The Torch in my Ear, page 31
“Indeed I do!” he said. And now came a splendid slap in my face, a thrilling recitation of several Heine poems, which belonged to Hardt’s most intimate repertoire.
I believe that this was the first jolting of my faith in Karl Kraus. For Hardt was measuring himself with Kraus on his most personal terrain, as a reciter, and he emerged victorious. He recited “The Wandering Rats” and “The Silesian Weavers,” and his power and fury were in no way second to Karl Kraus’s. It was an irruption of a taboo; and, despite threats, curses, and prohibitions, my mind was too sound not to make room for the intrusion. The impact was even stronger because Hardt had just listed all the objections to Heine: they crumbled and scattered. I felt the collapse inside me and I had to bear the consequences. For the dams that Karl Kraus had erected in me had been my defense against Berlin. I felt weaker than before, and my confusion mounted. I had been assaulted by the enemy in two places at once. My God had sat with Brecht, who had written an advertising poem for cars, and He had exchanged words of praise with Brecht. And Ludwig Hardt, with whom He had once been on good terms, who had been His friend, had struck an irreparable breach in me for Heine.
An Invitation to Emptiness
Everything was equally close in Berlin, every kind of effect was permitted: no one was prohibited from making himself noticeable if he didn’t mind the strain. For it was no easy matter: the noise was great, and you were always aware, in the midst of noise and tumult, that there were things worth hearing and seeing. Anything went. The taboos, of which there was no lack anywhere, especially in Germany, dried out here. You could come from an old capital like Vienna and feel like a provincial here, and you gaped until your eyes grew accustomed to remaining open. There was something pungent, corrosive in the atmosphere; it stimulated and animated. You charged into everything and were afraid of nothing. The terrible adjacency and chaos, such as poured out at you from Grosz’s drawings, were by no means exaggerated; they were natural here, a new nature, which became indispensable to you, which you grew accustomed to. Any attempt at shutting yourself off had something perverse about it, and it was the only thing that could still be regarded as perverse. And if you did manage to isolate yourself for a brief while, then you soon felt the itch again, and you plunged into the turbulence. Everything was permeable, there was no intimacy. Any intimacy was feigned, and its goal was to surpass some other intimacy. It was not an end in itself.
The animal quality and the intellectual quality, bared and intensified to the utmost, were mutually entangled, in a kind of alternating current. If you had awakened to your own animality before coming here, you had to increase it in order to hold out against the animality of other people; and if you weren’t very strong, you were soon used up. But if you were directed by your intellect and had scarcely given in to your animality, you were bound to surrender to the richness of what was offered your mind. These things smashed away at you, versatile, contradictory, and relentless; you had no time to understand anything, you received nothing but strokes, and you hadn’t even gotten over yesterday’s strokes before the new ones showered upon you. You walked around Berlin as a tender piece of meat, and you felt as if you still weren’t tender enough and were waiting for new strokes.
But the thing that impressed me most, the thing that determined the rest of my life, even today, was the incompatibility of all the things that broke in on me. Every individual who was something—and many people were something—struck away at the others with himself. It was questionable whether they understood him; he made them listen. It didn’t seem to bother him that others made people listen in a different way. He had validity as soon as he was heard. And now he had to continue striking away with himself to keep from being supplanted in the ears of the public. Perhaps no one had the leisure to wonder where all this was leading to. In any event, no transparent life came about in this way; but then, this was not the goal. The results were books, paintings, plays, one against the other, crisscross, zigzag.
I was always with someone else, Wieland, Ibby; I never wandered through Berlin alone. This was not the right way to get to know a city, but it may have been suitable in the Berlin of that era. You lived in groups, in cliques; perhaps, you couldn’t otherwise have endured that harsh existence. You always heard names, usually well-known names: someone was expected, someone came. What is a time of brilliance? A time of many great names, all close together, but in such a way that no name suffocates another., even though they are fighting one another. The important thing is daily life, steady contact, the blows that brilliance endures without dimming. A lack of sensitivity in regard to these blows, a sort of yearning for them, the joy of exposing oneself to them.
