Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  ‘I served under His Excellency Chief of the General Staff Baron von Benedek,’ the colonel continued, and swore that here too he had never … In this way he ran through his record of service, one commanding officer at a time, strictly according to rank, finally declaring in conclusion: ‘And I am not about to let a lowly pri—’

  He stopped mid-word. The very thought of somehow associating with a mere fledgling private proved so repulsive to him that his voice held its ground. But he began again: ‘And I am not about to kiss a lowly private on the a—’

  And with that solitary vowel, the pronouncement, sentence and life force of the colonel came to a sudden end. He collapsed, still panting: ‘a—a—’

  Everyone converged on him, everyone called for the regimental doctor, for the orderlies to look for a doctor, for ice from the officers’ mess and a pillow to rest his head on.

  I, too, wanted to help, but the captain in charge of the court panel, who just a few moments before had given testimony that favoured my case and now seemed consumed by his efforts to care for the colonel in the wake of his heart attack, never let me out of eyeshot. ‘You stay here!’ he sharply commanded.

  For now my case had taken a turn. The colonel had decided that the caricature represented him, and just one glimpse at the reclining man with the death rattle in his throat dispelled any doubt that, to the crime of which I was accused, the insidious phrase ‘with fatal outcome’ would be added.

  The dying colonel was transported to sick-bay in the west wing of the armoury; the fledgling private, the case against him now fanned by collective fury at the fatal outcome of his alleged actions, was taken to the east wing. The colonel found his eternal rest that very evening, consoled in his last moments by the regimental chaplain; the private, on the other hand, bereft of consolation, could not shut an eye. In time to the rhythm of the words ‘with fatal outcome’, I paced back and forth in my cell.

  The military justice division was already on the trail of the tattoo artist, the lithographer, but that very morning he had been escorted to a higher court. His crime was forgery, not because the tattoo falsely imputed the colonel’s culpability in conduct unbefitting an officer, but rather on account of his having taken it upon himself to promote a corporal to the rank of sergeant.

  The lithographer’s successor debuted with the reproduction of a printed invitation: ‘Those officers who feel the heartfelt desire to mark the passing of our dear fallen comrade-in-arms are herewith respectfully invited to attend a memorial service for Colonel Knopp von Unterhausen the day after tomorrow (Tuesday) at the officers’ mess.’ As to those who may not have shared the heartfelt sentiment, the respectful invitation noted: ‘Excuses will not be considered.’

  Private Kysela, a painter in civilian life, was commissioned to produce a life-size portrait of the late colonel for the occasion.

  ‘But I never saw the colonel,’ said Kysela. ‘At our swearing-in ceremony I was standing way back in the sixteenth company, second division. I have no idea what he looked like.’

  He asked for a photograph, but there was none. A person who has a monstrous snout slap in the middle of his face is not inclined to have himself photographed.

  The regimental adjutant had no choice but to refer Kysela to my tattoo. I was called to the guardroom, where the preliminary sketch for the portrait had, the day before yesterday, been incised in my skin.

  ‘Dear me,’ cried Kysela, with feigned horror at the sight of the tattoo, ‘the graphic is hung upside-down. How do you expect me to copy it?’

  The adjutant commanded me to lay myself flat on my belly on the table, but Kysela said it wouldn’t do. If I did a handstand, then perhaps he could manage to sketch a faithful copy. But nobody can hold a handstand for an hour.

  ‘Could one not with a reflex camera achieve the desired effect?’ the adjutant enquired.

  Photography was not his thing, replied Kysela; only in his studio could he manage to make a colour copy.

  So, despite the suspicion of my having committed a crime with fatal outcome, according to the military code, of having committed the murder of the regimental commander or at least bearing responsibility for his death – despite all that the adjutant was obliged to issue an order for my release from my cell, indeed from the entire perimeter of the armoury. So I received a twenty-four-hour furlough!

