But of course, I was merely imagining all this. Nothing of the sort happened in reality. Absolutely nothing happened in reality. Except that the silence, astir with clearings of throats and noses blown into handkerchiefs, began to show signs of overextension. Also, a contraction in the skin on the back of my neck indicated that once again many eyes were glued to my nape. Someone in the front row even bent forward to look into my face.
I felt extremely ill at ease. In front of me, rooted near the lilac bushes, stood the pastor, he too a flower: a white disk of petals on a black stalk, with a human head as a syncarp. His eyes too soaked into me. His throat, wreathed by the furbelow ruff, was then cleared—an unmistakable admonition. Finally, a jolt passed through the robe. With flowing folds, the robe began to move and carried the wondrous blossom of the head close to me, lowering the blossom to my nose as though inviting me to take a sniff.
“Would you like to say a few words,” it murmured—without a sympathetically vibrating question mark—from the furbelow ruff.
I shook my head, frightened and bewildered, aware of my incapacity.
“It is expected of you.”
This was not the time to negotiate by whom it was expected and what right they had to expect anything of me. So I simply murmured, “I can’t!” And feeling that this did not suffice, I stretched my neck and whispered toward the mountebank skull on the furbelow ruff, “I’m too moved.”
“Then your words shall be all the more ardent.”
It was no use. I had known it from the very start, when sneaking in here and hoping to remain unnoticed. Nothing could be done. I had to go along with it.
So I got to my feet and walked to the flower hill (seeing myself just as I had seen Witte and Scherping in my mind’s eye) and stationed myself in Witte’s place (hoping that no one would see me there as ridiculously as I saw myself). And I gazed down at the conquered peak of white blossoms—
and there was nothing. Nothing. No Schwab. No dead friend for me to mourn. No corpse with a waxen face. No deceased after whom I could send a few ardent words into the great void. A heap of tightly wired flowers on a socle, which loomed out of a pit in the floor. That was all.
A rat hunt began in my brain. Schwab had snuck away and left me in the shit. Typical. But just who was he anyway—Schwab? Did I even know who was meant when people talked about a man named Johannes Schwab? Wasn’t he someone else, and wasn’t the one I meant merely a figment, a fiction of mine? When had I last seen him? In Paris. At Orly Airport. He had wept and stuffed my pockets with money. Then he had vanished faster than that money. Had dissolved more swiftly into nothingness. A memory during his lifetime. And certainly a memory when the news of his death had arrived. My brother Schwab.
When had he become that? During the Ice Age. The lost mythical past. Had that period ever really existed? Wasn’t it a pipe dream of mine? Did the people sitting here know anything about it? Had they experienced those years as I had? Had I really experienced them as I imagined? Now, in this reality of 1965, in a world cemented to the sky and inundated with numberless kinds of plastic toys—was it possible to believe in the crèche Christmas of 1947? Could I give a high-rise horlà any notion of the neo-Gothic clinker-brick villa looming like a citadel from the surrounding landscape of ruins in 1948—the villa in which the British had installed Horst-Jürgen Stoffel as the first postwar German film producer? A nocturnal script conference there:
with the company scenario editor (former gofer of the last System-zeit intellectuals to find refuge at the Nazi Ufa movie studio), the head of production (former chief of lighting at Ufa), the head of distribution (former textile dealer, then war-economy adviser), the cinema consultant of the foolhardy daredevil bank that intended to finance the “project” (a man with a hitherto immaculate past as a teller), the film officer of the occupation authorities (child of Auschwitz victims; he had emigrated in time), a representative of Hamburg’s cultural senate, which had risen from the ashes of buildings like a phoenix. All these emaciated executive faces, colorlessly inserted into lamentable civilian clothes and marked with the indelible traces of various winter campaigns, were now notched by something almost more terrible: an urge to overcome the past (by way of the movie business) and to find personal fulfillment in artistic activity (“Creativity, ya know—that’s where all these guys in our business get so obsessed!”) . . .
