by Jim Shepard
The victor began to lower his mouth toward the proof of the vanquished’s masculinity.
The group at the table seemed unwilling to breathe. Wilhelm felt like he had become afflicted with a new, pleasurable form of fever.
The lights went out and a cheer rose up from the patrons. When the lights came back up, the two principals were holding hands and taking bows.
Veidt got up while they were still applauding. Time to get out of here, he said. They had other stops to make.
Out on the street, he fell into step beside Wilhelm and asked if that was the first male organ Wilhelm had seen in public. Ahead of them, Hans strode with his hands in his pockets, forcing Müthel to trot every so often to keep up.
Wilhelm could easily have called to him.
The next club was as raucous as a rally. A paralyzed patron, wheeled up a ramp onto the stage, dictated his will to wild applause. A grateful young man in silk trousers the color of pomegranate climbed onto his lap and passed cherries to him mouth to mouth while the crowd whooped like Red Indians. After each transfer the paralyzed man would chew the cherry and spit the pit high out into the audience.
The club after that featured two veiled tableaus: “Victory in Her Golden Chariot” and “The Shame of Catherine the Great.” While the latter was assembling itself, Hans touched Wilhelm’s shoulder and pointed. Spiess was along the opposite wall, sitting by himself. He gave no sign of having seen them.
With the evening winding down, Veidt read their palms. Hans’s left hand revealed a few simple gifts, and his right promised them rich development. The opposite proved the case with Wilhelm’s hands: many gifts, destined to go unused.
While his hand was still in Veidt’s, Spiess passed their table.
On the way to the streetcar stop Granach took Wilhelm aside and mentioned that Veidt was someone who let his little head rule his big head.
Rattling along on the streetcar, they talked about Byron. The saddest thing about his early death, Hans volunteered, was the way it overshadowed his work in so many memories.
Wilhelm’s education with Reinhardt proceeded. He worked on chamber-pieces adapted from Lessing. He was added to small committees Reinhardt called problem-groups to work on specific issues involved in the staging.
The first was lighting. This was his introduction to Reinhardt’s Kuppelhorizont, a plaster cyclorama sky-dome attached to a cupola that overhung the back of the stage. The plaster was covered with a kind of glaze. Properly lit with a diffused and modulated light, it transformed itself into a stunning illusion of space, and infinite depth.
He found himself astounded by the possibilities. Reinhardt dropped in every so often to monitor his team’s progress or gently urge them in one direction or another. They taught themselves all about light. They were drunk with light.
So that for their first production, the curtain rose on a horizon flooded with ultramarine moonlight. Then the theater was plunged into darkness, until a magic lantern in the orchestra pit, manipulated by a crouching Granach turning and turning his crank, covered the sky with rushing opalescent clouds.
Wilhelm and his group became the celebrated lightingmasters. Hamlet opened later that year with shadowy figures high on dark battlements against a bleak North Sea sky. Macbeth the following summer opened with witches in translucent costumes backlit by a sunset so fiery that they resembled agile skeletons dancing.
Their sunsets or northern skies could fill with or be drained of light at will because Reinhardt had invented, while Wilhelm’s group had watched and experimented and contributed whatever it could, what he called the “lighting console,” a large plywood board of interconnected and labeled switches which the operator could play like a musical instrument, bringing up light in the east even as he faded stars in the west.
Visiting Berlin, one of his brother’s friends saw Wilhelm in a small role in Hamlet. He was using an anagrammatic stage name but was recognized because of his height and his hair, which he’d left red for the part.
His father sent a three-line postcard. Nothing. Not another pfennig. I paid for you to become a professor, not a starving actor. The cheques stopped.
After Murnau had written a number of letters, Frau Plumpe worked out a solution. Her father would continue the support. Her husband would never find out.
Wilhelm’s brother eventually wrote that every so often their father would ask how he was managing up in Berlin, and their mother would assume a prim and displeased expression and say only “He’s managing.”
Once he got what he wanted, he wrote less and less. His mother’s letters became more plaintive, and despite her pain, his remained unapologetic, and rare.
