• • •
A thought in the middle of the night (I’m having a miserable time falling asleep; I lie awake for hours and watch the sky turn gray):
Rub Scherping’s nose in Gertrude Stein’s “people are not interested in stories, people are interested in existence.” No more artfully dramatized sequences of events in which characters appear as “actors,” determining the flow of the story by acting and suffering. Instead, the weaving together of existences in the motionless time-space of the narrative—existence is pure present, has no chronologic development, is in the simultaneity of past, present, and future—
no thread is spun, but a static piece of fictive reality is woven; events that occur within it are subjectivized and no longer exist as something that can be generally experienced. Instead, they stand by themselves as a pattern, the pattern of the weave in each separate existence.
(The difference between Tolstoy and Joyce—with luck, Scherping may be familiar with their tables of contents.)
Centrifugal and centripetal narration—
To obtain nuances, highlights, etc., take up some things not germane to the action—
(Scherping’s almost unimaginable astonishment that I’m plagued by such thoughts even at night [and thus definitely outside office hours], as if I had a personal interest in them, and not just as a wage earner. In fact, they’re a blessed distraction from the swarming nightmares in the Brueghel landscape of insomnia [my murder!]
—thus: literature as escape even in this sense—)
SCHWAB
Biographical note:
He can barely recall his boyhood years (and his childhood, not at all). He dreamed his way through them. He gets self-conscious when asked about them, pussyfoots around the facts as if they embarrass him. The truth is, he has trouble reconstructing them. They lie befogged in the diffuse light of the daydreams woven through them. The “way it could have been” always superseded what was actually happening.
So he’s almost incapable of telling the story of his life as it played out in the eyes of his family. They try to remind him of this or that event and he accepts it as a possibility. He can only conjure up something approximating it if it’s interlaced with a simultaneous dream motif whose emotional color allows him to recall that epoch. The tone, the nuances in the span between major and minor allow inferences about the character of actual occurrences. For instance, the anxiety at moving from a spacious, sunny, and comfortable house to a meager, narrow apartment after his father’s death; or the grueling, eye-straining hours of study so that he could escape that cramped place as soon as possible. His dream adventures rob those days of their reality. Replayed against the pale screen of life’s trivial happenings, his dreams are incomparably more intense and he is unable to discern their motifs and elements in the actual occurrences. Reality took place (a curious way to express it, but it captures the working-out of reality) without giving the experience of the past a sturdy framework, some sort of bone structure. And so in retrospect he himself is composed of feelings without a skeleton, a sort of mollusk. It’s up to him now to give what he dreamed then a framework and thus plausibility. He has countless possible biographies within himself. (Compare that to Aristides, whose memories are a series of concrete events only retrospectively illuminated by emotion.)
The loss of reality in the realm of the factual also determines Schwab’s relationship to the persons allotted him as family. To manufacture them he has to slot them into social categories. His mother: typically déclassé, a lady who had “seen better days,” suppressed indignation in every bone of her angular body, the “daughter of a good family” fated to become a domestic slave (in contrast to Aristides’s Aunt Selma, who was just as “worn out by housework” but without reproach and without dreams either, according to the testimony of Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha). Her love for her son was strict and ambitious; she was not about to let him think that lack of means led to social decline. Poor but proud. Emphasis on intellectual, culturally elevated pursuits. Idolized father: a frock-coated professor of the Wilhelmine era, incurably behind the times, his horizon blocked by the spines of his books. Highly respectable in his role as the noble philologist. Too sure of his own knowledge to become didactic. His son perceives it painfully as open contempt (in contrast to Aristides’s Uncle Helmuth: the flat-footed engineer who sometimes indulges in an excessively good mood, tells jokes, feels an affinity with the poltergeists that serve to lubricate the sticky spiritualism of séances. Not to mention his taproom politicizing).
