Käsebier Takes Berlin

by Gabriele Tergit

  “Enchantée,” Käte replied.

  “No atmosphere today,” said Margot. “Weak program. Boring.”

  “Yes, I think so too, it’s been quite some time since I’ve found Käsebier interesting. When will you finally come visit me?”

  “Darling, well, of course! But you must come over to my apartment first, tomorrow evening. We’re inaugurating our place. I think it’s turned out very nicely.”

  “Good evening,” said Muschler the banker, and stepped toward them.

  “Good evening,” said Mrs. Thedy Muschler. “My dear, we haven’t seen each other all summer! How are you?”

  “I’m so glad we bumped into one another, I’ve been meaning to call you, I’ve felt so guilty.”

  “We’ll see each other at tomorrow’s party, I’m looking forward to it,” said Mrs. Muschler, looking at Mr. Katter, the lawyer.

  “Good evening,” he said as he passed by, grazing Mrs. Muschler with his hand.

  “Goodbye,” said Muschler. “We’re very excited to see Käsebier.”

  “Au revoir, monsieur.”

  “Let’s ring each other sometime,” said Margot.

  “Give me a call,” said Käte.

  “Let’s call each other sometime,” said Mrs. Muschler.

  Then came girls who threw their legs up in the air and a small scene out of a film studio. Two jazz pianists on two pianos. And then: Käsebier.

  Käsebier was the same as ever. This time, he sang an old popular ballad. It was very funny. But people had expected much, much more.

  Everyone thought it “very nice.” But the program was far too long. Part of the audience got up and left during the second-to-last act. Käsebier gave a short speech after the last act. “That was well meant,” the audience thought condescendingly.

  “Miermann wasn’t here,” said Öchsli.

  “Yes,” said Gohlisch. “He’ll be greatly missed. I thought it was very pleasant, by the way.”

  “Yes, me too. Käsebier is such a good man.”

  “I suppose that’s not enough.”

  “Just watch, all the young kids’ll write that he’s avoiding the tough questions of our time.”

  “Yes, very likely, and perhaps with reason.”

  There was a large crowd at the corner of Kurfürstendamm. Word was a brawl had broken out. A truck covered in red flags rolled by, with young people screaming incomprehensibly hanging off the sides. The street steamed with excitement. Large election posters hung everywhere. Young people in uniforms with sticks on their shoulders marched by. Big words boomed: “Down with Capitalism!”—“For German Freedom!” But behind this big brouhaha was everyone’s gnawing worry: whether they could keep their place—big or small—and hold on to their station in life.

  Gohlisch and Öchsli took leave of one another.

  The Muschlers drove home.

  “A total flop,” Muschler said.

  Käte, who drove home with young Waldschmidt, said, “Käsebier is so touching.” She was sorry that she would no longer be able to discuss this fascinating rise and fall with Miermann.

  The big engagement and housewarming party was to be held the following evening at Margot Weissmann’s.

  35

  Muschler declares bankruptcy

  MISS KOHLER went to the office on the tenth of September and read the papers as usual. “The company N. Muschler & Son ceased all payments today,” the business section announced. She started, but only slightly; she didn’t think this event could affect her. She felt sorry for the Muschlers. “Terrible,” she thought. “Bankrupt. Terrible.” To her, bankruptcy seemed like the most dreadful event of a businessman’s life. In her mind, it meant being chased out of your house, abandoning your cupboards and clothes. To owe others, many others, perhaps unwittingly. She didn’t know that there was a long road from debtor’s prison to the endpoint: the triumph of the debtor and the breakdown of the creditor. But she still asked Gohlisch if she should do something. Gohlisch directed her to a businessman.

  Shy and slightly embarrassed, Miss Kohler asked Dr. Barein if the situation was bad and whether her securities were at risk—after all, her mother kept her remaining assets there.

  “Do you have a list of security identification numbers?” Dr. Barein asked her.

  “A security identification number? I have to confess, I don’t know what that is. Mr. Muschler always managed everything for us.”

  “Go home straightaway, make your inquiries, and retrieve your share certificates immediately.”

