In the evening we arrived at the Czechoslovakian border and my luggage underwent endless, infuriating inspection. Even Peter’s soiled diapers appeared suspicious to the surly customs officer. After he had finished I joined the long line at the ticket window, Peter sound asleep in my arms, Hans sitting on top of the highly piled suitcases on the luggage trolley, amusing the porter with his serious remarks. When I reached the window the irascible, hungry-looking employee took a look at the banknotes in my hand and said that they were not enough to pay my way to Prague. The inflation, several paces ahead of me, had deteriorated the value of currency to such an extent that I could not even reach Brno.
“Then what should I do?” I asked, desperately aggressive.
The man, who had heard that question many times during the day, shrugged and motioned me to move on. With Peter sleeping unperturbed on my shoulder I sat down in the hall. The porter hesitated for a while, then slowly began to unload Hans and the suitcases. I wanted to tip him but he waved it aside: my situation was too pitiful and my marks worthless. I was ready to cry and Hans, sensing difficulties, looked anxiously at me with his golden eyes. A young, well-dressed woman passed by, stared at me, turned, approached again and asked: “Excuse me, are you Frau Steuermann?” I said that indeed I was.
“I recognized you immediately. I am so glad to have the opportunity to tell you how much I admired you in . . .”
I interrupted her: “Then could you do me a great favor and send a telegram for me—provided I have enough money for it.”
“Of course I will,” she said eagerly. “I suppose you are caught short by the devaluation of the mark?” I told her that I did not have enough to continue my trip.
“But I have enough for a third-class ticket to Dresden. Please let me buy it for you.”
I did not want to accept but she insisted. “In a sense I am a colleague of yours. I sing in a cabaret.” She told me her name, which was vaguely familiar.
This kind stranger attended to the telegram and bought me the ticket. There was no time to thank her properly as we were leaving immediately. I could not even buy a warm breakfast for the children.
We were squeezed into a crowded third-class compartment among Transylvanian peasants. They were large, heavily built people, the women taking up a great deal of space as they wore at least six petticoats. Four centuries ago their German ancestors had settled in Transylvania, which, after the war, was given to Roumania, and they had to leave their farms to resettle in Germany. They spoke a strange-sounding dialect, but we could understand each other. Hans and Peter stared at them wide-eyed. The old woman opposite laboriously extracted from the luggage rack, a huge loaf of bread and an earthenware pot of raspberry jam. The smell of home baking and country kitchen filled the compartment. The loaf was as big as a cartwheel and Hans said: “Oh!” pointing to it expectantly. The woman unpacked a knife and passed it to her husband, who began to cut thick slices on which she spread jam, and distributed them among her companions. Their slow, deliberate chewing made Peter’s mouth water and he stretched out his hand, making demanding sounds. Hans, more restrained, swallowed hard. The woman laughed and asked me if she could give them a piece of bread.
“It would be very kind of you. They have not eaten since yesterday evening.” And I told her about our difficulties. She could not stop commiserating with me, and put so much jam on the slices that the boys were smeared all over with raspberries. They held onto the bread with both their hands, refusing to let me break it into smaller pieces. Not for a second would they part with it. The old woman had not offered me a piece of bread, and pride prevented me from asking her.
A Transylvanian from another compartment opened the door and announced that we were approaching the German frontier. They all got up, crossed themselves, knelt down facing the window and prayed aloud that the new earth would receive them with friendliness. I often thought of them during the Hitler years.
In Dresden I had just enough time to give the children their bath, feed them and put them to bed in Olga Fuchs’s apartment. The place Berthold had rented was not yet free, the nurse had taken another job, and so far he had not found anyone to replace her. Hans and Peter could stay one night with Olga; then another friend of ours insisted on taking care of them. I dreaded the prospect. The children were so young and so used to being with me, and though Berthold assured me that he would spend all his free time with them, it was terrible for me to leave under such circumstances. If only we didn’t need the money! More than ever everyone’s existence had become endangered by the inflation. No, that was not true; some people were making millions. Only the threat of the penalty I would be obliged to pay, if I did not appear next morning at the rehearsal, made me tear myself away.
