A play was being acted out on stage according to the “just in time” principle. A couple fights. The father-in-law appears just in time. But the father, rather than the son-in-law, turns out to be having an affair. Just then, a soubrette enters. A baby is put in the arms of the wrong father. The audience howled. The show had been sold out for days. There were no ambiguities. The whole thing was incredibly ham-fisted. But it made them happy. Half an hour from Potsdamer Platz: Anno Domini 1900. Rococo salons and trumeaux prevailed.
A virginal pair, white, green, and silver. A Grecian dove balancing act. A dozen doves. The vestal girl placed the doves on her little head and shoulders, let them flap about. The boy formed a bridge. Doves crawled over his stomach and back, through his legs, and returned to his head. He seemed immune to tickling. The crowd listened to “My Faithful Little Dove.” By then the man in the tuxedo had already come out and sat himself down on a chair whose one leg was stuck in a bottle.
“Wow, that’s really something,” said a specialist in bodily dexterity, perhaps a carpenter or roofer.
“Ridiculous,” said Miss Kohler. “It denies all humanity and, because of that, it’s unbearably sad. Dexterity for dexterity’s sake, as a way of filling your days, is embarrassing—it’s not for fun, recréation, which implies rebirth, renewal. We slide back into the Middle Ages when we take someone else’s mortal peril for an amusing diversion. It’s the same as burning people at the stake in the village square.”
“You usually have a sense for symbolism. This is about grabbing the right rope, an action that is doubtlessly instructive. Let’s wait for the main act.”
The gentleman on the slackline wasn’t bad either. He picked up a handkerchief with his teeth, carried a table, and rode a unicycle. This was honest work. Standing on a wire and picking up a handkerchief with one’s teeth had nothing to do with death. Gravity was no longer victorious, it no longer bent the human body, that most sublime of instruments, into a crooked shape. Instead, man knew, and laughed at destiny. So far, nothing more had come of it than him lifting a round pine table high over his head with one foot on the wire, but something still could! It could!
Then at last came the main act: it was Käsebier, Käsebier himself, and he sang! First, something new. “If You Wanna Come with Me, Come with; and If You Don’t, Go Your Way Alone.”
Then, “Boy, Isn’t Love Swell?” And finally: “How Can He Sleep with That Thin Wall?” Oh, what a fellow, how he suffered, standing there, crying, “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God—I’m sad.” There he stood, wrinkles drooping, a faithful hound with hanging ears. And then: “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God—life’s grand.” Kicking his legs, corners of the mouth turned up, blissful eyelids, ears perked up. Käsebier was no Adonis, no Harry Liedtke, no Menjou.13 He didn’t make the girls swoon; he most certainly did not embody any erotic ideal. He was short, blond, fat, and flabby, with a snout, almost a mug. In the background: the Fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, a vine-covered roof, and a moon veiled in mist; next to him, Hedy, who could have been Claire Waldoff’s younger sister.14 The banks of the Rhine. A love song: “We had our first kiss . . .” It didn’t go much farther. The audience believed him, felt heavenly longing, even if their spouses’ hands were groping for their effects. Dr. Kohler would have liked Lambeck to do the same. Lambeck would have scorned it. So she hid her primitive feelings. Then Käsebier almost punctured the dream of the Rhine and the moon with a wavering tone; he came back with a little toy apron and a hoop, and sang all of our childrens’ songs: “Fox, You Stole the Goose,” “Little Hans,” “Little Mary Sat on a Stone,” “A Dwarf Stands in the Woods,” “All the Birds.” He bawled, “I do-hon’t know what it mea-hea-heans,” fresh, bold, out of tune. Too fat and too blond, a snout, almost a mug, he comforted fathers, mothers, and children, blood of the blood of this city. To ensure his place as the darling of the people, he sang an encore: “I’m dancing the Charleston and he’s dancing the Charleston and she’s dancing the Charleston—what about you?” What’s the Charleston got to do with anything, five minutes away from Reichenberger Strasse, where they string up wires for wild grapes on the balconies after they get home from work and father has to be cooked for, patched, and washed? In unison, they sang, “I’m gettin’ stamped and he’s gettin’ stamped and she’s gettin’ stamped—what about you?”15—“I need dough and he needs dough and she needs dough—what about you?”
