But Feodor: a warm little wool jacket over the world’s most expensive bass voice; green tie, the red cockade of the Legion of Honor on his lapel; drinks sherry and speaks the broad French of someone who never makes it past the novice level; his hair is fair as flax; the cigar he is smoking seems to be the very best import, Chaliapin’s broad chest inhales its smoke deeply, too deeply; the singer’s fans are starting to stare.
From the crossfire that keeps coming at him, and which he withstands patiently, like a pro, we learn:
That Feodor Chaliapin was born in Kazan, in Tatarstan;
That his parents, simple peasants that they were, worked the land and had a warm pechka, a warm stove at which the young Feodor dreamed of Nevsky Prospect and the Iberian mother of God;
That Chaliapin joined a boys’ choir through divine providence, and in this post he got nothing less than one ruble per month;
That Feodor, who was smitten by the world of the stage at the tender age of twelve, traveled throughout the hinterlands of Russia at seventeen as a funny old man in a ludicrous operetta;
That in Tiflis, in the Caucasus, Chaliapin finally devoted himself wholeheartedly to his voice training, while his teacher, Usatov, spared neither effort nor cost to rein him in;
Then just like that, Feodor was hired to perform in Petersburg and Moscow at the Imperial Opera, and the rest was smooth sailing.
“C’est ma vie,” Chaliapin stated, and toasted every second year of his development, which he recounted bit by bit, with a sip of sherry; today he is up to fifty-two.
Never have I known that there could be so many questions. What would Chaliapin’s aunt have named her son if it had been up to him? And what about the everlasting nature of art? Isn’t it really about time for them to straighten out the Leaning Tower of Pisa? The pay, how much? And so forth.
He raved about Toscanini and Rachmaninoff and others. But Wagner, on the other hand, was not for him, you know—
The conversation turned to Soviet Russia. Chaliapin hadn’t been there for five years. Those on the right wanted firm proof that he was against his homeland. Those on the left latched onto everything positive Chaliapin had to say about Moscow.
It seemed to me that Feodor was celebrating his brothers fervently, though at a distance. But I didn’t speak my mind.
Ate only caviar, genuine Astrachan caviar. Went down the stairs and whistled softly—out of reverence, I suppose—the burlaks’ song, “Ej Uchnem” [i.e., from Song of the Volga Boatmen]. Da svidania, gospodin Feodor!
Berliner Börsen Courier, November 12, 1927
Claude Anet in Berlin
Yesterday I met Monsieur Claude Anet on the Esplanade, and I have to say that I don’t know what you want from him; I find him very serious. When I happened to bring up the subject of Anita Loos, her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I thought I saw a furrow forming on Claude Anet’s pleasant forehead; he resented my mentioning him in the same breath as Dekobra and other popular writers. He’s right, of course, because he is in the business of literature and takes it quite seriously.
We should not, of course, misconstrue that. Anet is not the man of letters we take him to be. One topic we spoke about was the German novel, but alas, Anet had only this to say, in an extraordinarily charming manner—naturally—that apart from Goethe he knows only one single German: Dr. Peltzer, whom he saw running at the Stade de Colombes, and that it was simply formidable how the German outran Séra Martin.
Anet’s enthusiasm for the sport is quite touching. After all, he himself was a French tennis champion for years! And he put Suzanne Lenglen, the queen of tennis, on a pedestal. Sports and women are two topics that appeal to him in equal measure.
Anet, French and of noble descent, born at Lake Geneva, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned his teaching certificate, yet he never practiced the profession. He wrote. When a Frenchman writes, he writes about love, in a hundred out of a hundred cases. He spent some time in Russia as a correspondent for the Petit Parisien, and even though there was a revolution in progress, he found enough time to fall head over heels in love with the Russian women. It was here that he wrote Ariane, which brought Anet fame. He continues to write about love and women; heaven knows he never runs out of material. But the women requite his love; his Notes sur Amour are on the night tables of the madams, in London and in Prague, in Paris and in Berlin.
I will leave the closing words to Claude Anet himself:
“The lady-killer disappears after his victory. Then the women curse the hour he was born, yet they regret not that he came, but that he went.”
