at ease about a place only if it was open to the world. Odessa was such a place. That was how Babel felt about Odessa and its stories. In my childhood home, all windows faced Vienna. Now, on a previously averted side, a window was opened toward Odessa.
Babel was a small, squat man with a very round head. The first thing you noticed about him was his thick glasses. Perhaps it was these glasses that made his wide-open eyes seem particularly round and gaping. No sooner had he appeared than you felt viewed, and, virtually as recompense for so much attention, you told yourself that he looked broad and powerful and by no means feeble—an impression that would have been more consistent with the effect of the glasses.
I first saw him at Schwanecke, a restaurant that struck me as luxurious, perhaps because people went there at night and after the theater. It would then teem with famous theatrical figures. No sooner had you noticed one than another went by, an even greater celebrity. There were so many celebrities during this efflorescence of the theater that you soon gave up noticing each and every one of them. There were also writers, painters, patrons, critics and fancy journalists. And Wieland, with whom I had come, was always attentive enough to explain to me who these people were. He had known them all so long already that they made no impact on him. He didn’t sound as if he were name-dropping, more as if he were questioning their right to fame, as though they were overrated and would soon vanish from the scene. He had his own horses in the running, the people he had discovered himself, whose books he published and whom he was trying to bring to the attention of the public. Hence he naturally preferred talking about them, and certainly in greater detail. At Schwanecke in the evening, he never sat at a separate table with his loyal followers, dissociating himself from the outside world. Instead, he mingled in larger groups, where friend and foe sat together; here, Wieland looked for someone to attack. He advocated his cause aggressively, not defensively, but he generally didn’t stay long, for he had already noticed another group where there was someone who inspired his urge to attack. I soon realized that he was not the only one employing this aggressive method. Then too, there were people who asserted themselves by complaining, and even those who came right into the midst of this noisy turbulence in order to keep quiet—a minority, but a highly conspicuous one: mute, pinched face-islands in the seething landscape, turtles who knew how to drink, and whom you had to ask about because they never reacted to any questions.
The first evening that Babel appeared at Schwanecke, a large group was sitting at a long table in the front room. I had come late and had sat down shyly at the far end of the group, right near the door. I hovered on the edge of my chair as though sliding off and about to vanish. The “handsomest” man in the circle was Leonhard Frank. He had a deeply furrowed face with chiseled features; it looked as if it had gone through all the ups and downs of life, gladly marked by experience and for all to see. Frank’s slender, muscular body was clothed in an elegant custom-made suit and seemed about to leap; one jump, and he would have swung as a panther across the entire length of the table, and the suit would not have been crumpled or twisted in any way. Despite his deep furrows, he didn’t look the least bit old, more like a man in the prime of life. In his youth, people said in awesome tones, he had been a blacksmith (others said, less poetically, that he had been a locksmith). Not surprising, given his strength and agility. I imagined him at the anvil, not in this suit, which bothered me. However, there was no denying that he felt absolutely wonderful here, at Schwanecke.