This time I traveled in a sleeping car, for which the Schauspielhaus was paying, and I could have rested, had I not been worrying all night.
The Medea rehearsal was merely a run-through, to adjust to the guest performer. The actors, with the exception of a new young girl who played Kreusa and needed more direction, had been in Hamburg many years, and their mannerisms had that same dignified pomposity as that of their colleagues at the Hoftheater. But they were cordial and cooperative.
The audience that night was most receptive: they clapped and shouted until the safety curtain came down. The manager, Dr. Paul Eger, who looked like an old style diplomat, came to my dressing room and said that he would like to discuss a contract. I was gratified but worn out. It is very depressing to be alone after a success—almost as bad as after a failure. Not even a telephone call to Berthold was possible at that hour.
Next day was a Sunday. I played a matinee and again in the evening. Monday was free, so that if I could make the night train to Dresden, I would be able to spend twenty-four hours with Berthold and the boys. Then, leaving early on Tuesday morning, I would return just in time for the evening performance. I asked Dr. Eger if he would let me go. He made a face. And what if the train was late? No, he could only give me his permission if I promised to be back in the morning, but that would mean two nights in the train! I said that it did not matter.
The curtain calls never seemed to end that evening, but as the theater was right next to the station I caught my train. I shared the compartment with an old lady, who, fascinated, watched me remove my make-up. After a while she said enigmatically: “Well—I suppose we are all human beings—aren’t we?”
Berthold was waiting at the station. Those two days in Hamburg had been so long that I felt I had not seen him for ages. In the taxi he told me what I had sensed all the time. The night I had left, Hans woke up and called me. Olga explained to him that I had gone away for a few days but would be back. Desperate, he had run through the apartment, searching in every corner, and crying for me. His grief was so great that Olga and Mrs. Waldheim were helpless. They called Berthold and when he arrived Hans clung to him, until he fell asleep exhausted.
Since then many years have passed and greater tragedies have occurred. Hans has long forgotten his tears, but I am still haunted by them.
They were eating breakfast when I came into their room. Peter stood up in his highchair, stretching out his arms to me, but Hans looked away. The next second he was crying and clinging to me for dear life. The new nurse, Fräulein Thea, red-haired and spinsterish, was a friendly Saxonian and I was told the children had taken to her at once.
The remainder of my visit was spent explaining to Hans why I had to leave again, but I could not convince him of the necessity of our parting. In the evening I put them to bed and stayed with them until they fell asleep. Then, again with a heavy heart, I boarded the train.
This became the pattern of my life for months. Sometimes I stayed two or three days, but often I could not leave Hamburg for a whole week. This brought me another kind of suffering: Hans and Peter, now used to my sporadic appearances became very attached to the more permanent Thea.
I had hardly seen anything of Hamburg. I had no time to stroll around, but I liked the few stree
ts I knew and the Alster. It was a big city with a harbor. One breathed the salt in the air; this alone was exhilarating. I signed a contract for the next season and returned to Dresden for Christmas. In February Berthold went to Berlin to direct for the Reinhardt theaters.
Soon after the war a young man by the name of Moritz Seeler, fanatically dedicated to the theater, had founded the Junge Buehne (Young Stage) and put on plays by unknown dramatists which the leading theaters, for one reason or another, did not have the courage to produce. The authors Seeler presented were Bertolt Brecht, Annemarie Fleissner, Carl Zuckmayer and Arnolt Bronnen. The first of the plays, Bronnen’s Vatermord, was to be directed by Brecht. But some of the actors refused to submit to the authority of the young man. Brecht resigned and Seeler asked Berthold to take over. As Brecht had no ill feelings, Berthold agreed. Elizabeth Bergner, Agnes Straub and Alexander Granach played the main roles. Vatermord, Bronnen’s one and only flash of talent, helped by a remarkable performance, had a tremendous success, and for a long time was considered an important, revolutionizing theatrical event.
