The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  He actually had three fatherlands, together with their languages. But it was only German that he acknowledged as his “mother tongue,” based on decisive experiences in Hamburg that forevermore made him feel that he was essentially a German. Goethe’s concept of Humanität and the spirit of Romanticism guided him as he underwent a by no means painless rebirth. As a writer he became a citizen of the tragic country of his choice, more and more so as his destiny led him onwards. This soon brought him in conflict with his ideas about German liberty. “How has it come about,” he asks in his memoirs, “that in Germany, the homeland of Schiller, Kant, and Fichte, such degradation of character can have occurred?” As I typed out his words I hazarded an answer to this question: because we Germans are also Hagen’s nation, a people that likes to sing for a fee about “honor,” a “disloyal nation” as Ernst Bertram once called us, a purblind collective that for the Führer’s sake was taking the side of the Angel of Darkness. Kessler once wrote that in order to measure the greatness of Walther Rathenau, one must always add that man’s personality to whatever he said and did in his lifetime. Or on the other hand, one must subtract that personality from his achievements. This is equally true of Rathenau’s biographer, who lived and accomplished more with his imponderable artistic sensibility than with a calculating mind.

  Over time we grew closer, one to another. I gradually got to see his true face beneath the mask of politesse.

  I was now typing like some ink-crazed coolie—if you will permit me this odd simile, since it was only the author who was making the ink flow. Kessler’s script wasn’t always easy to decipher, but Beatrice helped me out. I delivered the typed results with the proper gestures of humility, and a few days later, with the proper gestures of humility, they came back to me together with fresh pages of manuscript. Each time this happened, I was asked to grant the author a thousand pardons—which I willingly did, although it was no circus to retype pages and pages incorporating emendations, additions, and deletions in gothic script. In this fashion there arose a multitude of different versions of Kessler’s memoirs, variants that text-critical scholars like to designate with letters of the roman alphabet. That is how the scholars do it; for me it meant difficulties of the purely mnemonic sort. There were versions of certain sections that reached the letter M. And to change or add anything, even a single word, meant retyping the entire page with several carbons. But it was only in this manner that the author could gain clear oversight over what would eventually become the “final edition.”

  Epochs and faces, nations and fatherlands started spinning madly inside my brain. It was like a parade of jumping frogs, but one with many leaps backward and very few that went on ahead. How I longed for a return to my Unkulunkulu or to my stupid Huns, both of which I had abandoned. Are we a “disloyal nation”? It all depends. Count Kessler was punctual with his fee payments. The further the variants reached in the alphabet, the more I earned as a typist. Kessler will have been thinking: this guy is half crazy, so he’s the ideal copyist. I began to comprehend the scribal playfulness of the medieval monks to whom the German language owes its cockamamie orthography. But unfortunately I was not permitted to indulge in such aesthetic games. On the contrary, I was obliged to consult meticulously the Duden Dictionary, because Count Kessler wrote Imperial Austrian German, and soon enough I was confused as to whether the word Thron is written with an h or without, whether Kamel had two e’s or just one, or whether Gränze was the correct spelling of the word for “border.” During this process, “Thelen” most often got spelled as “Thälmann,” but I soon made my peace with this third dimension of my Vigoleis, with no hurt feelings.

  Everything, or almost everything, was now democratized in accordance with the regulations of the Association of German Book Printers, Inc. I had a free hand. The final judge was our mutual friend Dr. Theodor Matthias, whose competence Count Kessler doubted from time to time but, like a good German, accepted as our authority, thus relieving him of one worry. We had a harder time with Gustav Wustmann, whom I knew only by name, since I never had much scholarly interest in that man’s book German Language Blunders. Language is custom, and as such it can never avoid blunders. On the contrary, it has made great strides in the direction of blunders, even so far as to engender de-humanized human beings.

