THE PRINTED HEAD Volume I, number 3.
Karl Kraus on Ehrenstein: "He leaves behind him an agreeable stench of brimstone when he walks by." (1911).
Ehrenstein was one of the very first of the German Expressionists, his early poems causing an immediate sensation. "Tubutsch," however, made him famous — it reached five figure sales and went through numerous editions. It was written in 1907, published in 1911. Its melange of bitter humour, self-reproach and poverty-stricken megalomania reflected aspects of its author. Ehrenstein was something of a loner, he travelled continuously after 1918, despite his financial plight. Only in his last years did he settle down (involuntarily) — increasing poverty and isolation finally caught up with him in New York, where he died in 1950. Despite his melancholic nature Ehrenstein was also a political activist: a radical socialist, he co-founded the Anti-Nationalist Socialist Party in 1918, and later the left-wing writers' group "Gruppe 1925" with Brecht and Doblin.
"Tubutsch" has not been translated into English before.
ALBERT EHRENSTEIN
__________
TUBUTSCH
Translated by Malcolm Green
MY NAME IS TUBUTSCH, KARL TUBUTSCH. I ONLY MENTION THIS BECAUSE I have very few possessions apart from my name . . .
It's not the melancholy and bitterness of autumn, nor the feeling one gets after completing a major work, nor the dullness with which one only dimly awakes after a long, serious illness: I just can't understand how I have sunk into this state. Inside and outside of me is governed by a complete emptiness, a desolation. I've become an empty shell and don't know how. Just who or what has brought about this ghastliness: a great nameless magician, the reflection in a mirror, the fall of a bird's feather, the laugh of a child, the death of two flies; it is futile to search for it, or even to want to search, as foolish as attempting to track down any cause in this world. All I can see is the effect and its consequence; it's established that my soul has lost its balance, something in it is buckled and broken, the inner fountains have dried up. I can't even guess at the reason for this, the reason for my own particular case, and the worst of it is, I can't see anything which might change my hopeless state, not even slightly. For my inner emptiness is complete, systematic as it were, the result of a lamentable lack of any sort of chaotic elements. The days slip by, as do the weeks and the months. No, no! just the days. I don't believe that there are such things as weeks, months and years, there are only days, days which keep plunging into one another, days which I am unable to hold onto by some experience or other.
Were someone to ask what happened to me yesterday, I would answer: "Yesterday? Yesterday one of my shoelaces snapped." Years ago I used to be furious if one of my shoelaces snapped or one of my buttons fell off, I invented a special demon to preside over this department and even gave him a name. Gorymaaz, if I remember correctly. Now I thank God if one of my shoelaces snaps in the street. For only then do I have some degree of justification to enter a shop, request a shoelace, answer the question as to whether I would like something else with: "Nothing!", pay at the till and depart. Or else: I purchase the goods from one of the lads who keep on shouting: "Four for five bob." and get stared at by numerous passers-by who take me for a public benefactor. In any case, a few minutes pass by in this way and, all said and done, that's something after all. . .
It shouldn't be said that I have a special aptitude for feeling bored. That's not true. Since time immemorial I have possessed an exceptional ability, have been endowed with the talent for killing time, for coming up with the most exotic of imaginable occupations.
By way of proof: not long ago, as I was on my way to Ganster Lane, I walked up to a policeman, desirous of more proximate information, even though I did not know the whereabouts of the aforementioned thoroughfare. And thereupon I made an important discovery which seems to portend the toppling of a number of universal laws. The policeman smelt of rose water. Just think: a perfumed policeman. What a contradictio in adjecto! At first I didn't believe my nose. Doubts rose up inside me as to the authenticity of this law enforcer. Perhaps an artful criminal, a usurper, had clad himself in the uniform of a policeman in order to elude his pursuers. Only when I received my information was I convinced of his authenticity. It was so Delphic. Now it was up to me to find out whether all law enforcers — perhaps on account of a new regulation, say — had to disseminate pleasant odours, or whether he was the sole example with this characteristic and had acted, as it were, on his own initiative. Without batting an eyelid, I set myself this far-reaching task. A dissertation, or better still an essay: "On policemen and their odours" swam before my eyes . . . One policeman after another was sniffed at without finding a single further stain on their station, although I did ascertain that not one of them trimmed his moustaches in the English fashion. An observation whose importance for science can only be compared with one which I recently arrived at after unspeakable difficulties. Namely that not one single mammal is coloured green.
