by Jim Shepard
Sharing their enthusiasm for these new wild-men painters and their work became a new way for the two friends to be together. Through Marc and Meidner they met more lunatics: Pechstein, the “nature-boy,” with his uncomplicated manners and obsession with nude bathing; Kirchner, the neurasthenic, who so consistently flew into a rage if asked about his family in the provinces that his friends always did, for sport; and Kubin, who interpreted the world as poison and breakdown, and who finally stopped answering his bell and responded to calls from the street with only a wave from his window. They were struck by the ecstatic nervousness of these young men’s paintings, like strike-storms signaling the release of psychic pressure. Being in their studios was like gazing upon handwriting in extremis.
They became part of the group, and christened themselves The Pathetic Ones. Hans and Zech even began a newsletter called The New Pathos.
They learned more about posturing. They viewed new forms of self-destructiveness. They saw the way an artwork could create a new vibration in the soul; the way it could play an ignorant game with the ultimate and still manage to evoke its own outline.
The urgency of their sexual focus on one another came and went. They conducted themselves as if, even late at night, they were still on display. They had a saying for it whenever they lingered too long in each other’s proximity: “The drapes are open.”
Their intimacy was based instead on talk about sex. They slumped on their Oriental divan working themselves into a quiet agitation that would thrum through them all night. They talked about the pitfalls of physicality, and how it circumvented reason. The ideal was “friendship love,” which didn’t bear the mark of greed or thoughtless gratification, but instead focused on the willingness to sacrifice and the well-being of the other.
They pursued such insights sitting side by side, with their hands in their pockets.
Their rhetoric came from the Society of Free Spirits, an offshoot of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in opposition to §175, the statute against Contrary Sexual Sensibility. But while Hirschfeld had been convinced that science, combined with the necessary public education, would lead to the repeal—Per scientia ad justiam—the Society had put its trust in strong individuals who measured life’s worth according to their own rules, free spirits who leaped all barriers and lived by their own authority, their goal the creation of a male culture. They would make no effort to generate pity, since that was an unmanly way of attempting to lift the criminal code.
Hans and Wilhelm had joined, though they kept their distance and only occasionally attended round tables on the creation of a lasting and noble society.
Still, they lived under the shadow of §175. Repeal was impossible. Who would even sign the petitions? A few years earlier, one of the Kaiser’s closest friends had been toppled by just the insinuation in a magazine that he deviated from the norm in psychicsexual terms.
They subscribed to Hirschfeld’s Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Tendencies. In the front were scholarly articles. In the back were press reports of convictions under §175, as well as for blackmail. The obituary page had a special subsection for suicides.
Christmas was approaching. They suffered through four straight days of freezing rain. It occurred to them that they still hadn’t gone on that long voyage they’d promised themselves. They still couldn’t afford to. But in the hope of rededicating themselves to each other, they decided that a weekend trip to the south might do. At one of the society’s gatherings they’d met a young man whose mother ran a ski lodge in Murnau, a spa village in Bavaria. The lodge was near a waterfall and superb hiking trails. It was also of the sort Berliners called storm-free: where your hosts asked no questions and refused to be shocked by anything.
Outwardly they treated the trip as they had any of their other excursions. Inwardly it was as though their hearts were diving-bells, constricting and expanding from the changes in pressure.
Long stretches of the trip made no impression on their memories. A snowy hillside outside Augsburg. A black dog up to his chin in snow. Hans losing a glove in the taxi to the lodge. They barely spoke, and were unable to read. In their room the night they arrived, they ate smoked ham, cheese, black bread with mustard, grapes, and chocolate cake. They warmed Hans’s hand before the fire.
They bathed and sat before the hearth buried under thick rugs. It was puzzling, Hans ventured, that physical pleasures, precarious at best and rare, were regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise. Could they think of any happier couples, among those they knew? They spent all their time denouncing the dangers of sensual excess instead of fearing its absence or loss, while the energy they put into tyrannizing their senses could be better spent embellishing their souls.
