October
That story C. told me, when she was visiting from Germany. How after several years of a seemingly contented life, married with children, she hit a wall within herself, and could not continue. She left her marriage and eventually began a search into her past.
Wolfsohn felt that to heal himself he had to explore his own voice. In the cries of the dying he had heard a range of the human voice beyond all conventional expectation. Men with untrained voices cried out in the highest soprano notes, a pitch believed to belong only to women. He studied with a series of voice teachers until finally one of them allowed him to express his feelings with his singing. But no teacher was willing to explore with him the extremities of the human capacity which he had found on the battlefield. He believed this larger capacity would reflect the fullest dimensions of the human soul.
October
She had always known her father had been in the Gestapo, but now the meaning of that became clearer to her. It was hard to reconcile this with her memory of him—he was the more affectionate parent, full of life, playful—until, one day a memory returned of how he beat her as a child. She had forgotten this side of her father.
Over time Wolfsohn developed his own method of teaching voice. What was it like to study with him? His methods are still being taught at the Roy Hart Theatre in the South of France. A few years ago I visited this theatre, which is mostly a school. I wanted to meet Marita Guenther. She is the senior teacher there; she studied with Wolfsohn for years. And she became his lover.
October
First cold day. The last of our Indian summer this week. Different layers of distrust peeling away. I can feel how most of my life my whole psyche has been organized around fear.
The morning we met it was pouring rain, then hailing, and then the sun came out, bright, even hot. Isn’t it beautiful? Marita said, throwing open the windows of the room so we could see the weather directly. Her voice, even speaking, was so rich and vibrant it bordered on music. We have everything here, she said, meaning the weather in the region in France known as the Cévennes, I’m so glad you are seeing all the possibilities.
October
Nan and I move in and out of an extraordinary and sometimes frightening trust.
How did she come to know Alfred Wolfsohn? She herself was German, raised in Leipzig, and Wolfsohn was a second cousin of her mother, but she never met him in Germany. She only came to know him after the war, in England, where he took refuge and where she emigrated when the danger was past. Wolfsohn was Jewish, but her situation was more ambiguous. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was Jewish. Therefore, according to Nazi logic, her papers were stamped 25% J.
October
Is it because we both suffered such severities in childhood that we can be so close? There are also, of course, those hellish moments when we evoke each other’s nightmare—mine of being locked out, hers of being locked in.
Like me, Marita was raised by her mother’s parents. She remembers one day when, after her grandmother’s death, her uncle came to visit. He was an actor, who was considered by the Nazis half Jewish, and so he was being denied parts in the theatre. She overheard him arguing with her grandfather in the next room about all the atrocities, including his own unemployment. But her grandfather was a Bismarckian who still believed in empire and emperors. Don’t talk like that, he told his son. These are the rumors of warmongers.
October
Now I can see how deeply history is implicated in the pattern of self-destruction in my family.
Was Marita’s grandfather aware that the Nazis were accusing the Jews of being warmongers? Later, she did learn that her own father was anti-Semitic. She had discovered the terrors of history within her own family. It is not surprising then that in 1949, when she was twenty-one years old, she left her family and country both.
October
A history which no one in the family questioned. We were as if victims of an impersonal force, beyond and above us.
On an earlier trip to Europe, in Germany, I was told another story about a man who had one Jewish grandparent, a grandfather. He himself was allowed to be in the army and he had a record of heroic action. He thought this might allow him to save his grandfather. He went to the Gestapo to plead for his grandfather’s life but was literally thrown into the street. Years later he became a serious alcoholic and then he committed suicide. The woman who told me this was his good friend, the daughter of a Nazi general and, later, an active member of the generation of conscience in Germany that tried to bring the events of the holocaust to public light.
October
This joke told in a cabaret in the new Germany, “A wonderful future lies behind us.”
I myself have an ambiguous status. Perhaps my great-grandmother was Jewish. This cannot be known. But stronger than any such possibility is the reality I experienced as a girl, adopted into a Jewish family. This bonded me to the particular history of a people. Yet I am not Jewish. I have another history too. I belong either no place, or in two places at once. Thus I have come to understand both the freedom and the strange vulnerability of exile.
October
It is so satisfying to put into words what has not been expressed before, whether it is comedy or tragedy, a small or a large meaning.
Marita knew no one in England. But before she emigrated her mother gave her the name of her cousin. He was in London, and she was in the countryside working as an au pair, with too few days off to visit him and almost no money. Still, after she arrived she sent him a letter. It would be comforting to have even the most minimal contact with anyone who knew something of her history.
October
What then distinguishes this process of writing from Himmler’s fanatical record keeping?
Weeks went by with no response and she finally assumed he had no interest in meeting her. But he was away, and now, as she reconstructs it, she believes he was in Amsterdam, visiting Charlotte’s father and stepmother, who had just returned from Villefranche where they found Charlotte’s work, Life or Theatre?
October
What seems clear to me is that Himmler used his records not to reflect but to replace experience.