  Twenty-four hours of freedom! Ordinarily after lights-out, no soldier was allowed out on the street or in a bar, unless he had done overtime duty and, therefore, had an exit permit until a certain hour. But Kysela and I had no time limit. Despite the doctor’s warning that alcohol would aggravate the pain of the tattoo, I drank till I dropped. There’d be time and leisure enough for sickness during my prison sentence.

  The following morning, as we went staggering up to the house in which Kysela had his studio, we had an awful fright. Two soldiers were stationed outside. Were we under arrest? Or perforce under guard? Neither. The regimental adjutant had, the day before, sent the uniform of the late colonel for the painter to copy, and the two soldiers had been ordered personally to hand it over to the painter. Since Kysela was not at home they spent the whole night waiting.

  Which reminded Kysela that he still had to paint and deliver a life-sized portrait today. The uniform was at least something to go on; Kysela could paint a copy. To do the tunic he had to use two tubes of Prussian blue. At least another tube more would have been necessary had Kysela not saved the large blank circular space for the medal, which he applied with brass-coloured tint. In this way the colonel’s hulk filled a good three-quarters of the canvas. The cap also proved a great boon, as it practically covered the whole face, a face he did not know.

  For the face Kysela only had my tattoo to go on. But, as brazen as he usually was, he did not dare transfer its crass reality to a life-sized oil painting. Only in dabs of reddish violet did he hint at the nose, and so the depiction on his canvas was far and away not as faithful as the graphic on my skin.

  Still fresh and wet, the painting was brought to the armoury, marking the end of my furlough. I returned to my cell, reporting in sick with a high fever and was prescribed a special diet.

  Framed in gold and hung on the wall of the officers’ casino the day of the funeral, the oil painting was duly admired. The colonel’s widow asked to see the artist.

  ‘The painting is splendid. You must surely have known my husband quite well,’ she said, by way of praise.

  Kysela replied that he had never seen the colonel.

  ‘Never saw him? But how then were you able to capture such a perfect likeness? No photos were ever taken.’

  Kysela replied that he copied it from a tattoo.

  ‘What? From a tattoo? Who had a tattoo made of my husband’s portrait?’

  Kysela replied that it was a private named Kisch.

  ‘How moving!’ Madame Colonel exclaimed, turning to the staff officers standing around her. ‘Isn’t it really truly touching, gentlemen, that a soldier should have the picture of his commanding officer tattooed on himself so as to be able to preserve it for ever? So much love and gratitude for a superior officer!’

  The staff officers nodded and remarked that it did indeed attest to a seldom expressed love and gratitude for a superior officer.

  ‘I would really love to see the tattoo. Please have the private brought to me. I want to thank him for having furnished Mr Kysela the prototype for this beautiful painting.’

  Now the acquiescent nodding of the staff officers came to a sudden halt. They balanced nervously, first on one foot, then another, until the regimental physician came to their rescue with the report that Private Kisch was unfortunately very ill, suffering a fever of forty degrees, and could not possibly be called in.

  ‘Then take me to him,’ Madame Colonel declared with firm resolve, ‘it’s more fitting, after all, that I should go and see him to express my thanks. Where is he bedded down, in sick-bay?’ No, she was told, the man is in the blockhouse.

  ‘In the blockhouse
? Very well then. The major and the captain will have the kindness to accompany me there.’

  And so it came to pass, as I lay there flat on my belly in a feverish state, that my cell door suddenly flew open and in strode the major and barracks commander, the captain and regimental adjutant, with a black-veiled lady between them.

  She came towards me. ‘I am Madame Colonel von Knopp. I want to thank you for having had yourself tattooed with my husband’s portrait.’

  ‘Oh please, Madame Colonel,’ I said, a bit bewildered, ‘no need to thank me, it was done … I hardly knew …’

  ‘I would like to see the tattoo.’

  Now the major and the captain leapt forward: that’s impossible.

