City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel

by Wolf, Christa

  I thought: Why do I need to learn this truth in a foreign language? Maybe in my native German I couldn’t endure it. How does everyone live with this knowledge? I was inconsolable. Angelina brought me tea. My fever rose, Ria came to look in on me, Therese too, Peter Gutman stuck his long skull in and used the word “crisis.” It lasted two or three days, then it was over. I stood up, still swaying a little; I recovered quickly, went to see the others, took part in their lives and their conversations.

  What had mattered before had lost its importance. Now I knew that I had to die. I knew how fragile we are. Old age began. The overcoat of Dr. Freud had gotten torn and I wanted to find out what its lining was made of. I could do that anywhere, any place on earth, why not here?

  Peter Gutman didn’t approve of the mood he found me in. We were in my little Geo on our way to see Karl, the German photographer, at his house in the hills right under the letters that spelled HOLLYWOOD. The streets were unexpectedly calm. That morning, the jury had announced its verdict in the Rodney King trial—the second trial against the four white policemen who had beaten a fleeing black man almost to death. Many people expected an outbreak of violence in the city, starting in the black neighborhoods and spreading from there, if the verdict came back “not guilty.” The jury had delivered a Solomonic judgment: two of the defendants “guilty,” two “not guilty.” The whites breathed a sigh of relief while cheers broke out in the black churches.

  Life in the city continued on its normal course. Karl had covered the walls of his intricate little house with large photos, portraits of residents of the city: white, black, yellow, Latino. The longer I looked at them, the more I felt the strain they were under and the effort it took to live here. Yes, Bob Rice said—he was there too, of course, and had brought along Allan, his boyfriend—how long was this supposed to keep going? We had been spared again this time, again we whites would forget how scared we all were. We would refuse to admit what thin ice we were all walking on.

  Sitting next to me was an old Jewish professor who seemed to be very sick. He was a research psychologist who had dedicated much of his life to studying Hitler’s psyche; I got the impression that he felt it to be a kind of obligation he was keeping to the murdered Jews. There was one thing he could be certain of: the man was impotent. And his blindness during World War One was a hysterical blindness. The professor’s wife, an elegant, elderly lady, signaled me that I shouldn’t continue with this conversation. Later she whispered to me that it made her husband too anxious. Only then did I notice that we had been speaking German the whole time.

  Karl said he wanted to go back to Germany as soon as he could. He wanted to photograph the faces in East Berlin and West Berlin, wanted to try to capture this unique moment. I saw before me a series of shattered faces from the year of the Turn. You better hurry, I said. They’re shutting down again. They have already started to feel ashamed of having had hope for a few weeks, and having shown that hope too.

  Hope for what?

  I realized I found it hard to answer: it was as though answering would mean denouncing the hopeful people of the time, since what they—what we—had hoped for was so far from reality, so embarrassing, so ridiculous. I barely remember what I said to Karl. Maybe I pronounced words like “self-determination,” or “justice,” or “solidarity.”

  “Freedom,” someone suggested.

  That wasn’t the word I heard at the time. Free elections, yes. Freedom of travel. The goals were mostly very concrete.

  People mean so many different things by “freedom,” don’t they, Peter Gutman said.

  He came along the next morning to see the places where the émigrés had lived—Therese wanted to show them to us. She had rented a nice car, she was working on her assignment to report on the mayoral election campaign. Our first stop was Mabery Road, the house where Salka Viertel lived for twenty-five years, raised her children, wrote screenplays that were mostly not produced, talked to Greta Garbo about plans for movies, and wrote scripts for her. The house became a meeting point for German émigrés in the thirties and was where she organized her extensive campaigns for colleagues in need in California, and people trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. Her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, was sitting next to me on the seat and after I read it I often drove past her house, not far from Second Street down Ocean Avenue, which curves to the right and then turns into Mabery Road. It was less than a ten-minute drive, during which I told the others about Salka Viertel, apparently in a tone that made Peter Gutman ask: You would have loved to meet her, wouldn’t you?