Berliner Börsen Courier, November 25, 1927
At the Home of the Oldest Woman in Berlin
Frau Auguste Richter, Berlin-Moabit, Birckenstr. 30, is celebrating her one-hundredth birthday today. The Berlin magistrate, Zörgiebel, the police chief of Berlin, and many other officials showed up in their capacity as well-wishers.
The birthday girl who is the object of the excitement in Moabit today, with all conversations revolving around her and flowers and little heartfelt gifts delivered here, is lying in a snow-white bed, her toothless mouth in a smile, training her beady eyes, red-rimmed but alert, on each intruder as if to say, I’m happy you’re happy that today’s my one-hundredth birthday.
They’ve put a hundred things in Frau Richter’s room: porcelain cups, real pure coffee, lace hankies, chocolates, candies, prayer books with ivory covers, and a silk scarf. The door to Frau Helene Wendlers, the daughter of the woman who’s turned a hundred, doesn’t stop opening, and everyone is there to see the marvel: the oldest woman in Berlin.
Frau Auguste Richter is actually an exception in her family. Her father “only” made it to age sixty-five, her mother “only” to age eighty-four. She has spent her entire life in Moabit, where she was also born. She still has a sister in Berlin, who is all of eighty-eight and may be well on her way to beating Auguste’s record.
Grandchildren play ring-around-the-rosy around their hundred-year-old grandmother’s bed, she always laughs, pulls her hands out from under the blanket—slender, wax-colored hands full of wrinkles, but still strong—and claps out the beat. And downstairs in the courtyard, someone plays on the guitar:
We’ll never meet again while we’re so young
It’ll never be so wonderful again …
Berliner Börsen Courier, December 9, 1927
Felix Holländer
ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY
The latest to turn sixty years old is Felix Holländer, who will join these ranks tomorrow, in a series of milestones among the generation once called “naturalist,” which started with Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Halbe, and Otto Erich Hartleben. Holländer was one of the first in line. He launched his career in the newspaper business, dealing with the restlessness of the day in a way that requires the sharpest vigilance. Like Hauptmann, he is Silesian. In one of his best novels, he portrayed the middle-class patriarchal sphere of his childhood home, and in Dream and Day he depicted nature and the villages of the Riesengebirge.
In the early 1890s he became a novelist in Berlin. A collapse of a bank, Unter den Linden, was the subject of his Tempest in the West, a portrait of society framed with a keen eye for current events, which was one of the first to capture the abrupt shifts that occurred during this transitional period, its crises, and its sensations. Then Holländer wrote Jesus and Judas, a novel of the socialist movement. And at the end of the decade his major novel of personal development, The Path of Thomas Truck, recapitulated everything that was being debated among intellectuals.
Thomas Truck, who yearns to take the cares of the world upon himself and whose idealism is seduced and duped by the sensuality of a millionaire’s wife from the Tiergarten neighborhood, meets a working-class girl at a Salvation Army gathering. The suicide of this poor soul, who has sunk so low, inspires him to regain his freedom. In the bohemian group that gathers at the “Nachtlicht,” he is drawn to all kinds of revolutionary inclinations and finds the balance he is seeking in
a Tolstoyan Christ. This novel has secured its place even today in the history of novels that depict the era between 1900 and the present.
From then on Felix Holländer remained one of the most widely read storytellers, often astounding his readers with the sure touch he gave his characters, and always with the nervous art of tension, as in The Oath of Stefan Huller, set in the milieu of acrobats in a variety show, and in The Dancer, the fantastically crafted novel of a con man.
His foray into playwriting resulted in a single stage drama, Ackermann, which he co-scripted with Lothar Schmidt and which enjoyed success onstage with Emanuel Reicher in the lead role. But he always had a secret love for the theater itself. He pursued this love when Max Reinhardt was working in Berlin, approaching him as a dramaturge and director, and for many years was the energy behind the operation, with tremendous vitality and stamina that only increased as time went on. When Reinhardt left the Deutsches Theater, Holländer took over the directorship and stayed in this post throughout the chaos of the postwar years until the worst was over and he could once again place it in Reinhardt’s hands. Now he’s back in the theater critic’s orchestra seat. In addition, he did sparkling work as a stage producer.