Wolfsohn wrote her immediately upon his return and they were able, over time, to arrange a visit. The man she met captivated her. He seemed to call up in her, as he had in Charlotte, the depths of herself and her own longings. He convinced her to take a voice lesson. And this first lesson changed her life.
October
I wanted to add this to the fourth chapter. But it proved impossible. As Reichsführer SS, head of the secret police, Himmler organized a crude information retrieval system. Index cards stored on an enclosed mechanized wheel could be brought to hand by pushing a series of buttons.
Marita spoke to me of this experience in the way that a religious pilgrim speaks of revelation. There is no language adequate to what she experienced. Except the image of a vein of gold inside her, and somehow within her voice. I have had such experiences. One comes upon a new body within the familiar body. And yet this new body, strange as it is, seems to be the rightful body, a body that opens out further and further to worlds one has dreamed or imagined at the fringes of reason might exist, a territory at once expansive and unknown and yet near, close as a lover, ready, willing.
October
It is perhaps a choice each of us makes over and over, even many times throughout one day, whether to use knowledge as power or intimacy.
So powerful was the knowledge she drew from Wolfsohn’s lessons that from that hour forward her life began to move in a different direction. It was not easy to follow the path that opened up for her. Risking unemployment and poverty in this still strange country, she moved to London. Eventually she found work as an usher in a movie theatre. And every hour not at work was spent studying with Wolfsohn.
October
All along as I write, I have Charlotte’s images in my mind. It is not simply the recognizable shapes, faces, moments that mov
e me. I am immersed in the colors she used, and the vitality of her compositions become part of the atmosphere of my body.
The hours were long and tiring, but she had something to sustain her that she had not had before. Within her own throat, tongue, mouth, ears, and indeed all her flesh and bones she had found a medium resonant with her deepest being, even that which in herself was not yet fully formed.
November
More astonishing to me than any technological achievement is the simple fact that a human hand holding a pencil or a brush can render in a few lines or washes of color a state of feeling, an insight, layers of history.
Twice I observed Marita giving a lesson. The approach is simple. Why is this so often the case when the effects are powerful? The singer is asked to make sounds. Nothing must be held back. Nothing censored. The whole body is engaged. In the beginning the aim is not control but instead an exploration of every possibility, even if the sounds are unpleasant. So the sounds the singer makes are unconventional, even ugly. They are not on any scale. They transgress.
November
I am thinking about smart bombs.
By this process the voice is liberated from the boundaries of culture. It makes a terrible sense that Wolfsohn should have discovered this method in the midst of a war that seemed to be tearing civilization to pieces. And he was no bystander to that disintegration. The destruction that occurred among nations continued after the war in his own mind. He had lost part of his memory. It happened after he was discovered under a pile of bodies.
November
I find the idea of a smart bomb intriguing. If it is true that social institutions like the military can make wishes, would this represent a wish for a more refined, subtle intelligence, the intelligence that we are after all born with, and then over time relinquish?
What was it like for Wolfsohn to lose part of his memory? I have some idea from the illness which, though it is in my immune system, also affects my mind at times. It is as if pieces of oneself were missing. The forgotten word, the incident, the name is present just enough to feel its absence. One has a sense of being that cannot be put into words, and so that part of the self exists in a neighboring world, close yet inaccessible.
November
I remember the stunning moment when, in our small seminar on nuclear technology, Emilio Segré, who was speaking to us that day, pulled a small tube, less than half a meter long, from his jacket pocket. This was the first particle accelerator. In that moment one could see so dramatically that the most important ingredient in atomic research is the human mind.
One can imagine why he would not be able to remember. He had lost consciousness. He was in a coma. But even in a coma, some part of him would have taken in all he felt and heard. Did the stretcher-bearers who carried him discuss his death? Did he struggle as in nightmares one struggles to call out when no voice comes? Did he wake at once or in fitful starts, taking in the rancid smell of rotting flesh, the feeling of cold limbs, his eye perhaps open on a gaping wound, a mutilation? To be taken for dead and wake among the dead; such an experience requires a second birth.
November
What an irony that nuclear weapons, which spring from such creative insights, should reduce the warrior to a technician.
But this birth is not into a new body. It is into an older body, the body of origin, body of birth, the body before it has been socialized out of its own knowledge of itself. In this sense Wolfsohn’s insights were not isolated. He was part of a larger movement trying to regain this body. A movement that included Isadora Duncan, Wilhelm Reich, Ida Rolf, Elsa Gindler, Gerda Alexander, Ilsa Middendorf, and later Moishe Feldenkrais, Emilie Conrad Da’Oud. Like Wolfsohn, many of these pioneers came to discover this original body when they faced a physical crisis. Elsa Gindler was told she was dying of tuberculosis; Ida Rolf nearly died of pneumonia. Feldenkrais was told he would be disabled for the rest of his life.
November
Yesterday, driving over the bridge, I was exhilarated.