“That’s reason, this divine ratio,” Dr. Kohler said to Lambeck. “He doesn’t shriek about his pains for his coffee or bread and butter for an evening’s entertainment. Instead, he sings. That’s the answer. A chorus instead of a cheap thrill.”
“Although we’ve long searched in vain,” said Lambeck, “we’ve finally found irony, gallows humor, and the bliss of company.”
6
A star is born
LAMBECK’S play opened eight days later. It was almost too late, as March had already begun. Dr. Kohler found it terribly dull, a failure, a total flop. How should she react? Gentility prevailed. She called up Otto Lambeck.
“It was very nice,” she said.
“You can go ahead and say it was a total flop. They’re saying I’m exhausted, finished, done. That I’ve always been a bit overrated anyways. A reporter at a big-time newspaper called me senile, completely senile. ‘After all that,’ Ixo said, ‘it’s best we stick to the plot,’ and then he stuck to the plot. I won’t even repeat what Öchsli wrote. I don’t want to discuss it anymore. I’m working on a new play now. It’s about an inheritance.”
How awful, a play about an inheritance, Dr. Kohler thought.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I found the story in a sixteenth-century French chronicle.”
“Oh,” she said. Why does this man, who has an unparalleled knowledge of contemporary life, always pick such silly topics? He uses sixteenth-century chronicles instead of police reports. Tragic, she thought.
“Have you written about Käsebier yet?”
“Yes, I’ve begun.”
He’s like an ant, she thought once she’d hung up. His work may get trampled, but he’ll start right up again.
Otto Lambeck wrote about Käsebier. He described what he’d seen and heard, and called him “underrated,” a word that Gohlisch had already used.
The article appeared in the morning edition of the Berliner Tageszeitung.
That evening, Blumenthal the agent phoned up the cabaret director at the Primus Palace.
“Have you read Lambeck’s article in the Berliner Tageszeitung? Listen, what a find! Don’t you want to pin him down now?”
“Get out of here! Just cause a poet likes it.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve got a good nose. Right now, you can get that man for fifty marks a night. In three months, you’ll have to pay three hundred.”
“Get out of here,” said the director.
At eleven o’clock on the following day, Lambeck’s phone rang.
“This is Dr. Zwörger calling from the studio. Am I speaking to the master himself?”
“Yes,” said Lambeck.
“My good sir, you wrote an article on Käsebier for the Berlin Tageszeitung. All of Berlin is abuzz. He’s your find. I’m calling with a request. Would you be willing to interview Käsebier on the radio?”
“What do you want me to do?” Lambeck asked.
“Interview Käsebier.”
“But I’m not a journalist, I have a terrible voice, and my reactions are rather slow. I’m not at all suited to such a task.”
“Let me put it differently. Would you be willing to have a discussion with Käsebier the singer on the radio?”
“No, I won’t do that either. But Doctor, please don’t take this as my general attitude toward radio. I am an adherent of this extraordinary—I might even say world-changing—invention.”
“Would you be inclined to hold a small lecture on him, about twenty minutes long?”
“Yes, I could do that.”
“Perhaps Friday, in four days.”
“That seems a bit too soon. I need to prepare. But I’d happily do it for next Friday.”
“Let me see if we can add it in on Friday. One moment, please—good, Friday it is.”
On Friday, March 10, Otto Lambeck talked about Käsebier on the radio. He called him “underrated,” as he had already done in his essay, and as Gohlisch had.
After that, there was no stopping it. Fritz Grönemann wrote a long article in the Weltschau and likened the singer to the finest Parisian traditions. Otto Magnus wrote a short article for Excelsior, the magazine for modern living. Countess Bloomsiek wrote about him in the elegant right-wing newspaper, which was no different from the elegant left-wing newspaper. Here was a fundamentally German talent, she wrote, a sort of court minstrel and popular poet rolled into one, an extraordinary union of natural musicality and popular humor.
The Rote Stern wrote that this man was doubtlessly talented, but that his lyrics attested to the foolish glorification of a declining class, a fact that made it impossible for class-conscious workers to seek out such pleasure palaces.
