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

by Wolf, Christa

  Something else that is deeply disturbing in my copy: In the yellowed margins of the narrow book, the printed text is supplemented with penciled notations that must have come from a Jewish reader, an émigré. They accompany the dark events of the story with commentary, exclamations, belated advice. And under the last line, this reader wrote: “America is full of Jews who love Germany and are nostalgic.”

  I can still see myself in Mr. Kline’s hot attic of books: the tower of books that I wanted to buy grew—known names, unknown titles by Arnold Zweig, Leonhard Frank, Vicki Baum again, Bruno Frank—but what awakened the greatest longing in me were three inconspicuous gray issues of a journal, almost read to pieces: three issues of Das Wort (The Word), the émigré journal published in Moscow in the thirties. I’d like these, I said to Mr. Kline when he came back. He laughed with satisfaction: I bet you would, he said. But they are not for sale, he said, he had acquired them used himself as a student in Boston and wanted to keep them. We discussed the other books—prices, shipping, everything went off without a hitch. Then I came back to the topic of the journal issues: Whether there was any way he might be willing?… Mr. Kline shook his head. He shouldn’t have shown them to me, he said. I said I could use them in my work right away, maybe he could take that into consideration. There were precious memories connected to these volumes for him, he said. I sensed a hint of indecision in his tone and kept pushing. There was a pause. Finally Mr. Kline turned to me and said: But they are very expensive!

  Of course they are. How much? I asked. Mr. Kline looked at me thoughtfully as he said: One thousand dollars.

  He didn’t want to sell them. He wanted to test me.

  I knew that I had to pay the price, for many, many different reasons. I said: I’ll take them. They are more important than a new car.

  Mr. Kline seemed taken by surprise. There was a pause. I agree, Mr. Kline finally said. He laughed and hugged me tight. I had to go to the bank. Mr. Kline gave me the three issues to take with me and I didn’t have him ship them back home with the other books. I have never once regretted the purchase.

  I lay down on the bed in my apartment and flipped through the issues of Das Wort. I read forewords by Thomas Mann and Hemingway. I read Erich Weinert’s memoirs of the faces of his fallen comrades in Spain. Who thinks about them anymore? I said to Ruth and Peter Gutman when I saw them the next day. In this new Germany, they will be consigned to oblivion. But that was exactly the point, that was why I had clung to the smaller Germany: I saw it as the legitimate successor to this Other Germany, the one that, in all the prisons and concentration camps, in Spain, in the various countries of emigration—persecuted, tortured, horribly decimated—nevertheless resisted.

  I needed to turn over the pages of the thickest issue of Das Wort for them, the one with a gray worn cover with red letters, badly yellowed pages: a double issue from April/May 1937. I was especially lucky to have found this one. The editors had asked all the anti-Fascist émigré German writers they could find for “biographical and bibliographical information” and had printed their answers—fifty pages, one hundred authors, twenty-eight of whom I had known personally, I said to Peter Gutman and Ruth. Their faces, their fates, their writings passed before my eyes. “These books were burned in Germany”; “These books are banned in Germany” appeared under every one of the paragraphs. When this issue came out, I said, I was eight years old, a passionate reader of Grimm’s and Andersen’s and Hauff’s fairy tales, maybe that is what saved me from the worst. Can fairy tales lay the foundation for joining the fight against injustice? For the ability to tell the difference between good and evil?

  You never once heard an openly spoken word of criticism against the Führer, you only noticed the doubtful, worried expressions on your mother’s face, more and more despairing toward the end of the war. She had said to a customer she trusted—it must have been 1943 or ’44—We’ve lost the war! And she was reported. After that she was visited and interrogated several times by two men in trench coats. Your parents were filled with fear, which they wanted to keep secret from you, though they didn’t succeed.

  Sitting on the table in front of us was a volume of Paul Merker’s book, which I had also found at my bookseller’s: 574 pages, with a brown linen hardcover, the publisher stated as “Editorial El Libro Libre, Mexico, 1945.” Title: Deutschland—Sein oder nicht sein? (Germany: To Be or Not to Be?). I knew the head of this publishing house, I told my guests: an ardent Communist from a working-class family, who worked illegally after 1933, spent time in a Nazi prison, fought as a commanding officer with the Spanish People’s Army in Spain, and was interned in French camps after Franco’s victory. In Les Milles among others.

  You went there yourself, from Marseilles, where you and G. tried to retrace the path that Anna Seghers laid out in her novel Transit. There was no one at Les Milles and the building that had once housed the prisoners was locked; you and G. peered through dusty windows into the large interior room and could make out parts of the frieze on the wall—fruits, other foodstuffs—that the prisoners, among them Max Ernst, had painted to cheer up their starving comrades. The whole area was covered with pulverized stone, both finely powdered and more coarsely shattered: bricks used to be manufactured here. Every rainfall must have turned the whole plot of land into a red swamp.