  Miss Kohler was choked with fear. She drove home and told her mother what had happened.

  The brave woman said, “Then I’ll open a guesthouse.”

  She still thought people could get by through hard work and thrift.

  “We can hardly rent it out in this state. I just want to make sure I can retrieve our securities. Do we have a list of security identification numbers?”

  The mother didn’t know what that was either. “Oppler will know, he’s on the judicial council,” she said. Miss Kohler briefly spoke to old Oppler on the phone. She felt uneasy about involving him in the matter. He had never demanded anything from them. He had known the family for forty years and had earned hundreds of thousands through old Kohler.

  Old Oppler said, “Of course you have a list of security identification numbers. Drive over immediately and make sure to get your certificates. Cash assets as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “About four hundred marks.”

  “That’ll be gone now.”

  “Oh God. That’s not possible.”

  “Drive over immediately.”

  She drove to Französische Strasse. The chestnut trees were beginning to turn. The dome’s beauty belonged to another era. If the church was open, Miss Kohler thought, I’d go in and rest. Across the way stood a house made of red sandstone from the Main, a grandiose palace in Italian Renaissance style. No expense had been spared on the building; the steps of the stairs were of white marble; the stairs were covered with red carpet; the walls were made of dark marble; the bannisters were bronze. Several cars stood in front, chauffeurs were huddled together chatting. Inside, chaos. She heard voices, doors. “Unbelievable!” said a man approaching Miss Kohler. Old Mayer, whom she’d known for many years, a dignified, respectable older gentleman, descended the stairs.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Mayer?” Miss Kohler asked.

  “What’s going on?” he cried, upset. “We’re broke!”

  In the cash office, she was engulfed by an agitated swarm. There were workers: a man who made letter paper, a small-time printer who was supposed to receive a thousand marks. An older, elegant-looking gentleman was vehemently demanding his deposits back; a young doctor his savings. The little people stood there, fearing they’d lose what they’d worked for, people who’d managed to save a small chunk from the inflation and were afraid once again. Miss Kohler spotted Löwenstein the lawyer. “What now? What can we do?” she asked.

  Löwenstein shrugged. “I’ve lost my money too.”

  Miss Kohler said, “We can’t lose that money, it’s the last we have. My father, you know—I think it was twelve million.”

  “Well,” said Löwenstein, “well.”

  “Where’s Mr. Muschler?” an ordinary man cried. “Where’s that Muschler?”

  “I want my money back!” a woman sobbed.

  Miss Kohler went over to the secretary. “Miss Fischer, what’s happened to our certificates?”

  “Gone,” said Miss Fischer.

  “Even those with security identification numbers?”

  Miss Fischer shrugged her shoulders. “My savings are gone as well.”

  “Can I speak to Mr. Frechheim, perhaps?”

  Miss Fischer went into his office.

  Frechheim came out toward her.

  “What’s happened to our securities?” asked Miss Kohler. “We had them in a custodial account.”

  Frechheim said, “The accounts ar
e here.” He had become an old man overnight.

  He went with her to the waiting crowd. “Where are my savings?” someone shouted. “Thieves, scoundrels, crooks. I’m going to go and file a complaint!”

  Frechheim said, “No account holder will be disadvantaged.”

  “But the savings aren’t there, are they?”

  “The bankruptcy trustee has full authority over everything.”

  Miss Kohler went over to Miss Fischer once again.

  “Miss Fischer, please, tell me the truth.”

  “Mr. Muschler tapped into the accounts, all of the securities have been mortgaged.”

  “All of them? And where are our Siemens bonds?”

  “Pledged for cash long ago, last year already, before the family went to Cannes.”

  “I don’t understand. I need to speak with a lawyer.”

  “The family intends to reimburse the funds.”

  “I demand to be given either the certificates or their monetary worth. I demand it. Where’s Mr. Muschler? What about the house? Or Mrs. Muschler’s jewelry? Aren’t they collateral?”

  Miss Fischer shrugged. “Mr. Muschler said it was all his wife’s private property. There have been terrible fights around here. Mr. Frechheim didn’t know anything, you see. Everything came out when the banks made large demands and Mr. Muschler couldn’t pay. We’ve seen it coming for a long time. We haven’t received our salaries for a month. You’ll need to report your claims.”