  Oh yes, I would have. It struck me that I rarely had that thought, no matter how much I admired the émigrés whose houses we were about to see. She is almost forgotten, I said. In some of the things you read about “Weimar under the Palms” she is barely mentioned.

  Would I have wanted to meet Lion Feuchtwanger? We were driving up Sunset Boulevard to San Remo Drive, high above the city, and I had just reread Jud Süss to reassure myself that the book—obviously—contained not a hint of anti-Semitism. Unlike the Veit Harlan film, which was connected to a strange childhood memory, impossible to prove. Of course your mother would never have let you see the movie, and of course you desperately wanted to—just like The Great King, with Otto Gebühr, or, at the very end, The Golden City with Kristina Söderbaum. You were never allowed to do anything you really wanted.

  Then came a memory that could not possibly be based on a real experience but that was so solid it was hard not to believe it. There were three movie theaters in our city, and one of them, the most modern, the Kyffhäuser Lichtspiele, had a side exit where you were standing one beautiful day—where I can see myself standing, in this untrustworthy memory of mine—peeking through the slit in the closed curtains into the movie hall, right at the screen. You saw different dazzling images in intense colors—a face twisted in fear, a gallows—images you wanted to keep watching at all costs but couldn’t stand any longer for anything in the world. Then someone grabbed you from behind on the shoulder and dragged you away, cursing. Jud Süss. Longing and horror, that is what remained.

  I obviously didn’t tell Marta Feuchtwanger about that when we visited her a few years ago at the Villa Aurora, when it was still intact, I said. With the wonderful Spanish tiles in the entranceway; the valuable Feuchtwanger library from which Marta would pull a few volumes, incunabula; the study where Feuchtwanger’s secretary, Hilde Waldo, an old invalid by then, told us about his working methods, various drafts of the manuscripts on different-colored paper, and his legendary concentration; the ancient turtle creeping around on the terrace with its incomparable view of the Pacific Ocean. All gone now, Marta Feuchtwanger was dead, the library had been donated to the university, the Villa Aurora was a construction site. Later it would give—now it gives—fellowships for German writers to live there, and it would be the only place left in the city as a reminder of the German emigration.

  As always, whenever I started to follow the traces of the émigrés, I could not fight off a depressing sense of futility. Can you believe it, I said, at the end of the war I had never even heard the names of the vast majority of the people who were living here because Germany had kicked them out? Not Brecht, obviously, whose house on Twenty-sixth Street we were about to visit, not Alfred Döblin, who lived modestly in an apartment building we were driving by, as did Heinrich Mann, by the way, while Thomas Mann’s villa, 1550 San Remo Drive, the next stop on our tour after taking Sunset Boulevard farther and turning off into Amalfi Drive, came across as prestigious and magnificent, although practically hidden from sight by the high hedges surrounding it. I had never dared to approach it. Therese wanted to walk onto the property; we talked her out of it. She wanted to at least see the window he had sat behind while writing Doctor Faustus, she said. And I had to wonder again if it was really possible that on my parents’ narrow bookshelf in the “gentlemen’s room,” behind Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space) and Karl Albrecht’s Der verratene Sozialismus (Socia
lism Betrayed) and Edwin Erich Dwinger’s Die Armee hinter Stacheldraht (The Army Behind Barbed Wire), stood Buddenbrooks in the second row, as I thought I remembered. I must have been mistaken, I said to myself again; because if it had been there you would have read it back then, since you read every printed piece of paper that came into your hands.

  Is it possible that I didn’t know the name Marlene Dietrich either? Had no one ever spoken in my presence about The Blue Angel? Therese knew all the houses here where Dietrich had lived. Franz Werfel? Not to mention the composers, the actors. A thick web of German culture had spread out to cover this city in the thirties. None of it was left. How many twenty-year-olds today know these names? I said.

  What do you expect? Peter Gutman said. Being forgotten is the most natural thing in the world. And you, and me, and Therese—we haven’t forgotten them.

