The Torch in my Ear, page 32
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I had seen many things in Berlin that stunned and confused me. These experiences have been transformed, transported to other locales, and, recognizable only by me, have passed into my later writings. It goes against my grain to reduce something that now exists in its own right and to trace it back to its origin. This is why I prefer to cull out only a few things from those three months in Berlin—especially things that have kept their recognizable shape and have not vanished altogether into the secret labyrinth from which I would have to extricate them and clothe them anew. Contrary to many people, particularly those who have surrendered to a loquacious psychology, I am not convinced that one should plague, pester, and pressure memory or expose it to the effects of well-calculated lures; I bow to memory, every person’s memory. I want to leave memory intact, for it belongs to the man who exists for his freedom. And I do not veil my dislike for those who perform a beauty operation on a memory until it resembles anyone else’s memory. Let them operate on noses, lips, ears, skin, hair as much as they like; let them—if they must—implant eyes of different colors, even transplant hearts that manage to beat along for another year; let them touch, trim, smooth, plane everything—but just let memory be.
Having made this profession of faith, I would like to tell about things that I still see clearly, nor do I wish to seek any further twilight.
When the era found itself in its common denominator, The Threepenny Opera, when the joy of feeding your face before talking of right and wrong became a household slogan on which all the conflicting forces could agree—at this point, my resistance began to organize itself. Until then, I had felt more and more tempted to stay in Berlin. You moved in a chaos, but it seemed immeasurable. Something new happened every day, smashing at the old, which had itself been new just three days earlier. Things floated like corpses in the chaos, and human beings became things. This was known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Thingness”). Little else could be possible after the long and drawn-out shrieks of Expressionism. Nevertheless, whether a man was still shrieking or had already become a thing, he knew how to live well. If you arrived fresh and still didn’t let on your confusion even after several weeks, but instead flaunted a clear mind, then you were considered useful and you received good offers, which lured you to remain. You latched on to any newcomer, if only because he wouldn’t be new for long. You welcomed newcomers with open arms while looking around for other newcomers; the existence and efflorescence of this era, which was great in its way, hinged on the incessant arrival of the new. You were still nothing, and yet already you were needed, you moved chiefly among people who had likewise been new.
You were considered old-and-established if you had an “honest” profession; the most honest profession (not only in my eyes) was always that of a physician. Neither Döblin nor Benn1 was part of the scene. Their work kept them from the routine of incessant self-flaunting. I saw them so rarely and so fleetingly that I have nothing substantial to say about them. But I was struck all the more by the way people talked about them. Brecht, who acknowledged no one, spoke Döblin’s name with the greatest respect. A few rare times, I saw him unsure of himself; he would then say: “I’ve got to talk to Döblin about that.” He made Döblin sound like a wise man from whom he sought counsel.
Benn, who liked Ibby, was the only man who didn’t pester her. She gave me a New Year’s card that he had sent her: he wished her everything that a beautiful young woman would like to have, and he listed these things individually. His list contained nothing that Ibby would ever have thought of. He had judged her by her appearance and he adhered to this impression. Thus, the card, which had absolutely nothing to do with her, seemed to come from some unconsumed writer who was sure of his senses.
I could have remained as a “newcomer,” and, regarding my external progress, I would surely have been well off. A certain generosity was part of this bustle. Nor was it so easy to say no when people cordially pressed you to stay. I was in an unusual situation: not only did I have clear sailing to reach anyone, but Ibby’s stories had informed me about people in a way that would have been beyond anyone else’s reach. She knew people from their most laughable sides; her observations were ruthless, but also accurate. Never did she report anything false or approximate; whatever she hadn’t seen or heard herself did not exist for her. She was the desirable eyewitness, who had more to say than others, because it is this witness’s chief experience to stand back.
During the weeks after the premiere, when the urge to escape this world began to articulate itself, I stuck to Ibby. I told her I had to return to Vienna for my examinations; I would then get my doctorate in the spring. That was how it had been planned. Then, in summer of the next year, I could come back to Berlin and make up my mind, depending on what I felt like doing. She was unsentimental. She said: “You’ll never commit yourself. You can’t commit yourself. With you it’s the way it is with me in regard to love.” She meant that she wouldn’t let anyone talk her into anything, inveigle her, or seduce her. She also felt that it was clever to have the examinations ahead of me. “They’ll understand, these artists! Four years of drudging in a lab and then not getting a doctorate—they’d think you were crazy. Forget it!”
She had a good supply of poems. I had turned a whole stock of them into German, more than she would need for a year. The cigarette man, who had listened to our discussion of her poems, had set up her monthly pension for a year; two checks had arrived so far, accompanied by a cordial and respectful card.