About that time, they made their acquaintance of the famous Lasker-Schüler by attending one of her poetry readings. Wilhelm invited Veidt along but Veidt said he’d had enough histrionics for the day. Hans was sulky when he heard, and Wilhelm let him sulk.
When they arrived at the Romanische Café, Lasker-Schüler was seated by herself near the door of the ladies’ room. Her eyes were closed, her fingertips held to her temples. She was small, with short hair. Her velvet jacket was the same brilliant red as her lips, and despite the season she wore wide Turkish pants and a Tartar’s fur cap. She’d painted a golden arrow down her throat. The arrowhead echoed the vee of her buttoned blouse.
Hans pointed out a small boy sitting Indian-style on the floor, playing with a wooden glider. Waiters stepped over him.
Veidt had identified Paul, her son by her second husband.
Hans went over to him. Wilhelm kept his seat.
The boy looked asthmatic and pale and miserable in the smoke. He lifted the glider for Hans’s inspection.
The master of ceremonies ascended the steps and banged the podium with the heel of his hand. Hans returned to his chair. Lasker-Schüler surfaced from her meditation and stepped onto the platform while the introduction was still proceeding.
The audience laughed affectionately. Apparently this was the sort of thing she did.
“Is that a street sign, Else?” someone called, referring to the arrow. There were boos and whistles and laughter.
“So often it’s the woman in whom awareness resides,” Lasker-Schüler said comfortably. “The man, stripped of his power, gazes on, inadequate.”
Laughter and cheers.
Her first piece was a dialogue with a wood grouse. Wilhelm made a list of things to do for the next day. On the floor in front of his mother, Paul described loops in the air with his glider. Then, in a clear, full voice, she recited: “Your sinful mouth’s my burial crypt / Narcotic in its sweetness, fragrant-lipped, / So that my virtues fall asleep. / I drink with drunken senses from its well / And will-lessly, sink into its deep, / With radiant thoughts descending into hell. / My lips are parted in shy hesitation, / Like poisonous flowers that do the devil’s bidding.”
After that, the two friends saw her whenever she read anywhere within reach. Their enthusiasm continued unabated for nearly a year. Each occasion was different. One recital in a gallery was accompanied by bells, flutes, and a man who made occasional gasping sounds; for another she stood in a deep box while an assistant continually poured dirt over her. Her voice was insinuating, breathy, and expressive. At the end of every reading she came over to them, leading Paul by the hand. Hans became the only person with whom the boy seemed at ease.
She and Hans exchanged poems, and she proclaimed herself prostrate before his talent. She began calling him “Tristan.” She dedicated poems to him, and was capable of producing one on the spot. Her first to Hans began In your blue soul / The night places her stars. In place of a hello, she took to reciting it with her eyes closed.
She was a bottomless source of gossip. She told spectacular and unlikely stories about the grandest figures. She interrogated Hans and Wilhelm about the True Place of Poetry and Theater in the modern world. She also held forth with intelligence and passion on Hans’s writing. Her encouragement gave him great hope, and her patronage generated publi
c readings and the interest of reputable publishers.
She struck Wilhelm at first as one of those annoying café artists always on the hunt for shattering emotional experiences. But when he ventured to share that opinion, Hans ignored him.
Whatever her weaknesses—and some of the poems, they agreed, testified to a total softening of the brain—Hans maintained that at a time in which the love poem had become an endangered anachronism, she’d restored the form to great beauty.
She talked and they listened, usually in cafés, with Paul asleep in Hans’s lap, Hans stroking his hair. The poem, she believed, was nothing more than the poet’s faulty record of the poetic state; she caught her breath in images. She tried to seduce Hans with the straightforwardness of someone going to market. She worked to enlist Wilhelm’s help, and made use of Paul. Hans spent more time with her alone, at her request, and resisted her advances. They worked together on his poetry.
He’d come around, she told him. She admired what she imagined to be her own touching helplessness. By way of explanation, she said she’d noticed that even the roughest person was conquered by her fear.