The names rubbed together, that was their goal. In a mysterious osmosis, one name tried to filch as much radiance as possible from another name, after which it hurried off to find yet another one very quickly, in order to repeat the same process. The mutual touching and sloughing of names had something hasty to it, but also something arbitrary; the fun of it was that you never knew which name would come next. This hinged on chance; and since names that were out to make their fortune arrived from everywhere, anything seemed possible.
The curiosity about surprises, about the unexpected or the terrifying, left you in a state of mild intoxication. To endure all these things, to keep from entering a state of total confusion and remaining in it, the people who lived here all the time grew accustomed to taking nothing seriously, especially names. The first person in whom I could observe this process of cynicism about names was someone I saw frequently. His cynicism showed itself, first of all, in his aggressive statements about anyone who had excelled in anything. These statements could appear as expressions of a political standpoint. But in reality, they were something else, namely a kind of struggle for existence. By acknowledging as little as possible, by hitting out in all directions, you yourself became somebody. Anyone who didn’t know how to hit out in all directions was doomed and could simply hit the road: Berlin was nothing for him.
One very important thing was to keep being seen, for days, weeks, and months. The visits to the Romanisches Café (and, on a lofty level, to Schlichter and Schwanecke), which were certainly pleasurable, were not meant for pleasure alone. They were also impelled by the need for self-manifestations, a need that no one eluded. If you didn’t want to be forgotten, you had to be seen. This obtained for every rank and every stratum, even for any moocher who went from table to table in the Romanisches Café, always getting something, so long as he maintained the character he performed and did not tolerate any distortion of it.
An essential phenomenon of Berlin life in those days was the patrons. There were many. They sat around everywhere, lying in wait for customers. A few patrons were always there; others were just visiting. There were some who commuted frequently from Paris. I met my first maecenas—a man with a mustache, a globular face, and lips revealing a good cuisine—at the Romanisches Café. I was with Ibby. There was little room; a chair was free at our table. The man with the mustache and lips joined us and kept totally quiet. We were talking about Ibby’s poems again. She had just been asked for a few. She was reciting them to me. We were trying to decide which ones she ought to show. The man was listening and chuckling as if he understood us. Yet he looked like a menu with nothing but French names. He clicked his tongue several times as if about to speak, but then remained silent. Perhaps he was looking for suitable words. Finally, he found them, with the aid of a calling card that he flashed. He was a cigarette manufacturer and lived in Paris, near the Bois de Boulogne. You could look into every worker’s pot, he said; you knew what was in it. The pot and its content sounded ominous and explosive. We were both frightened. Whereupon he invited us to dinner, well-bred and courteous. We begged off, pleading something important that we had to discuss. He insisted. He said he had something to discuss with us, too. He was so emphatic that curiosity got the better of us and we agreed to dine with him.
He took us to an expensive restaurant that we didn’t know. He indulged in a few rhetorical flourishes about the French cuisine, mentioned Baden-Baden, where he came from, and then asked me quite discreetly whether he could offer the young poetess a monthly pension of two hundred marks for one year. A tiny amount, almost nothing, he said, but it was a heartfelt need. He said not a word about the poems he had heard. It sufficed for him that he didn’t understand them. He had seen Ibby for the first time in his life just one hour ago. She was beautiful, certainly, and when she recited her poems, her Hungarian German also sounded seductive. But I doubt that he had an organ for it. When Ibby, in response to my rather chilly question, agreed to accept his offer, he gratefully kissed her hand—and that was the only liberty he took. Yet this was a man in the best years of his life, and he knew what he wanted (not just in regard to menus). His goal here, however, was to be a patron of the arts; that was what he had wanted to discuss with us. He kept his word; and since he was never in Berlin, he never attempted to force himself on Ibby.