She made things easy for me, as I had assumed she would do. While we weren’t lovers (we had never even kissed), all the people we had spoken about stood physically between us, a forest that kept growing, that could not die for her or for me. Both of us were poor letter-writers. She must have written me, and I sometimes wrote her, too; but how meager this was when we couldn’t see one another and listen to one another.
Then, three weeks after the premiere, came the soirée in her empty apartment; the shock destroyed the magic of her stories.
I began to be ashamed of the things I had heard from her about other people. I realized that she led men on merely in order to tell me about it. When I finally understood that the freshness, originality, and accuracy of her accounts were connected to the fact that she provoked men to make fools of themselves for her stories—the conductor of a chorus of voices, of which I couldn’t hear my fill—when I finally admitted to myself that I had never, literally not once, heard anything in favor of any man, and only because any favorable remark would have sounded boring, I suddenly felt a dislike for her and exchanged her mockery for Babel’s silence.
During my last two weeks in Berlin, I saw Babel every day. I saw him alone; I felt freer with him alone; I believe he preferred seeing me alone, too. I learned from him that one can gaze for a very long time without knowing something, that one can tell only much later whether one knows something about a person: only after losing sight of him. I learned that nevertheless, without knowing something as yet, you can carefully note everything you see or hear, and things lie dormant in you, so long as you don’t misuse them to entertain other people. I learned something else, which may have seemed even more important after my lengthy apprenticeship with Die Fackel: I learned how wretched judging and condemning are as ends in themselves. Babel taught me a way of looking at people: gazing at them for a long time, as long as they were to be seen, without breathing a single word about what you saw. I saw the slowness of this process, the restraint, the muteness, right next to the importance Babel placed on what could be seen; for he sought tirelessly and greedily—his only greed, but also mine, except that mine was untrained and not yet certain of its justification.
Perhaps we met in a word that was never spoken between us, but which keeps crossing my mind when I think about him. It is the word learn. Both of us were filled with the dignity of learning. His mind and my mind had been aroused by early learning, by an immense respect for learning. However, his learning was already completely devoted to human beings; he needed no pretext—neither the expansion of a field of knowledge, nor alleged usefulness, purpose, planning, in order to “learn” people. At this time, I, too, seriously turned to people; and since then, I have spent the greater part of my life trying to understand human beings. Back then, I had to tell myself that I was doing so for the sake of some bit of knowledge or other. But when all other pretexts crumbled, I was left with the excuse of expectation: I wanted people, including myself, to become better, and so I had to know absolutely everything about every single human being. Babel, with his enormous experience—although he was only eleven years my senior—had long since gotten beyond this point. His desire for an improvement of mankind did not serve as an excuse for knowing human beings. I sensed that his desire was as insatiable as mine, but that it never caused him to deceive himself. Anything he found out about human beings was independent of whether it delighted or tormented him, whether it struck him to the ground: he had to “learn” human beings.
Part Five
The Fruit of the Fire
Vienna 1929–1931
The Pavilion of Madmen
In September 1929, upon returning home to Vienna after a second visit to Berlin, something that I called the “necessary” life began at last. This was a life determined by its own internal necessities. Chemistry was done with: I had gotten my doctorate in June, ending a course of studies that had served as a delay but meant nothing else to me.
The problem of earning a living was solved: I had been commissioned to translate two American books into German. I could make the deadline by working four or five hours a day. Further translations were in the offing. Since the work was well paid (I was living very modestly on Hagenbergstrasse), I had two or three free years ahead of me. Translating, which I took seriously as a livelihood, was easy. However, the substance of these books touched me only superficially; sometimes, while working, I caught myself thinking of entirely different things, my own.
For, by resolutely detaching myself from Berlin, I had obtained external peace and quiet; but this was no idyll to which I returned. I was full of questions and chimaeras, doubts, forebodings, catastrophic anxieties, but also an incredibly powerful determination to find my bearings, take things apart, set their direction, and thus gain understanding of them. None of the things that I had witnessed during two visits to Berlin could be shoved aside. Day and night, everything surfaced, with no rhyme or reason, it seemed, plaguing me in many shapes, like the devils painted by Grünewald, whose altar hung in details on the walls of my room. It turned out that I had absorbed more than I myself was willing to admit. The fashionable term suppress was apparently not coined for me. Nothing was suppressed, everything was there, always, simultaneously, and as clearly as if one could grab it with one’s hands. Tides over which I had no control determined the things that surfaced in front of me on waves and were swept aside by other waves. One always felt the vastness and fullness of this ocean, seething with monsters all of whom one recognized. The frightening thing was that everything had its face, it looked at you, it opened its mouth, it said something or was about to say something. The distortions it pestered you with were calculated, they were intentional, they tormented you with yourself, they needed you, you felt compelled to surrender. But no sooner had you found the strength to do so than they were swept aside by others whose demands on you were no less intense. Thus it went on, and everything came again, and nothing remained long enough to be grabbed and detached. It was no use stretching out your arms and hands, there was too much, and it was everywhere; it couldn’t be overcome: you were lost in it.