  Once I had become used to Kessler’s little manias and literary tricks, one day I took it upon myself to point out to him, as discreetly as I could, a few stylistic glitches—offering apologies if I had misread his handwriting. But these were genuine howlers, he said, and asked me to be so kind as to look them up in Wustmann right away. I didn’t own a Wustmann. “What!? And you claim to be a writer and a Germanist!?” I was a failure at both professions, it seemed, probably because I had my own ideas about languages, blunders, and similar synonyms.”But that’s terrible! We must get you Wustmann’s Language Blunders right away,” said the Count. I was told to go visit the little Swabian at the German Shop and order the book at Kessler’s expense. He was unwilling to lend me his own copy, which lay ready at hand on his desk. But how come…

  I ordered the book, but the course of history had seen to it that the older Blunders were out of print. It took months for a new edition to be released, one adapted to the universal blunder of the Third Reich by a certain Herr Schulze, and containing an obligatory motto ascribed to Hermann Goering saying that it was a particularly noble task to foster pure language that was understandable for the masses. Obviously the linguistic purifiers had said “yes” to the Hitler regime. When I showed Count Kessler this genuflection of the German language to the German Führer, he took fright and with a visible attack of embarrassment said that it would be an insult to present me with this book. A thousand pardons. I countered by saying that in spite of my dubious university training as a Germanist, I was at least aware that the people who take delight in pointing out linguistic mistakes are the ones who commit the very worst ones. Then I asked him if I could write down something to this effect in his book. He firmly rejected this idea, saying that it would be tantamount to speaking of the devil. This was a smart move on his part, since the exiled Count’s memoirs were due to be published in Berlin by the renowned Samuel Fischer.

  I have a faulty memory. Printed matter doesn’t stay with me very long. After a single month I can re-read a poem or a novel that impressed me, and it’s as if I were seeing it for the first time. This forgetfulness of mine is no doubt an obstacle to critical penetration into a given work. But my preferred reading matter is the mystics, and it’s no accident that I am the translator of Pascoaes, the thinker who has brought the long line of Iberian mystics to its culmination. Still and all, despite the crevices and non-functional synapses in my brain, over time I knew the memoirs of Count Harry Kessler by heart. After a half-dozen retypings I had it down just like Goethe’s “Erl-King,” though with this difference: I learned Goethe’s classic spooky ballad in the final version approved by the author, whereas the Count’s recollections of peoples and fatherlands, having solidified in my brain to a kind of geode, were still very much in a state of flux. Although I can type pretty fast, I do it with two fingers only, and my eyes are always focused more on the keyboard than on the text. In this case, the result was that Kessler’s newest version kept slipping back to an old one. Ignoring his corrections, I re-inserted his erasures, sometimes leaving out whole words and phrases. Kessler called this a form of creative collaboration, for which he was grateful. The earlier version, he often said, was the better one. I was praised for what he deemed my sense of good style and my Wustmannian acuity.

  Hearing this, I blushed crimson at my shameful, sieve-like memory, doubtless also in acknowledgment of the fact that it never functioned like a guard dog for my own writing activity. I refused to accept the borrowed plumes the Count was offering me, and begged him to pardon my wayward ways at the machine. Pardoning me, I said, should be doubly easy for him, seeing that he himself had warned me about the slavish work involved and that he had been a student of the
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, under whom he had earned his doctorate. From that time onward, Kessler often called me, in jest, his personal Wustmann. Our discussions of stylistic matters will remain in my mind as the most rewarding and instructive I have ever had. Thälmann was effectively repressed, and receded into the background. Professor Wilhelm Wundt would have had a ball with his electrical affect-sensing apparatus!

  The first volume of Kessler’s memoirs came out in print, and with the proverbial courage of desperation I set to work typing out Volume Two, with the aid of my internal and external Wustmann. This new volume contained his accounts of the origins of the American aristocracy, including MacAllister’s famous “400.” He reported on his own lonely nights in Canadian cabins, where Kessler’s father owned a bear-hunting preserve as big as all of Bavaria, and on the naked girls in the upper-storey windows of bordellos in San Francisco—a lascivious custom that set the tone for other cities with the exception of Amsterdam, where vice gets displayed on the ground floor, although climate and Calvinist tradition prohibit a degree of undress worthy of the name. I of course applied my stylistic talents to the various versions of the manuscript. The Count later presented me with two copies of Times and Faces, one bound and the other in a cardboard cover, neither of them containing an inscription. He told me that he had pondered for a long while whether I would be willing to accept the “final edition” of his book, since I was no doubt thoroughly sick of it, and in light of the fact that three more volumes were yet to follow.

