The Torch in my Ear, page 6
The focus of this epic on just a few people contrasts with the turbulent period in which I encountered it. My memories of those Frankfurt years are structured by events of a public nature, which followed one another in quick succession. They were preceded by rumors—the boardinghouse table was a hive of rumors, not all of which proved to be false. I remember the boarders discussing the Rathenau assassination before we read about it in the newspapers (there was no radio). The French figured most often in these rumors. They had occupied Frankfurt, then withdrawn, and were now suddenly rumored to be coming back. Reprisals and reparations became everyday words. The discovery of a secret arsenal in our school basement caused a great sensation. When the matter was investigated, it turned out that these weapons had been stored there by a young teacher, whom I knew only by sight; he was very popular, the most popular teacher at school.
The first demonstrations I saw made a deep impact on me; they weren’t infrequent and they were always against the war. There was a sharp separation between those who sided with the revolution that had ended the war and the others, who resented not the war, but the Versailles Treaty one year later. This was the most important distinction; its effects were already tangible. A demonstration against the Rathenau assassination provided me with my first experience of a crowd. Since I articulated the consequences of my experience in discussions some years later, I would like to wait before talking about what happened (see pp. 79–82).
Our last year in Frankfurt was again a year of dissolution for our small family. Mother felt ill; perhaps the tension of our daily confrontations had become unendurable for her. She went south, as she had often done in the past. We three brothers left the Pension Charlotte and moved in with a family, whose caring female member, Frau Suse, welcomed us with warmth and kindness such as one doesn’t even expect from one’s own mother. This family consisted of a father, a mother, two children about our age, a grandmother, and a maid. I got to know every single one of them, plus the two or three foreign boarders they took in—I got to know them so well that it would take an entire book to explain what I came to understand about people during this period.
This was the time when the inflation reached its high point; its daily jump, ultimately reaching one trillion, had extreme consequences, if not always the same, for all people. It was dreadful to watch. Everything that happened—and a great deal happened—depended on one thing, the breakneck devaluation of money. It was more than disorder that smashed over people, it was something like daily explosions; if anything survived one explosion, it got into another one the next day. I saw the effects, not only on a large scale; I saw them, undisguisedly close, in every member of that family; the smallest, the most private, the most personal event always had one and the same cause: the raging plunge of money.
In order to stand my ground against the money-minded people in my own family, I had made it a rather cheap virtue to scorn money. I regarded money as something boring, monotonous, that yielded nothing intellectual, and that made the people devoted to it drier and drier, more and more sterile. But now, I suddenly saw it from a different, an eerie side—a demon with a gigantic whip, lashing at everything and reaching people down to their most private nooks and crannies.
Perhaps it was this extreme logical consequence of a thing that she would at first have coolly put up with, but which I reminded her of incessantly, that prompted my mother to flee Frankfurt. She felt like going back to Vienna. As soon as she was halfway recovered from her illness, she picked up my two younger brothers and found schools for them in Vienna. I remained in Frankfurt another six months, because I was about to graduate high school and was then to start university in Vienna.
During these last six months in Frankfurt, I stayed with the same family, feeling perfectly free. I often attended meetings, listening to the discussions that followed them on the streets at night; and I watched every opinion, every conviction, every faith clashing with others. The discussions were so passionate that they crackled and flared; I never took part, I only listened, with an intensity that strikes me as dreadful today, because I was defenseless. One’s own opinions were not up to this immoderation, this excess pressure. Many things repelled me, but I couldn’t refute them. Some things attracted me, but I couldn’t tell why. I still had no sense of the separateness of languages colliding here. Among all the people I heard, there is none I could evoke or even mimic in his true guise. What I grasped was the separateness of opinions, the hard cores of convictions; it was a witches’ cauldron, steaming and bubbling, but all the ingredients floating in it had their specific smell and could be recognized.
I have never experienced more disquiet in people than in those six months. It didn’t much matter how they differed from one another as individuals; at this time, I barely noticed things that would have been the first I’d look for in later years. I was attentive to every conviction, even if it went against my grain. Some public speakers, who were certain of their tried-and-tested effect, seemed like charlatans. But then, in the discussions on the street, when everything had splintered, and people who were no orators tried to convince one another, their disquiet seized hold of me, and I took each of them seriously.
If I describe this period as my Aristophanic apprenticeship, I am not trying to sound arrogant or flippant. I was reading Aristophanes and was struck by the powerful and consistent way that each of his comedies is dominated by a surprising fundamental idea from which it derives. In Lysistrata, the first Aristophanic play I read, the women refuse to have sexual relations with their husbands, and their strike brings about the end of the war between Athens and Sparta. Such basic ideas are frequent in Aristophanes; since most of his comedies are lost, many of these brainstorms are not extant. I would have had to be blind not to notice the similarity with the things I perceived all around me. Here, too, everything derived from a single fundamental condition, the raging plunge of money. It was no brainstorm, it was reality; that’s why it wasn’t funny, it was horrible. But as a total structure, if one tried to see it as such, it resembled one of those comedies. One might say that the cruelty of Aristophanes’ vision offered the sole possibility of holding together a world that was shivering into a thousand particles.
