Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  And it came to pass that from one of the allocations, 870 more pairs of soles were carved than could normally be carved by the most efficient utilization of raw material. Horst-Jürgen Stoffel thus found himself in a ticklish dilemma: as an upstanding entrepreneur, he was obliged to register the increased output; but if he reported the overproduction, then inevitably the assholes at the Industry Office would cut the allocations by enough raw material for 870 pairs of soles (or else expect the same overproduction for the same allocation from that day forward), and, moreover, they would demand an accounting for the missing 870 pairs of soles from all previous allocations. Stoffel got out of this predicament by simply “remaindering” the extra 870 soles on the black market.

  I don’t remember what price was fetched by a pair of black-market wooden soles in 1947—Stoffel, at any rate, got 150 marks a pair from the middleman, a paltry sum when one recalls that fifteen Wild Woodbine cigarettes cost the same at that time. Still and all, Stoffel had 130,500 marks in his hands. To be sure, that was worth no more than 13,050 cigarettes, roughly what an average smoker puffs into the atmosphere, after a brief incorporation into his pleural cavity, over the course of, say, fifteen months—

  what could be more obvious than taking the money, which could so easily dissolve into thin air, and investing it in an industry that creates ephemeral shadow plays? Horst-Jürgen Stoffel applied to the military government for a license to produce movies.

  Of course, there were other reasons, linked to the times. Hamburg, as we know, is called the Gateway to the World, and during those winter days it was worthy of the name. Never before or since has it been the scene of such animate transience as in the first phases of the mass migrations (not yet arranged by travel agencies but triggered by the advancing Russians), when the natives of Brandenburg (pushed by the Upper and Lower Silesians, who passed through Lausitz and the Magdeburg plains into the Hanover region, and from there northward to Schleswig-Holstein, only to be shoved toward Hesse by the Pomeranians and East Prussians, who were driving the Mecklenburgers before them) advanced into Bavarian territory in order to avoid the Thuringians, who had likewise started moving, while the Rheinlanders, who had been evacuated into the Warthegau, tried to trade positions with the Poles who had been hauled to the mines in the Ruhr; however, the Rheinlanders were severely hindered by the Sudeten Germans, who had been thrown westward and whose flanks were being attacked by Transylvanian Saxons and Bukovinan Germans (Gaia used to say: What do you need to make a good salad? A spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar—and a madman to keep tossing it and tossing it).

  Anyway, back then things were extraordinarily animated. Although the means and routes of transportation were demolished and also inhibited by countless checkpoints, incessant swarms of people trickled along the provisionally patched-up nervous system of the Western Zone road network. Trains were so thickly breaded with people that they looked like rainworms after rolling in sand. Railroad stations were military encampments. Basement waiting rooms were like the dormitory of Sainte-Brigitte . . .

  And thus, of course, there were all kinds of unexpected meetings. Human destinies interpleated unpredictably, and attachments formed; Christa (whose meager hoard of language was enriched with the lovely images of a farmyard childhood) said, “Cow and donkey harnessed to the plow.”

  •

  And so where Stoffel’s application for a license is concerned, it was assisted by just such an—at first blush—heterogeneous attachment. You see, the originally involuntary migratory instinct had also seized hold of the moviemakers. But not necessarily every survivor of Ufa Films was incited to move from Berlin-Babelsberg to Munich-Geiselgasteig. A few flocks wound up in Hamburg. There, in the subterranean makeshift waiting room of an eye doctor, Horst-Jürgen Stoffel had his fateful (especially for Nagel and me) encounter with Astrid von Bürger, the emancipated daughter of a professor of metallurgy at the Technical University of Berlin. In blitzkrieg times, by way of the School of Physical Culture, she had become a movie extra at Babelsberg, where a friendly cameraman had got her a tiny part, through which she had caught Reich Minister Goebbels’s eye and then quickly risen to Greater German film fame.

