Few writers, and perhaps none in recent times, have staged their departure from the world with such a masterful sense of theatre as Thomas Bernhard. Success as a writer, fame and notoriety ensured that he was certain to avoid the final humiliations often inflicted on the poor and displaced. However, Bernhard, who had often been close to death since contracting pleurisy and tuberculosis at the age of eighteen, did not want his burial to be the occasion for another kind of humiliation. He was determined that there should be no hypocritical gestures of reconciliation over his dead body by an Austrian state and Austrian literary establishment which he despised.
Thomas Bernhard died alone, of heart failure, on Sunday 12 February 1989, at his home in Gmunden, Upper Austria. By the time the municipal authority confirmed his death on Thursday the 16th the funeral was already taking place in Vienna. Apparently three people were present. The author’s testament was equally implacable. That no word of his literary remains was to be published is not a surprising demand from a writer who took such care with the ordering and correction of his texts; less common is the requirement that for the duration of legal copyright nothing he had ever written is to be performed or published
Within the borders of the Austrian state, however that state describes itself. I categorically emphasise that I want to have nothing to do with the Austrian state and I safeguard myself concerning my person and my work not only against every interference but also against every approach by this Austrian state to my person and my work for all time to come.
This uncompromising, unforgiving statement from beyond the grave is a conclusive demonstration of the hostility between official Austria and the country’s most outstanding writers even if it can also be seen as an expression of injured love. The antagonism long preceded the chain of scandals and debacles, beginning in 1986 with the Minister of Defence’s welcoming handshake for a war criminal released from an Italian prison, which have soiled the cosy image of Austria. These events, above all the election of Kurt Waldheim as president and the allergic reaction of Austrian opinion to external and internal criticism, have seemed to confirm Thomas Bernhard’s intemperate vision of Austria as corrupt and mendacious.
In post-war West Germany, one of the roles assumed by writers was to act as a public conscience with regard to the crimes committed under the Nazis and to threats to civil and democratic liberties. On occasion, this role has brought conflicts with politicians and the state. There has nevertheless existed both a considerable degree of consensus on the legitimacy of intellectuals to speak out and a sphere of public debate in which they have participated.
One telling difference between West Germany and Austria as successor states to the Nazi-Reich was that Austria refused to regard itself as such. West Germany, of course, had no choice. Gerhard Roth, another Austrian writer, has suggested that the Austrians discovered that when they had been committing criminal acts they had been Germans. So, by becoming Austrians again after 1945, their consciences, Kurt Waldheim’s included, were clear.
Consequently, the Second Austrian Republic put considerable effort into constructing an identity which relied on ‘the Habsburg myth’ and the embalming of Vienna’s cultural heritage. There was an avoidance not only of the Nazi period (and the divisive topics of exile and resistance) but of the First Republic as well, with its problematic features of civil war and clerical fascism. Music and literature – or rather their existence – were of fundamental importance to this identity. But since the whole edifice was fragile, and required so many subjects to remain taboo, the writers who emerged from the 1950’s onwards and whose work was not safely historical or homely were viewed as disturbing threats to Austrian harmony.
A suffocating aesthetic conservatism was closely connected to other shortcomings of the Austrian scene: the lack of reputable publishers, of serious newspapers, of informed criticism. Austrian writers like Bernhard are largely published in West Germany, and frequently address their polemics on the state of affairs in Austria via the West German press. The limited possibilities for public debate have further contributed to the bitterness of the estrangement between Austrian writers and much of Austrian society. Paradoxically, condemnation in the press and by representatives of the government helped bring writers to the attention of a reading public – often outside Austria.
Bernhard himself was not shy of making public interventions. (His revulsion at Nazism and Catholicism and what he saw as their continuing influence on Austrian attitudes was almost matched by his contempt for Social Democracy and state-subsidised writers.) Nor did he tire of varying his expressions of disgust at Austria. In Concrete, for example, which was first published in 1982, there’s a long passage, with something of the tone of a sermon – or a jeremiad – in which the narrator, while he prepares to leave Austria for a stay in Majorca, reflects that he is merely leaving a country whose lack of intellect no longer makes a man like himself despair but only vomit, and whose condition is simply that of Europe’s uncleaned latrine.
Of course, there is much more to Bernhard than a critic or satirist, however brilliant and vituperative, of Austrian and German circumstances. He and his work, in any case, elude political classification – ‘conservative anarchist’ has been one tentative description. Bernhard is a great writer for the breathless intensity with which he delineated inner geographies, the unceasing monologues inside our heads, and his marking both of the power of words – not least over the readers of his prose – and of the limits of words, their inadequacy as a means of communication.
Concrete presents a familiar Bernhardian situation. The narrator, a sickly scholar of private means, is unable to complete, in fact unable to begin even the first sentence of the definitive study of Mendelssohn which he has been preparing for more than ten years. More than three quarters of the book, itself a single almost uninterrupted monologue, advances reasons for not having begun to write, takes them back, modifies, corrects and then contradicts them. Every kind of distraction is, or may be, or may not be, responsible. ‘Probably I have only again and again been unable to begin my work, because the books and writings on my desk were not properly arranged…’ is in the end perhaps the narrator’s most convincing conclusion.
This calculated humour is a feature of Bernhard’s writing which is sometimes ignored by English-language critics who see only apocalyptic gloom and nihilism in his work. Bernhard is frequently and unexpectedly funny, as here in a novel whose flow of writing about the impossibility of writing is provoked and qualified by the narrator learning of the suicide of a person whom he barely knew.
But more than that, Bernhard’s whole mode of address resembles that of a comic. A stand-up comic who buttonholes the listener’s attention with a sentence, an unending sentence, draws the listener in, without the latter quite understanding where these non sequiturs, alarming exaggerations, bare-faced denials are leading until the listener (the reader) finds himself entrapped within a verbal construction with new an unfamiliar rules of logic from which there is no escaping until the narrator-comic’s telling telling telling, which is both a curse and relief, runs out of breath. Common to both Bernhard and the comic is the reliance on, and play with, reported speech, and a constant balancing between control over words and the risk of words running out of control.
The narrator in Concrete describes himself as ‘tiresome, unbearable, sick, in the truest sense of the word, impossible’, and that is how Bernhard himself has been seen. Yet, one perceptive critic concluded his obituary with the remark that Bernhard was ‘probably… the most loved author of our time’. That this was more than formal piety towards a writer who not only appeared to be ‘unbearable’ but in whose stories and novels current vernacular, dialogue, description, character-drawing, action and sexual love are largely absent is due in part to his comic aspect, his verbal clowning.
There are other reasons why the word ‘love’ is not such a misplaced characterisation of the relationship between Bernhard and his readership. One is the constant reminder of physical vulnerability which his work conveys, and a sense of the oddity of the conjunction of thinking head and decaying body.