Since then, I have had an unshakable dislike for stage depictions of merely private matters. In the conflict between the Old and the New Comedy in Athens, I sided with the Old Comedy, though not quite realizing it. The theater, I feel, should depict only something that affects the public as a whole. Comedy of character, targeting some individual or other, usually embarrasses me a bit, no matter how good it is: I always feel as if I’ve retreated into some hiding place that I leave only when necessary, for eating or some similar purpose. Comedy lives for me, as when it began with Aristophanes, from its universal interest, its view of the world in larger contexts. However, it should deal boldly with these contexts, indulge in brainstorms that verge on madness, connect, separate, vary, confront, find new structures for new brainstorms, never repeat itself and never get shoddy, demand the utmost from the spectator, shake him, take him, and drain him.
It is certainly a very late reflection which leads me to conclude that the choice of drama, which would be so important to me, should have been decided back then. I do not believe I am mistaken; for how else could I explain that my memory of my final year in Frankfurt is bursting with the turbulence of public events and yet contains, as though they were the very same world, the Aristophanic comedies, overwhelming me when I first read them. I see nothing between these two aspects, they overlap; and their being so close together in my memory signifies that they were major things for me in that period, each having a determining influence on the other.
But something else was operating at the same time, connected with Gilgamesh, and serving as a counterpoise. It concerned the fate of the individual human being, separated from all other human beings, in his own way of being alone: the fact that he must die, and whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.
Part Two
Storm and Compulsion
Vienna 1924–1925
Living with My Brother
In early April 1924, Georg and I moved into a room in Frau Sussin’s apartment at 22 Praterstrasse, Vienna. It was the dark back room, with a window to the courtyard. Here we spent four months together, not a very long period. But this was the first time that I lived alone with my brother, and a great many things happened.
We became close. I took the place of a mentor with whom he conferred about everything, especially all moral problems. What one could do and what one should do, what one must despise under any circumstances, and also what one should find out, what one should get to know—almost every evening of those four months together, we discussed those things, in between our work at the large square table by the window, where we sat, each with his books and notebooks. We were at a ninety degree angle to one another, we only had to raise our heads to see one another right in the face. Back then, although six years my junior, he was already slightly taller than I. When we sat, we were nearly the same size. I had decided to begin studying chemistry in Vienna (without being certain that I would stay with it); the semester was to start in another month. Since I had had no chemistry at school in Frankfurt, it was high time that I acquired some knowledge in this field. In the remaining four weeks, I wanted to make up for what I had missed. I had the Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry in front of me; and since it was theoretical, involving no practical tasks, it interested me, and I made rapid headway.
But no matter how absorbed I was, no matter what the topic, Georg was allowed to interrupt me at any time and ask me questions. He attended the Realgymnasium [secondary school emphasizing modern languages] in Stubenbastei and, being thirteen, was in a lower year. He learned willingly and easily, and had trouble only with drawing, which was taken very seriously in his school. But he was as eager for knowledge as I had been at his age, and sensible questions crossed his mind about every subject. They were seldom about something he didn’t understand; he easily understood everything he read. What he asked about was details that he wanted to find out in addition to the more general contents of the textbooks. I could answer many of his questions on the spot without first thinking about them or looking them up. It made me happy to transmit information to him; previously, I had kept everything to myself; there was no one for me to talk to about such things. He noticed how glad I was about every interruption and that there need be no limits to his questions. A lot of things came up in just a few hours, and his questions enlivened chemistry for me, which seemed a bit alien and threatening because I would quite possibly be studying it for four years or longer. Thus he asked me about Roman authors, about history (whereby I always turned the conversation to the Greeks, if I could), about mathematical problems, about botany and zoology, and best of all, in connection with geography, about countries and their people. He already knew that this was what he could hear most about from me, and sometimes I had to bring myself up short—that’s how willingly and thoroughly I repeated to him the things I had learned from my explorers. Nor did I refrain from judging the behavior of people. When I got to the struggle against diseases in exotic lands, I was beside myself with enthusiasm. I still hadn’t gotten over giving up medicine, and I passed my old wish on to him, naïvely and without restraint.
I loved his insatiableness. When I sat down to my books, I looked forward to his questions. I would have suffered more from his silence than he from mine. Had he been domineering or calculating, he could easily have put me in his power. An evening at our table without his questions would have crushed me and made me unhappy. But that was it: there was no ulterior motive to his questions, any more than there was to my answers. He wanted to know; I wanted to give him what I knew; everything he found out led automatically to new questions. It was amazing that he never embarrassed me. His insatiableness stayed within my limits. Whether our minds ran in the same channels or whether the energy of my mediation kept him away from other things, he only asked me questions that I could answer and he never humiliated me—which would have been easy, had he stumbled upon my ignorance. We were both completely open, holding nothing back from each other. During this period, we were mutually dependent; there was no one else close to us; we had only one demand to fulfill: not to disappoint one another. On no account would I have missed our joint “learning evenings” at the large, square table, which had been pushed over to the window.