I distinguished between the loud and the silent patrons; this one was a silent patron. Their loudness depended on whether they could have a say; for this, they had to be familiar with the jargon of the circle that they bankrolled. In the group around George Grosz and the Malik people, one often saw a young man, whose name I have forgotten. He was rich and noisy and wanted to be taken seriously. He participated in conversations and liked to argue. Perhaps he knew something about a few subjects, but the first thing I got to hear from him was the Glass-of-Water Theory. This theory was making the rounds; there was nothing more hackneyed in all Berlin. But when he spoke about it, he really picked up an empty glass, brought it to his lips, pretended to drain it, and scornfully put it down on the table: “Love? A glass of water, drained, done with!” He had a blond mustache, which puffed up slightly in pride: every time he came out with the Glass-of-Water Theory, the mustache bristled. This young man was a high-style backer; perhaps he helped to support the Malik publishing house. At any rate, he was a patron of George Grosz.
A truly silent maecenas, who never had his say, because he understood so much about his own field that he didn’t want to say stupid things about other fields, was a youngish man named Stark, who had something to do with Osram light-bulbs. He was often around, listening carefully to everything, saying nothing, and sometimes making himself useful when it seemed imperative—but he was always restrained, never making a splash. In a building owned by him or his firm at the center of Berlin, there was a vacant apartment, three lovely rooms in a row. He offered this apartment to Ibby for a few months (it wouldn’t be vacant after that). The rooms, with wall-to-wall carpeting, were totally empty. He put in a couch for her to sleep on; that was all. Everything else was up to her.
She had the graceful idea of leaving the apartment empty, not get a single piece of furniture, and invite people into her emptiness. “You have to say the furniture,” she said. “I want inventive guests.” To support their inventiveness, a small porcelain donkey grazed on the green carpet in the middle room. It was a very pretty donkey. She had seen it in the window of an antique store, had gone in and offered to write a poem about the donkey in exchange for getting it. “Brecht a car, me a donkey. Which do you prefer?” she asked me, knowing quite well what my answer would be. The proprietress of the store had agreed to the barter (there were such people in Berlin), and Ibby was so astonished that she wrote her “best poem” for the woman—it was lost.
Ibby threw a huge housewarming. Each guest was first led to the donkey, introduced to it, and then asked to have a seat wherever he liked. There was no chair anywhere in the apartment; the guests stood or sat down on the floor. Drinks were taken care of: there were patrons for such things, too. Everyone showed up, no one who had heard about the empty apartment wanted to miss it. But the odd thing was that everyone remained, no one left. Ibby asked me to watch George Grosz. She was afraid he’d get drunk and attack her, saying all the things that I refused to believe he said. When he came, he was enchanting, in his most dandyish elegance. He brought along someone who was loaded up with bottles for Ibby. “Too bad,” said Ibby, “that I don’t fall in love. Today it’s all starting charmingly. But just wait!”
We didn’t have to wait too long. Grosz was already drunk when he came, playing the élégant. He sat on the day couch, Ibby sat on the floor not too far from him. He stretched out his arms to her, she recoiled so that he couldn’t reach her. Then he blew up and there was no stopping him: “You don’t let anyone get to you! No one gets anything from you! What’s going on?” He went on in this way, and he grew even worse. Then he switched over to singing the praises of “Ass!” “Ass, ass, you’re my delight!” She had predicted this after my very first visit to him, when I had returned with the Ecce Homo folder that he had given to me; I had been full of enthusiasm about him, full of veneration for the sharpness of his eye, his relentless scourging of this Berlin society. There he sat now, crimson, drunken, uncontrollably excited because Ibby had turned him down in front of all these people, who weren’t even offended by his behavior, his shameless cursing—and all at once, he seemed to me like one of the characters in his drawings.