  Astrid was a smug girl. In later years, long after divorcing Horst-Jürgen, ruefully renouncing the cinematic art, and remarrying, this time a solid electronics industrialist named Häberle, bearing him flocks of children, and moving to an attractive mountain farm in the Alpine lime countryside south of Bad Tölz (and if she hasn’t died, then she’s still living there today!), she would tell about this meeting in an unadulterated Berlin-Charlottenburg accent:

  “Man, if that wasn’t love at first dim sight! . . . I’m sitting on that poor sinner’s bench in the basement office, waiting to be ushered in to ol’ Doc Four Eyes because my specs had dropped and the last Russian in Berlin had tramped on them with his Siberian boots, and without one and a half diopters I can’t tell the difference between the ‘ladies’ sign and the ‘gentlemen,’ and the guy’s dragged down the stairs by two other guys like a plaster war casualty on the Pergamon frieze, and they drop him very carefully in an armchair, and he keeps holding this neatly folded handkerchief over his eye, because while he was inspecting his factory in Dumpsville on Shit’s Creek, a splinter from one of his dolls had flown into his eye, and then he takes the handkerchief off his bloodshot li’l piggy eye and gives me such a heartrending look through his veil of tears, like I should feel a little sorry for him on account of his little boo-boo—and all that plus the blond lock over his thinker’s brow, ya know, and him taller than a centurion and stuffed to the hilt, his flesh white as boiled cod—well, I say to myself, Astrid my girl, I say, you’re gonna buy that rubber lion, he’s one of the blow-up kind, you can let off the overpressure, it’s as easy as pie. That’s my kind of man—it’s not for nothing I’m singing my Häberle’s praises still today. . .”

  •

  But I too (in contrast to Christa and, incidentally, Nagel) did not find the combination of Astrid von Bürger and Horst-Jürgen Stoffel to be all that bad. For semantic reasons, to be sure: in my opinion, the two names dovetailed marvelously:

  and it was with their names that they first entered my life: through Nagel, who came to me one day and spoke so glowingly of the founding of Astra Films and of the lofty couple.

  Apparently, Horst-Jürgen’s temporarily and unilaterally dimmed vision had likewise instantly recognized Astrid as his ideal love object.

  Because of the above-indicated mutual readiness, it didn’t take much courtship; besides, Stoffel had only to give a little free play to his talent for procuring things, and any female would melt. Winsenon-the-Luhe was surrounded by farms, in which cows, pigs, and all kinds of domestic fowl were still thriving. A wood-processing plant had something to offer, a fair exchange with mutual profit. A good country ham could get a nice number of bottles of whiskey, the whiskey in turn brought willing ears at the traffic office—i.e., a car permit and a gasoline allocation; with the car one could go in for large-scale butter hoarding; the butter could be exchanged for nylon stockings and plenty of toiletries; for a bottle of Chanel No. 5 any farmer’s wife in the Lüneburg Heath would give up her resistance and hand over any home-cured ham. In short, a smoothly running perpetuum mobile. No sooner were his eyes fixed than Horst-Jürgen read all of his Astrid’s wishes in her eyes—and behold: her wishes coincided with his.

  For what, after all, can be the foremost wish of a movie actress who has only just reached the zenith of her career and suddenly cannot make movies because, as a result of world-historical events, there is no such thing as a movie company? Don’t worry about it, darling, we’ll start our own. Here’s a ham, you can get so and so much scotch for it, for scotch there’s Chanel No. 5, for Chanel No. 5 the goodwill of the German secretary (and bedmate) of the military government’s cultural officer, he’ll give you not only a license but also, of course, film, and several automobile permits with the necessary gasoline allocations, which means butter again
(and more of it); for butter, cigarettes again; for cigarettes, ham again; after all, we’ve got to crank up the economy in this pigsty, and first and foremost the movie business.