  Miss Kohler left. We’ll have to go through it all over again, she thought. I’ll need to speak to the landlord, to ask him to let us rent the apartment for less, or let us out of the contract. We’ll have to give up the apartment! What will Mother say? But we can’t slide into poverty just because of the linens and the silver and the porcelain. We need a large apartment because of the closets! That’s just mad. As a child, she thought, I always circled the curtains and tablecloths I liked most in the Herzog, Gerson, and Grünfeld catalogs. Now I don’t want to own anything at all! I want to be as mobile as possible! But how will Mother take it? An auction! Giving up the apartment! For her, it will mean nothing less than the abyss, the end.

  She spoke to her mother.

  “Won’t we receive a move-in fee for the apartment?”

  “Out of the question, Mama. We have to try to convince our landlord to let us out of the contract.”

  “And where will all the things go if we rent two rooms?”

  “We have to try and sell them. We’ll need to anyways, so that we have money for the move.”

  They made an appointment for a man to come by. He glanced through the ten rooms and declared that an auction wouldn’t be worth it. No one would want the huge buffet table in the dining room. They would be lucky if someone took it away for free. And the chandeliers were worthless—maybe good enough for the scrap collector!

  Miss Kohler was embarrassed at how shabby everything was. Nothing had been renovated in ten years. The wallpaper was dirty, the ceilings blackened with soot.

  The man began in the hallway. That iron umbrella stand: wasn’t it trash? Those cloakroom hooks were hideous: fit for the scrap heap. He went through the rooms.

  Mrs. Kohler said, “Please forgive the fact that beds are standing in all of the salons. We’ve been renting out the rooms, but we can’t go on like this!”

  “Oh,” said the man. “Doesn’t bother me. I can already see it’s not much.”

  “It was once very good furniture,” said Mrs. Kohler, making an effort. But the man knocked on the large buffet in the dining room. The painted plaster, fake early Renaissance! The brass chandelier with the faded silk pull-down lamp in the dining room was just as dreadful as the iron chandelier in the study! He’d give them five marks for the giant mahogany mirror.

  The furniture in the music room, which was from 1910 and upholstered with green damask, was in bad shape and the fabric was torn. No one wanted the imitation rococo chairs in the ’90s salon anymore, and the cloth was more gray than pink. Not to mention the bedroom! The vanity with the colorful washbasins had been Mrs. Kohler’s great pride in 1897. But who still wanted to wash themselves in sinks where the spout poked out of the middle of a La France rose? There was walnut furniture. No one wanted a Danzig baroque armoire from 1904 in their study anymore, no one wanted a sofa-cabinet—which should have been refurbished long ago—in their salon.

  “The carpets’ll do, but they’re all too large,” the man said.

  “And the grand piano?”

  “The grand piano’s maybe worth four hundred marks.”

  Mrs. Kohler cried out, “In its time, that instrument cost four thousand.”

  The man shrugged.

  Like a fat grim reaper, he walked through the apartment and mowed down everything with his gaze. The Turkish smoking table was nixed. The velvet and silk curtains, the draped shades, the net curtains, the dining room cupboard filled with crystalware, the twenty-four differently colored wine goblets, the little armchairs upholstered in green silk, the cupboard with Meissener figures in the music room, the leather armchair decorated with chestnut leaves, the oak standing lamp. —The vast quantities of rococo-patterned silver could only be sold in bulk. No one wanted rococo silver anymore.

  Does nothing last? Miss Kohler wondered. If we were buried alive, like in Pompeii, would nothing be worth excavating? Is everything we’ve done worth nothing?

  The man stopped: “The Biedermeier room might bring in a hundred marks.”

  “But I’d like to keep that for myself,” Miss Kohler said. The only things worth anything in their entire household, ten full rooms, an elegant apartment in the old west, were: a Dutch baroque armoire from 1700 with Delft vases, a place setting for twenty-four people from the Royal Porcelain Factory, a commode from 1790, the carpets, a few embroidered linens. That was it. Everything else was unusable in these new times. “It’s not worth auctioning this stuff off. It won’t bring in any money.”

