Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  All this is known. Most of my German contemporaries went through it themselves (meanwhile, cinematic artworks have come to us from America envisioning the day after the annihilation of the world by hydrogen bombs: the mood is pretty much the same), so I can spare myself the trouble of describing it in detail. The only interesting thing is that this grim wintertide stayed with me rather traumatically—but only by virtue of its loss.

  What people don’t know (or at least don’t generally remember) is that it was heartrendingly human. It was certainly no radiant humanity (like, for instance, that of the late Herr Doktor Albert Schweitzer, who was being held up to everyone as an example) but, rather, the dismal, gray-faced humanity of slums—and, despite all the anguishing nuances, the story is ultimately of biblical simplicity: the evil are bad, the good good; the lukewarm lukewarm, the fiery fiery; the wise wise, the fools foolish; the smart people smart, the stupid ones stupid.

  That’s how simple the world was (until the day when the weather changed again as though by magic, marked in my notes as the “day of the currency cut”): almost a picture-book world.

  People dealt plainly with one another (almost everyone wore rags). If you had nothing to say, then you held your tongue (although the man who held his tongue was not necessarily the one who had nothing to say); but if someone talked, you listened. If he talked nonsense, you promptly told him so: people weren’t shy in those days (they had already learned the meaning of fear). If you asked someone for something and he turned you down, you accepted that as his privilege and didn’t hold a grudge. If someone gave you something, you were grateful. If someone stole something from you, you let him go (you would probably have done the same in his place). If you had no bed to sleep in, you pushed a couple of sleeping people closer together and lay down next to them—and if they drove you away, they had bad dreams afterward. Anyone who didn’t want to share his piece of bread ate it alone and was ashamed (or else wasn’t: that was his privilege). Any man who coveted his neighbor’s wife was a wonderboy: just where did he get the calories?!

  Most likely, a very few did live in joy, in the lap of luxury, on the gravy train. But they were marked. Marked not to be condemned but to be marveled at: extraordinarily vital (or miserable) existences. To put it tersely and topically: the middle-class categories were canceled. Values were drawn not from ideologies but from living reality—in nouns, not adjectives: my friend the black-marketeer. That asshole of a food official. Unsophisticated, plain, and simple.

  All in all, it was a wonderful time.

  •

  It was the time when Christa had every reason to be jealous of Nagel. I truly loved him. His makeshift home was a garden house that a couple of nearby bombs had torn askew (our home was the remnants of the adjoining villa on the Elbchaussee: Christa was counted among the relatives of the victims of the Twentieth of July, to whom the assholes at the housing office gave preference). And here, I made up for the boy-scout romanticism I had avoided in wise timidity during my formative years in Vienna (albeit not without secretly envying my cousin Wolfgang, who joined everything). We distilled turnip liquor in an apparatus cobbled together out of two old watering cans. We lay in wait on the Elbe ice to catch starving coots. Once, we even bagged one, and in order to roast it festively, Nagel burned his cello (he couldn’t play it now anyway, not with one hand). In the evenings, when we snuggled under an old horse blanket like orphaned brothers, field-flower bouquets of delightful stories blossomed from the fiery mouth of the little iron stove (to which we had fed Christa’s portable gramophone—I wanted to contribute my fair share, after all). Christa, meanwhile, lay in bed in the ruined villa and pouted.

  No one could tell such marvelous stories as Nagel. He had lived through a lot and was a keen observer. After all, he had made up his mind to write at a very early age—a reader of Jack London and Joseph Conrad, later an enthusiastic adept of Knut Hamsun, and then, of course, Hemingway. He had had all the experiences that I had not had: the hard, deliciously variegated, adventurous reality of life. Everything I still have not managed to experience. When scarcely an adolescent, he had run off with a circus. For one and a half months—still and all. When they caught up with him, his parents put him in the doghouse, but six weeks later, he was off again: signed up as cabin boy on a tiny freighter that plowed the Baltic Sea. Only one round trip, to be sure, but the wind hit Force Nine three times. His father was a beer-brewery engineer in Harburg. At sixteen, Nagel could drink like a fish and was kicked out of the Hitler Youth for insubordination. A resistance fighter, obviously. Shortly before he was supposed to graduate from high school, he punched his teacher, was expelled, and entered the Labor Service. He dug ditches in the hills of the Rhön and learned how to fly a glider; he fell from an altitude of thirteen feet and broke his leg. Wearing a cast, he took a makeup exam; and no sooner could he walk again than he strapped on a rucksack, according to the good old German tradition, and, with the laudable humanistic goal of hiking along the entire route of Goethe’s first voyage to Italy, set off. But because he was nearing conscription age, the assholes at the passport office refused to give him a passport; embittered, he went to the coal district of Upper Silesia, where he worked underground for eight weeks with a safety lamp on his forehead (I was familiar with the white-toothed smile in his blackened face from his dealings with the iron stove). Then he had an idea. He went to Munich and, by way of old comrades from the Labor Service, contacted a certain Party agency, which, after a brief training period (he already knew about explosives from the mine), sent him across the Alpine border to infiltrate Austria as a provocateur.