Bernhard wrote against death – outran death – with such an unparalleled gusto and combativeness that it is sometimes possible to forget or miss the presence of compassion and sorrow. Perhaps the most important element of that sorrow is a note of mourning for what children lose in becoming adult.
In Concrete Anna Härdtl is a young woman from Munich whom the narrator, Rudolf, remembers meeting. She related the circumstances of her husband’s suicide while on holiday in Palma. Her life appears to be ruined because of a child-like confidence that adulthood will turn out as it is supposed to be. In an earlier novel, Gargoyles, the narrator who is accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds notices a group of schoolchildren in a restaurant. ‘They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.’ The tragedy is both that children grow into gruesome adults and that those who are unable to do so are destroyed.
In Bernhard’s novels childhood is usually only present as a need, as something missing rather than fulfilled. A need which is thwarted by the indifference, if not positive antagonism of adults. (The absence can also be described as a need to belong somewhere, a need for home-ness.) However, in his autobiographical writing Bernhard was not afraid to use such words as ‘paradise’ and ‘idyll’ of his early life in the countryside and in the town of Traunstein – before school, a Nazi-Catholic education system, war and illness. And in an interview he admitted, ‘Nevertheless, it was a happy childhood, probably, certainly even.’ This respect for childhood and its investment with a degree of utopian light brings Bernhard, in this respect at least, close to the grand old Marxist utopian Ernst Bloch. (In the novel Corrections, the central figure, Roithamer, is described as constantly having his most important books – which always remained the same – ready to hand: ‘Montaigne, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ernst Bloch…’)
Thomas Bernhard’s aesthetic subjectivity and its capacity for defiance, disruption and contradiction can clearly not be reduced to an individual biographical identity. The disturbance his writing produces cannot be translated into moral or social terms. Nevertheless, his work owes its power – an ability to disarm, as well as a capacity for disruption – not only to the way his prose overwhelms the reader and to his Swiftian revulsion at human motives, it draws too on his sense of the comic and an underlying intimation of a loss, a waste, of the potential for humanness.
(The above text was first published in 1989 as the Introduction to the Quartet Encounters edition of David McLintock’s translation of Thomas Bernhard’s ‘Concrete’. – MC)
In the late 80’s and early 90’s I co-edited (with the publisher Pete Ayrton) a series of Extraordinary Classics for the Serpent’s Tail publishing house. A number of important translations were published under that imprint, notably Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Book of Unrest’ and three novels by the great Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti. These were not titles I was directly concerned with, but there were three authors I was particularly pleased to have helped introduce to English-language readers. One was Ernst Weiss, whose novel ‘The Aristocrat’ I translated, the afterword to which is reproduced below. Of course, Weiss has hardly become a popular classic since then, but three more of his books have been published in English and ‘The Eyewitness’ appeared as long ago as 1978. The latter, unfortunately, was brought out in a rather misguided edition which blurs the difference between document and fiction (the subject is the Jewish doctor who during the First World War cured Hitler’s hysterical blindness) and the novel deserves both retranslation and representation. Weiss was a friend of Kafka and the latter’s praise for him was considerably more heartfelt than it was for Max Brod. “But what an extraordinary writer he is!” Kafka tells Felice Bauer in a postcard dated 19th April, 1916. “You absolutely must read the book!” (He was referring to ‘Der Kampf’ – The Struggle). So far Kafka’s endorsement hasn’t led to appreciation of Weiss in the English-speaking world. But perhaps one just has to be patient. It has taken more than half a century since Robert Walser’s death and a hundred years since his modest heyday as an author in pre-1914 Berlin for his distinctiveness to be valued in America and even in Britain.
Serpent’s Tail also played a part in making Walser better known. Walser’s novel ‘Jakob von Gunten’ had been published in the United States as long ago as 1969 in an outstanding and ground-breaking translation by Christopher Middleton, but had never appeared in Britain. We had already republished a selection of Walser’s stories (‘The Walk’) and were embarked on the process of acquiring rights to Jakob von Gunten. (In the days before e-mail or before e-mail access became general this meant rather wearisome communication by post, fax and telephone with an uninterested University of Texas Press. I think we only got anywhere when I approached Christopher Middleton himself.) At this point we discovered that the film-makers the Brothers Quay, who had enjoyed cult success with a stop-motion animated version of Bruno Schulz’s ‘Street of Crocodiles’ were preparing a feature film of ‘Jakob von Gunten’ under the title ‘The Benjamenta Institute’ (adopting the title of the French translation). So in the hopes of benefiting from the publicity and success of the film we also used that title (though with some considerable regret on my part). As it turned out the film although beautifully shot in black and white – in Hackney – was not a commercial success even by the standards of an ‘art’ or cult film and disappeared very quickly without much helping sales of the novel.1 I have to admit I was also critical of the Brothers Quay interpretation of Walser’s book. The film remains worth seeing, however, not least for the performance of Gottfried John as Herr Benjamenta, the proprietor of the Institute Benjamenta school for servants. (John is one of the great actors of the European cinema and perhaps was never greater than as Reinhold in Fassbinder’s film of ‘Berlin, Alexanderplatz. Günther Lamprecht as Franz Biberkopf and John as his nemesis make for an incomparable double-act.)
After the publication of ‘The Institute Benjamenta’/‘Jakob von Gunten’ I would have liked to translate Walser’s novel ‘Die Geschwister Tanner’ which I considered the most appropriate follow-up. By that time I had taken on the task of producing an English-language version of the Diaries of Victor Klemperer, which proved to be a much more time-consuming and demanding project than I had at first naively supposed and other translation work was pushed into the background for several years. In the meantime, however, the cause of Robert Walser had migrated back across the Atlantic and thanks, not least, to the unflagging commitment of the translator Susan Bernofsky all of Walser’s surviving novels as well as a large amount of his shorter work is now available in English.
The third author I’m proud of having a hand in making more familiar to English-speaking readers is Daniil Kharms. Kharms was a belated Russian avant-gardist, writing in the 20’s and 30’s. He’s now recognised for his bleak and blackly comic stories, scenes and anecdotes which refuse the familiar comforts of character, narrative and plot. (But then, as the Glasgow writer Jeff Torrington once put it, ‘Plots are for graveyards’.) In his lifetime he made a living, when he made a living, with children’s stories and books. He died, forgotten, literally, probably of starvation, in a Leningrad mental hospital in 1942, during the siege of the city. He was only 36. His work, aside from the writing for children, only began to become known in the 1960’s, but then exerted a growing influence among artists and dissident literary circles in the Soviet Union.