  And in the movie business, Astrid knew every man who wasn’t out of the picture—whether because he’d been killed at the hands of the enemy or on account of holding unorthodox political values or from the postwar lack of food—and every man knew her. After all, the episode with Reich Minister Goebbels had been maliciously inflated by envious and competitive witnesses; everyone in the movie business had been invited there sooner or later, anyone who didn’t go was risking his life for nothing—in any case: “Stop carrying on, Karl. When they wanted to stick you in the propaganda company, you opted to take part in Jud Süss—right? Just keep quiet, kid; when they strung up your Lisa it didn’t have anything to do with the resistance, it was because of the Bulgarian she kept running around with, they couldn’t find him then because he’d taken off—right? Don’t imagine you can spin something for yourself out of it . . . So, cheers, friends! To Astra! And to the great future of the reborn German screen!”

  •

  We received tidings of the rise of the Astra Art Films Company before this star had ascended in full radiance over the horizon. Horst-Jürgen Stoffel’s entrepreneurial dynamics and organizational talent (supported by Astrid’s knowledge of the industry) kept him, of course, from overlooking the fact that in order to build up a proper movie-production company (and also to get the license), he needed a so-called project—that is to say, a subject to grind through the lens—and for that, in turn, he required the work of intellectually creative people.

  But this too was no problem. Intellectuals too had washed ashore in Hamburg. The occupation-controlled radio had a nest of them. And these people had gotten through the political filters; you didn’t have to worry that their intellectual products might be marked with stains of the past—

  but unfortunately, they were still intellectuals. The ideas they suggested were miles from what Horst-Jürgen Stoffel’s healthy folk sensibility expected to see on the screen, especially at a historic moment when the masses, oppressed by collective feelings of guilt, should be granted messianic promise from that very screen.

  (“Well, if it were up to me, the movie would simply have to be called A Silver Lining to the Cloud—laugh all you want, Astrid, but this much even I understand about movies, I know they’re a mass-market article, and so the public alone decides what it does or doesn’t want to see—and believe me, darling, I’m not living in an ivory tower, I have contact with people every day, not old Kurfürstendamm coffeehouse hangers-on but farmers, workers, factory managers, railroad employees, businessmen: these people expect us to give them a guide-post for the future, and a future that they understand, that they can tackle with their own hands, that they can see emerging from the labor of their own hands—believe me, gentlemen, and you too, darling: political philosophy is of no interest to people now, they’ve had it up to here, it’ll come automatically anyway, what they really care about is things that are strictly human, that are close to them: Give us this day our daily bread—right? And for now that’s it—and then maybe: And forgive us our debts . . .”)

  Little in this connection could be expected from the intellectuals who were creating “The Cultural Word” at the Northwest German Radio Network.

  (“Just listen to just one of those programs—why, it’s nothing but coffeehouse chitchat—and it doesn’t even have the pep the Jews developed way back when at the Romanisches Café.”)

  still, that’s where the solution came from. One of the secretaries of the church radio program was friends with Ute Seelsorge, who had told her a great deal about the fascinating discussion evenings at the home of a young writer named Karl Nagel—

  in a word: the cinema bigwig Stoffel came and (to put it in the graphic lingo of the executive world, which, thank heaven, has taken over the cultural business) “made a pitch to Nagel.”

  •

  From the first few discussions with Horst-Jürgen Stoffel and Astrid von Bürger, Nagel returned home with the euphoria of a lover freshly struck by his gracious madness—and thus also duly and ardently communicative. I couldn’t help basically agreeing:

  “To judge by the name, it seems to be a promising connection: Jürgen as in George the Dragon Slayer with the defiant lofty eagle’s eyrie in Horst and the earthbound rootedness in Stoffel—plus the North Star, Astrid, over the delicate sociological synthesis of von and Bürger—the nobility of the mind, no doubt?”

  Nagel bared a fang.

  “Is she blond?” I asked.

  No. He was blond: Stoffel. Straw blond. She was dark. An Icelandic queen. I was shown a photo (charming dedication, primitively printed: “To the Nagel in my coffin!—Astrid”)—

  Aha, so she was the one . . .

  •

  I should have known, of course. It’s true I rarely go (and rarely went back then) to the movies, but this face had been hard to get away from in the last years of the war, even outside the movie theater.