They kissed, each of them shaking.
Hans rose to rummage through his rucksack. Shivering, he returned to their rugs. He had a page marked in his copy of Xenophon. He opened to it and read: “Xenophon had with him an Olynthian called Episthenes, who on this occasion saw a good-looking boy at the most beautiful age, on the point of being put to death; so he ran to Xenophon and begged him to intercede. Xenophon went to Seuthes and asked him not to kill the boy. Seuthes said: And would you, Episthenes, be willing to die for the boy? Episthenes stretched out his neck and said: Strike the blow if the boy tells you to. Seuthes then asked the boy whom he should kill. The boy said: Kill me. And at this Episthenes put his arms around the boy and said: Now you will have to fight me for him. For I shall never give him up.
“And Seuthes laughed, and let the matter rest.”
And still they did nothing! They lay, heads together, watching the fire in a state of such excitement that when fatigue hit, it struck them all at once.
Wilhelm woke with the fire diminished, and the room dark. He dragged himself to his feet and whispered for Hans to come to bed. Hans followed him under the fat comforters, and they fell asleep.
Plumpe asleep: the circulation of his blood, his measured breathing, the delicate function of his kidneys, the world of dreams in his head—all linked to the power of fate.
Hans woke him. The fire was out. The winter outside howled through the darkness. The lodge’s welcoming bell clinked under its ice sheath.
His hand on Wilhelm’s belly moved to his sex, cupping it as it grew. His fingers encircled and pulled, as if drawing out the erection. He quoted Xenophon again, to give Wilhelm courage. “All these soldiers have their eyes on you,” he whispered, lowering his face to Wilhelm’s hip. “If they see that you’re downhearted, they’ll become cowards; while if you are yourself prepared, they will follow.”
He held Wilhelm still, as if pondering something. For Wilhelm it was a thrilling moment of privacy violated, as if his life had taken a leap that made everything more worthwhile. Poor Spiess, he thought, feeling his happiness rise; poor Veidt; poor Else.
“My Wilhelm,” Hans whispered. “My cold boy of understanding.” He put Wilhelm to his lips. Wilhelm gave himself over, wanting to let himself be taught, and to let himself teach. A phrase of schoolboy Apollonius streamed through him: ψνχὴ γὰρ νεφέεσσι μεταχρονίη πεπότητο (“For her psyche had taken flight high among the clouds”). Hans lifted him off the bed with his hands and his mouth, and eased him back down.
In such a situation, Wilhelm dreamed. He dreamed he was free and that people loved him. He’d done nothing wrong and was fully happy, and the one he loved most was kissing him. He felt that unsettlement at his heart, that absolute stripping down. What he learned, shockingly vivid, dimmed immediately, as illness does for convalescents. It was a glimpse into that other world.
He slept. In the moments before he woke, he savored his existence as someone else, without future or past.
The next morning, when he emerged dazed and dripping from a bath, Hans had arranged before them on their dressing table an English breakfast: strong red tea from a teapot Wilhelm could hardly lift, with jam, scones, bacon and eggs, oatcakes, potted meat, and home-baked bread.<
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He was changing his name, Wilhelm announced. It was the first thing he’d said that morning. He was no longer Wilhelm Plumpe. From that moment on, he was Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. He was breaking with one family to better signal his allegiance to another.
Hans was unusually silent the rest of the day. In the lodge’s parlor the next morning, as they were making ready to leave, he presented Wilhelm with his schoolboy’s copy of Faust. On the inside cover, he’d inscribed, To Murnau. Christmas, 1910. Even then, even there, out of deference to the other lodgers, they refrained from a prolonged embrace.
VERDUN, 1917
Four months after the war began, Murnau was called up into the First Regiment of the Foot Guards at Potsdam, perhaps because of his size. Hans had volunteered with a less elite unit the month before.