  It was quite an accomplishment, I said, for an émigré press to publish that book by Paul Merker in two thick volumes. And that’s after the accomplishment of writing the work in the emigration. What prompted him to write it was no doubt the burning question among the leftist émigrés of what should become of Germany after the victory over Hitler—there were controversial debates on the topic, for example between Brecht and Mann, here in California, where eight outstanding writers, including Brecht and both Thomas and Heinrich Mann, considered it “their duty” in August 1943, “at the moment when Allied victory approaches,” to welcome “the announcement of the German prisoners of war and émigrés in the Soviet Union” that “called upon the German people to force their oppressors to unconditionally surrender and to fight for a strong democracy in Germany.” Then came the all-important sentence, anything but self-evident: “We also consider it necessary to sharply distinguish between, on the one hand, the Hitler regime and the social strata connected with him and, on the other hand, the German people.”

  And the next day, Brecht noted grimly in his “Work Journal,” Thomas Mann dropped by Feuchtwanger’s and withdrew his signature, saying that it would be “stabbing the allies in the back.” He said he would not consider it unreasonable for “the allies to punish germany for ten or twenty years.”

  All the more did I, and do I, admire Paul Merker’s farsightedness. His book, after its trip across the ocean, now lies before me again, and I flip through it to the last page, where he proposes an eleven-point platform to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Point One: “Establishing an anti-Fascist democratic regime and a parliamentary republic with all the democratic freedoms.”

  What happened to this man? Peter Gutman asked me back then.

  He died in 1969, “physically and emotionally broken” as they say, I said. First he was expelled from the Party because he had been in contact with Noel Field, an American, who had helped him in his flight from occupied France and helped many other émigrés. To tell you his unbelievable story too would take us too far afield, I said. Then Merker ended up in the GDR offshoot of the Prague Slánský trials and was sentenced to eight years in prison—after Stalin was already dead! He served four years. After that, he was released and rehabilitated, by the same judge who had earlier sentenced him. And sidelined with trivial assignments.

  Walter Janka, who had shared his exile with him in Mexico and been his assistant for a time after their return, was the one who had told you and G. about him. Janka also had three years of GDR prison behind him, for “forming a counterrevolutionary group.” He didn’t come out of it broken, he stayed militant. He worked for the movie studio and advised you and G.
on film projects.

  When someone becomes interested in something, it seems like everything related to that interest suddenly appears, apparently by chance, for instance I now come across a newspaper article, “Bright Spot from the Dark Past,” summarizing recent research on how Berlin workers acted during the Nazi period. The resistance of Social Democrats and Communists took a particularly heavy toll: thousands jailed and tortured, hundreds executed. The argument that the Nazi social order led to social corruption in the population could not be proven in the case of the Berlin working class, the newspaper said.—Where is the monument honoring them?

  I felt that I had to give myself a break from thinking, from writing. I lay down, I tried to empty my mind the way the nun recommended, but I heard the telephone ring and could not just let it ring. The voice came from far away: a friend wanting to tell me the news that the Bosnians were now blockaded in a city where, they announced, they had a chlorine factory, and if they blew it up it would release enough chemicals to poison all of Europe.

  Sometimes I wish I knew how the layers of time through which I have traveled, that I penetrate so easily in my thoughts, are actually arranged inside me: as actual layers, each one stacked carefully on top of the other? Or as a chaotic mass of neurons from which a power we do not understand can draw out whichever thread we want? Will neuroscientists ever find out?

  I was looking for distraction and I felt my departure date breathing down the back of my neck; I had to admit that I had paid too little attention, or none at all, to the important sightseeing attractions that everyone thinks of in connection with the magical name Los Angeles. Bob Rice agreed—you can’t come to L.A. without going to see at least one of the famous Hollywood studios, he said. Allan, his Japanese boyfriend, who worked “behind the scenes” at Universal Studios, would be my guide. The date and time were arranged without my doing a thing—it was one of those undertakings where my urge to do it and my inhibition against it remained in conflict to the end, but, finally, being polite to the other person won out. A Swiss colleague joined us, a literary critic, and I saw in his face when we met up the same skepticism that I felt. Allan himself seemed to feel something almost like embarrassment as he brought us to the entrance, the several tunnellike glass-roofed moving walkways that transported tourists nonstop to the tour that we joined. “Welcome to the largest film and television studio in the world. Here you don’t just watch the movies—you live them. The real star is you.” Fifty minutes in a gondola, through stage-set cities spread over a giant area, past the sets for famous movies—just the movies, I said to Allan, that I wouldn’t call “my genre.” I’m sorry to hear that, Allan said, but I was only trying to prepare him for the fact that I might not recognize the movies and their sets. Or that I might leave the tour early, it was already getting on my nerves, more because of the insanely enthusiastic tourists than because of the silent witnesses on either side of the route.

  But you must be interested in Psycho! And there it stood, spookily lit, the house of horror, and later they would show us how they had shot the famous shower scene, but first there was more: E.T. appeared, making his yearning sounds. “Quick! Hop aboard a starbound bike! And fly home with E.T.,” and so we did, we flew into space and then landed in various dangerous situations imitating scenes from movies I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. A bridge collapsed under us, we felt an earthquake in a subway station, cars tumbled into chasms, passengers shrieked, the threatening fin of a shark appeared in a pond. The best one was the snow tunnel where you suddenly started spinning around, but actually it was the walls spinning. That was something worth keeping in mind: that when you think you’re in the middle of the whirlpool, being dragged down into the depths, it might be only the walls that are spinning around you and you yourself might be in the eye of the hurricane.