  We were exhausted, hungry and tired. Therese didn’t care about our complaints, she had plans of her own. She took Hollywood Boulevard and brought us to Musso and Frank, where American authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald used to meet, but also many German émigrés. Brecht, for example, was known to have eaten there. I love places like that, and we sat down in one of the booths, on the red seats that must have been there since the restaurant opened; we inspected the other guests to see if maybe a famous face might be among them. The menus had not changed either, we learned, so I ordered a cutlet—as predicted, it presupposed an enormous appetite, but in a place like this nothing could bother me.

  After a while, Therese said that when she was a little girl she had wished many times that she had been born in another place, to other parents. Not locked away in that horrible Catholic boarding school. We could not imagine, she said, the forces leveled against her there, how harshly the one true faith was imposed. She had hated the church ever since, she couldn’t help it. She had been given an overdose of religion. She had to laugh whenever she heard or read how children in the GDR were “indoctrinated.”

  * * *

  I don’t know why it took me so long to visit the used bookstore on Second Street for the first time. I think it was Stewart, the one black scholar in our community, who recommended it to me. We were sitting in front of Café Largo eating seafood salad. Of all the scholars in our year, Stewart was the one who kept the most to himself—a solitary type, who for that very reason, and despite certain guarded reactions of his in our conversations, I had long been interested in. It was possible to read mockery or criticism of our discussions in a turning down of the corners of his mouth, or a raising of his eyebrows. He was the only American in our group who lived in Los Angeles, he was further to the left than any of them, and he was the most realistic in his assessments of the conditions in this city. He came up in the labor movement, he said, but from a splinter group—the major, “white” unions didn’t care about big companies exploiting Mexican workers, who were often paid absolutely nothing if they were illegal immigrants. His research as a sociologist was about how employers, with the help of the market, divided workers along ethnic and racial lines and how unions helped them do it. Or how racist the distribution of housing was, how the real estate and mortgage business worked, what they do is illegal but everyone knows about it and everyone does it. He was working toward a multicultural society and worked with groups in nonwhite neighborhoods, to politicize them. They had to understand the kind of society they lived in.

  Here was someone who still wanted to change the world. So was it worth it? Stewart said: I hope you aren’t giving up over there. I thought: I want to remember that a young American said those words to me, and I did remember it, and when I call this sentence to mind today I can still see the light falling from the cloudless afternoon sky down onto Third Street. I realized only later that Stewart had invited me out to lunch to say goodbye. A few days later he was gone, he had had to break off his stay at the CENTER early, they said. He hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. I found a note from him in my mailbox: Don’t worry.

  So it was he who sent me to Eric Chaim Kline’s used bookstore, where it was as dark as it should be in a used bookstore, and all the walls as well as several tables were covered with books. English, French, even Russian. Finally, in the back left corner, I found the German shelf and started hunting through the rows of books. I opened this or that book and read names and dates. They must have been the property of German émigrés who had died here, abroad, or were able to return but had had to leave behind the things they had originally brought from Europe. How else would a thick novel by Vicki Baum, bound in red linen, well-worn by now, have ended up here? Liebe und Tod auf Bali (Love and Death in Bali), published in 1937 by Querido, the émigré press in Amsterdam. I had never heard of the title but had just recently driven past Vicki Baum’s gigantic house on Amalfi Drive. She had emigrated from Germany early, astutely gauging the nature of National Socialism, and she was one of the few who had found equal success in the United States and could live well. I was flipping through the book when a very polite young black man came up to me with the obligatory question: Can I help you? I tried to explain to him what I was looking for. One moment, please, he said, and a few minutes later a sprightly older man with white hair and a black yarmulke on his head came over, clearly the owner. He listened patiently to my request for literature by German émigrés who had lived here. He understood. I should come back tomorrow afternoon, he said, he thought he had some items that would interest me. I put the Vicki Baum book on hold until then.