I couldn’t stand it. I was in despair. I was furious at Ibby for putting him in this state, knowing what would happen. I wanted to get away. I was the only guest who didn’t feel comfortable here. I sneaked out, but I didn’t escape, for Ibby, who had kept her eye on me all the while, was already at the door, blocking my way. She was afraid. She had provoked the entire scene to show me that he really did act toward her as she had told me. However, his outburst was so powerful and so long-lasting that she now feared him. She, who was never afraid, who had managed to get out of countless bad situations (she had told me about all of them, I knew about all of them)—Ibby now didn’t dare remain in the apartment, which was full of people, if I didn’t stay to protect her. Now I hated her because I couldn’t leave her alone. Now I had to remain and watch one of the few people I admired in Berlin, a man who had been magnanimous to me and had acted the way I still expected people to act—I had to watch him demean himself and I had to make sure that Ibby was concealed from him and didn’t come within his reach. It was so horrible listening to him rage that I would rather she left with him. No one seemed surprised at his conduct, nor did anyone laugh; people were used to these scenes, they were part of daily life here. I just wanted to get away from there, far away, and since I couldn’t get out of the apartment, I wanted to get away from Berlin.
Escape
That was late in September. At the end of August, Ibby and I had attended the premiere of The Threepenny Opera. It was a cunning performance, coldly calculated. It was the most accurate expression of this Berlin. The people cheered for themselves: this was they and they liked themselves. First they fed their faces, then they spoke of right and wrong. No one could have put it better about them. They took these words literally. Now it had been spoken, they felt as snug as a bug in a rug. Penalty had been abolished: the royal messenger rode in on a real horse. The shrill and naked self-complacence that this performance emanated can be believed only by the people who witnessed it.
If it is the task of satire to lash people for the injustice that they devise and commit, for their evils, which turn into predators and multiply, then, on the contrary, this play glorified all the things that people usually conceal in shame: however, the thing that was most cogently and most effectively scorned was pity. To be sure, everything was merely taken over and spiced up with several new crassnesses; but these crassnesses were what made it so authentic. It was no opera, nor was it what it had originally been: a parody of opera. The only unadulterated thing about it was that it was an operetta. In opposition to the saccharine form of Viennese operetta, in which people found, undisturbed, everything they wished for, this was a different form, a Berlin form, with harshness, knavery, and their banal justifications—things that they wished for no less ardently, that they probably wished for even more than the saccharine things.
Ibby had no feeling for the piece and was no less astonished than I by the raging spectators, who stormed up to the apron of the stage and were so enthusiastic that they were ready to smash everything to smithereens. “Gangster romanticism,” she said. “It’s all false.” And even though I was thankful to her and felt the same word false, and used it, we each meant something very different by it. Her idea, which was more original than the play, was that everyone would like to be one of these false beggar characters but was too cowardly to do it. She saw successful forms of hypocrisy, employable whininess, which you held in your hand and manipulated, and the whole thing was placed under a supervision that allowed you to have your fun, but exempted you from the responsibility. I saw it in far simpler terms: everyone knew himself to be Mack the Knife and now he was at last openly declared as such and approved and admired for it. Our opinions went past one another, but since they didn’t touch, they didn’t disturb one another, and they strengthened our defenses.
That evening, I felt closest to Ibby. Nothing could faze her. The raging crowd of the audience didn’t exist for her. She never felt drawn into a crowd. She never even considered public opinions: it was as if she had never heard them. She walked untouched through Berlin’s sea of posters. No name of any item stuck in her mind. If she needed anything for daily life, she didn’t know its name or where to find it; and at the department store, she had to ask about both in the most haphazard way. Watching a demonstration of one hundred thousand people passing before her very eyes, she felt neither attracted nor repelled; anything she said right afterwards was in no way different from her words beforehand. She had watched carefully and grasped more details than anyone else; yet nothing added up to a direction, an intention, a compulsion. In this Berlin, which was filled with violent political struggles, she never said a single word about politics. Perhaps this was because she could never repeat what other people said. She read no newspapers, she read no magazines either. If I saw a periodical in her hand, I knew that it had printed a poem of hers, which she wanted to show me. I was always right; and when I asked her what else was in the same issue, she shook her head in total ignorance. I often found this unpleasant and accused her of having a big ego. I said she acted as if she were alone in the world. But this was unfair of me, for she noticed more about people—all sorts of people—than anyone else did. It puzzled me that she never let herself be swept up by a crowd; at the premiere of The Threepenny Opera, I liked the very thing about her that I had often criticized.