A selection of Kharms’ pieces appeared in German as early as 1973, but I read him in Peter Urban’s much more extensive two volume edition published by Haffmans in the 1980’s. After only a few pages I was an enthusiast. I investigated what was available in English and found out that apart from a slim US edition which presented some texts by Kharms and his friend and fellow-member of the OBERIUT (Union of Real Art) group, Vvdensky, there was nothing, at least in book-form. I was determined that there should be something more of Kharms in English. I needed a translator, of course, and friends who were students of Russian affairs pointed me in the direction of Neil Cornwell, an academic at Bristol University, who, it turned out was not only an expert on Kharms and his circle but was able to do justice, in English, to the writing. I acted as editor of Cornwell’s selection, using Urban’s German translation as a guide, but I don’t recollect any differences between us. ‘Incidences’, as the book was entitled, appeared in 1994 with an introduction by the translator.2 Unfortunately review editors didn’t agree with us that we were introducing an unknown modern classic to English-speaking readers and there were next to no reviews. No sales were only turned into modest sales because, unknown to us, Theâtre de Complicité (as the group was then called) were preparing a stage show with music, using their own translation, based on Kharms’ texts. This was ‘Out of a House Walked a Man…’ and it was presented at the National Theatre in late 1994 and created at least a little interest in Kharms.
Nevertheless despite some subsequent publications in English of writing by Kharms, ‘Incidences’ has established itself as the most reliable selection from and guide to his work and it was republished in 2007, although by a different publisher.
- The premiere was celebrated with dinner in a private members club in Dean Street in Soho. A place where, if I remember correctly, there were mirrors at face-height above the urinals, but none above the wash-hand basins. At table, representing Serpent’s Tail, I found myself sitting between Geoff Andrew, then head film critic of Time Out, and Terry Gilliam, a long-time supporter of the work of the Brothers Quay. The critic ignored me, but the supply of wine appeared limitless, and I spent hours in conversation with a genial Terry Gilliam. (The Brothers themselves didn’t seem such great drinkers and somehow faded away without quite sliding from their chairs.) I now have no idea what we talked about, I imagine about films. At the end of the night, that is to say some time in the early morning we enthusiastcally shook hands on Dean Street – that image at least is stored in my mind – and went home. And, of course, I’ve never met him again. [↩]
- Last year (2012) a beautifully produced new four volume collected edition of Kharms appeared in German (Galiani Verlag), for the greater part translated by Alexander Nitzberg. Nitzberg and at least one distinguished reviewer, Ralph Dütli, have expressed highly critical opinions of Peter Urban’s translations. I haven’t had time yet to compare the two versions but at this point I can only say that I’m grateful to Urban to introducing me to Kharms, one result of which was Neil Cornwell’s English translation ‘Incidences’. [↩]
Ernst Weiss and ‘The Aristocrat’
1
Ernst Weiss published more than a dozen novels, many stories and novellas, several plays and a considerable quantity of criticism and essays between 1913 and his death in 1940. Although he had enthusiastic admirers from the beginning of his literary career and his work was published by prestigious houses, major successes eluded him. After 1934, in exile in Paris and lacking a non-German readership, he lived in poverty. A few of his novels were republished in the 1950 and 1960’s, and his last novel, The Eyewitness, appeared for the first time. During these years, if Weiss appeared in the literary histories at all, it was as a minor character in the life of Franz Kafka.
The two appear to have become friends in 1913. Already resident in Berlin, Weiss acted as a go-between for Kafka during part of the latter’s engagement to Felice Bauer. Weiss was present at the dramatic meeting in a Berlin hotel in July 1914 at which the engagement was broken off. He was critical of Kafka for resuming the engagement, which seems to have contributed to a cooling in the friendship.
Since the 1960’s, Weiss has been rediscovered as a writer of lasting interest and this has played a part in a re-evaluation of the relationship between the two authors. 1982 was the centenary of Weiss’s birth and was marked by the publication of the first collected edition of his work. By that year, one critic (Joachim Unseld) could describe Weiss as being a model for Kafka when the latter at last left Prague for Berlin in 1922 to live the life of a writer. (Kafka, of course, became fatally ill and died in June 1924.)
The friendship had never been completely broken. In the late 1930’s, however, Weiss, although a sensitive reviewer of Kafka’s work as it appeared in print, was still complaining in private that Kafka, whom everyone liked to regard as a saint, had behaved to him “like a scoundrel”.
According to Margarita Pazi, the sense of injury that Weiss felt at being rejected by Kafka is reflected in The Aristocrat. In the novel, Titurel, humiliated, spurns his friend Boëtius, after the latter has saved him from drowning.
2
Weiss and Kafka came from similar backgrounds in the German-speaking Jewish minority (a minority within the German minority) of Bohemia and Moravia when these were still part of the Austrian Empire. Ernst Weiss’s father was a textile merchant in Brünn (Brno) who died when his son was four. Weiss studied and practised medicine, as a surgeon, in Vienna, Berne and Berlin. After war service with the Austro-Hungarian forces, he gave up medicine to concentrate on writing, returning to Berlin where he remained until Hitler came to power in 1933. He died, as a consequence of attempting suicide, on 15 May 1940, one day after German troops entered Paris.
The novels and stories of Weiss and Kafka have certain common themes, notably a recurring problematisation of father-son relationships. And when, in 1937, Weiss reviewed Max Brod’s biography of Kafka, writing of him as “a man… who truly could say of himself, it is a monstrous world he had in his head. It is not a comfortable friendly world,” he could equally have been speaking of his own work. Nevertheless, for all the common aspects, which are also, in part, a measure of Kafka’s influence on Weiss, they are very different as writers.
The Aristocrat demonstrates one obvious difference. Although the relation of father and son is the organising theme, it is the father’s absence and weakness that presents a problem for the adolescent Boëtius von Orlamünde. He may feel powerless, but his father is not the unjust, oppressive, overwhelming presence of Kafka’s stories.
If Kafka is careful and sober in style, then Weiss is breathless, almost careless. A desperate urge to get everything in sweeps the reader along and lends certain scenes in The Aristocrat an exceptionally dynamic quality with a quite physical impact.
This is above all true of a long scene in which Boëtius breaks in the stallion Cyrus. Yet the energy of the prose, the evocation of the effort and exhaustion of the protagonists, would be much weaker in its effect if Weiss was not also able to combine pace with the greatest precision in describing the equipment used and the responses of the horse.
This portrayal of bodies, human and animal, being tested, testing themselves to the utmost, has few equals. Occurring quite early in the book, although following briefer scenes of almost equal intensity, it takes the reader to the core of Weiss’s novel.
The setting of the greater part of The Aristocrat is House Onderkuhle, an exclusive boarding school for the sons of the aristocracy. Onderkuhle is placed in eastern Belgium. The time: a few months in the summer of 1913.