As to whether that particular policeman came by his odour from a servant-girl or from some other fault of his own . . . I lacked the courage to ascertain. And nothing became of the treatise De odoribus polyporum. I didn't dare ask him. For such a remarkable law officer, an officer of the law who smelt of roses, might well have read "Crime and Punishment," even if not "Raskolnikov." And knowing what a thrilling sensation many a criminal experiences at the idea of torturing himself and playing hide and seek with the authorities, he might simply have arrested me as some wrong-doer circling the showplace of his misdeed. And I would be faced with having to make my confession, the shameful confession of my innocence.
A cowardice similar to that with the policeman also hindered me in getting to the bottom of other mysteries, the sensing and pursuit of which is my sole occupation and interest in life. On my forays I often passed by an old greengrocer, a woman in her middle years with a coarse appearance and a down to earth way of expressing herself. She deals mainly in green peas. She bestowed a customer, who had sampled her ware and left shrugging his shoulders without making a purchase with appellations which, in their just and multifarious nature, were not second to those given to an oriental ruler. But an old sparrow nibbled at the peas every day unpunished, was never chased away, pecked at the pods and banqueted on the fruit, and I was never able to summon up the courage to ask the vegetable dealer whether or not she was a widow. For there is no escaping the thought: the sparrow is none other than her deceased spouse who comes and visits her and — oh omniscient unconsciousness — is fed by her!
Thanks to my timidity I shall never get to the bottom of this question. . .
Likewise the sign above the cobbler's: "Engelbert Kokoschnigg, master shoemaker. At the sign of the Two Lions. Established 1891." Universal riddles are hard to solve. For weeks on end I racked my brains in vain; why did the esteemed craftsman display a sign which was only befitting for an innkeeper? Had the contracting of marriage, which had presumably coincided with the founding of this business, been lauded in the form of this encroachment, so that one of the roaring lions was the cobbler's wife? Or had a world famous lion-tamer visited Vienna that year, drawing these citizens along with him in the wake of his fame?
Should I wish to put an end to this unbearable dilemma, by interviewing the master craftsman in person, I would necessarily be obliged to have him make me a pair of shoes. And that in turn, quite apart from my ever more chronic lack of the customary legal tender, would be black treason against my own personal shoemaker, old Peter Kekrevishy, who has so often whiled away my time with his tales. All well and good, both he and his handiwork have a somewhat old-time charm about them, he still greets me with: "Good day to you!" and when I ask him for something he says: "Yes, my heart!" He is as kindly as the canary which overhears u
s from its coconut shell, interrupts us with its song and then rewards itself by directing a peck of its beak to its sugar. And the cobbler's tales are also like a song, like the quiet song of resignation. Klausenburg is his birthplace, he finished the lower school there, and was the best pupil when his father died. Then his guardian, a butcher, did not allow him to continue his studies. The lad had to help at the chopping block during his vacations, and when he applied for the high school, the principal would not have him since his fellow pupils would be forever teasing someone who did the meat round, and the decorum of the school had to be safeguarded . . . The guardian had then apprenticed him to a cobbler, because the butcher's lads also wouldn't tolerate a secondary school pupil among them, and then he found the profession far too disgusting. All that bloodletting! But in the year of '48[1], when the citizens of Klausenberg decided that it was time they also had their own to-do, he had done his bit, albeit with the local band . . . A fellow student, who had been awarded worse marks than him, became the director of the observatory in Vienna, and a few steps away from it, in a dingy little room stinking of gruel, sits a man whose wife goes charring and whose only daughter is married in Agram. A man too old, too gentle, too poor to be able to afford a helper, a man who after much pleading, must be glad when his customers don't walk out on him because he is so slow . . . Now his wife has managed to find him a small sideline. Every day I see the weak little man with his shaking hands taking a paralytic out in her wheelchair. For which he receives a little pocket money and is not even allowed a small glass of wine on Sundays, no! But instead he may choose a book from the paralytic's library and completely wreck his half-blind eyes reading the tiny print, while another — Counsellor to the Court, Baron, Commander of the Order of Franz Josef, etc. — gets paid for summoning the eternal stars down to earth, drives about in a proper carriage, lives right in the lap of luxury — for no better reason that that he didn't have a butcher for a guardian . . .