Hans called her a child. She responded that she was always being called a child, and that making a child of someone was just as mysterious to her as making an angel of someone—it was like giving with one hand and taking with the other.
She didn’t want a friend, Wilhelm finally told him. She wanted an unconditional surrender.
Hans chose not to answer. Then he said that what they both connected with, when it came to Else, was that longing for a second face.
They received in the post a handbill announcing Hans’s inclusion in a New Poets reading series. Else Lasker-Schüler would introduce him.
Hans’s writing occurred at all hours, day or night. He was able to start and stop at will. He wrote in longhand, looping in his amendations neatly and scratching out deletions with a razor.
Wilhelm had been his primary reader since they’d met. When he’d arrived at Charlottenburg, Wilhelm had considered one of his other callings to have been verse. Hans had expressed admiration for one poem, and had not asked to see another.
The reading was to be held in a common room attached to a Lutheran church in Mariendorf. The night of the reading they splurged and rode the whole route by taxi. Both were silent. Too excited to speak, Hans shuffled his recopied poems in a folder on his lap.
Paul greeted them at the door, wearing a small blue bow tie and holding a carnation for Hans. He was delighted he had something to give.
Three other poets were also on the program. They waited in separate corners to go on. They posed.
Lasker-Schüler said that her husband and some friends were coming.
They sat at the front of a few rows of empty folding chairs. The audience looked to consist of some local artists and a church usher who was keeping an eye on things.
The husband and friends never materialized. Eventually, Lasker-Schüler stopped waiting and announced they would begin. She stood and welcomed those in front of her.
Hans was first. Her introduction ran as follows: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Spirits and Slaves, Sons of Moloch, I give you one of Heaven’s Elect. I give you a Windstorm. I give you Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele.”
The audience applauded as though they’d wait and see about that Windstorm.
But Hans read with the confidence and fluency of someone in the middle of a storied career. Standing up there alone with his few sheets of paper, he had more presence than Wilhelm had achieved in his years of shambling about onstage.
He read a series of lyrics in an order the two friends had debated. Three city poems first: “Rhapsody,” “Not Yet Day! The Hideous Night—,” and “Rejoicing Zion, Murderous Baal.” Then a poem for Lasker-Schüler, followed by one for Wilhelm—“And There Will Be Days Like Silk”—and finally, an elegy entitled “My Friend, Who Went to the Shadows,” which he refused to discuss.
The applause afterwards was sincere. That night they toasted the beginning of his public career as a poet. He soon was published in small magazines and the Sunday newspaper supplements, and made plans for a chapbook. He became known to other poets. “And There Will Be Days Like Silk” appeared in Free Spirit, with the dedication “For Ulrich the Helmet”—a nickname coined by Lasker-Schüler.
Even so, Wilhelm wondered about that mysterious Friend now in the Shadows. Had Hans meant him, or a rival?
He had little opportunity to find out. Reinhardt demanded more and more of his attention. But, as he wrote his mother, to be twenty years old and onstage with the sort of actors and actresses that had begun to crowd those productions …! There would be time for talk later. And Hans had his own life. In the meantime, at any given night, in any production: Wegener, Basserman, Loos, Veidt, Krauss, or Jannings.
Of course all the other theater companies began pillaging from them. All over Berlin, all over Germany, somewhere in Act I, young men emerged from the gloom like wraiths, while diagonals of light fell from high windows into vast and empty atriums. Every production began to look like theirs. And why not? Wilhelm himself was copying all he could, and in the process learning discernment, dedication, focus, and confidence. Reinhardt’s confidence, as sets collapsed and experiments backfired and audiences mutinied, reminded Wilhelm of a remark attributed to Haydn while the French were besieging Vienna: Don’t worry. When Haydn’s around, nothing can go wrong.
He was learning Romanticism: in Reinhardt productions Expressionist screaming might be restaged as tender kisses. He was learning subtlety: Reinhardt taught him how to use the quieter characters onstage like those half-shaded figures behind the heroes who could so transform a painting.