  ‘Why should it be impossible if it’s what I wish?’ Madame Colonel’s voice sounded strained, ever so slightly threatening.

  ‘Beg your pardon, Madame Colonel,’ stuttered the major, ‘I beg your pardon, but the tattoo is situated on a delicate spot.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense, I’m a married woman!’ she turned to me and, in a tone of command in which the word ‘please’ hardly mattered, she said: ‘Please show me your tattoo!’

  I showed my tattoo. Alcohol and fever had inflamed it with the pink pinch of blossoming life, but that alone did not explain what happened next. Who would ever have guessed that the crass reality of the tattoo could suddenly take a lyrical turn and end up arousing such a stirring declaration of love.

  ‘Ferdinand,’ whispered Madame Colonel, deeply moved upon seeing the spitting image of her late husband there before her, ‘oh my Ferdy!’ she practically panted, in a burst of emotion, and bent forward to plant him with kisses.

  PART THREE

  The Experiment or the Victory of the Children

  1950

  Unica Zürn

  One day a man went through every house in the city in which children lived to, as he put it, verify their state of health, and with his polite and courteous comportment secured the mothers’ permission to enter the playrooms.

  ‘Permit me to spend a few moments watching the children at play,’ he pressed the mothers. His mild expression and the smile he shammed exuded an evident fondness for the vitality of youth. He immediately won the mothers’ confidence, all the more so in that he came so well recommended, having furnished himself with a letter affixed with an official seal from the Ministry of Health, and thereby dispelled from the start any suspicion that he might be a burglar or child molester.

  The man sat quietly in the corner; he was so quiet that most of the children promptly forgot about him and went right back to playing. Every now and then he took notes, the way a person jots down something that strikes his fancy and seems worthy of record. Consequently some of the mothers thought that he might perhaps be writing out prescriptions for the children, that he was a famous physician or child psychologist, and they were, therefore, somewhat disappointed when he once again took his leave with a polite farewell and without any advice for the mothers or the children.

  The man went about his business for several months. Finally, once he’d finished his rounds, he set about drafting a comprehensive report based on his observations.

  A gathering of the appropriate experts was called together by his department on the occasion of the first presentation of this report, at the start of which he had to deliver a brief introductory précis before all present got down to the serious business of considering his recommendations. The man got right to the point. His remarks went more or less as follows:

  ‘I would like to sum up my observations concerning the present state of child’s play in a single sentence: let’s put an end to the individual impulse to play! It’s time to create the collective toy!’

  The room rang out with cries of bravo. The Minister of Health started leafing through the report, reading passages out loud: ‘Feverish concentration of six-year-old Paul over a building game, aggressive defensive reaction against his little sister Ilse who asked him a favour.’ ‘Ten-year-old Kurt and twelve-year-old Fritz came to blows over possession of a humming top.’ ‘A tense nervousness displayed by three-year-old Anna while dressing and undressing her doll.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said the Minister, ‘the congruence between the observed instances is striking. Gentlemen, I believe we all agree that we can no longer give free rein to the egocentric impulses of children. Our children are our future. I recommend the government-mandated introduction of the collective toy. I ask for a vote.’

  The vote resulted in a majority of eighty-eight out of a hundred, the gathering was adjourned and the blueprints for the Collective Toy Industry that had already been drafted well in advance were distributed to selected factories. Production was to begin immediately, Christmas being close at hand.

  ‘In Every Family with Children a Collective Toy’ – this placard hung in every toy shop window; on orders from the authorities all toy shops were cleared of the hitherto common and customary playthings, and two weeks before Christmas the pertinent shops opened with the new Christmas Toy Show.

  And it was strange and frightening. Mothers and fathers strode in silence through the stores. Of course there were still dolls, cars, trains; but all these things were vastly oversized.

  A kind of plaything had been devised and produced that no longer belonged to a single child, but rather to many. To undress and dress such a doll, three to four girls had to really exert themselves carrying, dragging and lifting. The same held true when playing with the trains and cars.