This is my only social contact, an old cobbler and — of course! — a ruined hat-maker who is in no way remarkable except that he made it to Mexico under Emperor Max. He has nothing to say about this land except that it was very hot. Be that as it may, in my eye he is a man of importance, I have no one else among my acquaintances who has gone further than him . . . and there is something exotic in the air when he says: "Yes, in Velacruz!" and I ask dutifully what it was about this place and he cracks his only joke: "Yes, in Velacruz, they ain't gotta slivovitz to match the likes of ours." . . . I am always loyal and laugh, can't spoil things with him. He is the ombudsman for the poor, and maybe he will at last help me gain Viennese citizenship. I could do with a little sinecure one day . . .
I used to have one more acquaintance, a bow-legged Doctor Philosophiae who also completed the course at the export academy and knows an unbelievable number of languages. His name is Schmecker, he's employed at the central bank, works for all he's worth, and doesn't allow himself a holiday. For that reason I once said to him: "Yes, my friend, there are a few drawbacks when you want to end your days as a bank manager." He really will become a bank manager, but that "end your days" has spoilt his fun in advance, and if he sees me approaching in the distance, he looks away when I draw near.
I also used to have a distant relative, Norbert Schigut, the representative. Once he met me unannounced on the street and imparted to me triumphantly, without any invitation on my behalf — he clearly wanted to forestall any rumours — that although his wife had recently walked out on him, she came back again shortly after, full of remorse. This often happens, I remarked. As for myself, I had always written with a dip pen, had changed to a fountain pen, only to clasp my quill once more in disappointment, without that being reason enough to give up the hope of one day coming into possession of a typewriter. He ingenuously replied that this had probably been due to the poor quality of the fountain pen, and by happy chance he was just at that moment representing a first class maker of fountain pens from America. I fell into an unending fit of laughter, although still able to consider whether I shouldn't wrap up a bit of this laughter and save it for gloomier times, but the peculiar fellow went his way, insulted, as if my laughing had been intended as an attack on his commercial honour. Since then we are relatives no longer.
I wander around the city alone. No one pays me any attention. At most a pinscher barks at me as it nervously paces back and forth on the roof of one of the passing delivery vans. Often I'd like to bark right back. Unfortunately decorum doesn't allow it. One must retain a sense of propriety. And so I can't even enter into closer relations with this pinscher.
I used to write. But the last time I cast a look into my inkwell, there were two dead flies inside. Drowned.
Just what had taken place, the double suicide of two lovers . . . or an avalanche in the glass mountains brought about by rolling dust particles . . . could no longer be established. The word "fame" exploded inside my head, who knows what these flies had meant to their people! I was overcome by horror, and I went outdoors to shake it off, ended up near the Kahlenberg line and saw, next to a miserable hovel belonging to one of the railway employees: two cockerels — an old one and a young one — fighting for world dominion on a dung heap. I returned home, completely taken up by this event, and the next day I was highly surprised that none of the papers had printed even the smallest report about this titanic contest for the hegemony of the dung heap. Not to mention the shocking news of the two deceased flies, which must have occurred too late for the stop press.
