The Tongue Set Free, page 31
Hebel was full of such teachings, which are hard to forget, and each was tied to an unforgettable story. My life had begun with Kannitverstan’s experience, when my parents spoke privately in a language I didn’t know, and the things that had been heightened in his lack of understanding on individual occasions—the beautiful house with the windows full of tulips, asters, and gillyflowers; the riches that the sea washed ashore from the boat; the great funeral procession with the horses muffled in black—all those things had turned into a heightening of an entire language for me. I don’t believe there is any book in the world that engraved itself in my mind as perfectly and as minutely as this one; I would like to follow all the trails it has left in me and express my gratitude to it in a tribute meant solely for this book. When the pompous iambic morality that dominated my surface in those years collapsed and fell into dust, every line that I had from that book survived intact. I have not written any book that I did not secretly measure by the language of that book, and I wrote each one first in the shorthand whose knowledge I owe to that book alone.
* * *
Karl Schoch, who brought us The Treasure Chest, had a hard time with himself and the pupils. He had a small, oval head with a ruddy face and canary-yellow hair, which stood out especially in his moustache—was it really that yellow or did it only seem that way to us? His movements, which had something jerky or hopping about them, may have contributed to his nickname: soon after we made his acquaintance, he became known as the “Canary,” and he kept that sobriquet until the end. He was still a young man, he didn’t have an easy time talking; it was as though he had problems moving his tongue. Before his tongue produced what he wanted to say, he had to prime himself well. Then the sentences came, but always very few. They sounded dry and monotonous, his voice was hollow, but very soon he lapsed into silence again. First, we had calligraphy with him; this subject, which I never got anything out of, may have made him seem pedantic. He took beautiful script as seriously as a pupil who had only just mastered it. Since he said so little, each word of his gained an exaggerated importance. He repeated himself, even when it wasn’t necessary; anything he wanted to impress upon us had first to be wrested out of himself. No matter whom he addressed, his tone of voice was the same. You suspected that he had to practice in advance what he wanted to tell us. But then he frequently and inexplicably bogged down, and all his rehearsing was for nothing. He didn’t seem feeble, so much as out of place. He wasn’t put together right, he knew it and probably had to think about it all the time.
As long as it was calligraphy, he just barely passed the cruel examination of the pupils. There were some who made an effort and learned a good hand from him. All they had to do was cleanly copy the signs he chalked on the blackboard. It was the subject making the fewest mental demands, and it gave those who were still undeveloped the chance to prove themselves. But, while writing on the blackboard, he gained time for his silence. He then related to letters, not living pupils, he wrote them big and precise, for all together instead of for individuals, and it must have been a relief for him to momentarily turn his back on those gazes, which he feared.
It was disastrous that he subsequently replaced Letsch for geography. He was shaky in it, and the class delightedly grabbed the chance of getting back at Schoch for Letsch’s tyranny. After the colonel, Schoch seemed like a minor recruit, and now he also had to speak all the time. He was welcomed with a soft twittering, which referred to the canary. After class, he was dismissed with a loud twittering. He hadn’t even closed the door behind him when the twittering began. He never took any notice, he never wasted a single word on it, and there is no telling whether he knew what it meant.
We had come to South America; the big map hung behind him, he had us come forward one by one to indicate and name the rivers. Once, when it was my turn, the rivers I had to name included a Rio Desaguadero. I pronounced it correctly, which was no big thing; one of the most frequent words I had heard and used all my life was agua (water). He corrected me and said it was pronounced Rio Desagadero, and the u was silent. I insisted that it was pronounced agua; he asked me how I knew. I stuck to my guns, saying I ought to know, because Spanish was my mother tongue. We faced each other in front of the entire class, neither gave in, I was annoyed that he wouldn’t acknowledge my right to Spanish. He repeated, expressionless and rigid, but more resolute than I had ever seen him: “It is pronounced Rio Desagadero.” We hurled the two pronunciations at each other several times, his face got more and more rigid; had he been holding the pointer, which I was clutching, he would have lunged out at me. Then he got a saving flash, and dismissed me with the words: “In South America, it’s pronounced differently.”
I don’t believe I would have gotten that opinionated with any other teacher. I didn’t feel sorry for him, although he would certainly have deserved it in this embarrassing situation. We had a few more lessons with him; then once, as we were waiting for him—the twittering had already begun—another teacher appeared and said: “Herr Schoch will not come anymore.” We thought he was sick, but we soon learned the truth. He was dead. He had cut open his wrists and bled to death.
