by Bryher;
We took the train to Berlin the following day, passing through an extraordinary landscape of black and white cows standing among pools of coral-colored leaves. The description sounds strange but there was no other word to describe the color and occasionally, to add a surréaliste touch, strips of blue bark hung from the trees. I had only been once before to Germany, at the age of nine. All that I remembered about that visit was a trip to the Wannsee on a sunny afternoon.
I fell in love with Berlin at once to my own amazement. There is a time when if development is to continue, childhood associations must be put temporarily aside and I had known France too long and too well. In the sharp bite of the air of the North I could watch the first patterns evolve of the post-war decade. Russian and Polish refugees sat on benches in the station, clasping bundles done up in old, faded blankets, too weary at first either to look for work or beg for food. We were conscious that we were standing near the center of a volcano, it was raw, dangerous, explosive but I have never encountered before or since so vital a response to experimental art. In Paris, people had used the classic phrases of me, “She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t make love, what are her vices?” They guessed everything but the right one, it was danger, I was to have rather more of it than I expected during the next ten years.
The first person we met on arrival was Marc Allégret, come like ourselves to see the new German films. We went out together to Neu-Babelsberg. In our innocence, we had supposed this to be the appropriate name of a studio, it turned out to be a place. A guide led us through pines, startling many tiny rabbits, and stopped at a platform covered with sand. “You cannot hurry documentary films,” he said reproachfully although such a thought had never crossed our minds. An ichneumon was sleeping on a corner of the table, an assistant in a white coat lifted a small, wriggling serpent out of a glass jar: both refused to perform for us, the snake coiled up on the sand, the ichneumon took refuge between two boxes. I noticed a bottle labeled “Dangerous, Do not open.” Did it contain chemicals or more reptiles? We were asked to look for an insect hanging from a branch like a dead leaf and felt when we could not find it that we were being judged contemptuously as unobservant English. It was very thorough, very German, and we stood about like small children following a learned uncle round a zoo. Yet the documentary was perhaps the true expression of that time. Such films caught the everyday and revealed it as unfamiliar. To photograph a landscape seemed in some way to ensure it against memory’s loss and these cameramen approached their subjects as if their work were some royal form of ritual.
A studio today is a fort with its own passwords and sentinels. Oh, we were lucky. We were in at the beginning and wandered freely about the studios as we liked. After all, in England in those days, films were barely respectable. The last time that I was on a movie set, it was regimented and formal, reporters were spectators, herded behind ropes. In the early days everybody was mixed up together in a wild informality and I think this gave life to the episodes. The technical advances have been enormous and imperfections of both lenses and lighting strike the senses if we watch the projection of an early picture but the life has gone from modern films, they are seldom creative, but have become what we prided ourselves should be avoided, photographed theater. They do not “move.”
A gigantic crucifix was standing inside the main building against an immense backdrop of sky. There was a crowd in front of it and hundreds of green leaves had been strewn over the grass. There were ledges full of lamps above our heads, wires crossed the floor in what seemed to be a pattern of idly drawn lines, there was a small wooden platform for onlookers. “Luther” our guide whispered, “it will all look natural on the screen.” We stood still while a shot was taken and then hurried through some plaster columns into the next set, a “dancing” where the air was an Indian temperature under the mercury vapor lamps. A mechanical piano played and stopped, played and stopped, at a whistle’s command. We dodged a make-up woman plastering the heroine with powder, paused to watch a cameraman fixing an electric motor, huddled into a corner among more wires while the director shouted, a waiter moved among the dancing couples and the cameras whirred. The whistle blew, all was silence and we walked on, passing an old carpenter pasting strips of wallpaper on frames and a group of weary people sitting on decrepit chairs round an old piano. “White Russians,” the guide remarked, “they have no money for real sets and only shoot their scenes twice.” Three times was the normal number although there was a rumor that in Hollywood von Stroheim had shot some of the scenes in Greed ten times, an exaggeration we could hardly believe.
It was pleasant to get back into the open. We passed a wooden pavillion that had been constructed for the just finished Waltɀ Dream and turned into a wide street that had been built up to one story, mirrors would reflect the additional height required and thus save eighty per cent of the cost. It had already been used twice. There were German names over the shops at one end of the street and Spanish ones at the other. We skirted a trench and rolls of rusty wire, “our battlefield for the second Weltkrieg film,” came up to Rotwang’s house from the newly released Metropolis, and wandered further across sandy soil that was like the floor of some newly drained sea. Tiny violets grew among discarded Agfa boxes, the ivory ends of scrapped film and lengths of discarded paper littered the trolley lines for cameras that stretched in every direction. Yet all these objects had gone to make what we should now call tranquillizers for a war-shocked generation whose members had been torn from everything they had been brought up to revere. Perhaps the films were illiterate but they reflected their time and gave a moment’s respite to the millions whose lives had been wrenched out of shape. They may have also fulfilled the same purpose in the twenties as the epidemic of dancing is said to have done after the plague and the Crusades. There really are moments when reality is too grim to be faced by the majority if they intend to survive.