Boëtius von Orlamünde, a pupil at the school, is the only offspring of an ancient but utterly impoverished noble family. Eighteen years old and almost at the end of his schooling, Boëtius no longer sees the point of the education he has received. He has learned the arts of horsemanship and fencing. The most important subject at school, however, is the forms of etiquette (“all the refinements of aristocratic intercourse”). In the past, perhaps, these “forms” had given structure and meaning to life; nobility was its own justification. Boëtius recognises the redundancy of his education, yet he can conceive of no other standards by which to live than those that it instils. Unsure of a place in the world, receiving no news from home, Boëtius more and more falls prey to loneliness, dread, a fear of death. In the absence of guidance, he searches out and accepts “tests”, like the breaking in of the stallion, which will justify his rank. However, they are not enough. The horse’s submission leaves him feeling disappointed; the contest was unfair. Then, as the school burns down and he is called on to display his courage by trying to rescue a fellow pupil, he breaks down, fails to make the attempt, finally (to himself) forfeiting his nobility.
Boëtius flees to Brussels, where his parents live, but finds lodgings, and works as a labourer in a turbine factory. (The manufacture of the engines is as powerfully captured in a couple of chapters as the earlier struggle with the horse.) Finally he does return to the parental home to be at the side of his dying father.
The Aristocrat is presented in the first person in the guise of an autobiographical document written by Boëtius himself. With occasional lapses the present tense is used, however, which lends immediacy. In other respects, too, the notion of “reporting” is only loosely adhered to. The recounting of events flows into dreams and imaginings. The careful description of phenomena is frequently combined with the abandonment of a coherent time sequence and of a fixed perspective. Boëtius often observes a single occurrence from more than one viewpoint, and the shift between them can take place several times within one paragraph. For example, when, on his return to Brussels, he hides in a doorway opposite his parents’ apartment, waiting for them to appear, his gaze is simultaneously on the entrance and inside the house.
At the conclusion of the novel, Boëtius seems reconciled to his fate. He appears to have renounced the role of aristocrat. After the seven years of separation in the boarding school, he was nevertheless at last granted his wish of being, for a few precious weeks, truly a son to his father.
The contemporary reader, however, knows just as well as did readers in 1928, when the novel was first published, that this cannot be the end of the story. Is it coincidence that Onderkuhle School, the stone repository of the old values, burns down on the 29th of June 1913? That is almost one year to the day before the assassination of the Austrian crown prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. One year on from the time at which the novel is set, its hero Boëtius von Orlamünde would have been a young officer, about to participate in the carnage of the Great War. There he would find a place, a purpose, in a new kind of army, just as he does in the army of labour in the turbine factory, whose work force is described as if it were a military unit. What kind of officer would he be? And if survived, what would he be likely to do afterwards?
3
Michael Hamburger (A Proliferation of Prophets, 1983), rightly recommends Ernst Weiss as one of the outstanding German novelists of his time, emphasising his “hectic imagination”. Of The Aristocrat he concludes, “It seems unnecessary or irrelevant to state that [it] is a novel less about aristocracy… than about fear and the acceptance of death, about courage and cowardice, which Boëtius comes to see as ‘more dangerous’ than courage, about pride and humility, about nature and civilisation, about violence and tenderness. All these concerns are woven into a texture so seamless, that it becomes impertinent to pick them out.”
While one can bear in mind the warning of that final sentence, it seems to me that such a summation of The Aristocrat renders it much more harmless, much more of a conventional Bildungsroman than it is. No place there for the perversity and misogyny of the hero and of other characters in the novel. Boëtius longs to be close to his friend Titurel, but it is, not least, the imperfections that are attractive. Boëtius’ urge to dominate is quite evident. Visiting Titurel in the school hospital, he derives pleasure from the latter’s weakness, from his rotten, decaying teeth, even from the smell that emanates from Titurel’s mouth. He takes Titurel’s hands, and they are like “warm meat”.
Since being sent away to Onderkuhle, Boëtius has lived entirely in male society. His only contact with his parents have been occasional visits by and letters from his father. In the school, displays of weakness are grounds for punishment. When a young boy, Alma, bursts into tears during a swimming lesson, the most serious aspect of his behaviour is that he calls for his mother. “And after a few poor, feeble strokes the unbelievable happens: Alma loses his head, begins to cry for his mother… Naturally I pay no attention… Even in the greatest danger I would never have thought of my mother. I would never have called her. Only my father.” The boy nearly drowns, and the Duke of Ondermark, a famous former pupil on a visit to the school, bursts into laughter.
The Duke is one of the two adults whom Boëtius considers as possible substitute fathers. The other is the schools Master of Ceremonies, who despite his low birth is the guardian of tradition, the teacher of etiquette. The Duke of Ondermark, however, with his will to command, and not simply an inherited right to do so, embodies a more modern form of leadership. But what kind of modernity does he represent? The expeditions, tightly disciplined, which the Duke organises for exploration in Africa, are machines designed for slaughter – of animals, of humans, it hardly matters which – and for the grabbing of booty. Boëtius admires the Duke because this field of action with its veneer of legitimation by science keeps him away from the embourgoisement of the court (and the “Congo deals” of the King). Whether on one of his expeditions or attending a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, the Duke remains in male society. His seeming modernity – exemplified by “the powerful, ear drum shattering Winchester rifles, such as have to be employed on hunts in the tropics” which have made him deaf on one side – involves paradoxically, a return to the oldest, the warrior justification of nobility. It is a nobility stripped of all the rather quixotic “gentlemanly” virtues maintained by Boëtius’ father, who dies forgotten by court and society.
Boëtius may realise that the aristocratic ideal as taught at Onderkuhle is useless as a guide to living, but existence without the order of a rigid hierarchy is unimaginable. Indeed, order, knowing one’s place, requiring distance, are so essential for him that he feels revulsion at unexpected contact with other – human – bodies. (Converted into “meat”, like Titurel’s hands, they become more bearable.) He complains that his mother has always flinched from kissing him, but the contradictory account of the reunion with her, after seven years, reveals that it is Boëtius who draws back from physical contact and projects this revulsion onto his mother.
It seems that, for Boëtius, affection is only possible within a hierarchical relationship (his love for his father, for example). Since he defines his father as his creator, the status of his “young mother” is problematic. She is excluded by the bond that unites father and son, is little more than a nuisance. As his father sinks away, Boëtius begins to hate her. It is she who should be dead. After the father’s death, she is packed off to widowhood and poverty on a tiny pension, to live with the aged Countess P.
In truth Boëtius feels closest to animals, beings that do not have the capacity for self-reflection on their condition. Enviable, he repeats several times. Though at one point he declares inanimate objects – stones – to be even more enviable. In the disciplined circumstance of the factory he approaches an ideal condition. “We are machine tools of iron and some of us of flesh and blood and produce machine tools.
Weiss’s portrait of Boëtius of Orlamünde (and of Duke Ondermark) is similar to the picture of “soldier males” that Klaus Theweleit, in Male Fantasies (1987 and 1989) derives from his reading of memoirs and novels by former members of the Freikorps, published in the 1920s and 1930s. (The Freikorps were armed bands of ex-officers and students who fought to defend “Germanness” in the Baltic states and on the eastern borders and put down working-class unrest in Germany itself.) Weiss, one guesses, shared some of the fears and obsessions of these displaced, unemployable and brutalised “White Guards” with their dangerous and absurd military codes of behaviour, whose only purpose in life was fighting.