  There, however, he didn’t spend much time provoking the Schuschnigg regime, which was decaying anyway (his opinion of Austrians was never high; he found fault with me too, certain features that he ascribed to my formative years in Vienna: inadequate solidity of character, for instance, hence also careless squandering of a certain talent for linguistic artistry). He gave up political agitation among the cisleithan assholes and (a forerunner, a pioneer, of hitchhike tourism) thumbed his way across Switzerland to Italy. There (more dynamic than Goethe), he forged ahead through Terracina, all the way to Palermo, crossed over to Libya, traipsed along the North African coast to Ceuta (a florilegium of small adventures—nowhere near as vividly narrated as on those frost-crackling winter evenings under the horse blanket—has just been put out by Scherping). Next, he crossed the Fretum Herculeum, navigating his own sailboat, and, by way of Spain and France (five fantastic days in Paris: brothel visit and so on!), he came back to Germany. While crossing the border, he was intercepted. He had neglected to obey his draft notice, had not promptly answered the call of duty, and was therefore considered a deserter. The outcome could have been unpleasant, but his father (fortunately a World War I veteran, Iron Cross First Class, gold Party pin) ironed the matter out. Of course, his offspring was promptly inducted into the Wehrmacht.

  Uniformed, shorn, given hell, thrown in the guardhouse, put on latrine-cleaning detail (“I’m gonna make you slave like Augeas, you fucker!”). Then, as a reward for the work accomplished, he was allowed to belly through the Lüneburg Heath in full battle dress and kit. In revenge, young Nagel (familiarized, incidentally, with the teachings of Sigmund Freud during his travels abroad) drew the necessary conclusions from the twofold Oedipus situation with his father the beer-brewer and with Father State and became a Communist. However, an active cultivation of this anything but popular ideological direction was obstructed by the war.

  But in those days, when the ice wind tattered the angels’ frozen feathers, something glowed over the crooked garden house of the villa on the Elbchaussee: the star under which our allegedly rationalist yet ardently myth-believing century has ever sought the start of a new Golden Age.

  Nagel had ignited the star. He had, of course, enriched it with evangelical rays (he had met God in the war—a story that has been served up to his readers in several versions), but the model was still recognizable.

  From
among those who had returned and those who had stayed at home, refugees, stragglers, and drifters, a small circle of like-minded and simply conversation-minded people had formed around him, and this circle now drank our home-brewed turnip schnapps, rolled cigarettes out of the tobacco Christa raised on the manure pile (she, meanwhile, lay in bed and pouted), and overcame the unovercomable past (which back then was the present of yesterday). People discussed Karl Marx, Ortega y Gasset, and Hemingway, the Bible, Hermann Broch, Camus and Sartre, Max Weber, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and, promiscuously and chaotically, just about everything we got wind of. Anyone who came emptied out of his pocket not only crumbs of sugar, ersatz coffee, herring paste, or cigarettes but also the tiny hoarding bag of his knowledge, emaciated by twelve years of Nazi rule. He would bring along a book he had smuggled through the Thousand Year Reich—a volume of Karl Kraus, James Joyce, Musil, Kafka—or simply a foreign newspaper, or a report on a radio program he had recently listened to, probably still with the subliminal fear of being caught. Intellectually too, it was a slum; “but,” as Nagel later wrote, “in intellectual matters, hunger is a virtue that yields miracles. Though the loaves be as meager as at the feeding of the five thousand, not only does one eat one’s fill, but one also gathers twelve baskets from the crumbs that are left over.”

  •

  Karl Nagel would not have had to encounter the most fatherly of all fathers in order to add the four rays of the Evangelists to the pentagram of politically applied historical materialism. This too was due mainly to the weather. The weather was so grim that a small iron stove, heated fairly well with now superfluous cultural instruments (we had already tackled the wooden paneling in the villa library and the shattered grand piano in the drawing room), was a wellspring of upswelling gratitude, which, in light of the prevailing circumstances, was bound to overpour into the metaphysical.