they squat there, half-asleep, as though they had been shit into the titanic club chairs provided by the megalomania of Hanseatic founding fathers: they are exhausted, exasperated after seven hours of grating against one another’s narrow minds, ignorance, resentment (“I tell you, gentlemen, if we’re to form this brain trust of ours to make our project foolproof, then we’ve got to make sure that the image of the German woman in wartime is done properly!”)—yes indeed! But how can this idea be carried out with the actress slated to play the lead in the “project,” Primordial Piglet Stoffel’s wife Astrid von Bürger, the darling of the public during the last years of the war and now emerging purged from the final collapse, rape-spree tested, a blend of noblewoman and tease . . .
poor Nagel! How he loved her! . . . And how he hated me because of her! And yet he should have known that my betrayal was only a parody. . . How often had I wanted to explain it to him: “Damn it! Can’t you understand that I was trying to make a joke! Granted: it was a bad joke. Blame it on my Viennese upbringing! Your hatred for the Ostmark is justified.” It wouldn’t have mattered. He was a serious man, our friend Nagel. There was no teaching him that it could be considered funny that a man who has just returned from the war minus an arm, arriving in a shattered Fatherland where everything has to be rebuilt, at last, at last discovers what he was fated for, and writes, damn it, writes, arduously and sedulously with his awkward left hand, penning short stories and the beginning of a play and the outline of a novel and another and another . . .
and his head whirrs with ideas and images, and his heart leaps blissfully in his body because of the wonderful, wonderful life next to the small stove in Witte’s garden house on the grounds of the halved villa on the Elbchaussee—and he’s already sold two stories to the radio network, and one is printed in Die Welt, which is publishing again, and now the movies have approached him too. (“We have a specific project in mind for you, dear Herr Nagel: would you like to write a screenplay for us? If so, then we’ll come to you.”)—and he instantly has an idea for a screenplay, a lovely idea, after all it’s to be the first postwar German film and it should have something symbolic in it too. So, somewhere in South or Central America—in any case, the guys are wearing sombreros—a man is wandering, a scientist, ethnologist, anthropologist—right?—he’s traveling to a remote Indian tribe to study a bizarre custom: you see, the Indians believe that every fifty-three years, corresponding to a cyclical eclipse of the moon (which can be observed from their territory), the world comes to an end, only to be re-created and resurrected the next day. En route, this scholar meets another man with the same destination, and he introduces himself as a government-licensed executioner. He explains that during a famine, a woman of this Indian tribe went to the communal store of grain and stole a handful for her child. According to the natives’ law, which is respected by the government, she has to die for her crime, except that the government reserves the right to perform the execution—typical, eh? Hahahahaha! Well, the two men, the scholar and the executioner, reach the Indians at the very moment when they are preparing for the end of the world. Tomorrow night, at one a.m. on the dot, the world will end. Ten after one, it’ll be re-created. This is shown very graphically—it’s a movie, you know: all fires are put out, everyone strews ashes on his head and lies down to die. Voices howl and teeth chatter when the eclipse begins, and then, when the moon lights up again, the past is past, the world is as neat as a new pin, they rekindle the fires and start baking tortillas with purged souls. Question: does the woman still have to be executed or not? . . .
a nice story, a profound story, as simple as a leg
end, you can almost tell it in three sentences, and Piglet King Stoffel is crazy about it and even more so his wife, Astrid von Bürger, the Beautiful, the Marvelous, whom Nagel, during the final years at the front, secretly carried in his heart like a schoolboy in love (“Man, if you ever get out of this shit alive—you’re gonna marry a girl like her!”).
Astrid von Bürger, now making movies with her husband, Stoffel, finds the story fabulous, simply heavenly. But there’s that moron of a scenario editor they’ve picked up, plus a head of production, an absolute prick, who thinks he knows something about moviemaking because he used to push lights around, and then, of course, that phenomenal asshole of a banker who’s supposed to finance the project—and those guys check every single scene to make sure it’s understandable and probable and psychologically and anthropologically and astronomically correct, and they want the symbolism clear, they want to hit you over the head with it, and Stoffel himself begins messing around with the story because he figures on difficulties in casting and in finding expensive locations . . . well, to make a long story short:
“Why don’t you come along to a meeting, they call it a ‘conference,’ I’ll tell them you’re a Young Writer too, then you can see the endless dimensions of human stupidity. . .”