For Theweleit, a key to understanding the proto-Fascism of the Freikorps men is their sense of being threatened by women who do not fit into a very few firmly defined and subordinated categories. Something of Weiss’s attitude to women can be gauged by the frequency with which the protagonists of his novels murder their wives. In Georg Letham the murder is carried out with a clinical lack of passion, almost in a spirit of scientific curiosity; in Die Feuerprobe (The Test of Fire) the murder instrument is a sharpened pencil (calling to mind the dispatch of female victims in Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom.) in Die Feuerprobe the narrator looks down at his apparently dying wife: “Now in pain the beloved face is distorted into an ugly grin. The mouth is a wide, bright red, wet pit, elongated, and the lips round about this pit are grey as her teeth.” In much of Weiss’s work there is as little mercy for the female characters as in a gallery of portraits by Edvard Munch.
Yet, of course, there is obviously no identity between Weiss and Boëtius von Orlamünde. However, the strength of the book, aside from its masterly depiction of an obsessive and acute awareness of the body, lies in its sympathy for a figure that far from becoming more mature in the course of his adolescence, feels quite incomplete unless he can submit to a discipline, to a leader. It is a figure whose capacity for cruelty and evil is only beginning to be displayed with the dismissal of his own mother. One critic of Weiss’s novels has remarked of the principal characters, “one would not like to be their friends”, and that is as true of the boy, Boëtius von Orlamünde, as it is of the others.
(The above text is a slightly amended version of the Afterword to The Aristocrat published by Serpent’s Tail, London, in 1994 and translated by Martin Chalmers)
My translation of the Austrian writer Erich Hackl’s ‘Die Hochzeit in Auschwitz’ – ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ was published by Serpent’s Tail in spring 2009. Some time before that I had been contacted by the German department of the German School in Richmond to ask whether I would be willing to introduce Erich Hackl and his work, as a text by him had been chosen for the school’s annual translation competition. As a translator into English I’m always willing to do whatever I can for the books and authors I’ve worked on and so I immediately agreed to speak at the prize-giving. Erich Hackl is a radical left-wing author and my talk, given below, was intended to do justice to him as a committed writer. I think I succeeded in that, at any rate the attaché from the German Embassy who was present demonstratively didn’t shake my hand afterwards. But that was a small pleasure which hardly made up for the fact that ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ got very few reviews (although they were extremely positive) and not many readers. A literary translator into English has to get used to indifference to literature from other languages, but the reception or non-reception given ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ has probably been the greatest disappointment of my career. It’s obvious from the text of my talk that I admire Hackl’s work. Aside from that, however, I was convinced that the book had the potential to attract attention and find readers to a greater degree than most translations. Hackl is something of a best-seller in German, his books are widely reviewed and his approach to combining oral testimony and fictional reconstruction is appreciated as a distinctive element in contemporary German-language writing. The title and ostensible subject alone seemed likely to guarantee interest in a British literary market place always eager for new insights into Nazism. I say, ostensible subject, because although the ‘incident’ of the wedding is indeed at the heart of the book, its subject is equally the aftermath of heroic acts (heroic acts by an imperfect hero). And that aftermath is a story of political disillusionment, of the failure of the Left to find an alternative to the apparent certainties of the anti-Fascist struggle. Perhaps the telling of the story and the shades of grey were too complicated for readers looking for simple depictions of good and evil, black and white. Perhaps it fell between stools: too much documentary and too much fiction. Or something like that.
Ambassador, Ladies and Gentlemen, Students of the German School!
In 1963 Edward Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ was published. It’s both a key historical study and a work of considerable literary distinction. It proved extremely influential even though the thesis of the book as stated in the dry-sounding title is a dubious one. The subject are the struggles by working people for better conditions, to protect their livelihoods in a situation of social upheaval – the industrial revolution – in the face of governments which supported the propertied. And above all it’s a study of the struggle to find means of expression, of communication, without which the solidarity necessary to political action – to form trades unions, political parties – is impossible.
There’s a much quoted sentence in the Preface to ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ which helps explain why the book continues to have an influence and to be read – and not only by professional historians:
Thompson writes:
“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott (Southcott was a millenarian preacher), from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
Thompson, in other words, does not see the rebellious artisans of the period as victims of industrialisation, of modernisation, of political repression, but as themselves actors in history, in their own history.
Thompson’s ‘Making’ was the work of an undogmatic Marxist who had broken with the Communist Party after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. The book was central to the development of what became known as ‘history from below’, and which was to have a powerful impact on the way historical research was done over the next couple of decades: In the History Workshop movement, for example, which brought together professional and non-professional historians. (Edward Thompson himself, incidentally never held a university post.)
One of the tools of ‘history from below’ was Oral History: The systematic recording and compilation of the testimonies of still-living witnesses to more recent historical events and processes. The testimonies of workers, of the inhabitants of the different quarters of towns and cities and of the countryside. Their words, collectively and individually, were accorded a weight and significance which had previously only been granted those who held or had held power in the conventional sense. It’s difficult to grasp now how important that was. Today a multiplicity of media outlets appear to allow unlimited expression of opinion. That freedom, however, is illusory, if it does not have the potential to produce or reinforce durable forms of collective expression and action.
In the German-speaking lands ‘history from below’, the recording and publishing of testimonies, was less the work of historians in the strict sense, than of writers. (German academic historians were, in any case, for a long time very resistant to such approaches.) This was in part likewise a response to, an engagement with the radicalising 1960’s. It was also eased by a greater formal openness of writing in German than in the English-speaking world. German literature has been more elastic, displays, for example, a greater variety of short forms.
At the same time, however, as writers explored the possibilities of incorporating documentary material, whether printed, written or spoken, in their texts, they were also aware of the limits of such material, of the limits of its use. So on the one hand there’s the awareness of the ‘slipperiness’, the ambiguity, the contradictoriness of the materials assembled and, on the other, that awareness is inseparable from the form found to convey and accommodate it. One solution may be to aim for a multiple perspective, for a polyphony of voices, in which the author, the shaper of the material refuses to try to answer every question, smooth out contradictions. Particularly when oral testimony is used, a representation, a way of telling has to be found which, as Erich Hackl has noted in an interview is “not abstract, not assertive, not vague.” And, with a degree of modesty he adds: “But how I find it, that unfortunately I can’t say. Not even whether I will find it.” I suspect the latter part of that statement is more true than the first.