Among these practitioners, many believed the body holds memories of hidden traumas. As the body is healed those memories come to the surface. Then earlier and forgotten feelings must be expressed. Stories told.
November
How frightening, when I could not drive my car, when I could scarcely walk across a room! It brought back to me the feeling of being a small child, and the trauma of abandonment.
It is a method used now to heal the survivors of sexual abuse and torture. The survivor tells the story of suffering over and over to a listener who will hear and respond to all that happened. The compassion of the listener is crucial. Is this because part of the trauma is the cruelty and coldness of the perpetrator? The survivor has been humiliated and blamed as well as physically wounded. The one who listens provides an accepting field for the story. An essential dimension. Moment by moment we help each other to see.
November
I put my hand to my face. My skin is soft in the way it used to be. The touch, pleasure. It is a feeling I could never have described when it was gone, but nevertheless I longed for it. The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.
When Marita teaches voice she is entirely present to her students. She goes with them into the treacherous regions. She does not reject the difficulties but encourages her students to explore these while she accompanies them. If the voice is cracking the singer does not go around that crack so much as enter it. The world inside that opening, a world that in all probability has been avoided for years, is rich with meaning. But it is also dense with troubling memory, sharp and disturbing emotion, and even the painful sensation of a prisoner, long held in darkness, waking into light.
November
More troops have been sent to the gulf. I find it hard to take in. Is this because I am feeling so much joy in my own life?
It was just this understanding that inside the cracks in the conventional surface a wider and healing awareness might be found which was to have a profound influence on Charlotte’s life. Much as I sat in the corner of a studio watching as Marita gave a lesson, Charlotte depicts herself as a young girl standing near a door secretly ajar; listening to Alfred Wolfsohn give her stepmother lessons.
November
Thinking of this is like one of those paintings in which the light is very intense and the shadows very dark.
Charlotte’s relationship to Wolfsohn is not unequivocal. In her story she depicts him as trying to seduce her stepmother, and she pictures her stepmother responding. She herself adores her stepmother almost like a lover. She is jealous of other suitors, even friends. But this time her jealousy extends in two directions. With the passion of a lover, she wants her stepmother’s exclusive love, but she also wants to be her stepmother. That is, she wants to be an artist. Does Wolfsohn possess the power to confer this fate upon her?
November
Much joy in my life now. And intimations of another way of being.
Charlotte meets frequently with Wolfsohn and she shows him her work. He is the first person who takes her seriously. He encourages her by asking her to illustrate his manuscript as a birthday present to him. But this guardian who bears her into the world of art has two faces. Making love to her stepmother, he also seduces Charlotte. Then we discover he is also engaged to another woman!
November
I can see in myself the glimmering of a possibility. To shed the fear I have carried around for so long.
Was this part of the story true? Marita told me she believed Charlotte’s paintings. She had never met her, of course. By the time Alfred Wolfsohn came into Marita’s life, Charlotte had already died in Auschwitz. But years later, after Wolfsohn’s death, a team of filmmakers and writers approached Marita wanting to know all she could remember of Wolfsohn, and what he might have told her about Charlotte. She traveled with them to Amsterdam, where Charlotte’s work had been preserved, and spent hours studying each painting. Charlotte’s stepmother, who was also interviewed by
the filmmakers, claimed the story was not true. It was fictional, wasn’t it? The names were altered. She said she was never Wolfsohn’s lover and doubted that Charlotte could have been. My own inclination, like Marita’s, is to believe Charlotte’s story; though in the end, as a work of art, what matters is its verisimilitude. Certainly it is a story that is resonant with other lives. It is one I myself recognize.
November
That fear of rejection. Of being left out in the cold. Is it possible that could leave me?
The memory is painful because within it is a kind of humiliation I like to believe I have put far behind me. I am a young woman. I have written a play. The director I show it to was once a lover. Now, without reading it, he takes the play in one hand and with his other hand leads me into the bedroom. I comply. I go with him.
November
I read in the papers today that Samuel Kramer died. He was the great Sumerian scholar who a few years ago, together with the storyteller Diane Wolkstein, wrote a modern rendition of the ancient Inanna myth. The goddess who descends to the underworld and has everything taken from her.
A woman who becomes an artist is a kind of thief. Like the Jewish artist who is seen by the anti-Semite as stealing culture, she breaks the trance of domination by the very practice of her art. It follows then that a young woman who tries to become an artist would also become the object of a sexual conquest.
Charlotte’s story is not, however, a simple story of victimization. The violator is also the teacher, the enabler. What he has taught survives and perhaps can even be freed of all traces of the spell of violation. The teacher himself, also, is more than just a violator. He is attractive precisely because he has pulled himself halfway out of delusion. He is only partly submerged in the old order of domination. His insights have come to him through a crack in the veneer of civilization, which was also a crack in his own soul. He had the courage to look in this direction.
November
I saw Diane perform this text in New York a few years ago. It was a harrowing time for me. A long relationship ending, my daughter in a crisis of adolescence, and the old demons of my childhood returned.
A Chorus of Stones Page 29