and I went along and was introduced to Stoffel and his primordial piglets as a Young Writer and was permitted to lean over the hand of Astrid von Bürger and kiss it and peep into her blouse décolletage, and I was forced to watch my friend Nagel being tormented and tortured, to watch a pen-knife vivisection of a fellow Young Writer and to witness a systematic slaughter triggered by an instinctive hatred of one kind of human for another, the murder of the seedling of a work of art—and my eyes bored into the smugly ironical eyes of Astrid von Bürger in order to learn what she was feeling and thinking during this slaughter, she couldn’t have overlooked the way poor Nagel loved her, his boyish chivalry and willingness to suffer. And because her eyes endured my gaze so long and amply that they swam, my gaze was lost in them and I suddenly heard her say, “Look, before you kick each other’s heads in, let the other Young Writer tell us what he thinks about this whole business. I have the feeling he has some ideas about it.”
Was this the right time to say that I found Nagel’s story simply fabulous? They kept saying they did—only to pounce on it all the more furiously and tear it to shreds. I figured it was better to point out what they might object to in it; the von Bürger bitch was right, I had thought about it while they kept yakking and yakking, and I believed I had found what was wrong. And so I said: I think the difficult thing about all stories with an open ending is that they sound wonderful in three sentences because they contain an insoluble problem in a single situation, but if you tell them in detail for an hour and a half, breaking them down into a series of situations, then you can’t intensify the problem or present it any more clearly, much less resolve it. The story always remains a “what if?”—
I wanted to add that they have to get beyond this; that the ending, which they had been arguing about for hours with their narrow, stubborn minds, was quite harshly and plainly obvious: the movie had to end with the young woman’s execution. The audience could then argue on the way home about whether it was just or unnecessarily cruel. But they all pounced on me as if I had tried to grab their favorite toy. Even Nagel yelled, “Goddammit, don’t you understand that it’s us in that what-if situation? Are we supposed to pronounce sentence upon ourselves?”
I was stuck with six men all screaming at the same time, and it was impossible to make them realize, individually or collectively, that they were idiots who had misunderstood me in the stupidest way. So I asked if I could offer them an example of what I meant: “Let’s assume that a man shows up at a radio station and claims that God is calling him. His name is Niels Otto Alsen, and he usually introduces himself by his initials: N.O.A. God’s voice is calling him, N.O.A., because a new flood is imminent. He says it’s high time to warn mankind. The radio station has to broadcast the news that the deluge is about to come and that people have to prepare for it. Needless to say, they think he’s a fool and kick him out. But an intellectual who’s hanging around the editorial office goes after him and maliciously points out the problem: if God has elected him, N.O.A., to be told of his intentions, it is because he is the only righteous man among millions of doomed sinners. He must not act more humane than God Himself. God won’t stand for it. Assuming the radio station really did broadcast a warning, the resulting panic would have consequences more catastrophic than the worst deluge. So: if the LORD intends to destroy humanity but for one righteous man, then he, this one righteous man, should not interfere with HIS workings. It is his duty to build an ark, fill it with two of every living creature, and wait until God has done His destructive work in order to begin the world anew on His behalf. Period. That is the ‘what if.’ The problem confronting a modern-day Noah becomes dramatic now. Where and how will he start his rescue action? How should he populate his boat? He can grab his neighbor’s cat from the windowsill, but things get tougher with the other fauna. There are several hundred species of finch; where’s he going to get a pair of each? Where’s he going to find lions, rhinoceroses, elephants? What kind of tools should he take for a new mankind? A knife, a cigarette lighter, an encyclopedia? But each of these contains the seed of new sins. Besides, this is 1947, and where and how is he going to get rationing stamps for the wood and nails for his boat? Wouldn’t he, the only righteous man in God’s eyes, have to commit all sorts of legal offenses in order to carry out God’s mission? And so forth . . .”
but I couldn’t get any further. I couldn’t demonstrate that this story too could not be told beyond this point because it has no end, it expands like a fan, but without moving, without coming to a dramatic point, without making the conflict clearer than it already is—
I couldn’t do it, because they all leaped on me at once and shouted at the top of their lungs: a solution at last, the idea was wonderful, much more plausible, much more symbolic than Nagel’s story. Stoffel jumped to his feet and gave one of his conference speeches: “Well, gentlemen, dear Astrid, I believe the solution has come to us from an unexpected source. Here we finally have the film we want, which will liberate the problem of our times from the eternal German guilt complex and raise it beyond the actual German situation to a universal human level . . .” And with that he opened a bottle of champagne, which back then was a great rarity on the black market.