Marc stayed on to attend a conference. Kenneth and I walked back to the station and I tried to buy two tickets for Berlin. The official knew no English, I tied myself up in knots. I apologized and explained that I had not spoken any German for fifteen years. He looked at me with hatred and snapped in German, “That is obvious.” There were few English people in Germany in 1927 and there was hatred of us everywhere but I responded vigorously to such a challenge.
There was one film that we felt expressed our generation. It was Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street) directed by G. W. Pabst and starring Greta Garbo for the second time in her career. It seemed to us the first picture to use contemporary material with a sense of intelligence and art. As I have already written, love seemed less important than a sudden act of kindness, and beauty alone was immune to the pestilence of the time. I had come to films too late myself to take any interest in their stars but with one exception I have never seen anyone more beautiful than Garbo was in this film. It was truly Greek.
Almost at the end of our first stay in Berlin, Kenneth returned from another conference with the news that he had actually met Pabst who had invited us both to a party at his house that evening. It proved to be an important moment for me because among the dozen people collected to meet us, there was a quiet, almost Eastern-looking figure sitting in one corner who was afterwards to be my analyst, Dr. Hanns Sachs. He had recently been acting as adviser on the first attempt to make a psychoanalytical film, Secrets of a Soul. It was a “lost” film because although it was shown, the producers had decided that the audience could not stand a purely psychoanalytical story and all the interesting portions had been cut.
At first we had ears only for Pabst. His round face was usually a mask of helpless laughter when he was off duty. On the set he ruled the assembly, actors, cameramen and technicians like an officer on a parade ground. His tongue was as sharp as any sword. “Everybody warned me not to take Garbo,” he was saying as we entered, “she photographed so badly,” we all laughed till the tears ran down our cheeks.
“She wanted to stay in Europe and she waited for a year afte
r Die freudlose Gasse was such a success but nobody offered her a chance and I had no suitable part for her in my next film.”
“They will ruin her in Hollywood.” (They did.)
“And are you pleased with your new film?” somebody asked. “Surely now you can do as you like?”
“As I like!” Pabst exploded again into his characteristic laugh, “The distributors will not want it as it is. There is not a smile in every sequence and nobody dances.”
“When will it be released?” Kenneth inquired.
“I will show you my real version. Once the exhibitors get it, they will give the heroine flowers and a happy ending and then they will say that the sets are too dark.”
A discussion on lighting began and I found myself talking to the only other nontechnical expert in the room, Dr. Sachs. I told him that I had met Freud and that I was interested in analysis though I was not sure that I could accept it completely; he confessed that he had had a daydream that a desperately neurotic maharaja would invite him to a remote palace in India where, after the daily hour of treatment which he agreed with me could easily take place on the back of an elephant, he could study one of his favorite subjects, the philosophy of the East. It was a strange ending to a fantastic evening. The films had brought us together but an inquiry into the secrets of the mind was nearer to me than the world of the studios. A few months later, after a long correspondence, I began the analysis that I have always felt to be the central point in my life.
I spent several months a year in Berlin from 1928 to 1932 nor was my work interrupted in the intervals because Dr. Sachs spent most of the summer in Switzerland where he continued to take his analysands. I went to him for an hour a day, during the rest of the time I saw films, attended to the business side of Close Up and shared in the extraordinary ferment abroad. Sometimes Kenneth was with me, sometimes I was alone. My German came back to me, I relearned it from the captions in the movies,
I had many friends, although looking back at them now the only Berliner was Lotte Reiniger (whose silhouette films have had today the same artistic success in England as they had then in Germany), the others were Austrians like Pabst and Sachs or Hungarian like the film director, Erno Metzner. Most of us made fun of the bourgeoisie but they had their revenge, the Nazis destroyed all forms of expression and drove the artists into exile. We were so full of what we could do with the future that we never perceived the darker motives of our enemies, who were gathering strength to destroy us. We were certain that obedience for obedience’ sake had been broken by the war and it was not until 1931 that we realized that the barbarians had broken through our undefended outposts. Sachs saw it early because of his deep understanding of human nature. I could not forget the words of the Times correspondent in Florence at the time of the fascist march.
At first, however, Berlin was all excitement and promise. It was a place of violent contrasts, a baby elephant at the Zoo tossed the fallen yellow leaves about its enclosure with the petulant trunk movements of an awkward child. We went to see Hoppla, wir leben where shots taken on an actual battlefield were suddenly flashed onto an immense screen behind the actors’ heads. The impact of the scene brought many of the audience out of their seats. We sheltered from the cold November winds inside small cafés whose red plush seats and marble-topped tables must have been a legacy of the nineties. There was desperate poverty, life and death seemed to hang upon trifles, a missed bus, an unexpected meeting. I sometimes felt that a collective but unconscious mind had broken through its controls. We went to obscure cinemas to see experimental films, Pabst took us to Neu-Babelsberg again where we followed him to his own set across the lunar landscape of the Frau im Mond and met Fritz Lang, its director. On another occasion I was sought out hastily as an interpreter for Harold Lloyd when he was visiting the studios. I myself found Berlin easier and nearer to me than any city where I had lived. It is rare for people to escape their inheritance and I was English with a century-old dash of German. It had always been hard for me to accept a given condition. I had always wanted to alter it or improve it. I never had to translate my feelings in Berlin; in Latin countries I was a wild plant escaped into a formal garden. It is not a question of one being better than the other. I was born and trained to be useful in a special way at a certain place. Remove me and in my uselessness I should become dangerous just as someone like Norman Douglas would have been wasted and unhappy in the North.