Perhaps he has thought of writing a memoir by this point. He was invariably in the thick of every moment of turmoil. It would surely be very interesting if he were to portray a portion of his journey, because he would be speaking not only of personal matters but of a turbulent era in the history of Berlin.
B. Z. am Mittag, October 31, 1927
The Elder Statesman of Berlin Theater Critics
ON THE DEATH OF ALFRED KLAAR
Alfred Klaar, the elder statesman of Berlin theater critics, who has now died two days before completing his seventy-ninth year of life, began his life on Prague soil, just like Fritz Mauthner. He taught at the Deutsche Technik academy, where he acquired the title of professor. He served as theater critic for the Bohemia. He was a focal point in the intellectual life of the city, in which he gave the final outdoor speech in German at a Schiller commemoration. To this day there is a picture of Klaar hanging in the rooms of the Concordia, the Prague writers’ association, for which he organized the talks. He looks like a mild-mannered, dark-bearded, pensive individual.
As a critic, Klaar embraced the aesthetics of idealism. For him, the German classical drama was the eternal high point; he wrote extended essays on Maria Stuart and reviews in serial form. But because he was at home in the Austrian cultural sphere, he enjoyed early exposure to the world of Ludwig Anzengruber, and with every generation he progressed into the next one.
The best thing about him was the forbearance with which he adapted to trends that had to have been unfamiliar to him. The criticism he penned at an advanced age was gentle and well intentioned. In the decades of his professional life he had seen a great deal, starting in Prague, at Angelo Neumann’s German Theater, where the luminaries of the north German and Austrian theater gathered as guests and for many a future giant of the theater was the springboard to success. He had a comprehensive overview of talents and trends, and in addition to his ability to recognize individual strengths, he was well versed in his capacity as a patriarch.
When he moved to the capital of the German Empire with Paula Eberty, a Berlin actress who worked with Else Lehmann, he wrote for the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, then for the Vossische Zeitung, Theodor Fontane’s and Paul Schlenther’s newspaper. He kept on working tirelessly right into his days of infirmity, and he attended every premiere, in a misbuttoned black tailcoat, a friendly old man with bright, serious eyes. The Association of Berlin Theater Critics just recently named him honorary president.
Of all of Alfred Klaar’s books, one stands out as the full expression of his personality. Its title is We and Humanity. This literary historian, who also wrote an account of Spinoza’s philosophy, was a humane individual to the depths of his soul. One of his last publications was a study of Heinrich von Kleist’s Marquise of O. He was a highly enthusiastic orator and had an astonishing memory. Anyone who has heard him talk about someone like Uriel Acosta for more than an hour without any notes knows his integrity and his ethical stance, and his exacting mastery of the word will ensure people’s reverential love for him well into the future.
B. Z. am Mittag, November 5, 1927
The B. Z. Lady and the German Crown Prince
At two on the dot, Schappel goes into Taubenschlag Restaurant on Behrenstrasse, sets up shop in the corner, spreads out at the round table in the back, and adjusts her cap, making the yellow knitted Latin letters B and Z, the newspaper’s famous acronym, run diagonally across her forehead, and as Frau Schappel pulls a good deal of change out of her coat pocket with her right hand, she presses her broad left thumb against her left nostril, which has a whole network of fine red veins running across it, like rivers on a map, while blowing a lungful of air through the other nostril. This is Frau Schappel’s way of regulating her breathing rhythms—then she lifts her head slightly and calls over to the bar: “Erna, a cuppa coffee!”
It’s been that way for twenty-five years. Erna serves Frau Luise Schappel four cups of coffee a day, which add up to four times twenty-five, that is, 100 times 365, 36,500 coffees all told, and then the leap years need to be added on, and Sundays and holidays subtracted. On those days Frau Schappel doesn’t sell the B. Z.; she lies in bed on Brunnenstrasse until three o’clock, ventilating her vocal cords, and only here and there do words burst forth, when Frau Schappel argues with her husband about who holds the record in selling the magazine. “He hawks ’em now, too. He needed a do-over, seeing as he was once a radical comedian, yes indeed. He has the same name as Stresemann.”
Gustav?
