by W. G. Sebald
The drama of a whole life is contained in this diary note, the events cut like a film—unrequited love, the pain of parting, a lapsing into death, the return of a woman cheated of her happiness.
The shift into fantasy so characteristic of Kafka’s writing, also found as something to be taken for granted in the passage just quoted, has often tended to obscure the fact that the author’s apparently hopelessly eccentric consciousness in fact closely reflected the social problems of his time. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kafka’s concern with the Jewishness that was lost to him. Characteristically, academic German literary criticism, particularly in Germany, showed very little understanding until the 1980s of a subject that was obviously of prime importance to Kafka himself. Even today the critics have not really compensated for this deficiency, which is due to an almost willful lack of understanding, and consequently Zischler’s study of Kafka’s diary entry of October 23, 1921, is particularly interesting. “Afternoon, Palestine film,” writes Kafka, without further comment. Zischler explains that this film, which bore the title Shivat Zion, was a documentary made in Jerusalem about the building of Jewish Palestine by the pioneers there, shown by the Zionist Selbstwehr (“Self-defense”) organization at a time when more and more Jews were thinking of emigrating because even then their situation was becoming increasingly difficult; it must, he says, have made a lasting impression on many of the Prague Jews who went to the private screening at the Lido-Bio cinema. Afterward, Zischler tells us, a film of the Eleventh Zionist Congress and Gymnastic Exhibition in Karlsbad was shown. It is not clear whether the gymnastic competition was a Jewish one, but that is not out of the question, for the realization of the Zionist utopia was primarily linked with an appeal to youth, and ideas of the physical training and physiological regeneration of the people were very much to the fore, as indeed they had been since the early nineteenth century in the emergent nationalist German ideology from which Zionism always took its cue. In the image of themselves that they projected, the two peoples, awakening from long oppression or rousing themselves from alleged neglect, were almost exactly the same, even if their standards and ambitions were different.
A reporter for the Selbstwehr journal, quoted by Zischler, describes how the Sunday-morning habitués of the Lido-Bio had to wait until the first showing of the Palestine film was over; it began at eight-thirty in the morning. “More and more salvos of applause are heard from the interior of the hall,” he writes, adding that a woman who had taken a look at the screen inside told the other people waiting, “You hardly want to believe they are Jews, they don’t look like it at all, I don’t know, but their blood must have changed.” This story reminded me of another which, like my experience of the flying Robert in the movie, dates from the year 1976. I had been to a performance of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise at the Coburg Landestheater, against my real inclinations because I dislike both the continuing misuse of this play, which I regard as rather questionable anyway, and German theatrical culture in general. At any rate, when what turned out to be an unspeakable performance was over and I was on my way out I heard an elderly lady, who must have been in full possession of her senses during the “great days” of the German people, telling her friend in a confidential whisper: “Well, he certainly played Nathan well. You might have thought he was a real Jew.” So unfathomable is this utterance that anyone who contemplates it must surely be overcome by vertigo, as indeed one is before most of the manifestations of the German-Jewish symbiosis. The overriding concept of those mirror-image identities is the myth of the Chosen People, to which the Germans blindly subscribed at the time when their ideas of national emancipation were taking a wrong turn. Whereas Herzl may still have been trying to square the circle when he suggested that German would be the language spoken in Zion, Hitler (somewhere in his table talk, I think) came to a conclusion which he thought irrefutably justified the annihilation of the Jews: there could not be two Chosen Peoples.
The “Palestine film” was the last of Kafka’s visits to the cinema mentioned in Zischler’s book. What Kafka thought of the film we do not know, either from him or from any other source. All that is certain is that he did not go to the cinema very often afterward. At least he was spared Triumph of the Will, though we may wonder what he would have thought if he had been obliged to watch all that marching. Let me be allowed one more discursion. According to Zischler, on September 20, 1913, the day when Kafka, in a state of long-term depression, felt the tears come to his eyes in a movie theater in Verona, the films Poveri bambini, Il celebro bandito Garouche, and La lezione dell’abisso were showing in the cinemas of that city. La lezione dell’abisso (“The Lesson of the Abyss”) was the precursor of the heroic Alpine genre in which Leni Riefenstahl made her name two decades later. In 1935 Riefenstahl—who, I am told, is still swimming and diving in the blue waters of the Maldives—was shooting a film high among the snow-white, cloud-capped mountains of Bavaria. There is nothing visible but the sky, while the Führer, a numinous being who is never seen (the audience views everything as if with a divine eye hovering above the world), is in a plane approaching the city of the Meistersingers where the Reich party rally is being held. Soon afterward he drives through the streets with a great retinue. Of the old, touching Germany that once came into Kafka’s mind as he leafed through Die Gartenlaube (“The Garden Arbor,” a family magazine), there is nothing to be seen for the sheer press of human beings—they stand shoulder to shoulder everywhere beaming, standing on projecting vantage points, walls, stairs, balconies, hanging out of windows. The Führer’s car moves through a positive torrent of people. And then, without warning, comes the strange, enormously evocative series of pictures in which, again looking down from high above, the audience sees a city of tents. There they are, stretching as far as the eye can see: white pyramidal structures. At first, because of the unusual perspective, you do not see exactly what they are. Day is just dawning, and gradually, in the still twilit landscape, people come out of the tents alone or in twos and threes, all going the same way as if they had been called by name. The edifying effect is rather reduced when you see the men in close-up performing their morning ablutions bare-chested, a frequent emblem of National Socialist hygiene. Nonetheless, a magical picture of those white tents lingers in the mind. A people traveling through the desert. The Promised Land appears on the horizon. They will reach it together. But eight or nine years after this vision was recorded on film we shall have, instead, the black ruins of Nuremberg, the city where Zischler was born in 1947 when it still lay in rubble and ashes.