  The point is, public transportation operated poorly in those days, and for mere mortals (surviving tenaciously despite hunger edema), personal means meant one’s own two legs, and some didn’t even have that: at least three of our intellectual companions were left with only one—or one and a half, or one and three-quarters. But anyone who came wandering out all the way to the Elbchaussee on foot (or even on crutches!) had to cross the icily whistling wastelands of the Reeperbahn and Altona, thus offering up a sacrifice of almost mystical grandeur—that noble self-renunciation that gives the formations of primal communities a legendary touch. The at first sporadic but then more regular get-togethers, where we talked ourselves into a fever pitch like Dostoevskian students, took on the character of consecrated hours. Even in its spiritual meagerness there was a certain crèche-like intimacy.

  All kinds of things were talked about, and if we sometimes reached one of those moments of collective reflection that occur when someone comes out with a newish truth that is not yet shopworn, then something like a simple poignancy in the mind occurred. “Our crèche piety,” I called it when telling Schwab about it later: “There it lay before us in the straw, naked and helpless, the new itty-bitty truth; the shepherds can’t take their eyes off it; even when three Technicolor kings come out of the bitter-cold, snowy night with an ox and an ass, their eyes remain fixed on it, the itty-bitty little truthlet. May it now grow and become the All-Inspirer. It is already radiating with starry brightness to all eyes that look up to peer at one another . . .”

  This was soon to change, when, in Hertzog, we got our first pope.

  •

  Hertzog joined us by chance—but of course Nagel had denied the existence of chance ever since his personal encounter with the Almighty: hence, God sent Hertzog to us. This happened in one of the green-camouflaged months, under the meteorological phenomenon of a violent downpour. We—that is, Nagel and I, the “identical twins,” as Christa called us (without anatomical allusion, surely?)—were tinkering around with the roof shingles on the garden house. We were about to take refuge under the overhang when we collided with a figure obscured by the thick slanted hatching of raindrops, who evidently had the same idea. It was an unusually lanky and, of course, given the period, scrawny man—a gentleman, one might say, despite the socially equalizing and also dripping clothes; so that at first I assumed it was one of Christa’s countless relatives, who were always dropping in. He promptly and cordially apologized for trespassing on the rubble property, but, as he explained, he had no umbrella. Oh, well, there were worse lacks in those days.

  The rain lasted longer than its intensity might have suggested it would. So Nagel, who was bored, suggested that we wait inside until it let up. The unknown gentleman accepted gratefully; we all introduced ourselves, shaking hands and clicking our heels together according to the fine German custom—with the inevitable moment of embarrassment in regard to Nagel when the stranger’s hand remained hovering, unseized, until its owner realized that the right hand he had aimed for was missing and the left hand was being offered in its stead. And thus, we were finally in the drawing room, please have a seat, wherever you can, yes, may I over here, wherever you like, there are no reserved seats here, if you like we can hang your jacket on that crate over there to dry out, unfortunately I don’t have an umbrella, who has an umbrella nowadays anyhow, there’s no such thing anymore, it would really look funny, so you’re a psychiatrist? Yes indeed, formerly professor at the University of Greifswald, you know. Paul Hertzog’s the name, Hertzog with “tee-zee,” if you please, then, of course, I practiced at the various war theaters. Shocks, yes? Traumatic neuroses, and so on—that’s right, I couldn’t imagine this kind of research could be done in the Third Reich, and at Greifswald, to boot, right? But weren’t the mentally ill simply done away with by euthanasia? A few, of course, regrettably, but still fairly late and depending on the war situation; however, research as such did not stop altogether, by any means—Eventually, Herr Professor Hertzog with “tee-zee” got a turnip schnapps and a cigarette made with Christa’s home-grown tobacco, many thanks, but I think I have my own somewhere, no, go ahead, it’s not Virginia of course, you’re much too kind, no, I can’t roll them, I’d rather you did it for me, you see, manually I’m awfully clumsy, why you’re amazing, with only one hand—here you are, you’ve got to do your own licking, so research you say? Yes indeed—Herr Professor Hertzog spoke very interestingly about the foundations and objectives of psychiatric research during the Third Reich, Nagel threw in Freud, yes, now, of course the man hasn’t been credited highly enough for what he did, but—well, everyone knows that Freud isn’t everything, C. G. Jung, now that’s a little closer to the bone—