Nagel, however, had gotten up and left the premises without a word of good-bye. When I tried to dash after him, the idiot, to get it into his thick head that I had wanted to help him with my parody, Astrid von Bürger held me back: “Leave him alone until he’s over his anger. He’ll realize how childish he’s acting.” But he never did realize it, my friend Nagel. He never spoke to me again.
•
Ah, that was the point when pretty much everything in my life began to go wrong. We had our little son, whom I could love above anything else, and he too loved his daddy above anything else, but things just wouldn’t work with Christa and me; she kept getting more and more bitter, more and more uncommunicative; I had disappointed her, I had not brought prosperity and conviviality into her life, only want and shame; I, the husband, had lost the war, Hamburg was a flattened city, you could see all the way across town, only the red-light district near Gänsemarkt and the other one behind Davidwache had been spared, symbolically, by the bombs (incidentally, the theater, tax office, and police station too). I was doing my best for the reconstruction of conjugal tenderness, but it was not easy, nor was it successful: Christa’s perfidious way, the instant she got to bed, of placing her arm across her face so that her elbow lay on her mouth like a bulwark—the mean little mouth that I liked to kiss so much—frustrated my feeble attempts (until I recognized it as Hitler’s signature and didn’t want to kiss it anymore). To be sure, she was very frightened, the poor thing, there was a shortage of everything, you really didn’t know how you were goi
ng to survive from day to day. At night, the rubble killer roamed the streets. I myself often had horrible dreams, I murdered a cleaning woman with a coal shovel in a cellar, ran around during the day in Witte’s shattered library and made up cock-and-bull stories for Stoffel, Spouse & Associates—see, I had become the house author at Astra Art Films; every other week, either a new project was tackled or an old script reworked and revised, they were busy for the sake of busyness, and I had to lubricate it with brain grease; but I didn’t have the moral grit to toss the whole business aside, there was always that prospect of an incredible amount of money, and it remained a prospect, it soon had something religious about it, this constant promise of pecuniary grace, salvation, and bliss; Christa believed in it with as much ardor and unfulfillment as Witte (a Protestant) believed in the Virgin Mary.
But I also felt a certain defiance toward Nagel. He wouldn’t greet me even when we ran into one another in the ever wilder, ever ranker garden of the villa on the Elbchaussee, he wouldn’t respond when I called out to him, telling him not to be such an asshole, he turned his back on me and slammed the door of the garden house behind him. The light burned in his little window late into the night; he was nearly done—Witte told Christa—with his first novel and was already working on a second one; his play, said Witte, wasn’t going so well, but there were very interesting things in it; as for movies, he (like Witte himself and most likely Christa too) did not consider them real art. In a word, a full-time artist.
Well, I didn’t want to be outdone, and so I thought up a number of truly lovely films. For instance, a New Guinea movie: A missionary has spent twenty years trying to get a Dajak tribe to give up head-hunting, and just as the solemn renunciation is being celebrated with a great feast, a government commissioner shows up and offers five pounds sterling for every Japanese head; war has broken out, you see, and the Japanese might invade at any moment . . . That this too was another story without peripeteia, because it began with a conflict that from the outset was unsolvable, occurred to no one, because it was impossible back then to film in New Guinea anyway; and the other projects likewise came to nought for some reason or other. I kept writing countless and largely unremunerated scripts for Astra Art Films; some of them were even filmed during the next few years, although in completely revised versions. But for Witte, I was and remained a “part-time artist,” and, I’m afraid, for Christa too.
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