In interviews Erich Hackl has several times talked of ‘stories’ he has been told or has come across, which he would like to write about but has not, or not yet, been able to find a way, a way of telling that could satisfactorily bear or carry them. That is to say: He is intensely aware of the requirement of literary form, of appropriate language as he is of the stories, of the experiences which have imposed themselves on him. Stories which he encounters through his concern with the working class movement in Austria and with the lives of the resisters under Fascism of whatever kind, both before and after 1945. His concern also, as a Hispanicist, in particular with movements of resistance and opposition in Spain and Latin America. Sometimes in his books he is able to link the two, as in the case of Rudi Friemel. A working class militant in Favoriten in Vienna, Friemel volunteers with the International Brigades in Spain, falls in love with the daughter of a Spanish Anarchist, a story which then leads to that ‘Wedding in Auschwitz’ which is the title of one of his books and which has just been published in English; or as in ‘Als ob ein Engel’ – As if an Angel – in which left-wing Jews escape the Anschluss to begin new lives in Argentina. Later, in the 1970’s, during the regime of the generals, Gisela Tenenbaum, the daughter of a couple of that generation, joins a left-wing underground organisation, The Monteneros. She is captured and presumably tortured and killed, but her body has never been found, she is one of the thousands of ‘disappeared’.
Extraordinary stories, of course, but they are not presented as tragic accounts of those who died too soon, of losers or victims. Like Thompson, Hackl wants to restore the dignity of the resisters. That dignity which oppressors tried to deny, whether in the public hanging of Rudi Friemel on the Auschwitz Apellplatz or in the dreadful uncertainty to which the family of Gisela Tenenbaum is condemned, not knowing how or even when their daughter died and still hoping against hope that one day she will return.
The context of the stories, however, is even wider than that. Somewhere Erich Hackl remarks that at the time, that is, in the 1970’s, one did not and could not know that the bloody repression of the Left in Latin America and elsewhere was the brutal initial stage of the world-wide imposition of what would come to be known as neo-liberalism.
But perhaps it is easier to talk about politics than to grasp Erich Hackl as a writer. One way of thinking about him, about his work, is to see his style, approach, emerging out of a tension: On the one hand there’s the chronicler – a chronicler like Johann Peter Hebel who wrote brief stories for the almanachs read by the common people, as they used to be called. Concise, humorous, informative, without condescension. A part of a famous story by Hebel, ‘Unexpected Reunion’, is adapted in Hackl’s ‘Sara and Simon’. But then there’s the evident influence of writer who, while as insistent on details as Hebel, returns repeatedly to the theme of individuals or of a love overwhelmed by historical reality. ‘The Wedding in Auschwitz’ even appears in its title to evoke Heinrich von Kleist’s story ‘The Betrothal in Santo Domingo’. In Kleist’s story it is the brief flowering of love between a white officer and mulatto girl during a slave revolt which cannot come to any kind of happy ending.
Whether influenced by Hebel and Kleist or others, however, there’s a reserved timelessness about Hackl’s writing. In a poem dedicated to him by the Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’bal, the latter writes, “The voice of books does not age”. With a little bit of license I think we can apply that to Erich Hackl’s own books and writing. He has found for himself a style which is not only respectful of his subjects and their words, but also of the literary traditions his work draws on and in which his readers can situate themselves. It is not simply a matter of some kind of accessibility, but of a form of democratic conversation between past and present, between generations and across borders and oceans. It is that quality, too, which makes Erich Hackl a very special writer in German today.
Thank you.
Berlin is a city of many beautiful cemeteries. Usually relatively small, they are scattered across the city, some of the older ones virtually at its heart, often surrounded by tenements, back courts, workshops, railway lines; kitchen windows opening out onto panoramas of crowded gravestones and trees. The dead always in sight of the living. Surprisingly, perhaps, many of these cemeteries are still in use today. The plots used and re-used over the decades, the names on the stones bearing witness to a city of immigrants, as all cities are cities of immigrants, immigrants with Slav names, Polish, Russian, Czech, and from every part of German-speaking Europe.
Two of the most beautiful of these Berlin cemeteries are on Chausseestrasse in the old centre of the city. At the end of the Second World War it was included in the eastern Soviet sector, a half-city which in 1949 became the capital of the new German Democratic Republic – East Germany – set up in opposition to the Federal Republic in West Germany.
Directly on Chausseestrasse, separated from it and the whooshing clanking of the passing trams by a brick wall, is the smaller of the two graveyards, the former French or Huguenot cemetery. Forming a semi-circle above the door of the tiny chapel are the comforting and very un-Brechtian words: ‘Nous les croyons perdus, mais ils dorment’ – We think them lost, but they are sleeping. Behind the Huguenot cemetery, but approached from the road by a broad sand and gravel track – there are trees alongside, but it’s not quite an avenue – is the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrich Werder graveyard, usually referred to simply as the Dorotheenstädtische or Dorotheen graveyard. Laid out in the second half of the 18th century just beyond the Oranienburg Gate of the then city wall, this was originally the burial ground of the Dorotheen and Friedrich Werder churches. (The baroque Dorotheenkirche was badky damaged during the Second World War and the ruins cleared afterwards,the neo-Gothic Friedrich Werdersche Kirche is now a sculpture museum.) Situated on the southern side of the River Spree from the cemetery, their congregations included many of the wealthiest and most prominent families of Berlin. Perhaps just as important, the parishes included the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of the Arts and, subsequently, the University, and the members of these institutions also had the right to be to be buried in the graveyard of these churches. Among the older graves here are those of the philosophers Hegel and Fichte, who helped to establish the reputation of the then new Berlin university, and of the great architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He and his students designed many of the most distinctive buildings in and around Berlin, including the Friedrich Werdersche Kirche built by Schinkel himself.
Brecht’s last home was an apartment, whose windows overlooked both graveyards, on the first floor of 125 Chausseestrasse in a complex of mid-19th century buildings abutting the track leading to the Dorotheen cemetery. He didn’t, in fact, live there very long, from October 1953 until his death in the apartment on 14th August 1956. It was, however, the final destination of his manuscripts, his library and of the objects he had taken with him during the years of exile from 1933 to 1948, like the Chinese scroll picture of The Doubter and a Japanese mask. Both are commemorated in poems written in exile, the one on the mask is an example, in its brevity and memorable turn of phrase, of what made Brecht such a popular and quotable poet.
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.
(The Mask of Evil)
By far the longest-lasting of Brecht’s three marriages was to the actress Helene Weigel, who also had an apartment at 125 Chausseestrasse. After Brecht died she took charge of the Berliner Ensemble theatre until her own death in 1971. Today Brecht’s apartment is a museum, and the building also contains the Brecht archive and the Literaturforum im Brecht Haus, which presents a regular programme of literary and political talks and discussions, often, but not exclusively Brecht-related. A somewhat gloomy restaurant in the basement serves dishes purportedly taken from Weigel’s (Viennese) recipes.