He profited most from Reinhardt’s method of keeping a Director’s Book. Reinhardt worked on it for weeks before a production began, its purpose to give physical form to the text. Scenery, props, notes on character, changes of light, the volume and duration of the music—it was all there, in Reinhardt’s crowded handwriting. And in just under eight months, twenty-year-old Wilhelm from Westphalia progressed from merely watching to being allowed his own entries.
Wilhelm saved, and framed, the program notes for The Miracle, in which he had his largest role, as The Knight. The program notes consisted of the title, the credits, and then eight sentences, boxed: In our age we can communicate across the ocean. But the path to ourselves and our neighbor remains infinite. The actor walks this path. He transforms himself, his hands, eyes, and mouth full of miracles, and is at once artist and work of art. He lives at the border of reality. He carries in him the potential for all passions, for all fates, for all forms of inner life. He shows us that nothing human is foreign to us. If it were not so, we could not understand other men.
He saw even less of Hans after they had an ugly argument over Wilhelm’s handling of a letter from his mother. She had written that his father was doing badly, continually oppressed, furiously complaining that Wilhelm now belonged to that other hostile part of the world; that he couldn’t count on his children to carry on his name.
What about his brothers? Wilhelm had wanted to know. Couldn’t they deal with this? But Hans had been moved by the letter, and urged Wilhelm to visit. Wilhelm refused, though he finally wrote to Bernhard, his eldest brother, informing him of his decision to cut himself off. He told Hans a day later, elaborating with a little pride on his letter’s language. Hans responded that the necessity of an event did not establish its virtue.
Then Lasker-Schüler brought them back together by staging a surprise party for Hans’s birthday. Wilhelm was too absorbed in a new production to take part in the preparations. The party was small, composed of the group that had missed Hans’s first reading: her husband, Herwarth Walden (originally Levin), and the painters Zech, Meidner, and Franz Marc.
The theme was Red. Zech dressed as the Devil. Marc wore a red horse’s head. Wilhelm had had Reinhardt’s costume shop cover him with arm-sized streamers of red satin, and had come as Blood. Paul had come as the Red Knight, his armo
r painted cardboard. Lasker-Schüler was all in blue.
Marc and Meidner immediately took to renovating everyone’s costumes, pushing three tables together as their workspace; Marc in particular was so full of energy that Lasker-Schüler seemed chary and withdrawn by comparison. Paul went from being the Red Knight to the Red Cubist. Zech became the Scarlet Gryphon. Wilhelm became the Deadly South Seas Carnivorous Underwater Plant.
Marc decided he was fascinated with Hans, whom he called An Animal of the Higher Hillsides. Marc was a Bavarian just back from Paris, and presented himself as an unstable mixture of bumpkin and expatriate. While Paul sat on Hans’s shoulders, Paul’s new cubist costume slowly falling apart, the three of them played a nonsensical rhyming game of Marc’s invention. Wilhelm found himself in a seminar with Meidner, who’d been very excited by the recent production of The Miracle. Meidner vaporized about rhythm, dynamics, agitation, ecstasy, and motoricity. Wilhelm caught Hans’s eye while the painter mopped his face, and mouthed, “Motoricity?”
When Meidner finally staggered off to relieve himself, Wilhelm sought out Walden, who was sitting by himself. He was pale, owlish, and not what they’d imagined as Lasker-Schüler’s husband. He watched his wife across the room and alternated between parodying her hyperbole and offering more of his own. His wife dragged her family everywhere around the city, he said bitterly, and the best he could do was to take advantage of the situation by promoting his gallery and artists before the evening ended with his cuckolding in some other room of the house.
Wilhelm had no response.
“Go on, get out of here,” Walden said, and Wilhelm left him alone.
Meidner as he said his goodbyes announced that he intended to paint Wilhelm’s portrait and to portray him in a straw hat. Marc executed in blue chalk on the hallway wall a mural-sized blue ox and scribbled under it, In the Spirit of Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele.