The Enthusiast
The school year in the Schanchzenberg, the year of reconciliation, brought us a few new teachers. They used the polite form with us, Sie, it was the general rule, following it was easier for the “new” ones than for the teachers who had known us for a long while. Among those we had for the first time, there was a very old and a very young one. Emil Walder, the old one, had written the grammar book from which we studied Latin; aside from Letsch, he was the only textbook author I had as a teacher at the canton school. I awaited him with the curiosity and respect that I felt towards any “author.” He had an enormous wart, which I see before me when I think of him, but I am unable to localize it. It was either right or left, near one eye, I believe the left one, but it has the obnoxious quality of wandering about in my memory, depending on from where I conversed with him. His German was very guttural, the Swiss stuck out more powerfully than in other teachers. That gave his diction, notwithstanding his age, something emphatic. He was uncommonly tolerant and allowed me to read during lessons. Since I had an easy time with Latin, I got used to a kind of double existence with him. My ears followed his instruction, so that, if called on, I could always reply. My eyes read a small volume that I kept open under my desk. He was curious, however and, upon passing my desk, he pulled out the book, held it up close to his eyes until he knew what it was, and then gave it back to me, still open. If he didn’t say anything, then I took it as approval of what I was reading. He must have been a wide reader; once we had a brief talk about a writer whom he couldn’t get anywhere with. I was absorbed in Robert Walser’s The Walk, it was a strange work which I couldn’t put down, it was totally different from everything else I knew. It seemed to have no content and to be made up of polite formulas; I was caught up in it against my will and didn’t want to stop reading. Walder approached from the left; I sensed the presence of the wart, but didn’t look up, I was swept along too powerfully by the formulas, which I thought I despised. His hand came down upon the book, interrupting my reading—to my annoyance, right in the middle of one of the lengthiest sentences. Then he lifted the book up to his eyes and recognized the author. The wart, this time to the left, swelled up like a vein of anger; he asked me, as though it were an examination question, and yet intimately: “What do you think of this?” I sensed his annoyance, but I didn’t want to admit he was right, for the book also greatly attracted me. So I said, conciliatorily: “It is too polite.”
“Polite?” he said. “It’s bad. It’s nothing! One doesn’t need to read it!” A condemnation from the depths of his voice. I gave in and pitifully closed the book, and then read on later, having been made properly curious now. That was how shakily my passion for Robert Walser began; perhaps, if it hadn’t been for Professor Walder, I might have forgotten Walser at that time.
The antipode to this man, yet whom I liked because of his rawness, was young Friedrich Witz. He may have been twenty-three; we were his first class, he was fresh from the university and taught history class. I still hadn’t gotten over Eugen Müller, “Greek Müller,” as I called him privately. I had lost him as my teacher more than a year ago, and no comparable man had followed. I couldn’t even say whom we got for history after him—a protest of the memory against that heavy loss. And now came Friedrich Witz, the second love of my school years, a man whom I never forgot and whom I found again much later, almost unchanged.
What a school that was, how varied its atmosphere! There were teachers for whom discipline was something unforced, it prevailed, as in Karl Beck’s class, with no rebelling against it. There were other teachers who tried to train the pupils for the practice of subsequent life, sobriety, caution, reflectiveness. Fritz Hunziker was the epitome of such a teacher, and I waged a tenacious fight against the sobriety that he tried to inculcate in me too. There were richly talented men of imagination who stimulated us and gladdened us, Eugen Müller and Friedrich Witz.
Witz set no store by the raised podium position of a teacher. Sometimes he spoke from up there, with so much enthusiasm and fantasy that you forgot where he was standing and you felt as if you were outdoors with him. Then he would sit down among us, on one of the desks, and it was as if we were all together on a promenade. He never discriminated, he related to each pupil, he spoke incessantly, and whatever he said appeared new to me. All divisions in the world were wiped out; instead of fear, he inspired pure love, no one was put above the others anymore, no one was stupid, he skirted authority, he renounced it without attacking it, he was eight years older than we and treated us as if we were all his age. It was not a regulated instruction, he gave us what he was filled with himself. In history, we had gotten to the Hohenstaufens; instead of dates, we got people from him. It was not only because of his youth that power meant little to him, he was preoccupied with the inner effect it had on those who wielded it. Basically, he was interested only in writers, and he confronted us with them every chance he got. He spoke very well, vividly, movingly, but without prophetic overtones. I sensed the process of expansion at work, a process I would not have been able to name at that time; but, in an early, in an incipient stage, it was my own process. No wonder that Witz promptly became my ideal, in a different way from Eugen Müller, less sharply outlined, but closer, as attainable as a friend.