Now it might not have been so unfortunate that nothing of the weeks in Berlin had oozed away, that I had preserved everything. I could have written it all down; and it would have been a colorful and perhaps not uninteresting account. I could still set it down today; it has been preserved all this time. However, no account would have captured the essence: the ominousness with which that period was charged and the contradictory directions it moved in. For the one, uniform person who had seized it and now seemingly contained it all was a mirage. The things he preserved had been altered because he had stored them in himself together with other people. The true pull of things was a centrifugal pull; they strove apart, leaving one another at top speed. Reality was not at the center, holding everything together as if with reins; there were many realities, and they were all outside. They were wide apart from one another, they were unconnected; anyone attempting to harmonize them was a falsifier. Way, way out, in a circle, almost at the edge of the world, the new realities I was heading toward stood like crystals. As spotlights, these realities were to be turned inward, toward our world, in order to illuminate it.
These spotlights were the true means of knowledge: with them, one could penetrate the chaos one was filled with. If there were enough such spotlights, if they were properly conceived, then the chaos could be taken apart. Nothing must be left out. One must drop nothing. All the usual tricks of harmonizing caused nausea. Any man who believed he was still in the best of all possible worlds ought to keep his eyes shut and take pleasure in blind delights; he didn’t have to know what lay ahead of us.
Since all the things I had seen were possible together, I had to find a form to hold them without diminishing them. It would diminish them if I showed people and behaviors as they had appeared to me, but without my simultaneously communicating what was bound to become of them. The potentiality of things, which was always present as overtones when you were confronted with anything new, which remained implicitly, even though you felt it powerfully, was utterly lost in the depictions that were considered accurate. In reality, everything had a direction and everything increased; expansion was a chief characteristic of people and things; to understand any of this, one had to take things apart. It was a bit as if you had to disentangle a jungle in which everything was ensnarled; you had to detach every plant from another without damaging or destroying it; you had to view it in its own tension and let it keep growing without your losing sight of it.
When I returned to an environment marked chiefly by calm and restraint, the things I brought back, my experiences, became more urgent. No matter how hard I attempted to slow down and limit myself, my experiences left me no peace. I tried long walks, picking routes with nothing special about them. I walked down Auhofstrasse, the long stretch from Hacking to Hietzing, and back, forcing myself not to walk too quickly. I figured this would help me get used to a different rhythm. Nothing leaped at me from any street corner. I strolled along low, two-story houses as if I were going down a suburban street in the nineteenth century.
I started out at a leisurely pace; I had no goal; I thought of no tavern I would drop in at, even to write something. It was to be a walk that wouldn’t spin my head around, whether to the right or the left, no St. Vitus’s dance of sightseeing, no shrill fracas—a strolling prehistoric creature, that was what I wanted to be, an animal that doesn’t run from anything, into anything, that doesn’t make way, doesn’t stumble, doesn’t bump into anything, doesn’t push, doesn’t have to be anywhere, a creature who has time, who’s after nothing, who makes doubly sure not to carry a watch.
But the more total the emptiness that I had prepared for myself, and the more footloose and fancy free I started out, then the more inevitable the assault: something hit my eyes, a rock on my head—inevitable because it came from inside myself. Some figure from the time from which I was trying to escape seized hold of me, a figure that I didn’t know. It had only just come into being, and even though I knew where it came from—it was marked by its urgency—even though it ruthlessly grabbed everything I consisted of, it was utterly new to me. I had never encountered it. It disconcerted me to a terrifying degree, pounced on me, squatted on my shoulders, crossed its legs around my chest, steered me as fast as it pleased to wherever it pleased. I found myself out of breath on Auhofstrasse, which I had picked because it was innocuous and unanimated. I was obsessed, virtually fleeing, my shoulders weighed down by the danger that I couldn’t escape. I was frightened and yet aware that the only thing that could save me from the chaos I had brought along was now happening.
What saved me was that this was a figure that had an outline, that kept going, that gathered the senselessly scattered things and gave them a body. It was a terrible body, but it was alive. It threatened me, but it had a direction. I saw what it was after. I never completely lost the terror it aroused, but it also aroused my curiosity. What was it capable of? Where was it going? How long would it keep on? Was it bound to end? As soon as the figure is recognized in its sketchy outline, our relationship is reversed, and it’s no longer quite so certain who is possessed by whom and who is driven by whom.