  In short, it ended with Professor Hertzog’s unshakable assertion that man has an innate and irrepressible need for religion, no doubt about it, one can demonstrate it scientifically, certain mental disturbances can even be diagnosed indisputably as deficiency syndromes in this respect, mental scurvy, as it were, where faith has an effect like lemon juice, I’m speaking to laymen here of course, professionally I would put it differently, oh please don’t go out of your way, these are issues we’re all very interested in, by the way, if you’d like another, we brew it ourselves, you know, yes, thank you very much, it’s damn strong, but the effect is all the more Dionysian . . . you see how even you quite unconsciously keep bringing up supernatural things; as I’ve said, psychological needs can no more be suppressed with impunity than physical ones, there’s a wide-open field here, especially for social psychology. But this is a nice coincidence. You see, we’ve been discussing this for several weeks now with a couple of friends, more in political terms, why that goes without saying, it is a highly political problem, indeed, just look: your class-stratified state is conceivable only on the basis of the patriarchal principle, without the notion of God as the most fatherly father there can be no bourgeois social structure, naturally not, but that proves precisely what I’m saying: the need for religion is natural and innate in man, just like, say, the sexual drive, and Freud showed us what happens if you suppress it, well, and rationalism is simply the other repression,
just tell our friends that, why it’s obvious, we saw it in the Russians with our own eyes, despite a quarter century of Communism those people keep swarming into the churches, well, the war machine functioned there for completely different reasons, you can’t do without psychology even here, which is what rigid materialism would like you to do, isn’t it, incidentally Stalin is also a father, and what a father at that, and you can’t say the Russians have a truly classless society, on the contrary, the Kremlin elite has distinctly aristocratic features, granted, not on the outside, no, there’s absolutely no way you can claim that, hahaha, but Moscow’s betraying Communism in many ways, and the point is: how does a classless society establish its own notion of God, yes, the process must be reversed, first alter the notion of God, then establish the appropriate state, perhaps matriarchal, why not, I tell you, it’s the theologians who are at fault here, so listen, just drop by in the evening, then we can thrash this out with our friends, I’d love to, why not, it would interest me no end, you seldom come into contact with open minds, especially in young people, well, we’re not all that young, alas, but that makes no difference, you’re as young as you feel, so do come by anyway if you have nothing better to do, I couldn’t imagine anything better, certainly not nowadays, well really. . .

  He came. Not right away, to be sure. Cunningly, he waited until winter. But then, the green-camouflaged months soon passed. Nevertheless, Nagel was in a bad mood. He evidently expected Professor Hertzog with “tee-zee” to reconstruct his view of the world, which had got considerably out of joint since the encounter with Father GOD.

  Until then, it had been solidly founded on Darwin; Marx and Engels were firmly joined on top; and Nagel had even managed to insert the seductive Nietzsche seamlessly and to paste in Freud. But since that encounter with Father GOD, his ideological edifice was stretched thin as though by bomb suction, “puffed through,” as the rubble-dwellers put it in their jargon; and his gruffness in discussions bore witness to the awful draftiness in his spiritual home. Whenever I felt like teasing him (no one could so easily and ludicrously be made to fly off the handle as Nagel), I would advise him in case of intellectual inclemency to appeal to the man who had, it was true, no umbrella, but a need for the religious. Where was he anyway? Karl Nagel would instantly get mad as a hornet. However, when winter came, so did Hertzog. A downright epiphany. Since last we’d met, he had joined the resurrected university as a fully tenured professor and senior registrar of its neuropathological hospital, thus appearing among us whippersnappers with a corresponding authority as a complete human being and scientist. Not only that, but he had succeeded in convincing the military government of the occupation forces that he had heroically resisted the euthanasia of five patients—Party members. And true virtue is rewarded even by victorious armies. Thus, he came as a father: bringing along a bottle of real schnapps and two packs of English cigarettes. Santa Claus in person. In his sack of goodies he even had a “paper” down cold (not written, needless to say, though evil tongues maintained later that he had submitted it as a postdoctoral dissertation at the university). He carried this wealth of ideas in his head. He had only to open his mouth and the ideas, marvelously formulated in a gentle baritone, spilled out like treasure. Every sentence demonstrated how conscientiously he had worked through the subject matter. It had become so air- and watertight that there was little we could do but listen. The topic was obvious. Subsequently, it appeared in countless versions, variations, combinations, in many, many domestic and foreign journals and reviews and just plain magazines, thereby acquiring worldwide fame. Naturally, of these publications, only the popular-science ones are accessible to me, those where the expert across several fields, who communicates with colleagues in a kind of Freemason’s secret code, speaks to the layman as though to a feeble-minded illiterate. And if I remember correctly, these articles are crowned with titles like “Faith and Psyche,” or “Mental Illness and the Bonds of Religion,” or “The Psychiatrist as a Christian Minister,” or even “Savior vs. Sanatorium.” But I may be mistaken. For our little group, at any rate, which he seemed to regard, flatteringly but, alas, wrongly, as the nucleus of the postwar German political elite, the contents of his paper were framed in the title “The Need for God as a Principle for Forming the State.”