by Adam Thorpe
Herr Hoffer took to wearing a cape, at that time, and grew a little pointy beard like an artist at the turn of the century, imagining himself a member of a revolutionary painters’ group from before the war – Die Brücke, for instance: looking like Kirchner himself, or Erich Heckel, or Karl Schmidt-Rottluff with his monocle.
He smiled now, to think of it.
Imagine – he wore a broad-brimmed felt hat! Twenty-odd years ago. Impossible. As bright in his head as if it had happened yesterday. Very bright.
Yet it was not an easy time. Not very romantic. And not quite the Age of Reason, either. Oh no! By his second year, in 1923, he was having to fork out a thousand million marks for a simple meal, or hand over a couple of eggs for a ticket to the theatre. The streets of Heidelberg were filled with beggars and coke-dealers and his own bare little room was burgled several times. The government fell, there were no more rules, yet every time a revolution was announced, nothing happened except that somewhere else the workers were shot and food was even scarcer. Friends of his speculated each day with shares and grew immensely rich; Herr Hoffer drank more champagne at that time than at any time since, yet went hungry like other Germans when a party wasn’t thrown. And the girls! They were so free with their favours! He would sit in his room, the God-fearing fellow from Eberbach, rather terrified of the licentiousness – even dreading the girls who came along to the parties in their white pancake make-up, stripping to show their surprisingly clean breasts. They could not all have been actresses or cabaret dancers, surely!
And how quickly all those young men’s ideals melted into believing in nothing at all except the next speculation, the next stock-market tip, the next girl! Yet the ideals were all they really had, as they looked out over the plain from the ruined Schloss at eventide, when all was golden below, and quoted Schiller and Benn and Hofmannsthal and believed they were passing through chaos into a fresh era of beauty and refinement.
‘A spot of natural housecleaning,’ they would say. ‘That’s what it is. Without destruction, no creation. Without the blank canvas, stiff with size, no masterwork.’
And their young nation to be a beacon for the whole world!
He smiled inwardly to think of it, yet it also filled him with dread. He had so wanted a pleasant, stimulating life – and it had been given him, it really had, yet with this absurd shadow, this torment of an outer reality to which, nevertheless, he had subscribed as one pats an angry tiger on the head, hoping it will not eat you. He was forty-two, now. Forty-two! He had walked as a young man in the untended grounds of the ruined castle with his companions and, yes, he had dreamt of so much.
He was not a pessimist. He had his wife, his two darling daughters. This beautiful museum.
He should be back at home.
Werner had wound up the gramophone again: Schumann! ‘Die alten, bösen Lieder’ – another poem by Heine! The piano thumped its first fierce notes and then, ah yes, let us bury the old bad songs, the bad, wicked dreams, fetch a big coffin . . .! Werner was softly singing along, but Herr Hoffer thought it prudent not to, catching Frau Schenkel’s eye; instead, he closed his eyes and returned to Heidelberg and their dreams.
The uncouth rule of the vulgar – the direct consequence of science, technology and urban industrialisation – was unnatural. How far off did science, technology and urban industrialisation seem from the heights of Heidelberg, in the scent of wild spring flowers or the unmown grass under the boughs! Against that evil trinity they set the golden measure of art, whose spirituality was an unspoken mystery, a fragment of the divine, a sacred, yearning impulse that conferred dignity on the human endeavour and had been almost lost in the lying vulgarity of the modern world.
‘I hope they don’t have dive-bombers,’ said Frau Schenkel, from another realm.
‘Bless my heart,’ said Werner, ‘right in the middle of Schumann.’
Yet revolutionary newness inspired him, too: he would even feel the sharp, international mockery of the Dadaists as something invigorating, if not altogether healthy.
On seeing his first Cubist work for real, one summer – a vast swirl of colour by Delaunay in Berlin, in that fashionable gallery in Potsdamer Strasse – he felt really as if he was starting out on the most tremendous adventure! He stood in the glamour of it as he had stood in the glamour of the fallen tower and the hollowed grandeur of the Schloss: it helped that he was in Berlin, of course, and that the gallery hosted dances featuring girls naked from the skirt up. But he was enthralled. There was the death of money. There was the breath of art.