  The parents’ initial hesitation to go ahead and buy the collective playthings and give them as gifts to their children was superseded by the realization that if they did not buy this toy they would not find anything to give them, since all of the common and customary toys had been requisitioned and burnt. Moreover, the state-mandated ‘house-cleaning’ of ‘outmoded, deleterious playthings’ was rigorously enforced, and the city resounded with the cry of children bemoaning their loss.

  Only a very small number of fathers and mothers who refrained from Christmas shopping, and who were immediately reviled as unnatural parents and stick-in-the-muds, had the courage not to lay anything but apples, nuts and gingerbread under the Christmas tree. The majority did buy, and in the days leading up to the holiday, strangely determined teams of adults were seen dragging three-metre-long dolls and massive locomotives and rolling balls the size of giant advertisement balloons through the snowy streets.

  Just to describe a single scene of Christmas cheer in that noteworthy year: the lights on the tree burned brightly, the parents stood dressed in their Sunday best, as every year, ‘Silent Night’ played on the radio, whereupon the mother rang the bell to call the children for the distribution of gifts. The children came storming in, consumed with eager anticipation; but tree and candles, parents and familiar song – everything paled at the sight of a red-cheeked, pigtailed, smiling giantess leaning against the wall with her metre-long padded arms outstretched towards them. The children shrieked in horror and ran out.

  The father of this family, who, after thorough reflection, finally grasped the purpose of the collective plaything, burst into a rage, forcibly dragged his little offspring back into the living room and carefully tipped the doll forward and laid it on the carpet, its body reaching from one end of the room to the other. The doll’s ten-pfennig-piece-sized teeth grinned, the great staring eyes fell shut with a loud clap beneath a fringed curtain of eyelids. The father unfastened the instructions from a string around the doll’s neck and read them aloud. This is what it said: ‘So as to afford each child in the family equal access to a toy and once and for all do away with squabbling over its possession, here is a plaything built for three to eight children to play with together and at the same time. This toy is designed such that a solitary child wouldn’t know what to do with it, that he can only play with it in a group, with his siblings or friends, the pedagogical merit of which is to rid youth from the start of the notion of personal possession and to teach them that the pleasure of life lies
only in collective ownership.’

  The children could make neither head nor tail of these new rules of play, and those who had been accustomed, following the distribution of Christmas gifts, to take their favourite toy along with them to bed retreated to their room for a lengthy huddle. On that first night of Christmas they came to a decision which they did not reveal to the adults, for they’d lost their trust in them.

  The following morning, gentle as lambs, they strained to drag the massive playthings back to their room. The parents deliberately kept their distance for several hours, so as to give the children the chance to get acquainted with the new rules of play. But when, after a while, baffled by the silence in their children’s rooms, they finally peeked in, the children smiled back sweetly.

  The floor was clear. The doll (just to cite one example) was nowhere to be seen. But each child held a leg or an arm or an eye in his hand and played with it in self-absorbed bliss. The doll’s eviscerated plastic trunk was turned into a skiff. The carpet served as the sea. The little captain paddled about with hand and foot. Even if the children did not rightly know what to do with the cleanly severed limbs and appendages of the giantess, they at least pretended with a serious determination that these were particularly interesting playthings, from which, though not yet assigned a name, one could nevertheless derive considerable pleasure.

  Naturally, the state health officials sought to establish how the collective plaything, developed on the basis of the latest research in child psychology, had fared among its little co-owners. The week after Christmas the aforementioned man once again made the rounds of the children’s playrooms, once again took notes based on his observations, and presented the following conclusions to a meeting of concerned experts:

  ‘The youthful population of our city displays a frightening immaturity and retrograde tendency. But before resorting to other measures we will introduce the collective plaything in other cities. One thing is certain: we will definitely see the day when the youth of our country unanimously embrace the collective toy.’