In April 1954 Brecht’s theatre group, the Berliner Ensemble, had finally been allocated the newly restored Theater am Schiffbauerdamm as a permanent home. In 1928 this same theatre had seen the premiere and first run of Brecht’s greatest commercial success Die Dreigroschenoper – The Threepenny Opera with music by Kurt Weill. The Brecht and Weigel home was only a few hundred yards from the theatre, close to the River Spree, likewise only a few hundred yards from the theatre’s rehearsal stage, and not far, either, from a number of other theatres. These included the Deutsches Theater, made famous by Max Reinhardt, where the ensemble had been a guest troupe while waiting for its own theatre, the Volksbühne, the historic home of naturalism and before 1933 closely associated with the Social Democratic Party, the Maxim Gorki Theatre in the former Singakademie, the Komische Oper, the State Opera on Unter den Linden (which was still being restored at the time) and the ruin of the old Court and State Theatre – another of Schinkel’s designs – on Gendarmenmarkt, which would eventually be rebuilt as a concert hall and not as a theatre. Close by, too, were the artists’ club ‘Die Möwe’ (The Seagull), an important meeting place and, also, the government and Party offices and the representative institutions of the new East German state. A few hundred yards to the west [Clärchens Ballhaus!] was the boundary of the eastern and western sectors of the city. In the 1950′s there was not yet an impregnable ‘Berlin Wall’ and Berliners, not least actors and other theatre people, still moved relatively freely between the two halves of the city.
Brecht chose to be buried in the Dorotheen Cemetery: an island of continuity and calm (its trees growing again) in a city still full of ruins. No doubt, as a Marxist, he also liked the thought of marking his place in German culture alongside Hegel, the great promoter of the dialectic in the study of philosophy and history, and a profound influence on Karl Marx and a whole generation of radical intellectuals, who developed Hegel’s method in ways in ways of which he would scarcely have approved. Brecht, at any rate, was not buried with the martyrs of revolution and the Socialist and Communist leaders at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery far to the east of the city centre. In any case he wasn’t even a Party member and never had been.
The grave is on the first path to the right off the main track, with the Huguenot cemetery behind it. In the shelter of two brick walls at right angles, overshadowed by a large maple tree, are two unhewn grey granite boulders, the taller one simply marked Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956, the lower broader one bearing only the name Helene Weigel. The pairing suggests a monogamous harmony, a couple grown trustingly old together, which was very far from the reality of Brecht and Weigel’s life. On the next parallel path, close together, Hegel and Fichte. Also nearby are the graves of other writers and writers who made a commitment to the German Democratic Republic, to ‘building Socialism on German soil’ (or who at least believed that the best, progressive German republican and cultural traditions were much more likely to be continued in East than in West Germany.) Among them are Heinrich Mann, who died still in the United States as he was about to leave for East Berlin, but whose ashes were later interred here; the novelists Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig, the writer and poet Stephan Hermlin, the poet and GDR minister Johannes R. Becher, the graphic artist John Heartfield, the scholars Werner Krauss and Jürgen Kuczynski. By choosing this final resting place close to the centre of Berlin, Brecht set an example which others wished to follow, establishing a kind of Socialist cultural pantheon in the Biedermeier setting of the Dorotheen cemetery.
Also buried here, however, are a number of Brecht’s collaborators and friends, including some he had already known and worked with in the 1920′s. Hanns Eisler, perhaps the most brilliant of the composers with whom Brecht worked, is directly opposite Brecht and Weigel. A little to the left of Eisler are the graves of the more pedestrian Paul Dessau and of his wife, Ruth Berghaus. She succeeded Weigel as director of the Berliner Ensemble, from 1971 to 1977, and was to prove much more talented and innovative in developing Brechtian theatre. She was forced out by the Brecht heirs and subsequently made an even greater name for herself in the West as an opera director. Further along: Erich Engel, a theatre and film director with whom Brecht had worked as early as 1922/23. Although half-Jewish, Engel had remained in Germany throughout the Nazi years. He joined Brecht in Berlin as soon as the latter returned. Brecht trusted Engel, who had himself been a radical theatre reformer, more than any other director of his work, and it was he who took over Brecht’s last production (The Life of Galileo) at the Berliner Ensemble, when the latter became too weak to continue. A little further away is Arnolt Bronnen, a buddy and fellow playwright when Brecht was beginning to make his way in Berlin in the 1920′s. Like Brecht he was a young man on the make with big ambitions and a big mouth. Unlike Brecht he moved sharply to the right and by the late 20′s was an active Nazi, even becoming a speech writer for Goebbels; he later recanted, returned to the Left, came back to East Berlin from Vienna at the beginning of the 1950′s, becoming finally a noted theatre critic for the Communist press. Also nearby: the Bulgarian Slatan Dudow, who co-directed the film Kuhle Wampe with Brecht in the early 1930′s, and the stage director Wofgang Langhoff, who helped keep Brecht’s name as a playwright alive in Europe with productions at the Zürich Schauspielhaus.
At the outermost limit of this petrified choreography, in the most distant corner of the cemetery, close by Hannoversche Strasse, on which there is no entrance, lie two of Brecht’s most important collaborators (and lovers), Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897-1973) and Ruth Berlau (1906-1974). Elisabeth Hauptmann had played a crucial role in initiating the writing of The Threepenny Opera, when she noticed the success of a 1926 revival of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in London and translated the text for Brecht. Much later, after his death, she was the first editor Brecht’s work. The relationship with the Danish Ruth Berlau was one of the most intense and sustained of Brecht’s liaisons and also had as its legacy a number of works. The rather dismissive consignment of the two women to the edge of the graveyard, far away from the famous men, or women formally legitimated by marriage to men, almost seems to confirm the arguments of those who have accused Brecht of plagiarising and exploiting his collaborators, especially women (even though their contributions are credited in the German editions of the works). The tragi-comic position of the two women, facing one another, rivals in death as in life, is perhaps better explained by the influence and role of Brecht’s ‘official wife’, Helene Weigel, in East Germany after his death. Bitterly and proudly she declared: “Now it’s my Brecht”. Official GDR policy was concerned to put Brecht beyond criticism, to monumentalise him. Brecht and Weigel were presented as a great partnership, and Weigel was enshrined, somewhat paradoxically given the nature of the play itself, as the ‘Mother Courage’ of the young state. The libertinism of Brecht and his circle did not fit very well with such an image. And so Weigel’s competitors were banished as far away from Brecht’s and her resting place together as was possible without actually putting them out on the street.
What the presence of all these collaborators, surrounding him even in death, indicates very strikingly, is Brecht’s ability to gain and keep loyalty and friendship. (Even the doctor, Otto Müllereisert, who verified Brecht’s death, had already been part of his secondary school clique at home in Augsburg, as had Caspar Neher, both a close friend and most favoured stage designer, which was not his only talent.) If Brecht during his schooldays had never been the most academically successful pupil, he had always been at the centre of a gang, and remained so for the rest of his life (even if the gang could be called a team, a collective or an ensemble). It was the ideal way to work in the theatre, for one thing, and he loved to debate and create by way of discussion and was never shy of taking up suggestions or advice. Nevertheless he always remained the boss, whose unmistakeable style, tone, themes and questions make up the works of poetry, drama, prose and theory we know today as ‘Brecht’.