“He has a profane tongue. His close connection to the people of Berlin (and not to the proletariat as a class!) is due only to his charisma.”
“He portrays characters from the street and the underworld with such exceptional remove that indecency and double entendres no longer seem like subjective expressions, but attain objective form through art; thus, they are robbed of their moral danger,” the Zentrumszeitung opined.
The exceedingly brilliant critic of the Flamme wrote, “Käsebier is talented, but he falls short of genius. He lacks the transcendental touch that the metaphysical realm bestows upon the talented artist, and which anoints him as genius.” He continued, “Although Mr. Ixo has deemed him a brother to Guilbert, this is far from correct. Käsebier is a natural talent, but he readily slips into banalities when his subject exceeds the everyday—a slick banality that I personally value less than a raw cry wrenched from the breast of struggling youth.”
The Völkische Aufgang wrote, “Once again, a talent is praised to high heavens by the Jewish tabloids. The lackeys in the pay of Mr. Moses Isaak Waldschmidt are raving about things they don’t understand. Repugnant foreign Jews, plagued with hundreds of oversophisticated thoughts, abuse the German language to praise a socialist who is debasing our people’s greatest treasure, the folk song, and misusing it for his own vain ambitions.”
The illustrated magazines in Cologne and Munich ran articles on him featuring five to seven pictures.
7
Frächter publishes a book on Käsebier
TWO DAYS later, word had spread that Käsebier was to appear at the Wintergarten. But the rumor was premature.
Frächter offered the middling regional papers a series of articles on Käsebier. Leipzig, Breslau, Cologne, Dortmund, and Tilsit accepted. Ten pfennigs per line.
Frächter frequented the Romanisches Café in the evenings. Willy Frächter was very tall and had blond pomaded hair that was somewhat long at the nape. He was from Gotha.
The Romanisches Café is across from the Gedächtniskirche, and consists of a swimmer’s and non-swimmer’s section. The swimmers sit to the left of the revolving door, the non-swimmers to the right.16 The Romanisches Café is filthy. First, it is as smoky as befits an intellectual haven despite its large windows; second, it is dirty because of the habits of its guests, who constantly throw the remains of their smokes to the ground; and third, because of the enormous number of guests. This café is a home for many. Hungarians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Russians, Chechens, Slovakians, Ruthenians, Danes, Bohemians, Austrians, Balts, Latvians, Lithuanians, Serbians, Romanians, as well as the great flock of Jews from the east whose minds were opened in Berlin—they all come here to meet their fellow countrymen. That’s the way it is in Berlin: the censuses may be interested in Americans, but most immigrants come to Berlin from the East, along with the occasional Dutchman or Dane. No one makes much of it, but Berlin is one hundred kilometers away from the Polish border. Berlin is a suburb of the northeast, just as Vienna is one of the southeast. Berlin is not a fashionable capital, like Paris or Rome or London, where the British, the Americans, the Spaniards and the French “go sightseeing” in the spring, or take a summer “trip.” One comes to Berlin from the East to find work, make music, film, and paint, act on stage, write, direct, sculpt; sell cars, paintings, property, land, carpets, antiques; open stores, shoe stores, clothing stores, perfume stores; starve and study. Everyone sits in the Romanisches Café, first in the non-swimmer’s section, then in the swimmer’s section. They all talk and curse.
Willy Frächter was sitting in the swimmer’s section with Heinrich Wurm, and was telling Wurm how successful his series on Käsebier had been. Heinrich Wurm said that he was currently writing about various construction projects in Berlin. A swimming pool, for example. He’d also heard that the houses on Spandauerstrasse, Stralauerstrasse, and Jüdenstrasse would be torn down.
“All of them?” Frächter asked.
“Of course, what else are they going to do with those dumps? They’re going to build huge office buildings, nine stories high, made only of glass and this new stuff called Pathetix. Then they’ll put up a hotel with a thousand rooms that all look the same and cost seven marks a night, right where the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche is. Two architects developed the project, Grützekopf and Hobel. I’ve already sold the story to the Allgemeine Zeitung.”