Schwab, never ever called by a nickname but always by the sternly biblical “Johannes,” was haunted by the joyless atmosphere at home, which in a way was a monument to his deceased father, a monument erected against the shame of impoverishment and meant to put both paternal and maternal relatives in their place. Although much better off, with deep roots in the culture of suburbanized citizen-farmers, all those merchants and bureaucrats descended from the marsh-dwellers who farmed the heath gave way deferentially to the academic but had no intention of being bullied by his poverty-stricken widow. However, they pay their respects to the deceased whose glory reflects on the entire clan. His scholarly publications are mentioned reverentially, the books he edited shelved alongside Schiller, Gustav Freytag, and Treitschke in glass-fronted bookcases. His funeral (his son is sixteen, his lineage betrayed by glasses with a hair-raising diopter number) is not without political embarrassment. One of the speakers, with a Party pin in his lapel and obviously drunk, ventures to say that the best proof of this outstanding intellectual’s National Socialist sentiments was his grasp of the fact that the Röhm purge was not a liquidation of pederastic traitors but the overthrow of good old naive brown-shirted yokels. (They arrest him right there in the cemetery.) The deceased’s son, an ogreish giant a-tremble with neuroses and risible in his faded Hitler Jugend duds, listens with loathing but is preoccupied with dreaming himself out of what is going on, out of his effective reality: his massive body, weak chest and shortness of breath, rachitic knees of a wartime infant, oxycephalic forehead (cf. Cousin Wolfgang)—a few years later all that would be packed into a field-gray uniform. His experiences in the war are terrible. Even today he still wakes up screaming. That is a reality he can’t dream his way out of. His ability to escape the here and now into a field of fantasy has been obliterated. Hence his melancholy.
P.S. His two closest relatives: an “aunt” who by hanging out with bohemian barflies completes the image of a middle-class person with petit bourgeois lifestyle but pretentions to the prestige of the upper classes. And in addition a nymphomaniac niece. Both of them embodiments of his bad conscience. Unavoidably, he’s slept with both and would give his life not to have done so.
• • •
Depict as anecdotes:
The currency reform of 1948. Parallels to March 12, 1938, in Vienna (Nazi invasion). Beginning of a new era. (Cf. Uncle Ferdinand’s theories: a new epoch begins every time God inhales and exhales.)
The effect on Christa: the definitive de-heroizing of her erstwhile (run-down) table ally from the Nuremberg canteen; the deterioration of the oddball in Nagel’s primal community into a complete loser who won’t line up for the opportunities offered by reconstruction.
Schwab meets Nagel.
• • •
My relationship with Nagel (friendship? blood brotherhood? Brothers—yes, the Cains and Abels) is getting more and more difficult. Since chasing the thieves (Hertzog and his cohorts) out of the temple of our little community and thereby destroying the temple as well, he’s recapitulating in the new era the developmental stages of the post–Ice Age. At first the furious chronicler of events in the recent past (his first novel, Craterland, is in its third printing), he was soon carried away by the pull of market forces: radio dramas, a play (which hasn’t yet been produced), and recently film scripts for Stoffel—or rather, for Astrid von Bürger with whom he’s head-over-heels in love. He was careless enough to introduce me to them, so now I’ve met Horst-J
ürgen Stoffel, founding father of postwar German cinema, first licensed producer of a movie in the British Zone, and his wife, Astrid von Bürger (Nagel’s not the only one to rave about her), joint proprietors of STELLA FILMS.