  With the church reformer Johannes Kessler of St. Gall in mind, Beatrice baked some St. Gall Biber to celebrate the publication of the Part I of the Count’s memoirs. Beatrice now habitually spoiled Kessler with pastries and French conversation. Kessler, who suffered from homesickness, waxed sentimental and inscribed two dedications, one in gothic script, the other in roman. The gothic one was for his private Wustmann, his technical assistant in the production of the book. The other inscription was for Beatrice, who, tenacious as she is on all such occasions, insisted that he write one expressly in her name. But behold, the great diplomat and chronicler of peoples and fatherlands made a slip of the pen: Thälmann made a sudden reappearance, flowing from the Count’s pen with the radical-leftist’s proper name. When he noticed what he had done, Kessler was mortified. I burst out laughing. Beatrice, now caught unawares with her superstitions, turned pale and murmured something about evil omens. But because no events in this world can have so many bad outcomes as Beatrice is wont to predict for them, I was unfazed. Nonetheless, Count Kessler was upset, and took his leave soon after our little celebration, a feast that our Portuguese friends with their penchant for self-deprecation would call a copo d’agua—which is what it almost amounted to. Hardly had he left when Beatrice grabbed the book and disappeared into the kitchen. Years later, when we got to talking about this remarkable name-switching, I told her that instead of burning the entire book she at least ought to have salvaged the page containing the dedication. But apparently evil magic must be destroyed down to the last trace. Worse still, our other copy of Times and Faces got lost with other important and irreplaceable items during our escape from the island, whereas I took with us in our paltry bundle of possessions, of all things, the politically coordinated Wustmann. Well, as they say: books have their fate, although they have an easier time of it than the people who write them.

  You can read in Kessler’s memoirs that his family came from the region of Lake Constance, near St. Gall. The first mention of a “Kessiler” occurs in a document from the year 1282. This man had an estate in Stodon, between Feldle and Vonwil. An ancestor of our Count named Heinrich Kessler got involved in one of the many conflicts of the period and was killed in a 1372 battle, as a miles in the army of the Imperial Cities—not a terribly distinguished occurrence. It wasn’t until the fourteenth century that the family, situated in and near St. Gall, began to flourish. His forefather Johannes Kessler was born in 1502, a religious reformer who did battle against the dreaded aristocratic abbot of the St. Gall Benedictine Monastery. The chronicles of the city of St. Gall shower praise on this gentleman’s broad education, his refined taste, his simple, gentle, noble, and amiable character, and his exemplary life. Kessler quotes this passage verbatim. This ancestor of his wrote a set of memoirs with the title Sabbata, in which (I’m following Kessler) he recounts how, on his journey as a young student to the university in Würzburg, he met Martin Luther at the Black Bear Inn in Jena, when Luther was staying incognito in the nearby Wartburg under the alias “Sir George”. Gustav Freytag retells this story in his novel Scenes from Old Germany.

  For my novel about the Hun-less Tombs of the Huns, I had myself done a certain amount of research into my ur-Teutonic forebears on the banks of the Niers. It wasn’t easy to find the pertinent material, since I was able to consult only private libraries. Somewhere—I think it was in Don Juan’s highly erudite bookcases—I found a copy of Freytag’s Scenes in German, and it proved very useful indeed. By sheer coincidence, I read in it the account of the St. Gall reformer Johannes Kessler, and this happened in the days when that man’s great-great-grandson was wending his way to General Barceló Street. I had never heard of this harmless religious radical who played no role in the bloody 16th century battles of the theologians. To call him a “religious gangster,” as I did under the sweltering Unkulunkulu, was worse than slander. The pious fellow, who scrambled his way up from lowliest beginnings as a saddler’s apprentice to a career as a distinguished clergyman, didn’t deserve such an affront.