“Sure,” said Frächter. “The regional papers don’t pay as well, but there are a lot more to choose from. I never want to be on staff at a Berlin newspaper.”
“Oh, come on, Frächter.”
“Well, it might be a different story if I could get a spot at the Berliner Tageszeitung. But really, do you think those moronic editors could appreciate someone with a gift for politics? I’ve been living quite well off my short stories,” he continued. “I write two per month and can live where I want. I’ve gone from Ireland to Greece, even to the Soviet Union, and it’s always worked out. I’ve never had to write more than two, but I wanted to live in Berlin for a while. You have to take advantage of capitalism while it’s still hot; I’m already in it up to my neck. I had dinner with Lambeck recently, and he also told me that one should have lived in Berlin at some point.”
He waited for Wurm to look impressed. Wurm did indeed, but replied, “By the way, do you know that WTB and TU17 decided to report on Käsebier today? He’s going to appear at the Wintergarten. A second Yvette Guilbert.”
“I actually discovered him.”
“How so?”
“I brought him to Lambeck’s attention.”
“Damn, why didn’t you write about that?”
“It’s very difficult to get something like that out if you’re not a cabaret critic. But now I’m going to publish a book on him.”
“With whom?”
“I haven’t nailed down a contract yet, but I think it’ll work out.”
Lieven swooped down on the table.
“Have you already gone to see Käsebier? He’s simply magical. Nothing less than a natural genius. Only these idiots in Berlin, our most dimwitted critics, could overlook the greatest actor of our time.”
“I discovered him,” Frächter said.
Lieven jumped up and grasped both of Frächter’s hands. “Please allow me to congratulate you. I envy you. I wish I had done so myself. What are journalists good for if not to discover and profile the great men and women of their time? Why take up the pen if not to pave the path for genius?”
Frächter got up.
“Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and went to the telephone. He squeezed himself into the booth and called up Mohnkopp, a young publisher. “Listen, Mohnkopp, we’ve got to publish a book, Käsebier. I’ve heard rumors that he’s coming to the Wintergarten.”
“What a great idea. Where would be good to talk it over?”
“Meet me at Schwannecke tonight.”
; Frächter was at Schwannecke that evening. He’d come this far in just three weeks. A meeting at Schwannecke already!18 Yesterday, he’d still been at the Romanisches Café; yesterday, the bare floor had been covered in tobacco, cigarette, and cigar butts; marble tables, milky coffee, and two eggs in a glass; today, there was parquet with carpet, cozy booths, wine, a roast, and sauce béarnaise. Frächter arrived at eleven o’clock. Käte was sitting in the booth next to him with a lawyer. She was wearing a black evening dress with a rose. She looked good.
He waited. People came and went. The most famous guests were in the back room, celebrating a premiere. People came and went. Large men, small men, large women, small women, women with black hair, blonde hair, brown hair; Englishwomen, pale blonde and tall; Italian women, small, raven-haired, and colorful; a Japanese woman with slanted eyes and yellow skin; a blonde Prussian; a flabby French-woman; a slender, thin, tragic screen actor; a slim, blond, melancholy painter; a fat, short filmmaker; an ugly theater director. All of them ended up speaking Austrian, even the Japanese woman.
Mohnkopp arrived. Frächter ordered generously and was quickly in media res. The book was to be no longer than five folios, and would contain illustrations. Each copy would cost one and a half marks. And the advance? Frächter demanded a flat fee plus royalties.
“Nah, can’t do double,” said Mohnkopp.
“So let’s say an advance plus royalties.”
Mohnkopp negotiated. He only wanted to give Frächter royalties, ten pfennigs per book.
“No. And I want two thousand marks in advance.”
“Who’s going to write it?” asked Mohnkopp.
“I’ll ask celebrities to contribute short articles: poets, an actress, critics, journalists, sports figures, an industrial magnate, a government official. Let me take care of it. I’ll sign on as editor. And what’s more, there’ll be a long article: ‘Käsebier on Käsebier.’ But I can’t do it for less than two thousand marks up front. I guarantee it’ll be a smash hit. That’s why I want royalties.”
Käsebier Takes Berlin Page 7