Two weeks before reporting, Hans had gone with his family on a ski vacation. Murnau had been unable to go, due to a rehearsal schedule, so he sat around the Romanische feeling neglected and sorry for himself. Even Lasker-Schüler had left Berlin, on a lecture tour.
Unable to sleep, he walked the streets. Prowling the park one night, he was reunited with Spiess, who had been in the company of a young sailor. The sailor seemed mortified by their encounter. Spiess and Murnau exchanged addresses, and Spiess again proclaimed his old friend’s change of name a great amusement. The next day, he sent round to Murnau’s house a dozen chocolate roses and a ticket to the Philharmonic.
At dinner that night Murnau felt taken up by more capable hands. It was decided that he should improve his English. The merits of different teachers were discussed. None were apparently satisfactory on the issue of pronunciation. And naturally, given the political situation, finding a young Englishman was out of the question. Every so often the entire clientele of the restaurant broke out in patriotic songs.
After dinner they returned to Spiess’s apartment near the Oranienburger Tor, tucked in the back of a Period house. The inner door shut out the noise of the war demonstrations. Spiess went around the room lighting candles while Murnau studied the familiar antique bronze screen for the fireplace and the small silver casket suspended above the bed. The landscapes with their trees and broken figures were still visible down the hall in a studio. The rooms looked much as they had seven years earlier: somewhere between ransacked and rearranged, as though Gypsies had spent the weekend.
Spiess presented some of his experiments relating to his theory of colors. The theory was new to Murnau, and stupid. Sitting in little wooden armchairs, they talked about Murnau’s most recent roles. Spiess was flatteringly detailed in his comments. About criticism in general, he claimed that through the daily reviews a sort of half-culture found its way to the masses, but to productive talent, that same criticism was a noxious mist.
They talked for four hours and in the middle of the night found themselves asleep on the same sofa.
The candles were out. Spiess began easing off Murnau’s shoes, rocking each heel gently free.
He brought his face close. He smelled like candlewicks. Murnau held his breath. Spiess licked his finger and glossed it gently over Murnau’s lips and back across his gums. He leaned in to Murnau’s ear and whispered something about a priestly rite.
“This is demonic,” Murnau murmured.
Spiess was already undressed. He said quietly that the more elevated a man was, the more he was influenced by demons.
Murnau didn’t tell him to stop. He’d always assumed that a certain feeling for beauty would serve him in place of virtue, and render him immune to the coarser solicitations. But he lay there in the dark enjoying what was happening, reminded of Medea with Jason: shame holding her still while shameless desire urged her on. Spiess freed him from his clothes as if unwrapping glassware.
Murnau left while it was still dark. He stood outside Spiess’s apartment in the frigid blue light, matting his hair down and smelling his hands. Someone’s milk delivery had shattered on the stoop because of the cold. He thought, The frivolous finds eloquence in relation to the important because of what it debases and destroys.
The next morning, Spiess met Hans on the way to Murnau’s apartment. Murnau heard them laughing as they came up the stairs. Spiess was saying, “Now where do we meet an original nature? Where’s the man who has the strength to be true, to show himself as he is?” as Murnau opened the door.
They said their hellos, and stood about in the entryway like spear-carriers who had forgotten their blocking. Hans had his hands in his armpits to warm them. “Today we celebrate the regeneration of the sun!” Spiess finally said, and crossed to the window and drew up the blinds. Hans, in mid-smile, saw Murnau’s face and understood.
If Murnau could have forgiven himself for everything else, he could not have forgiven his responsibility for that moment. What they both understood was how inevitable the moment had been.
He watched Hans’s contentment transformed into the damaged wariness of a child’s understanding that his loved ones weren’t motivated only by selflessness. Hans left the apartment and thumped back down the stairs.
Hans was billeted in various places, and it took him three months to answer Wilhelm’s letters. When Spiess made a joke about the Foreign Legion, Murnau nearly struck him.
We’re not forced into our mistakes by the maneuverings of outside agents, he wrote in his journal; our vices are capable of generating fantastic illusions and idiocies all by themselves.