Summer came, the evenings grew long, we opened the windows facing the courtyard. Two stories below, right underneath us, was Fink the tailor’s shop; his windows were open, too, and the fine hum of his sewing machine wafted up to us. He worked until late at night; he worked all the time. We heard him when we ate supper at our square table, we heard him when we cleared up, we heard him when we settled down to read, and we forgot him only when our conversation got so exciting that we would have forgotten anything else. But then, when we lay in bed, tired because the day had begun early, we again heard the humming of his sewing machine until we fell asleep.
Our supper consisted of bread and yogurt, for a while just bread; for our living arrangement had commenced with a minor catastrophe, which was all my fault. Our allowance was scanty, but everything that we needed to live on had been calculated, and it would have sufficed for a somewhat more generous supper. I received the monthly allowance in advance, part of it from Grandfather, the rest from Mother. I carried the entire amount on my person, planning to administer it well. I was experienced in this respect; I had spent six months in Frankfurt with my little brothers and without Mother, and during the final, raging phase of the inflation, it hadn’t been at all easy to do everything right and make ends meet. Compared with that period, Vienna seemed like child’s play.
And it would have been child’s play. But I hadn’t reckoned with the Prater Amusement Park. It was very close by, not fifteen minutes away; and because of its overwhelming significance during my childhood in Vienna [see The Tongue Set Free], the park seemed even closer. Instead of keeping my little brother away from its temptations, I took him along. One Saturday afternoon, I showed him the splendors, some of which had vanished. But even those I found again were rather disappointing. Georg had been five when we’d left Vienna the first time, and he had no memory of the amusement park; hence he was dependent on my stories, which I embellished as temptingly as possible. For it was somewhat shameful that I, the seemingly omniscient big brother, who had told him about the Prometheus of Aeschylus, the French Revolution, the law of gravitation, and the theory of evolution, was now regaling him with, of all things, the Messina Earthquake in the Tunnel of Fun and the Mouth of Hell in front of it.
I must have painted it in dreadful colors, for when we finally found the Tunnel of Fun and stood in front of the Mouth of Hell, into which the devils were leisurely feeding sinners skewered on pitchforks, Georg looked at me in surprise and said: “And you were really scared of that?”
“I wasn’t. I was eight already, but you two were scared; you were both still very little.”
I noticed he was about to lose his respect for me. But he didn’t feel right about it. He was very fond of our evening conversations, even though they had only just begun, and so he showed no desire to view the Earthquake of Messina, which had lured us here in the first place. I was relieved to get out of it. I didn’t want to see the earthquake either now, and I pulled him away quickly. In this way, I could preserve my memory in all its old magnificence.
But I didn’t get off the hook so easily; I had to offer him something to make up for the disappointment. So I threw myself into the games of chance in the amusement park, even though they had never really interested me. There were various kinds, but the ring-toss game caught our eye because we saw several people winning, one after the other. I let him try it; he had no luck. I tried it myself; every toss missed. I tried again; it was virtually hexed. I had soon gotten so caught up in the game that he started tugging at my sleeve, but I wouldn’t give up. He watched our monthly allowance dwindling and was quite capable of gauging the consequences, but he said nothing. He didn’t even say he’d like to try it again himself. I believe he understood that I couldn’t bear the shame in front of him for my inexplicably bad marksmanship, and that I had to make up for it with a series of lucky tosses. He stared paralyzed, pulling himself together now and then; he looked like one of the automaton figures in the Tunnel of Fun. I tossed and tossed; I kept tossing more and more poorly. The two shames blended, flowing into one. It seemed like a brief time, but it must have been long, for suddenly all our money for May was gone.
Had it involved me alone, I wouldn’t have taken it so badly. But it also concerned my brother, for whose life I was responsible, for whom I had to be a surrogate father, so to speak, whom I gave the loftiest advice, whom I tried to fill with high ideals. In the Chemical Laboratory, where I had just started to work, I would think of things that I felt I had to tell him in the evening, things that would impress him so deeply that he would never forget them. I believed—precisely because of my brotherly love for him, which had become my predominant emotion—that every sentence carried responsibility, that a single false thing I told him would make him go a crooked way, that he could thereby waste his life—and now I had wasted the whole month of May, and no one must find out about it, least of all the Sussin family with whom we were living—I was scared they would give us notice.
Luckily, no one we knew had watched my fall from grace, and Georg instantly understood how important silence was. We comforted each other with manly resolves. We used to eat lunch regularly right near the Carl Theater, at the Benveniste Restaurant, where Grandfather had introduced us. But we didn’t have to eat there. We would make do with a yogurt and a piece of bread. For supper, a piece of bread would suffice. How I was going to come up with money—at least for this food—was something I didn’t tell him: I didn’t know myself.