  Kessler was a regular guest of ours for over a year, but he never once referred, not even obliquely, to the circumstances surrounding our first encounter. I once asked him if he thought I was completely batty when he saw me standing there under a bedsheet, naked, cursing all the tinkers of this world and singing the praises of Unkulunkulu, a god that only Kaffirs could believe in.

  Well then, he said, if I wished to bring that matter up again, he would have to admit that he couldn’t believe his eyes, and that he would prefer to have taken his leave immediately. But that would have been impolite toward Beatrice, and besides, he couldn’t make any sense out of my rhyming harangue about the church reformer Kessler. Not one in a thousand persons was aware that the religious purifier from St. Gall was an ancestor of his. As I might well understand, this coincidence had given him pause.

  “So I can thank Unkulunkulu for the fact that I am playing a peripheral role in the creation of your memoirs?”

  Count Kessler, too intensely concentrated on his own world, a world that was causing him more and more anguish as he surveyed his past, simply pointed to Beatrice and began talking French with her—thus avoiding a reply to my mystical gibberish.

  Yes, I said, Beatrice was a wonderful woman. She may not appreciate my enlightened Unkulunkulism, lacking as she did any sense of technocratic mysticism. But she tolerated it, and that was saying a great deal. Whereupon I enlightened the Count by explaining that just a few days before his arrival, in pursuit of even battier historical documentation, I had chanced upon the old reformer Johann Kessler in Freytag’s Scenes.

  Sometimes if certain pages had many corrections on them, Kessler wanted them retyped right away. On such occasions I retreated to our kitchen with my typewriter, letting him continue his writing at Doña Carmen’s clunky table. I informed him, of course, that the drawer had formerly done service as a tabernacle for our “God’s Eye” grail. This bit of news amused him greatly; his eyes squinted with mirth. He liked to get cheered up every so often by a picaresque story—if it wasn’t too long, because he was always in a hurry. He was now living solely for his work on the memoirs, and he was huddling in for this task as if for an endless winter. He was scarcely alert to current political happenings, especially those in the Nazi Reich. Which is to say, he deliberately kept out of touch as best he could. But sometimes his best was not good enough, and this caused him a considerable amount of trouble. We owned only one table, which we placed in our bible-paper room when he c
ame, leaving me to work in the kitchen on a board that the little Swabian had given me for a completely different purpose. When Kessler became aware of this state of affairs, he preferred to go to the Café Alhambra or one of the clubs on the Borne, where he joined the other elderly gentlemen. But instead of just lounging in an easy chair, playing dominoes while half asleep, or having his shoes shined ten times in succession, he continued working on his memoirs. He would suddenly notice that on page 206, nine lines from the bottom, the word should be “hurried” instead of “ran.” And then a botones from one of the recently organized squads of messengers would run—or was it “scamper”?—to the General’s Street, where his scribe dutifully entered the emendation in the proper manuscript variant, while forcing his memory to keep silent.

  In those days Ernst Thälmann was already in a concentration camp under a death sentence, but strangely enough still among the living. The left-wing Spanish newspapers discussed his case extensively, and the anarcho-syndicalists printed broadsheets and staged parades with flags and banners saying, DOWN WITH HITLER! IN THE NAME OF HUMAN RIGHTS WE DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THÄLMANN! This also took place on a particular Saturday. Kessler had been at our apartment. Beatrice was barely able to persuade him not to take his shoes off for fear of soiling our floor, which was carpeted with old sheets of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. He was worried about spoiling things for us little people, who no doubt wanted to keep things clean for Sunday. After dictating a few letters and finishing a portion of his manuscript, he left for the Alhambra. Half an hour later a botones appeared at our door in great haste, presenting a letter in a bluish, lightly perfumed envelope—but I may be mistaken about the perfume—that began, “My dear Thälmann…” It went on to say that he hoped that the boy would arrive before I started typing, “because on page… it should read…” There was no rush with typing his letters. He wrote further that he would not be returning to Barceló Street as agreed upon, but was going back home to Bonanova.