Those were heady years for Herr Hoffer.
And he fell in love, in the end, with a lovely vision in a hat shop: Sabine Tressel, who knew nothing about art but who lifted her hands to her hair and sucked Herr Hoffer’s breath away in one gesture.
Werner was mouthing the words, now, as they faded in that deliciously ironic and profound manner into the last, sad, delicate notes on the piano.
Knowest thou why the coffin, then,
so large and weighty be?
I lay both my dear love within
and my hard agony.
Could Werner ever have been in love? Might not some long-buried pain from his youth explain it all, explain Werner’s skeletal dryness? Could Werner ever have been young? Even when Herr Hoffer first arrived some fifteen years ago, Werner had looked just the same – pickled, fossilised, dusty. Yet he must only have been in his thirties.
Hilde Winkel was talking as Werner replaced the record in its sleeve, the brown paper spotted with his blood. The lull in the shelling made her wonder if they shouldn’t go up and see what was happening.
‘Maybe they’ve arrived from the motorway,’ said Werner, ‘and that is why they’ve stopped.’
They took this in.
Herr Hoffer could not really imagine it, except in the silliest, toy-like terms. The column of tanks snaking up the clean white motorway, with its square slabs of concrete, between the huge bare fields around Lohenfelde. He knew that their motorways were modelled on park footpaths in America – and now he saw the tanks like a boy’s toys on an American footpath, arriving in a model of their town, like the model on display in the Rathaus, and knocking some of the little buildings over.
‘Then they will go on and meet our boys marching back from the east with the Russian prisoners,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘and they will have a very bad surprise.’
‘What will the Russian prisoners do?’ asked Werner Oberst, as if it was amusing.
Frau Schenkel glared at him out of the corner of her eye.
‘They will cheer,’ Hilde Winkel suggested. ‘While we are crushing the capitalist enemy that is also their enemy.’
‘That’s right,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘The Bolsheviks will cheer,’ repeated Werner, a touch caustically.
‘That’s right. You just wait and see.’
‘Anyway, there won’t be any Russian prisoners – cheering or not cheering.’
‘You mean we will have shot them all?’ asked Hilde Winkel, as if surprised.
‘There won’t be any Russian prisoners,’ Werner repeated, with a grim smile.
Herr Hoffer knew exactly what he meant. A cousin of Frau Hoffer’s had a neighbour who listened to the BBC.
This frail contact was a source of great anxiety to him, in fact. He retained a neutral expression while Frau Schenkel frowned, looking upset.
‘They are decent men, our boys on the Eastern Front,’ she said. ‘They never shoot prisoners. Not even Bolsheviks. Slavs and Jews, maybe, but not the Bolsheviks. I should know. I can show you my dear ones’ letters. They give black bread to starving Russian children in villages. They’ve got a Jew as interpreter, even – a Russian Jew. They’re certainly not relying on rubbishy lies while sitting very comfortably at home with proper socks.’
She talked about her son and husband as if they still lived.
‘I for one am not very comfortable,’ murmured Werner, shifting on his cushion. ‘And my socks need dar
ning.’
‘Well, don’t ask me to do them,’ said Frau Schenkel.
Hilde Winkel and Herr Hoffer were smiling. The mutual antagonism of Frau Schenkel and Werner Oberst could be quite amusing, at times.
A distant detonation. Then silence again. Perhaps the Americans couldn’t be bothered with Lohenfelde, and had passed it by. It was almost an insult, if so.
Werner put his book down and closed his eyes.
I’ll bet he’s got a headache, thought Herr Hoffer. It’s too flickery and dark to read. This could be a dungeon. A dungeon for the deranged.
Watch out for that word, deranged. It has very nasty associations.