  Even after carpet bombs had flattened whole city districts, the unshakeable effigy of the beautiful Astrid had kept smiling down from tattered posters at the population (who, according to Reich Minister Goebbels, were not intimidated even by such acts of terrorism) or was wafted along on the singed front page of the Berliner Illustrierte, fluttering in the warm-air currents over the glowing remains of conflagrations. The face was beautiful, alert, bold, and base—the human epitome of the invincible baseness of the capital of the German Reich . . .

  But good old Nagel couldn’t know anything of this. For all his knowledge of the world (“The Bulgarian is the Prussian of the Balkans”), Berlin remained a blank spot on his intellectual map. Berlin in general, and certainly the Berlin shortly before and shortly after Stalingrad. At that time, he had been in the war, good old Nagel, risking his neck, while I . . .

  For me, in any case, this picture of a sassy female face surrounded by Brunhilde hair immediately brought to mind very specific associations—

  I was afflicted by an entire era: three years of draft-dodging in a virtually manless city crashed in on me; the cynicism of these years melded with a cheeky spiritus loci, the bad spirit of a city that has given up its spirit . . . I could hear its (to my Austrian ears) dreadful jargon, the pulp-novel name Astrid von Bürger evoked a whole Berlin ballad, churned out of a hurdy-gurdy like a lyrical toilet-paper roll, collapsing at the end of each stanza in a rooty-toot-toot as if under a cascade of shards, and then unabashedly straightening up again like a bounce-back doll. I was irresistibly tempted to do something malicious: hadn’t Nagel betrayed me, his bosom buddy, in the beautiful crèche period, to Hertzog? Hadn’t he betrayed our sacred buddyship even further by retreating into his garden house and assiduously writing without letting me in on his plans, his ordeals and triumphs? . . . Very well! I could write too. It was mainly valuable for myself; an act of overcoming the past—but, of course, it was primarily meant to be funny (in the spirit of my school days in Vienna, naturally): I wanted to make Nagel laugh. And if the verses of the poem that I dedicated to the “poet” Nagel evinced all my hatred of recent historical events, then it was, as Stoffel would have said, “on account of the times.” I, for my part, wanted to amuse the good Nagel, not shock, much less offend him. Not even with the title of the poem:

  Per Aspera Ad Astra

  The Rise of a Movie Star in the Third Reich

  Head to Wannsee, my dear child,

  Where you’ll still find waters mild—

  Cool your German maiden’s foot

  Arm held out in stern salute

  Rip that linen off your body

  And be a lady!

  Throw the ball and catch it quick

  Lie down flat upon your back

  Then stand up straight as a rod

  Bend forward and side to side

  Put your hands on both your hips—

  That way they can see your tits—

&
nbsp; Slip your pubis from your pants

  And try your best while in this stance

  To smile with chin between your ankles

  Careless as a draft evader:

  Give the cameraman his fill

  And keep still.

  For he’s one cool customer,

  Whom it seems the reigning order

  Like a blessing from the sky

  Amidst the bombs and flames and cries

  Has set right here before your feet—

  And for cheap.

  And if he’s no proper Aryan

  Like a Mecklenburg agrarian,

  Really you mustn’t complain—

  What would all the others say

  Whose dear beaus have all been done in

  Slaughtered round the Donets Basin?

  When the Volk are all off fighting

  Then at home it bears inviting

  Serbs and Turks, Indians, Persians

  In the end they’re all God’s children

  Just let the man do his best

  As ersatz.

  Out there on the sunny sand

  Give yourself with heart and hand

  Joyful sport on his dark hide

  (After all you are his bride)

  With saliva-softened hand

  Coax it out, his merry glans:

  For that’s where it has to differ

  From the Jewish member.

  Let him also, without haste,

  Feel around below your waist

  Germany’s youth have a right

  To their Aryan delight;

  Let the goatherd at it too—

  Their kind know a thing or two;

  Alas, they know much more besides—

  Who knew they came in such a size!

  Therefore don’t forget, take heed:

  Lest the court should judge your deed.