It isn’t immediately apparent what qualifies Herr Stoffel to be a producer, although his exterior doesn’t rule it out: typical entrepreneur of the German reconstruction from the cadre of those exempted from military service for the sake of the wartime economy (son and successor of a manufacturer of wooden articles in the town of Winsenon-the-Luhe; main product: gun stocks). In his early thirties and obviously well fed even in times of scarcity, viz: plenty of lard on a six-foot-one frame, flaxen haired, theatrical, booming voice. Educational level: left high school before graduation. But sly: a shrewd eye, quick grasp of a situation, without doubt ruthless. Clearly knows next to nothing about film but can bluff with the opinions of an observant moviegoer. (“What drives me crazy is that in movies, nobody ever gets change from a cabbie” or, “Have you ever seen a man get dressed and tuck his shirt in after he’s buckled his belt?”) He owed his license to his wife Astrid von Bürger’s relationship with a film critic, an émigré who returned to Germany as cultural officer in the military government. (That good fellow, one Mr. Fletcher—formerly Fleischer—is a fan of Astrid’s “Niffelheim beauty” and stoutly defends her against the accusation that during the war, she used her fame as a movie star to at the very least aid the Nazis in their push toward a final victory.) Meanwhile, in addition to her, Stoffel had the trump card of a million reichsmarks in hand (God only knows how he got them), not to mention his excellent connections to self-supporting Holstein farmers eager to trade their surplus ham and butter for Scotch whiskey. Thus he was able to found STELLA FILMS even before the currency reform, after which banks with large D-mark reserves swarmed onto the risky investment like flies onto dog shit.
Nagel is well aware of all that and appropriately repelled intellectually and morally, but not strongly enough to forgo his chance to write for the movies—to say nothing of spending a few hours each day in the presence of Astrid von Bürger. He’ll have to do penance for it, however. She takes a lively part in all script conferences and voices very strong opinions. But even if they aren’t always in artistic agreement, good old Nagel at least has the good fortune to sit down together in a cordial, collegial atmosphere with one of the masturbatory pinups of his infantryman’s days in flesh and blood and skin and hair and come-hither looks, with a good view of her cleavage and sometimes, when she casually crosses her legs, even up her skirt.
She greets me graciously. She’s undeniably beautiful, with a magnificent body, dark haired (Brünhilde’s mane), her voice a bit metallic, but ringing. She knows how to modulate it and is one of those German women who seek to establish with each person they meet a secret affinity between allied souls, a sort of elective affinity at first acquaintance that doesn’t exclude others but gives the person toward whom it’s directed the illusion of being singled out. Stoffel does something similar. He obviously doesn’t know what to do with me at first and is on his guard, but nevertheless turns to me with an occasional remark about the others present (including Nagel), as if there already existed a more intense relationship between him and me. It is just the feeling I’m receiving inappropriate attention that makes the exchange uncomfortable. (I don’t know how Nagel couched the suggestion that I be invited; what’s more, I’m embarrassed by the whiff of homoeroticism lurking in every meeting between two German men.) What unsettles me even more is that his spinning abstract threads of a relationship between him and me is a continual, potential betrayal of all the others (and likewise, between him and them, of me). The atmosphere is thick with treachery, the relationships slippery.
In his desperation, Nagel had brought me along to a script conference to help him defend his artistic ideas. The discussion takes place in the Stoffels’ new house on the bank of the Alster. Interior decoration: dark wood paneling with miniature Hanseatic merchantmen as chandeliers. Besides Astrid, Stoffel, Nagel, and me, in attendance were the STELLA FILMS dramaturge, a pimply young man who would have fit right into Nagel’s primal community if he hadn’t immigrated too late from the Eastern Zone; the investment bank’s film consultant and attorney; and two stereotypical gray-faced employees waiting like cats at a mouse hole to pounce on the bizarre notions of artistic types. Nagel had presented a marvelous idea. The treatment read like the ideal metaphor for Germans’ coming to terms with the past, poetically shifted far enough into the realm of symbolism and humanity in general so as not to seem uncomfortably allegorical. But with plenty of dramatic tension:
A native tribe in Central America (it was a saga Nagel brought home from his globe-trotting years) believes that every thirty-five years, the world is destroyed and renewed overnight. The fateful day is preceded by a time of scarcity. The tribe is threatened with starvation, and whoever steals from their meager food supplies is condemned to death. A woman steals a few ears of corn from the village storehouse to feed her starving children. The tribe has its own court that can issue death sentences, but may not carry them out itself. Now they are waiting for the executioner to arrive from the capital city. He arrives the night of the expected end of the world. The tribe is preparing for the end of the old and the birth of the new. They extinguish all their fires and destroy their old possessions. They await the morning on which a new world era will begin. The executioner must decide whether it is his duty to execute a prisoner condemned in the old world on the first morning of the new one.