To Hans he wrote about Lasker-Schüler, who had heard about his betrayal. He wrote about Marc, off at the front himself, and his insistence that the war was a clarion-call waking the sleeping and the lazy. He was still painting blue oxen, now on postcards.
When Hans didn’t answer, he wrote of his own call-up. He wrote of heavy fighting, and being made an officer. He described the shattering noise of his unit’s nightly artillery bombardments, and about mornings of feeling like a stranger pulling another stranger out of bed. He wrote about the kind of courage he wanted to possess: cool and detached, free from physical excitement. He hadn’t achieved it, he wrote, though his bunk-mates believed that he had.
He wrote of becoming a company commander at Riga. He wrote about his envy for those in the Flying Corps. He asked if Hans remembered the exhibitions before the war when all those sportsmen turned in their Mercedes so they could kill themselves in the air instead.
He told Hans that he’d sent many more letters than Hans had received: unwritten, happy, sad, chatty, and fearful.
It wasn’t until he quoted two lines from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer—It will come, it will come / The time with which one can fall in love!—that Hans answered.
He sent a packet. On top was a Simplicissimus cartoon called “Barbarian Girls,” in which happy maidens pored over a map of London marked “Zeppelin Targets.” One girl boasted, “And here our flyers will destroy St. Mark’s Square with bombs,” and another responded, “My God! The poor pigeons.”
In a note beneath the cartoon Hans thanked him for his letters. He’d heard from Lasker-Schüler and Veidt, and both were well. Paul had been a steady correspondent. He thanked Murnau for his concern. He said there was no need to apologize or to castigate oneself. He asked if Murnau had written to his parents. He closed with a new poem:
The hours go slowly.
Awake. Dig trenches and softly sing.
Dream of country; of happiness and going home.
Patience becomes duty. Waiting becomes action.
Across the German earth, the claxon of bells.
The snow of a dreary winter coats the shoulder,
layers the moth-eaten cap.
At the bottom of the packet, he’d wrapped some chocolate. On the wrapping he’d written: Saved this for you.
Murnau heard nothing again for a month. He was lounging in his dugout, his back to a quilt he’d hung for insulation, reading a months-old magazine by candlelight, when he was handed a dispatch. He was too bored to read it. Eventually he finished his leafing around and picked it up. Some kind of
lorry-load could be heard roiling past in the mud outside. The dispatch read: Hans Ehrenbaum was killed in action in Russia on July 28th. It was from his commanding officer, whom Hans had asked to notify Murnau in the event of his death. The other lounging lieutenant left the dugout when he realized Murnau had received bad news. That day Murnau’s company was standing down, waiting to be resupplied. He was temporarily relieved of his duties. He remained in the dugout.
How had it happened? Were they sure he was dead? He called through to Hans’s unit from the captain’s field telephone. The voice on the other end said that they’d identified his torso. He’d been given a field burial.
Murnau returned to his dugout. He cracked his head going down the steps.
Ideas jarred one upon the other. Over the course of the afternoon, fellow officers dropped in to offer condolences. Words ground on. His jaw felt dislocated. His hands were filthy with mud from the floor.
In hospitals, he’d seen men beat their heads against the wall in grief. On pickets, he’d seen a guard dog refuse to eat or sleep because its companion animal had been killed. He cried his way into coughing fits.
He sat on the dugout floor, stripped of the physical strength he needed for work.
What about Hans’s mother? he thought. The notion was a flare that burned away self-pity.
His captain came by. Murnau thanked him for letting him telephone. The captain waved it off. He borrowed Murnau’s candle, saying he needed more light to catch someone cheating at skat.
It grew dark outside. A short rain came and went.
Starlight made pale gleams on the runoff through the doorway.
He was buried alive by the news.
It was an easy declension to work out. Hans had been killed in Russia. Hans had been killed in Russia because he’d served in the Fusiliers. Hans had been where he’d been with the Fusiliers because of when he’d volunteered. And Hans had volunteered when he had because of Murnau.