Instead of listing the deeds of an emperor and binding them to their respective dates, he acted him out, preferably in the words of a recent writer. It was he who convinced me of the existence of a living literature. I had closed myself off to it, dazzled by the wealth of earlier literature, in thrall to Mother’s early theater experiences, and how could I have ever managed to exhaust what she brought to me from all literary cultures? I followed her memories, I was prey to her judgments. Whatever I discovered by myself crumbled if it didn’t stand up in her eyes; and now I discovered that Wedekind wasn’t merely an épater-le-bourgeois terror or a juicy item for the yellow press. When we got to Henry the Sixth, Witz didn’t bother with his own words. He didn’t feel adequate to this hubris, which was utterly alien to his nature. Instead, he opened a volume of Liliencron and read “Henry at Triefels” to us. He read it from start to finish, in our very midst, his right foot on my bench, his elbow propped on his knee, the book at a certain height. When he reached the passage about Henry’s passionate courtship, “Irene of Greece, I love thee!”, his forelock fell across the book—always a sign of his excitement—and I, who had never felt such love, felt icy shivers up and down my spine. He read with what the Germans call Pathos, an intensity almost verging on pomposity, today I would call it the Pathos of Expressionism, it was different from the Pathos of the 1880’s and 1890’s in Vienna, which I was used to hearing at home; yet his exaggeration wasn’t alien to me, it was actually familiar. Watching him, as he shook the forelock off to the side with an impatient gesture, so that it wouldn’t interfere with his reading, he made me feel as if I, who had always been the eldest in the family, suddenly had an older brother.
One can imagine that Witz’s position did not go unchallenged. Some considered him a bad teacher because he made no effort to maintain a distance and did not regard external authority as absolute and everlasting. Compared with any other class, his had a kind of intentional disorder. In his presence, we lived in the middle of a force field of emotions. Perhaps what gave me breath and wings was, for others, a sort of chaos. At times, everything got all muddled up, as though no one cared about his presence anymore, and he was incapable then of creating the usual dead order with words of command. He balked at being feared; perhaps there are truly blessed people who are unable to inspire fear. At unpropitious moments there were inspections by older teachers. We didn’t care to picture these reports to their superiors.
The wonderful time—it was one for me—did not last. He came to us in the spring, he left in October. Athough we had no facts to go by, the rumors among us, even among those who didn’t care for him, were that he had been dismissed from the school.
Witz was so young that he couldn’t act any differently: he tried to infect us with his youth. It is really not at all true that the road through the years has the same character for everyone. Some pupils come to school old, perhaps they were old previously, perhaps they were old from birth, and whatever now happens to them in school, they never get younger. Others gradually get rid of the age they have brought along and they make up for the lost years. For such pupils, Witz would have made an ideal teacher, but, by nature, they are in a minority. Then there are some who find school so difficult that they only start aging under its impact, and the pressure bearing upon them is so heavy, and they advance so slowly, that with all their force they clutch their newly gained age, never giving up any of it. But there are also some who are both old and young at once; in their tenacity at holding on to all they have come to understand, they are old; in the eagerness for all that’s new, without discrimination, they are young. I may have belonged to this latter group at that time, and that must have been why I was receptive to very opposite teachers. Karl Beck, through the tenacious and disciplined manner of his teaching, gave me a sense of security. The mathematics that I learned in his class became a deeper part of my nature, as resolute consistency and something like mental courage. From a possibly very small area, which is not to be doubted, you keep on going in one and the same direction, never asking yourself where you might end up, refusing to look right or left, as though heading towards some goal without knowing which, and so long as you make no false step and maintain the connection of the steps, nothing will happen to you, you progress into the unknown—the only way to conquer the unknown gradually.
It was exactly the opposite that happened to me through Witz. Many dark points in me were touched at the same time and they lit up, to no purpose. You didn’t advance, you were here, you were there, you had no goal, not even an unknown goal, you certainly learned a great deal; but more than what you discovered, you mastered a sensibility for things that are neglected or still concealed. Above all, he strengthened the delight in transformation: there was so much there that you hadn’t suspected, all you had to do was hear about it in order to become it. It was the same thing that the fairy tales had done to me earlier, but now it concerned different, less simple objects—figures, to be sure, but now these figures were writers.
I have already said that Witz opened my eyes to modern, to living literature. Any name he mentioned, I never forgot; it turned into a specific atmosphere, to which he took me, and the wings he buckled on to me for such flights, without my noticing it, remained with me even after he left me, and now I flew there myself and looked about in amazement.
I am reluctant to speak of the individual names that first went into me through him. I had certainly heard some of them before, like Spitteler; others had aroused a merely passive curiousity, as if it sufficed to keep them in readiness for a later time, like Wedekind. Most of them are now so taken for granted as a part of traditional literature that it seems ridiculous to make any fuss over them. But the majority, which I will not list here, greatly contrasted with what I had gotten at home, and even though I made very few of them my own at that time, the prejudice against all writers who had just died or were still alive was broken once and for all.
Witz took us on two outings in the bare four or five months that we had him as our teacher. One outing was a fruit-wine ramble to the Trichtenhaus Mill, the other a historical excursion to Kyburg Castle. The fruit-wine ramble had been discussed far in advance, and he considered a downright revolutionary plan: he promised to take along a cousin, a violinist, she would play for us.