  The next day, a June day, it was unseasonably hot again. The old bookseller, Mr. Kline, took me up a wooden staircase into a long narrow storage room right under the roof beams where thousands of books were piled along the walls, on the floor, and on long tables. The heat was unbearable; I was covered with sweat in an instant. It smelled of hot paper and hot wood. What if there was a fire in here! I thought. The bookseller had cleared off a corner of one table and laid out the books that he wanted to offer me. He left me alone.

  The books that I saw then for the first time are piled all around me now. I pick them up and something of the mood that came over me then returns. On the top of the pile is the little book Der Mensch ist gut (Man Is Good), by Leonhard Frank, a red paperback with a linen back cover, obviously old, worn, with yellowed paper, published by Gustav Kiepenheuer Press in Potsdam, with no date but with a note, “Written 1916–Spring 1917,” and the dedication “To the generations to come,” a solemnity that would not appear again in World War II, I thought, and the first time I flipped through the pages I could already tell that the author, in the first flush of youth back then, had written, with mocking sarcasm toward his title, a brilliant antiwar book portraying the horrors no less graphically and vividly than the later, more famous books of the 1920s. Why had this book been forgotten? It was at least as exciting and moving as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which lay there too, a damaged copy, without its binding or the publisher’s information, but clearly the same edition as the one you mysteriously had found at your grandmother’s house and read on her sofa. I have often told myself that it’s impossible, you never saw your grandmother reading anything other than the Landsberger Generalanzeiger and how would a banned book have found its way to her? But nevertheless I can still feel the rough armrests of her sofa under my hand while you took in, from reading that book, the images of atrocity that I still, today, feel sure I remember. Just like the aphorism, printed in gothic letters and hung in a black frame on the wall, which you read over and over again, which always sounded sad to you, and from which I retained one line. Only much later would I find out the source of the line “I once had a beautiful fatherland.” Heinrich Heine, I now know. How did a poem by Heinrich Heine end up at my grandmother’s? “I once had a beautiful fatherland. / The oak tree / Grew so tall there, the violets gently nodded. / It was a dream.” Did the poet’s name appear at the bottom? It couldn’t have … Also an émigré. Another person who felt homesick. Like the person who, in the book by Erich Kästner, Ein Mann gibt Aus
kunft (A Man Provides Information), which lay on the corner of that long table, wrote a dedication to one of his companions in misfortune: “Dearest Paul, Merry X-Mas—This book will help you remember our old language. Affectionately yours, Walter.”

  THOSE BOOKS SUCKED ME IN

  And I am back in the whirlpool again when I immerse myself in the books that the émigrés, remembering, wrote after their return to postwar Germany or their nonreturn. Ludwig Marcuse and Leonhard Frank and Curt Goetz and Carl Zuckmayer, Marta Feuchtwanger and Erich Maria Remarque—books that can still be found with an Internet search, used, since most of them have not been reprinted for decades. My work grinds to a halt while I burrow into these texts. I seek out the passages where the authors describe what exile has done to them. What it means to be rootless. And what it means to realize that no one, no native of their land of exile and certainly none of their former countrymen, can appreciate how the years of this shadow existence have changed them. And I reread the story I also found in Mr. Kline’s used bookstore, which I hadn’t heard of before, published in a series called Pazifische Presse (Pacific Press), founded by émigrés: “Mein ist die Rache” (Revenge Is Mine), by Friedrich Torberg.

  I remember every detail about the American night I spent sleepless as a result of this story—one of the first stories to describe the conditions in a German concentration camp. The sadistic tortures inflicted on Jewish prisoners by SS-Führer Wagenseil were described more harshly and bluntly there than in almost any narrative I have ever read. On a philosophical level, if one may put it that way, the story is about the question of whether a pious Jew is justified in taking revenge against his tormentor, even though the Lord says revenge is His. The first-person narrator has done just that: shot the SS man and managed the improbable feat of escaping to Holland and from there to the United States. Now he is standing on the pier in New York City, waiting for every ship from Germany to see whether any of the seventy-five comrades he left behind in the barracks is on board. Whether anyone else survived. He is haunted by the thought that they might have all been killed in reprisal for his having killed the SS commander.