  But how will we ever be able to tell the difference between deception and reality again? I asked.

  The whole point of everything here is to make you unlearn just that, our Swiss man said. But the feelings that the deception unleashes in us are real. We pay to have these feelings.

  We had also paid for a whole series of demonstrations from stuntmen, on land and on water, with gun smoke and fireballs and explosions, and an Asian swordfight in front of a dragon, but finally there was an auditorium where all the tricks were explained, for instance how you have to set things up so that someone can climb around on the Statue of Liberty and then in the end fall off, as Hitchcock did once.

  Then it was already evening and we were sitting, exhausted, up on the hill in the wonderful Japanese restaurant with a view of the whole city spread out below, where the lights were gradually coming on, that’s incredible, we said, unforgettable, and Allan, our host, smiled with satisfaction. First we drank a cocktail called a kamikaze, made of vodka, triple sec, and lime juice—it deserved the name, we thought, and before long we were very chatty; we ate sushi and combination dinners, a lot of food, delicious, including raw fish, and we talked about the contrast between the Japanese conscience and Protestant conscience: how one was driven by the fear of losing face in public, the other by the fear of failing before God. About how, in our opinion, it was probably progress in human history when personal conscience appeared. It was strange how well this conversation went with the day’s experiences, and the view of the city, just starting to show its nighttime lights by then.

  When I got back to the MS. VICTORIA, paying no attention to the three raccoons who were keeping watch as always, I saw that Peter Gutman had once again slipped a note under my door. A sentence of Kleist had seemed to him worth communicating: “But paradise is bolted shut and the cherub is after us; we have to circle the globe and go around to the other side to see if perhaps there is a back way in.”

  It was not yet midnight; I called him. What if we want to do without paradise?

  You don’t believe that yourself, he said. We are already hurtling along in this voyage around the world. But differently than Kleist could have imagined. Not in a carriage. With rockets. We’re looking for the back way in, and if it is closed to us too, we’ll blow it open. With nuclear bombs if necessary.

  Thank you very much, I said. That’ll help me get to sleep.

  The next day we drove to see his friend Malinka again, drove across half the city in my little red Geo. Malinka had made lunch and afterward we sat outside in her tiny little yard under a fragrant lemon tree and we talked about language. Malinka said she had grown up speaking Serbo-Croatian and had quickly learned English when she came to America ten years ago—accent-free, so as not to stand out. She wrote in two languages. But when she had something personal to write, she avoided Serbo-Croatian so as not to feel “sticky.”

  My personhood was tied to language, language was my real homeland—that sounded trite, but I could sense that the other two heard it with a certain envy. Peter Gutman told us his view, that there was a second person inside him who wrote in a language that, he often thought, was not his.

  We walked around Malinka’s neighborhood: on Fairfax, a Jewish area with Jewish restaurants, kosher grocery stores where Malinka bought certain kinds of cheese, Jewish fathers with yarmulkes, holding hands with their two very serious young sons, each with a yarmulke on his own head, on the way to synagogue. A lot of older people—there were old-age homes nearby. It wasn’t affluent, this neighborhood, these people: on the poor side, actually. But they moved at a slower pace than elsewhere in the city. It was a peaceful, almost translucent image. This city as a patchwork.

  Peter Gutman seemed to enjoy being between us, two women who were both fond of him. He admitted to having a “sweet tooth” and bought a big bag of very sweet cookies.

  When I drove back down the long Wilshire Boulevard, it was already dark.

  By now I was familiar with the tiny little house in the courtyard of a big apartment complex, where Rachel, my Feldenkrais therapist, had her practice. I could report to her that I was doing better, that I hadn’t taken any pills, but that I was somew
hat blocked again at the moment. Rachel held certain small joints in the hip area responsible and pointed them out to me on an anatomical chart. The treatment helped me but was not painless. At one point she put my leg on a pillow and gave it an order in Yiddish: Relax!

  I told her about our conversation about our different languages. Rachel said: Feldenkrais is my language, and it will take me my whole life to learn it properly.

  I brought the conversation around to William Randolph Hearst. We had just been shown the famous film Citizen Kane by Orson Welles because we were planning a trip to Hearst Castle. For reasons I could not fathom, this was said to be the best movie ever made. Rachel said: Men like Hearst and Carnegie and J. Paul Getty must have been evil men. We agreed on that point. She would never get rich doing what she did. The only way people got rich was by betraying and exploiting others.

  When I left, she said: You are a clever student. It had been a long time since any praise had made me so happy.

  It was time for the glass elevator up the outside of the Huntley Hotel again—Peter Gutman and I wanted to ride up it once more, drink the watery margaritas, enjoy the spectacular view, sit next to the high school teens—three girls with long hair acting provocative, five boys showing off to various extents, all around seventeen years old and unbelievably loud, the girls squealing at every opportunity and all of them behaving like the world belonged to them, middle-class white young people. Not one of them noticed the sunset.