Sitting in the vaults seven years later, Herr Hoffer remembered the opening as if it had happened last week. The Party official had not quite frothed at the mouth as the Führer had done when opening the exhibition in Munich, but he had very much adopted the same line.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he had said, leaning towards the microphone at one end of the museum lobby, ‘these works on display show natural forms horribly distorted, the sky as yellow rather than blue, and the world of dreams and hallucinations as more real than reality. Medical science would say that the creators of these works are suffering from a mental derangement. But the veil has been drawn over our eyes by so-called experts in the pay of Jewish capitalists. Soon, we might all be suffering from a mental derangement, if we do not speak the honest truth and say: Enough!’
Everyone had clapped. Herr Hoffer had fiddled with his spectacles, head lowered.
‘And now,’ the official had continued, in his strong Bavarian accent, ‘I must say “Enough” to myself, or there won’t be time to let you see for yourselves what rubbish has been foisted upon us all these years, contaminating our Germanness! Herr Hoffer?’
There was laughter at the little joke: everyone felt very clever and rational and good-humoured.
How stifling the cramped lobby had felt to Herr Hoffer, the fur collars and heavy coats giving off a pungency of stale scent and nicotine and sweatiness! He could smell it even now, seven years on.
Then it was his turn. It was one of the most difficult moments of his life. He thanked all those present and hoped that the thousands of anticipated visitors to the exhibition would learn something about ‘the central importance of art as something to be taken seriously’. A sea of faces: important faces. A couple of coughs. A sneeze. His collar was soaking wet. ‘That these visitors might understand art’s great value as a force representative of the highest good, sublime and timeless. As containing profound healing properties that might furnish and deepen internal units rather than demolish it.’
These ambiguous abstractions, mostly borrowed from a few pages of Julius Langbehn, cascaded harmlessly over the illustrious, gleaming heads and met with a polite round of applause.
The Party official had looked at him afterwards with suspicion.
‘You did not once mention the word “degenerate”,’ he said. ‘It was almost as if you were standing outside our collective indignation and smirking. Like a Jew. I do hope that is not the case.’
‘Oh, I think they know what the exhibition is called,’ said Herr Hoffer. It was fortunate, perhaps, that the official was short and fat and balding. ‘No one could have missed it, my dear sir, coming in.’
The official curled his lip and Herr Hoffer had gone on to say, with a caustic smirk quite alien to the muscles of his face, how the city’s burghers liked nothing better than to be titillated now and again by spiritually uplifting sentiments. This made the official feel superior. Herr Hoffer rounded it off by offering him a thin, expensive cigar.
The worst moment of the whole sorry episode came when the museum’s own humiliated pictures were once again carried out of their natural home, like a robber’s swag, on their way to Halle. That time it truly felt like theft. Herr Hoffer, out of sight of the janitor, cried real tears after ‘Degenerate Art’ had departed in two dirty furniture lorries, leaving only the words Entartete Kunst and Eintrittfrei in great swooping letters of red-painted wood. A large banner had been draped along the wall facing Count-von-Moltke-Strasse, showing a booted swastika crushing some Semitic-looking artists: this was the work of the local paper’s cartoonist. It flapped and snapped there for a few weeks until repeated letters to the local Propagandaministerium official got it taken down.
Of course, everyone congratulated Herr Hoffer on the triumphant success of the exhibition. And he then had a migraine that lasted ten days.
Werner opened his eyes and asked Herr Hoffer what he was thinking about.
‘Nothing much. My family, mostly,’ he fibbed. ‘And a soft bed.’
‘I am thinking of Irminfrid,’ said Werner.
‘Who’s she?’ asked Frau Schenkel.
‘The great king of the Germanic Thuringians,’ Werner sighed, ‘defeated by the Franks at Burgscheidungen in 531. Thereupon the kingdom was ruled by Frankish dukes, as we will be ruled by the Americans. You see, nothing is new in history, if one takes the trouble to delve. And we all come through, somehow. Again and again.’
‘I was thinking of coffee, I’m afraid,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘Sorry to be non-intellectual.’
‘Well,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘as Kurt Schwitters himself remarked: in times of acute shortage one’s heart hops from sugar to coffee.’
‘Schwitters is working in a lacquer factory in Wuppertal, these days,’ said Hilde Winkel, with a satisfied smile.