“Nah, Gus. But he’s still a beginner. I’ve been at it for twenty-five years, starting in 1904. Until 1904 I sold flowers, on Unter den Linden. Who still buys flowers, I ask you? Do you know the local barber Gilbert’s shop at the corner of Exerzierstrasse and Kanonierstrasse, I’ve been there the whole time. You know, neither storms nor rain nor heat nor frost. What’s it down to today. Forty-five. That’s nothin’. In 1917 it was up to seventy, but your hanky still froze to your face, in 1910 I almost lost my mind and passed out, and in the fall we can never dry off. We deal with so much crap just to keep you in the know.”
Once again Frau Schappel presses her thumb against her left nostril, emitting a strangely booming sound, the kind a broken saxophone might make. After a big gulp of coffee, she begins to sort through the pile of money with the tip of her index finger peeking out of her torn black glove; her finger and the glove are the exact same color: the half-groschens with the half-groschens, the groschens with the groschens, and the marks with the marks. Whenever she comes across a three-mark coin, she shakes her weighty head and says, “Back then I got a taler!”—and everyone at the Taubenschlag instantly knows what’s coming.
Here is the story of the crown prince and the taler:
It was 1914, in April or May, not a hint of war as yet, when he came riding along in his coach, from the general staff’s offices on Leipziger Strasse, down Behrenstrasse, to the castle. Sitting next to him was his adjutant, Mühlenberg, Mühlenreich, Mühlendorf, or something of that sort. Frau Schappel saw the coach coming, recognized the crown prince, and began to wave newspapers around, the way Robinson had with his nightshirt when he saw the first ship sail past his island.
Then it got even better: the crown prince stopped—on my honor—right in front of Frau Luise Schappel, the adjutant handed the crown prince a taler, and the crown prince handed it on to Frau Schappel, Frau Schappel handed him a B. Z., as she stood there trembling with fear and feeling ill, and stammered out, “Thank you very much, His Highness, Crown Prince!” The crown prince gave her quite a nice wave, and the coach disappeared. This pattern repeated every day.
Frau Schappel had been instructed by the adjutant, who went to Gilbert’s to get shaved, not to address the crown prince as “His Highness, Crown Prince,” but rather simply as “Imperia
l Majesty,” and she needed to “step lively.” Alas, our Lieschen really wanted to step lively, but when he showed up, Frau Schappel grew red as a beet and kept on saying, “His Highness, Crown Prince.”
Yes, those were nice times for Frau Schappel, she knew that he bought the newspaper “just for fun,” because “he never ever reads,” surely he made his daily trips along Behrenstrasse for her sake, Frau Schappel was less interested in the taler. But she soon figured out for herself that, no, he didn’t come just on account of Frau Schappel: over at no. 58, the address of the Friedrich Wilhelm Life Insurance office, the telephone receptionists lined up at the window, day after day, all dolled up, waiting for him excitedly.
Frau Schappel had an idea why he bought the newspaper from her every day: her newspaper stand was straight across from the windows where fifty girls with bright-red little faces hung there like ripe grapes, and Frau Schappel was already forty years old. She was overcome with jealousy.
Well, and then the war came, and that was that.
Frau Schappel drinks her third coffee today, remarks that the papers from Bolivia and Paraguay are now selling well, she talks about her best days, about the sinking of the Titanic, about the first weeks of the war, about Fritz Haarmann and Charles Lindbergh and Krantz and the Zeppelin blimp. Meanwhile, one drop after another splashes out of Frau Schappel’s nose right between the half-groschens and groschens sorted neatly on the tabletop.
Der Querschnitt, issue 2, February 1929
Stroheim, the Man We Love to Hate
His name is “Von,” pure and simple, and nowadays every child in Hollywood knows who “Von” is. Erich von Stroheim, that was too cumbersome. They pulled the “Von” out of his name and are inordinately fond of calling him that exclusively, as though wishing to flaunt the three noble letters on this playground for parvenus, and they pronounce this “Von” like “one.” And if a Hollywood greenhorn should ask, “Why do you call Stroheim ‘one’?”—the answer is: because every company can shoot only one film with him, then it goes broke.
Billy Wilder on Assignment Page 13