Of course, for all the names we see gathered around Brecht in the Dorotheen cemetery, the great majority of those who worked with him are not here.
In the early 1940′s, at the beginning of his period of exile in southern California, Brecht wrote a number of poems about the ‘missing’ of those years, as Nazism spread murderously outwards from Germany across Europe. Among the less familiar is this short and untitled one:
“where is benjamin, the critic?
where is warschauer, the radio man?
where is steffin, the teacher?
(the critic)
benjamin is buried at the spanish border.
(The radio man)
warschauer is buried in holland.
steffin is buried in moscow.
I drive past the bomber wharves of Los Angeles.”
(Walter Benjamin, the great Marxist critic and historian had, in the course of the 1930′s become both a friend and one of the best, sympathetic critics of Brecht’s work; Frank Warschauer had been one of Brecht’s closest friends in his early days in Berlin; Margarete Steffin, who died of TB in Moscow as Brecht and his family escaped from Europe by travelling across the Soviet Union and the Pacific to the US West Coast, had been a close collaborator, a stimulus and a lover – My general has fallen/My soldier has fallen//My pupil has gone away/My teacher has gone away, he wrote of her. He concludes another poem, Casualty List, with the lines Some/These death fetched. Others/Left me for the necessities of life/Or luxury.)
Among those not in the ‘last gang’ are the many who never returned from American exile (some ceasing to be ‘exiles’). Like Peter Lorre, whom Brecht begged to join the Berliner Ensemble: Rich or poor/Healthy or sick/Forget everything/And come. (Lorre may have reckoned that it would be difficult to maintain his drug habit in postwar Berlin); Lion Feuchtwanger, who early on recognised Brecht’s talent, fictionalising him in the novel Success as far back as 1929, who was refused US citizenship because of his politics and was afraid he would not be allowed to return to the United States if he left; and, of course, Kurt Weill. He and Brecht had already quarrelled before Hitler came to power. Genuinely friendly relations were never re-established, partly because Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, heartily disliked the ‘genius’. Nevertheless, in the United States Weill twice set Brecht poems in something like his ‘old’ style, rather than his American musical one. Weill never returned to Germany, though Lotte Lenya visited and performed there after her husband’s death in 1950. The great Jewish actor Alexander Granach died in late 1945 in New York as he was about to return to Europe. Karl Korsch, the Marxist politician and theorist and something like a mentor to Brecht, likewise never returned, also dying in the United States, in 1961. Among those who had not emigrated was the great comedian Karl Valentin. A profound influence on Brecht (as on Samuel Beckett), though not remotely a Marxist or an intellectual, he was never likely to be prised away from Bavaria and Munich. And then there were other more tragic cases (besides those already mentioned above): like the actor and director Kurt Gerron, the Tiger Brown of the first production of The Threepenny Opera; Jewish, he went to Holland after the Nazi seizure of power and was overtaken there by the German invasion in 1940. He was deported to Theresienstadt in 1944, organised a cabaret, and was then forced or persuaded to work on the notorious Nazi propaganda film The Führer Gives a City to the Jews. After completion of the film he was transported to Auschwitz and gassed on arrival. Or there was Carola Neher: luminously beautiful as Polly Peachum in G.W. Pabst’s film of The Threepenny Opera, she made the wrong choice of partner in the Soviet Union and disappeared in the Gulag in the late 1930′s. And others for one good reason or another are simply buried elsewhere, the singer and actor Ernst Busch in a cemetery in the Berlin district of Pankow, Caspar Neher in Vienna(?).
In recent years there have been further burials of the prominent and famous on the Dorotheen cemetery. They include Rudolf Bahro a Marxist dissident in the GDR and later a founder of the Green Party in West Germany, the writer and film-maker Thomas Brasch, the film-maker Frank Beyer, and in 2003 the remains of the philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse, who had died in 1979, were finally laid to rest here. There have also been figures who will still be associated with Brecht, for example the great Marxist critic Hans Mayer, who had been forced to leave East Germany in 1963, and who repeatedly wrote on Brecht. Above all, there’s the playwright Heiner Müller. His very appearance drew on Brecht as model and anti-model, as did his plays, at once exemplary in their deployment of the dialectic method, yet also increasingly dense, and at times opaquely poetic. He was perhaps Brecht’s greatest student as a dramatist, but no epigone. He died in 1995 shortly after taking over the Berliner Ensemble as sole director.
I went to the Dorotheen cemetery for the first time more than twenty years ago. On that occasion someone had left a half-smoked cigar on top of Brecht’s gravestone – photographs of Brecht often show him, even as a young man, with a cigar – just as one might respectfully place a pebble on a Jewish grave. Last year, in November 2005, when I visited, there were plenty of pebbles, as well as carnations, on the large, square block on Hanns Eisler’s grave (he was Jewish). There were roses on a number of stones, including a yellow and a red one for Ruth Berghaus. The Jewish custom of putting down pebbles had meanwhile spread, however, to the graves of those who were by no means Jewish by birth. Perhaps because in a post-Christian society the placing of a pebble can seem a more appropriate act than laying flowers, suggestive of a belief in resurrection, which will often simply be allowed to wither and wilt and decay messily. Also it’s often easy enough to pick up a pebble and place it down – though pebbles are hard to find on the sandy paths of the Dorotheen cemetery. There is of course the oddity and irony, that the Dorotheen cemetery, a nominally Christian graveyard has come to be the resting place not only of so many Communists and ex-Communist Leftists, free thinkers and revolutionaries, but that a considerable number of them were, at the very least, born into Jewish families.
At any rate, whatever form the markers of respect take, if we see them as indications of rising and falling stock or reputation, then Brecht’s no longer stands so high for visitors to the Dorotheen cemetery. Now he had been accorded only a few pebbles. In contrast on Heiner Müller’s plot, with its striking rust-red iron stela, designed by Jannis Kounellis(?) and reminiscent of a Moslem burial column, there are pebbles, roses and an empty packet of Cohiba cigars. (Müller was buried with a full box of Montecristo Havannas, smoking probably killed him, but now he can keep on doing it without any more worries.) On my previous visit a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses of the kind the playwright used to wear had been laid down in the right-hand corner of the plot. And the time before that there were three cigars (and a rose).
It was a quiet overcast November day, the smell of leaves and damp earth, the birch trees almost leafless. I was alone, observed only by a tabby cat with very long whiskers, keeping at a cautious distance from me, slipping under the evergreen bushes.
(The last part of ‘The Brecht Gang’ was first published in the 2010 Catalogue of Seagull Books, Calcutta.)