Dr. Sachs was then living in a small apartment at number seven, Mommsenstrasse, just behind the Kurfürstendamm. I went back to look at the outside of it in 1960 and it was one of the few houses to have escaped the bombardment. There was a center bed in the courtyard that was usually full of azaleas, guarded by a melancholy black and white cat with a blue bow, and a long, steep staircase up to the fourth floor, I usually went at noon (the hour that Theocritus describes as being the most dangerous), a sleepy, sultry time that was particularly pleasant in summer. Later I was transferred to the first hour in the morning. Dr. Sachs spoke English perfectly and had a number of English analysands, among them Barbara Low.
It is given to many to dream but too few to find their dreaming granted. Up to that moment I had asked questions but had received no answers. The object of my search since I had been a small child was absolute truth. Not to be believed was what I found hardest to bear. Also, as I have written, my vice is danger and there is nothing more perilous than to look at truth, that Gorgon’s head. I believe that it can be approached only through a long, slow training of many generations because to accept it fully would be to alter our beliefs and not always in the direction that our contemporary moralists suppose.
I began to understand from the beginning of my first hour. I had always known that my emotions had been stronger when I was six and that the unrelenting social machine had tried to crush them out of me ever since I had left the cradle. I had often thought that good intentions masked evil drives. A classical, Freudian analysis in the right hands is perhaps the sternest discipline in the world, the hardest form of intellectual activity and a great spiritual experience. It offers, as reward, liberty and understanding. There is probably no movement about which more popular misconceptions exist, largely because it threatens the irrational. There are many situations in which both guilt and fear are realities. What psychoanalysis is trying to do is to relieve us from the burdens borne by our prehistoric ancestors so that we can make further discoveries on the seas of the human mind. If you must have a comparison, it is our compass. A lot of us will die as pioneers but sometime, somewhere, we shall solve more of the mysteries that will then become so commonplace that their discoverers will be relegated to a footnote of history, probably with sneers.
Artists say to me continuously that they dare not be analyzed lest they lose their creative powers. The ones that I know who have gone through the discipline found that, on the contrary, it deepened their gifts. My own perceptions were enlarged, it taught me the mystery behind everyday events. Others tell me that they can analyze themselves. It merely shows that they have not grasped the first lesson. We are not dealing with what is conscious in our minds but with what is unconscious, and for that two people are needed. We surrender nothing of what we desire, we learn why we want it and occasionally find that it was simply a cover for something that we wanted more.
I admit that I was lucky. I was one of the early group of analysands and it was much less stiff (stuffy, I think, would be a more correct word) than it is today. We were made to feel that we were part of a band of explorers and I was packed off most evenings to lectures not only on anthropology and the theory of analysis but on the common forms of insanity and their symptoms. I grumbled at the time because my German then had not entirely come back to me but I have been immensely grateful since for the privilege. It enabled me to help people during and after the war who had gone temporarily over the borderline. I am not frightened of mental illness and because of this I am able to understand and handle certain cases during the difficult hours between their
treatments.
There is one catch. Psychoanalytical work is one of the most trying jobs in the world and analysts prefer to deal with acute cases where there is more chance of making some spectacular discovery. Being a practical Anglo-Saxon, I told Professor Freud that in my opinion they should be rationed to not more than two such people and should devote the rest of their time to analyzing the best-adjusted individuals that they could find and in particular those who had to deal themselves with big groups. Freud laughed and did not altogether reject the idea although he pointed out gently that analysts needed much experience with abnormal states in order to deal with the normal. Dr. Sachs and I agreed that ideally nobody should be allowed to teach who had not been analyzed; but again, Sachs added, they might then want to leave their schools. “Pedagogy as a science, that is as applied psychology, is in its cradle.”
As far as I myself was concerned, I enjoyed my own analysis tremendously. It shocked people, they felt I ought to be unhappy at times but I got more benefit out of our work through laughter than by going to the Mommsenstrasse (as some did) with a pocket full of handkerchiefs. Of course there were snags. One afternoon, after what had seemed to be a harmless enough hour, I was careless enough to get severely bitten by a mangabey at the Zoo. Nobody was sympathetic. The doctor at the first-aid post (“We always have a monkey bite a day”) rushed off to find a paper upon which he had written down a number of difficult English words and insisted upon my explaining them in detail before he would tie up my finger and my German friends giggled when they met me, “Ah, you have ape bite, yes?” All Dr. Sachs remarked with a sigh the next morning was, “Well, it had to happen.”
