Ernst Weiss and ‘The Aristocrat’

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.

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 29^th 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?

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)

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