Kafka himself is known to have distrusted all utopianism. Not long before his death he said that he had been exiled from Canaan for forty years, and even the community which he sometimes longed for was basically suspect to him; he wanted only to dissolve away by himself, as the water runs into the sea. Few people ever seem to have been as much alone as Kafka appears in the last pictures of him, to which we may add one extrapolated from them, so to speak, and painted by Jan Peter Tripp. It shows Kafka as he might have looked had he lived eleven or twelve years longer. That would have been in 1935. The Reich party rally would have been held, just as Riefenstahl’s film shows it. The race laws would have come into force, and Kafka, if he had had his photograph taken again, would have looked at us as he does from Tripp’s ghostly picture—from beyond the grave.
*Kafka geht ins Kino, Hanns Zischler, 1996; trans. by Susan Gillespie as Kafka Goes to the Movies, Chicago, 2003.
Scomber scombrus, or the Common Mackerel
ON PICTURES BY JAN PETER TRIPP
The two sails were billowing in the west wind, and we set a course to take our boat cutting through the tidal current against which the mackerel, well known to be the greediest of fish, like to swim. As day dawned we cast out our lines. Soon we could see the barrier of the chalk cliffs in the twilit distance, bordered on top by the narrow band of dark fields and woods, but it was some time after that before the rays of the sun shone through the slight waves, and the mackerel
showed themselves.
Crowding close together, apparently in ever increasing numbers, they shot past just below the surface of the water. Their stiff, torpedo-shaped bodies, whose outstanding feature is an overdeveloped muscular system that considerably restricts their agility, drives them straight ahead all the time. It is almost impossible for them to rest, and they can approach a destination only by describing a wide arc. Where exactly they go, unlike those fish which have more settled habits, has long been and still is a mystery. Ehrenbaum writes that in the oceans off the American and European coasts there are regions covering many square miles, and going fathoms down into the depths, where the mackerel can be found in thousands of millions at certain times of the year, and that the fish disappear from them again as suddenly as they came. Now, however, they were shining and flashing all around us. In the blue of their backs, which has an irregular dark brown stripe down it, purple and greenish-gold spangles sparkled in an iridescent play of color. We had often noticed when we caught the fish that at the moment of their death, indeed as soon as they felt the mere touch of the strange, dry air, the iridescence quickly faded and was extinguished, fading to a leaden hue.
The strange name of the mackerel reminds us of their wonderful shimmering appearance in life, for Ehrenbaum tells us elsewhere that it derives from the Latin epithet varius, or to its diminutives variolus, variellus, varellus, meaning pied or flecked, and consequently the petite vérole or syphilis takes its name from them, the disease that was once most usually caught in houses where, in the French idiom, maquerelle was the word for a madam. Very likely the connections between the life and death of men and mackerel are far more complex than we guess. Isn’t there, I thought as I pulled in the first line, an engraving by Grandville showing half a dozen particularly coldblooded fish decked out in starched shirt fronts, ties, and evening dress, sitting at a table and eating one of their own kind, or what would be hardly less terrible one of our kind? Perhaps it is no coincidence that to dream of fish is said to mean death.
Yet the same fish is an emblem of fertility among many peoples. Scheftelowitz, for instance, claims that among the Jews of Tunisia it was the custom to sprinkle mackerel scales on the pillow at weddings or on the Sabbath eve, while the Viennese psychiatrist and anthropologist Aisenbruk, who emigrated to California, tells us in his unjustly neglected writings that the Tyroleans like to nail a fishtail to the parlor ceiling at Christmas.
The facts of the matter, of course, are different. None of us ultimately knows how he may end up on someone else’s plate, or what mysteries are hidden in that other person’s closed hand. Even if we turn to ichthyomancy and to instruments for dissecting the mackerel, if we carefully take it apart and question the oracle of its entrails, we shall be unlikely to get an answer, for such things only look back at us blind and dumb—the grain in planed wood, the silver bracelet, the aging skin, the broken eye—and tell us nothing of the fate of our own kind. These thoughts preoccupied me until late in the evening. We had long since returned from our fishing trip, were back on dry land and looking out again at the gray sea, when it seemed to me as if something triangular were gliding out there, visible only now and then among the waves. “Perhaps it’s someone still out sailing,” said my companion, and she added, “or else the fin of that great fish we will never net passing us far out at sea.”