In April of that year the management of the Reinhardt theaters asked me to play in Hebbel’s Judith in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, the rebuilt Circus Schumann. Heinrich George, a new star, was to play Holofernes; Berthold would direct. As Berlin was not Dresden, I welcomed the opportunity to work with Berthold.
* Diminutive of Pan (Sir).
16
“YOU CANNOT SLAUGHTER A COW and milk it,” was one of Niania’s frequently expressed wisdoms. Berlin in 1922 made me often think of this. The war profiteers sat in cafés, restaurants and nightclubs, gorging themselves on black-market food, while the gray-faced jobless and the war veterans on crutches stared hungrily through the plate glass windows. The most heartbreaking were the emaciated children, who looked as if they had stepped out of Kaethe Kollwitz drawings. There were demonstrations, pacifists and workers carrying signs with Nie Wieder Krieg; but chauvinistic organizations like Feme and the Ehrhard Brigade and Noske’s regiments put a bloody end to marches and meetings, and they disappeared from the streets. The estimated number of political assassinations in the first four years of the Republic was more than five hundred. Among the victims were men like the Foreign Minister Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the Armistice in 1918.
The Government seemed ineffectual against the Rightist terror, and Hitler, first unknown, then ridiculed and shrugged off, was making speeches and gaining ground. Though politics were infuriating there was no question but that Berlin was much more stimulating and interesting than Dresden. First of all it had become international as never before, and in spite of hunger and inflation, artistic life was flourishing. There were exhibitions of Feininger, Kandinsky, Klee and Barlach. The music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern was gaining recognition. There were exciting performances at the Reinhardt theaters; Jessner, Fehling and Piscator were presenting Shakespeare, Brecht, Toller, Georg Kaiser, and thousands were nightly falling in love with Fritzi Messary, the enchanting star of the Metropol theater. Influenced by the Russians, Piscator was the first to originate the political theater.
In the Romanisches Café we met Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Kortner, Alexander Granach and the young actress Gerda Mueller. Very often Egon Erwin Kisch and a young communist, Otto Katz, would join us. Many years later, when he was known as André Simon, Katz was executed by the Stalinists in Czechoslovakia, where he had been Minister of State.
Brecht was thin and dark, with narrow eyes and a sharp nose, his hair combed down over his forehead. He could have been painted on a silk scroll as an Oriental sage, had it not been for his eternal leather coat and cap, which made him seem dressed for an automobile race.
I had known Kortner since our early days at Reinhardt; meanwhile, he had become one of the great stage and film stars. At the Berlin State Theater, under the direction of Leopold Jessner, he had sensational success in Wilhelm Tell, Richard III, and Othello. Kortner’s roots, like Berthold’s, were in Vienna. They both had the same Fackel-inspired, ironically negative attitude toward their hometown, and the same inherited longing for the Wiener Kueche. Fritz Kortner, who is now a distinguished-looking, gray-haired, much honored artist, was at that time a tall, broad-shouldered young man, with glowing dark eyes and short black hair. He was one of those ugly but attractive males women worship. When we saw him again in Berlin he had already fallen in love with Johanna Hofer, his Desdemona, a radiantly beautiful, shy woman and a very gifted actress.
Berthold knew Kortner from before the war, when, impressed by his talent, he had given the then unknown actor the leading part in a play he was directing. In their long “on and off” relationship the two attracted and repelled, fascinated, irritated, fought with and ardently admired each other. Both were violently egocentric, Kortner several degrees more so than Berthold. Falling in love with people, Berthold would enthusiastically “create” an idol, put it on a pedestal, persuade himself of its unsurpassed qualities. When the cruel moment of truth came, a crisis not uncommon in the theater, worship unavoidably turned to animosity. I would say that rifts were rarely caused by Berthold, who merely became disappointingly “objective,” something the dethroned idol could not bear.