In his treatment, Nagel has already described some scenes (extinguishing the fires, the tribe’s mood in the face of the destruction of the world) vividly enough to provide the men from the bank a picture even they can imagine. However, the first thing they do is start picking apart the content in minute detail—apparently feeling it their duty to the employers who put food on their table to make the movie so foolproof that even a department head couldn’t have anything against financing it. The arguments are correspondingly predictable: Will it be possible to convince moviegoers there are people who really believe that every few decades or so the world is destroyed and then raised from the dead the next morning? (I venture to interject that the miracle of the currency reform must have convinced most Germans of such a possibility, but I’m met partly with blank incomprehension—“Whaddaya mean?”—and partly with barely contained indignation, as if I’d called into question the inviolability of the monetary system and thus of the banks.)
Another objection: Why does the executioner have to come from so far away? (“Can’t these people string up their own criminals?”) Nagel patiently explains that after all, the tribe is subject to the laws of the country even if the government makes allowances for ethnic traditions and permits them to try their own cases. Carrying out the sentences, however, is reserved for the organs of the central government. Although she’s only Stoffel’s representative, Astrid von Bürger has taken charge of the discussion with a good deal of personal authority and asks somewhat mockingly (glancing at me for complicity) how they are going to inform the moviegoer of this complicated judicial situation—with a screen of written explanation, perhaps, listing the applicable precedents? (She’s already secured the complicity of the bankers; as chair of the meeting she has to support everyone equally.) Nagel squirms like he’s suffered a psychological shot in the belly. No, he says in a somewhat hoarse voice, the executioner himself could explain it in a few brief words—the treatment already has the movie beginning with an encounter between two strangers, the executioner and a world traveler who narrates the events. They meet at a campsite, both on their way to the natives. “Narrates?” Stoffel interjects in a booming voice. “I hate films that need voice-over narration. Film is a visual art, as proven by the decline in quality when the talkies were introduced . . .” Nagel interrupts him peevishly. “First of all that’s nonsense, and secondly, there’s no voice-over to what’s happening on-screen. Nobody explains what’s going on. The foreign t
raveler witnesses it all and we see what happens through his eyes.”
Stoffel is disgruntled. He doesn’t like being corrected. “What I said about the decline in quality isn’t nonsense because . . .” Again, Nagel interrupts him rudely. “Are you planning to make silent films?” Stoffel replies superciliously, “No, but I’m going to make films where the action is so obvious that at most, the dialogue serves to express the emotional reaction of the actors without needing the exaggerated miming of silent films—as straightforward, clear, and economical as possible, of course. Let the stage—the theater—celebrate the spoken word. Film is film!” That comes so close to voicing every possible platitude that even Nagel is struck momentarily speechless. Stoffel’s P.S. crushes him completely: “And by the way, I can’t see any role for Astrid in your story. As a native condemned to death, all she could do is get tied up and sit in her hut, waiting for the hangman.” Astrid says she doesn’t have to be in every STELLA FILMS production, and besides, exotic roles don’t suit her—except for Carmen. She worshiped Carmen when she was a little girl, but she’s no opera diva—and besides (she glances at me, looking for confirmation—I can’t help thinking of Christa), it’s Nagel’s job to introduce another, more attractive female character besides the candidate for execution. However—and this concentrates the smoldering skepticism of all those present on a common denominator—how does the story end? Does the woman get hanged or not?
Abel and Cain Page 83