The Unwritten Commandment
Endgame
The Mystery of the Red-Brown Skin
AN APPROACH TO BRUCE CHATWIN
It is not easy to think of a contemporary German writer who would have ventured as much from the first as that tireless traveler Bruce Chatwin, each of whose five books, remarkable by any standards, is set in a different part of the world. Nor could you find anyone in Germany, where the good average mind is typical and the art of biography is held in low esteem, who after the early death of such an author would have emulated Nicholas Shakespeare in tracking him down in the suburbs of Birmingham, in London, on the Welsh borders, the island of Crete, and Mount Athos, in Prague, in Patagonia, Afghanistan, Australia, and darkest Africa, to find witnesses who could speak of the man who passed them by like a comet.
Just as Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre. Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange manifestations and objects of which one cannot say whether they are real, or whether they are among the phantasms generated in our minds from time immemorial. Anthropological and mythological studies in the tradition of Tristes Tropiques, adventure stories looking back to our early childhood reading, collections of facts, dream books, regional novels, examples of lush exoticism, puritanical penance, sweeping baroque vision, self-denial, and personal confession—they are all these things together. It probably does them most justice to see their promiscuity, which breaks the mold of the modernist concept, as a late flowering of those early traveler’s tales, going back to Marco Polo, where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous, and the way through the world is taken from the first with an eye fixed on the writer’s own end.
One of Chatwin’s favorite books was Gustave Flaubert’s Trois Contes, in particular the story of Saint Julian, who must atone for the sins of bloodshed he has incurred by his passion for hunting on a long journey through the hottest and coldest zones on earth: his limbs freeze and almost drop off as he crosses the icefields, and in the blazing sun of the deserts the hair on his head catches fire. I cannot read a page of this terrifying story, the product of its author’s profoundly hysterical disposition, without seeing Chatwin as he was, an ingénu driven by a panic need for knowledge and love, still like an adolescent at the age of thirty.
Chatwin was born into a family of building contractors, architects, lawyers, and button manufacturers who became firmly established in the upper middle class of Birmingham during the Victorian era but who also—how could it be otherwise under the auspices of high capitalism?—included among their numbers some soldiers of fortune, failures, and even criminal offenders. His father, Charles, who was called up into the navy in 1940 and was based in Chatham, spent the war years at sea as captain of a destroyer and was only a visitor at home, so that the child and his mother spent the early period of his life mainly with grandparents and great-uncles and aunts, moving easily in an extended and quasi-matriarchal society which must have given him not so much a strict sense of family as a certain clan feeling, and his mother’s or grandmothers’ brothers would have featured as his male role models. One of these uncles, who was very fond of his sister’s blue-eyed child, told the biographer that Bruce noticed everything from an early age and looked at it like a scholar. “And I thought it important,” he added, “that he should become articulate.”
Chatwin, according to Shakespeare’s informant, did indeed develop extraordinary eloquence and imaginative power. Like every true storyteller who still has links with the oral tradition, he could conjure up a setting with his voice alone and populate that stage with characters partly real and partly invented, moving among them just as his china collector Utz moves among his Meissen figurines. Chatwin too, as the invisible impresario of all that is extravagant, wears—even when he is traveling in the desert—a theatrical robe like the housecoat that hangs in Utz’s bathroom, a masterpiece of haute couture in quilted, peach-colored silk with appliqué roses on the shoulders and ostrich feathers around the velvet collar.
As a pupil at Marlborough College, one of the best schools in the country, Chatwin had a not very illustrious career, and by his own admission shone only as an actor, particularly in female roles, for instance in plays by Noël Coward. The art of transformation that came naturally to him, a sense of being always onstage, an instinct for the gesture that would make an effect on the audience, for the bizarre and the scandalous, the terrible and the wonderful, all these were undoubtedly prerequisi
tes of Chatwin’s ability to write. Scarcely less important must have been his training at the London auction house of Sotheby’s, where he gained access to the treasure chambers of the past and acquired an idea of the singularity of artifacts, the market value of art, the importance of craftsmanlike skill, and the necessity of precise research energetically pursued.
But most important of all in Chatwin’s development as a writer were surely those early moments of pure fascination when the boy crept into his grandmother Isobel’s dining room and, looking past his own blurred reflection, marveled at the jumble of curios arranged on the shelves of the glass-fronted mahogany cupboard, all of them from very distant lands. It could not even be said where some of them came from or what they had been for; apocryphal stories clung to others.
For instance, there was a scrap of reddish fur that was kept in a pillbox, wrapped in tissue paper. Nicholas Shakespeare tells us that this surreal object was a wedding present to Bruce’s grandmother from her cousin Charles Milward, a clergyman’s son who, when chastised once too often, had run away from home and gone to sea. He was shipwrecked on the coast of Patagonia. While he was in Patagonia one of his extraordinary ventures was to join forces with a German gold panner and blow up a cave in Puerto Natales, bringing to light the remains of a prehistoric animal, the giant sloth or mylodon. He did a flourishing trade later in various body parts of the extinct creature, but the piece of skin sent to Birmingham was a gift to his beloved cousin.