The two cockerels had battled to the last, it hadn't been one of those faked show fights, there was no doubt that it had been fair and square, but not a word! Perhaps for that very reason . . . which should have been precisely mine for dutifully informing every newspaper in the world. But given the diametrically opposed views of the world which separate me from the editors of the popular illustrated weeklies, and the differences in the things which we are both structured to view as important, it was pretty questionable as to whether I would succeed in making my opinion heard. Of course, if the two splattered flies had been the owners of a plum-jam mine, and been called Pollak, or one cockerel had been the Austrian champion, the chess master Papabile, and the other the presumptive world champion . . . then one would not be able to walk the streets without being ambushed every two steps by the everyday faces of these two heroes staring out from the shop windows . . . Better to keep to ourselves and deal with our own affairs. With regard to the cockerels, there was nothing more I could do for them, and anyway as an author it's not in my nature to take sides and forcibly intervene in the course of battle. Just as it is not in my nature to desecrate the slumber of the two flies which had fallen into death's bitter inkwell by exhuming and cremating them . . . I left them on the spot where fate had cast them. Given that the boldest of heroic deeds go unmentioned, who will be surprised at my decision to write my notes as of now in pencil, so, as it were, to make them even more transitory. One could more readily accuse me of egocentricity in my reverential approach to the flies. For what could be better suited to my mood than the smell of their decomposing which other hardier constitutions probably wouldn't even notice?
I have now made the effort and bought myself a street directory. I should have done it long ago. People like myself whose centre of gravity lies outside themselves, somewhere out there in the universe . . . who yield like wax to every impression . . . must continually feed their sensorium, even if just with shop signs, in order to keep from falling into the gaping void.
I travel on a small scale. The Tirol is a pretty land but soon the Baedeckers will start blossoming on the trees, and the majority take their milieu with them when they travel. . . in the shape of their relations and friends. In fact it's a matter of complete indifference whence we travel, we always go along quite regardless. Can't leave ourselves at home. This sort of travelling doesn't agree with me. If at all, then through time. I would like to talk with a lord from the 14th century, would like to pay a call on Mr Menemptar, the e
arly Egyptian poet, booming lyricist and world-famous author of the hymn-cycle "Songs to the Crocodile of the Nile," but sad to say I am in such bad shape that I couldn't manage to force the sterling lad to appear in a vision or a hallucination. Technicians! Bring me a tramway to the past. No, not until a conductor — the globe dangling from his watch chain — shouts out: "Cambrian Era! All change!" I won't take part until then. Ah, but not even then, for no sooner has something of this sort come into being than Mr. Pollak is in on it too, leaving his sandwich wrappers strewn around the Cambrian Era. And it really doesn't deserve that. I see now that it's better for me to go for a walk along Linz Street, because it's the second longest lane in Vienna . . . I'd also like to be the second longest lane in Vienna . . . things would be easier then.
What's there to look at? Not a lot. Next to a shop selling umbrellas is a corner shop selling books, paper banners trumpeting the praises of the latest tome, along with others announcing that fresh herrings have arrived at last. Some may like to refer to this as the ingenious arrangement of the non-oriental capital, the rest, more down to earth, go crazy with the disorder. But I myself haven't a clue which are umbrellas, which are books and which are herrings: all the differences swim before my eyes, they have all become too minimal for me so that all I can see within this apparent diversity of objects is insignificant gradations in one and the same material . . . gradations which eternally recur, meanwhile it is simply the human means of expression which changes. And then I say, laying a book aside: "I must have seen this hat somewhere before," or eating a mince-loaf suddenly gives me the idea that I am in fact dealing with a fashionable talent which is at the conceptual and material roots of this sort of mode of perception and remains unchanging, for otherwise the perceptions would be an impossibility. And people think that I am paradoxical? I've simply learnt from a drunk.
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