  The man disappeared.

  “That man doesn’t know anything,” said the councilor’s wife, half-convinced, half to console herself. “Look, Aunt Amalie always had an eye on the buffet with the silver and glass inlays. It must be worth something.”

  “You know, Mama, why don’t you call up Aunt Amalie. Let’s give it to her.”

  “It’ll be too large for her small apartment.”

  She did call her up. It was too large for Aunt Amalie. But she’d ask her daughter.

  That evening, Aunt Amalie called back and told them that Annelies had laughed. She had a box for her silver; that was enough for her. That’s the way it was with kids these days.

  Miss Kohler went through the apartment, looked at the salon with its many rickety tables and chairs, the sofa-cabinet with its mirror, the table fully decked out in Gobelin. Nothing held up anymore when examined objectively.

  What great bourgeois wealth miserably squandered! Could one—just one—beautiful piece still be found? A piece of Bulgarian embroidery lay on a table, a soulful oasis next to the bronze bust of a long-haired girl wearing a crown of water lilies. The icebox might be worth something, but it was too big as well. Men had worked hard to stuff their houses from top to bottom with shabby junk, so that nothing would have to be borrowed for parties with fifty guests. And yet hadn’t Lotte had a wonderful time before the war? Hadn’t she been just as blind to reality as everyone else? Hadn’t she thought it more elegant the bigger the rooms, the larger the buffets, the broader the chandeliers, the more ornate the crystal, the more richly stitched the table linens? It was only elegant when the porcelain was trimmed with cobalt or gold, when the cigarette boxes were made of silver and the room was decorated with bronze busts, vases, and porcelain—far more than the eye could take in. Hadn’t she thought their elegant, classical house in Blumeshof, with its curved white wooden staircase and the red velvet handrail, inferior in 1911 when everyone was moving to Kurfürstendamm and Kaiserallee, into buildings with entrances decorated with baroque plaster, bronze sphinxes flanking th
e stairs, and spinach-green and strawberry-pink murals?

  Her mother was weeping over the debacle in the dining room. “If my husband could see this!” But Miss Kohler had cut off her braid, shortened her skirts, and cast off her longing for a full closet of linens. To be mobile, light! The ideal: two small rooms surrounded by greenery! That is, if things couldn’t get worse; what if hard work and thrift no longer sufficed? A mortal fear suddenly crept over her. What if she lost her job? Her life was still secure—minimally, at least—but nonetheless secure. What then? Wasn’t it better to keep things for the pawnshop? To have something when one had debts at the baker’s, the butcher’s?

  Thus, ten years after the death of Privy Councilor Kohler, a man with a fortune of twelve million, his daughter sat in their ten-room apartment.

  The brown bronze lamp burned. Her father had received it for some anniversary or another. Now she could throw it out, or maybe donate it! She went through the corner room into her bedroom. The dining room carpet may have been a lovely Bukhara, but it was threadbare. The goblets may be ugly, but hadn’t they all happily drunk wine from them? Everything flew through her mind in a jumble.

  The rubber Käsebier doll that Gohlisch had given her last Christmas sat on the sofa in her room. “Käsebier, the real rubber doll, something for the kids so they’ll laugh and won’t cry, you can squeeze it to your chest, put it in your bath.” Maybe Muschler will get a good deal on the house and avoid bankruptcy, she thought.

  •

  That same day, Mitte and Muschler held a meeting. Mitte, Matukat, Muschler, Dr. Löwenstein, and Frechheim were present. Frechheim wasn’t speaking to Muschler anymore. He had decided that he wouldn’t let Muschler end up behind bars, but otherwise he was done with him. They were discussing the next steps for the Käsebier theater.

  “What a good deal,” Muschler said to Mitte. “I want to be the second buyer too!”

  “I don’t, with your fancy-schmancy Käsebier theater,” said Mitte.

  “Why not? Why not?”

  “Come on! The poor sod! No one’s going to go. First you lured him out of Hasenheide, now he’s sure to go to the dogs here.”