At the time they were rehearsing John Gabriel Borkman, Kortner and Berthold, both firmly established on their separate pedestals, not only enjoyed working together, but began planning a common artistic enterprise.
The Moscow Art Theater and Tairoff’s Kamernyj were touring Germany. Not since that first evening in Berlin, when I had seen Reinhardt’s Othello, had I been so aroused and so in love with my profession. What we admired most were not only the great actors, Stanislawski’s direction, Chekhov’s plays and Tairoff’s magic expressionism, but the discipline and dedication of both ensembles. Like everything else, after the war the ensemble idea had deteriorated in the Berlin theater and the star system prevailed. A new element precipitated the decline: the great temptations of the film. Not only for financial reasons, but also for the enormous popularity it gave them, actors preferred to make films than to come to rehearsals. Although most of the films were cheap and vulgar, a few remarkable ones had emerged. They were The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Paul Wegener’s Golem, Lubitsch’s Anne Boleyn, with Jennings as Henry VIII, and the first films of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. The latter had a great deal of calculated sadism, and for myself I preferred Mauritz Stiller’s wonderful Swedish tales. But most of all we were all admiring the Little Tramp: Charlie Chaplin.
For a director, the possibilities the new medium offered were so fascinating that when UFA asked Berthold to write the scenario and direct Ibsen’s Nora, he decided to accept, though the subject was rather problematic for a film. Berthold wanted me to stay in Berlin while he was working on the script, but it was summer and I intended to take the children to the country. Of course, the country could only be Wychylowka.
Grandmother had died that winter. She was eighty-two years old and deafness had made her withdraw into such loneliness that she could hardly be reached. I missed her absent-minded remarks and now I could no longer brush her long, lovely, silver hair. Sadly I realized that this had been the only attention I had given her in the last years of her life.
Rose was married and had come with her husband. Although Papa strongly disapproved of our profession, he approved of the men we married. Josef Gielen was lovingly received into our family. He was handsome, well-educated and warm-hearted. His sense of humor and simplicity were refreshing and endearing. He had given up acting and become a successful director. The State Theater in Dresden engaged him to replace Berthold. Edward arrived after a strenuous season of concerts and teaching, bringing new twelve-tone compositions.
At the end of August I returned to Hamburg, taking the children with me. For some time Ludwig Muenz had been living there, doing research at one of Hamburg’s private collections.
I have often been asked, usually by young women: “When and where have you been happiest in your life?”
It was impossible to answer. Happiness demands a special kind of selfishness, never lasting, seldom approved, and you have to pay for each minute of it, usually too dearly. There are people of such harmonious, Apollonian disposition, of such well-balanced desires and temperament, that they never abandon the prudent domain of self-control. I belonged to a more reckless race.
That year in Hamburg was a wonderful year. Hans and Peter were growing, they were intelligent, healthy and happy. I played interesting roles, not only the obligatory, classic heroines. I had Ludwig’s affection and friendship. But Berthold was the heart of my heart, the root of my being.
17
FRITZ KORTNER ARRIVED in Hamburg to play Othello at the Stadt-theater; he had great news for me. He and Berthold had decided to have their own theater; they had found a businessman, a millionaire, who would finance it. Of course I had to join them.
To have our own ensemble had been our cherished dream. Berthold and I had planned it from the day we met. Now I was surprised that things had advanced so rapidly. By the sheer force of his personality, Kortner’s partnership changed the whole idea of what we originally had in mind: no stars, an ensemble where all the actors would participate in a common cause.
We were to share the profits (nobody had the slightest doubt that we would rake in the money), bring back great but neglected plays of the past, and introduce meaningful ones of the present. We hoped that if we succeeded we would attract courageous young people unafraid of experiment. I was moved by Kortner’s decision to be part of such a group. His enthusiasm silenced my doubts, though I was aware of his idiosyncrasies, and Die Truppe came into existence.
The Kindness of Strangers Page 15