‘That’s Oscar Schlemmer,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘Schwitters is in exile in Norway.’
‘Even better. It’s cold up there.’
‘We had one of his piles of rubbish,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘and Frau Blumen chucked it out.’
‘Not quite, Frau Schenkel,’ said Herr Hoffer, lifting his finger like a teacher, nettled by the comments. ‘We had one of his assemblages, Small Cathedral. Clearly related to his Cathedral of Erotic Misery. It consisted of a lock, three pieces of driftwood, a shred of cloth and a metal grill. It illustrated the artist’s belief that life is an aesthetic phenomenon, and that art and life are one glorious fusion. Frau Blumen simply objected to having to spend ten minutes dusting something off a rubbish heap. Her words, not mine. We gave her a little extra each week, a new feather duster, and the work was spotless. Did you know I went to see Schwitters’s huge Merz sculpture, in Hannover?’
Nobody looked impressed.
‘It had little grottoes to his friends, and in them he had placed mementoes of them, things found in their homes. Moholy-Nagy’s was a sock, a pencil, and, as far as I remember, a cigarette stub. One grotto had a guinea pig running about in it. I was very jealous of Hannover. The Degenerate thickies took ours and no doubt stamped on it with their big black boots.’
He was enjoying the illicitness, the attention: Hilde seemed to tingle beside him, very cross. He had never been so frank.
‘Whatever, we’re best shot of them,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘It wasn’t what I call art. He can stay in Sweden, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Norway,’ corrected Herr Hoffer.
‘He can stay wherever, as long as it’s not Germany.’
She studied her nails, which had not been varnished for a few weeks: varnish was kept back for the Luftwaffe.
‘At the bottom of a fjord, preferably,’ she added.
‘Tell that to the Americans,’ murmured Werner.
Hilde Winkel snorted. ‘You think they care about a clown like Schwitters? Or any kind of proper art? All they care about is blowing our cities to bits – and their chewing gum!’
Blood beaded around the lint on her swollen top lip.
‘The fusion, my dear Fräulein Winkel, of life and art,’ Werner smiled.
‘Do be careful of your lip,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘They’d only care about the so-called fusion of life and art if it made them money!’ Hilde snapped, not even wincing. ‘Just like the British! And what are we doing about it, now?’
She glared at each of them in turn, but a
gain at their chins, as if there was something interesting crawling there. Her nostrils were flared and her jaw stuck out. Despite her top lip, Herr Hoffer thought she was a little like the fearsomely lovely Brigitte Helm from his youth. He hoped she wouldn’t be this angry within earshot of the Americans.
‘We are staying alive, Fräulein Winkel,’ he said, softly. ‘There is no point in doing anything else, right now.’
She shook her head, as if in despair, and caught a drop of blood on her hand.
Herr Hoffer consulted his watch. It was not yet half past eight in the morning. It felt as if they had been there for hours.
The shelling resumed, but further off, now: just a distant grumble.
Werner put on another record: an ancient jazz number that Herr Acting Director Streicher would play very often in his office, purely in defiance of the Party. Now it was in defiance of Hilde, who shook her head again, in disgust this time. The music jigged about madly for a minute and then hit a terrible scratch that sounded like a train failing to get going. Werner moved the needle on, but the scratch continued to the paper label.
‘What a pity,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘Danced to that, in my youth,’ said Frau Schenkel, pouting her lips around her cigarette and touching up her severe grey hair.
Werner slipped the record back into its sleeve and closed his eyes. The silence was more noticeable after the raucous jazz. Herr Hoffer’s thoughts went from sugar to coffee and back again. The minutes dragged. He tried to imagine Frau Schenkel as a young woman, dancing to jazz. The cathedral of erotic misery!
His stomach made noises like a creaking door. He shifted and coughed, touching Hilde’s shoulder with his. She moved hers away, slightly, until they no longer touched.
‘Maybe we’ve beaten them back,’ said Frau Schenkel.
Hilde Winkel laughed caustically, then winced. She held a hand over her mouth.
‘I think I need stitches,’ she said. ‘I hope the Americans will treat me, at least.’
