But this book would not be strict about exactness, not edifying on all the scholarly material – above all, it would not be a German thing – if its fullness did not come from its lack, if each landscape’s circuit, which here the historian and researcher measure, were not experienceable or encountered by another closely related German type as a spellbound sphere, as a dangerous, fateful space of nature. ‘Interpreter’, so pronounces Hofmannsthal, when he deals with this genius and his most woebegone, most calamitous act of God, ‘they are interpreters in their highest moment, Visionaries – the scenting, suspecting German being appears again in them, scenting after primal nature in people and in the world, interpreting the souls and the bodies, the faces and the stories, interpreting settlements and the customs, the landscape and the clan.’ That is embodied in its most lucid figure, Herder, and, fifty years later, in its darkest, Ludwig Hermann Wolfram. ‘How does nature seduce’, so announces the pontifex of his lost Faust poem, ‘the poet saturated with spirit’?
Stream becomes the brook, outpouring itself in the flood of the sea the lowly flower becomes the highest cactus column,
the willow tree becomes the primal forest’s most powerful giants,
the gorse bloom becomes the giant lotus blossom.
So has from the little German village canton up to that of the Javanese primal forest every form on earth buried its physiognomic seal in the writings of German geographers, travellers and poets in one century. Therefore the title of this book is more than a happy formulation: a discovery, and each reader will find fulfilled in it the hope of its editor, which is ‘to introduce’ a portion of ‘lost German intellectual greats’.
—
Translated by Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski.
First published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 February 1928; Gesammelte Schriften III, 88–94.
PART THREE
Play and Pedagogy
Jumping Jack (Hampelmann), 1919.
CHAPTER 32
Review: Collection of
Frankfurt Children’s Rhymes
Bust of a Child (Kopf eines Kindes), 1939.
The cultural effect that children’s lives and activities exert on the ethnic and linguistic communities in which they take place has been, to this day, a largely unexplored chapter of cultural history, and yet it is one of the most relevant. As contribution to this, the highest value should be accorded to a comprehensive collection of verses and sayings of children from Frankfurt, of which I am about to convey something. Its creator is the locally based Rector Wehrhan, though incidentally he is not a child of Frankfurt but, rather, a native of Lippe. In 1908, he laid the foundations for a large archive, which has grown over the course of time to include well over a thousand pieces and fragments, thanks not only to his tireless efforts, but also to a well-organised support system. Everything – all manner of verses, turns of phrase, jokes and puzzles – that accompanies the lives of Frankfurt schoolchildren, from their earliest babyhood to the threshold of puberty, can be found here, no matter whether these are the child’s own idioms or whether they have their origin in stereotypical phrases from their parents’ tongue.
What is found in Wehrhan’s collection, however, is partly an ancient good; in only a few cases was it created by children. And the judicious user of these documents will not focus on ‘originals’. Rather, here he can trace how the child ‘models’, how he or she ‘tinkers’, how – in the intellectual realm as well as in the sensuous one – he or she never adopts the established form as such, and how the whole richness of his or her mental world occupies the narrow track of variation. The children return the oldest fragments and phrases of verse to the adults in variegated forms; their work lies not so much in the gist of these pieces, as in the unpredictably appealing play of transformation. The material encompasses around a hundred folders, organised according to keywords. There are ‘the first jokes’, ‘baking cakes’, ‘rhymes told on the lap’, ‘going to bed and getting up’, ‘the dumb and clumsy child’, ‘the weather’, ‘animal names’, ‘plants’, ‘weekdays’, ‘Zeppelin’, ‘world war’, ‘nicknames’, ‘Jewish rhymes’, ‘banter and teasing’, ‘tongue twisters’, ‘popular songs’, to name but a few. This is to say nothing of the great collection of playground rhymes and the impressive codex of hopscotch games, including the copious schemes that have been drawn in chalk onto the pavements of Frankfurt, where, over the years, playing children have hopped on one leg.
Some rhymes from the World War with their scathing satirical power:
My mother became a soldier
She got some trousers for that
With red edging
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
My mother became a soldier
She received a coat for that
With shiny buttons on it
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
My mother became a soldier
She got some boots for that
With high legs on them
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
My mother became a soldier
She received a helmet for that
With Kaiser Wilhelm on it
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
My mother became a soldier
She got a shotgun for that
And so she shoots here and there
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
My mother became a soldier
So then she went into the trenches
And there she got kohlrabi
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
My mother became a soldier
She got put in a military hospital
She got put in a canopy bed
Tara zing da
My mother became a soldier.
If I stand in the dark midnight
So lonely on the hunt for lice
And I think of my silent home
That thinks of me in the moonlight.
Little Marie
You silly little cow
I will pull up one of your little legs
Then you must limp
On your ham
Then you will go to the city hospital
Then you’ll be operated on
You will be smeared with soft soap
Then the German men’s choir will come
And sing a little song for you.
Some counting rhymes:
On a rubber-rubber-mountain,
There lives a rubber-rubber-dwarf,
Has a rubber-rubber-wife.
The rubber-rubber-wife
Has a rubber-rubber-child.
The rubber-rubber-child
Has a rubber-rubber-ball,
Threw it in the air.
The rubber-rubber-ball
Broke.
And you are a Jew.
* * *
10, 20, 30,
Girl, you work hard,
40, 50, 60,
Girl, you are blotchy,
70, 80, 90,
Girl, you are alone.
Some constructivist feats:
Last glove I lost my autumn.
I went finding for three days, before I looked for it.
I came to a peep, there I peered through.
There sat three chairs on a man.
Now I took off my good day and said:
‘Hat, Sirs’.
Lovely father from my greeting. Here would be
Soles to beboot. He does not need to money for his fear.
If he would come in, he would pass by.
An old cloister joke from children’s lips:
Dear parish of Pig Mountain!
Stand up or remain seated.
We read in the book of Pitchfork,
Six prongs and thirty-five gaiter buttons,
Where it is written:
In my earliest youth I perpetrated my bold
est deed.
With ice-cold water I burnt out the eyes of children.
And with a blunt rasp I cut off their fingers.
After the deed was done the broom handle arrested me.
This brought me to the higher regional court Burglary.
Here I received fourteen days detention, afterwards freedom.
Now receive the blessing of the Lord!
The hat-maker makes hats for you,
The umbrella-maker makes covers for you,
The roof-maker lets his roofs shine over you.
We are singing song number three hundred:
Big clump, we plane you!
Hallelujah!
Hopefully all those who are interested in researching children’s creativity need not wait too long for a complete publication of the Wehrhan collection.
—
Translated by Esther Leslie.
First published Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 August 1925; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 792–6.
CHAPTER 33
Fantasy Sentences
Portrait Sketch of a Costumed Lady (Bildnisskizze einer kostümierten Dame), 1924.
Formed by an eleven-year-old girl from words given to her.
Freedom – garden – faded – greeting – crazy – eye of a needle
Since freedom cannot be attained as quickly as the leaves in the garden have faded, its greeting is all the stormier, and even the crazy people, who believe the eye of a needle to be larger than a monkey, take part.
Table cloth – sky – pillow – continent – eternity
The table in front of him was covered by a table cloth and it stood under the open sky. He lay on the pillow on the continent remote from the world, as if he did not want to wake up for eternity.
Lips – bendy – dice – rope – lemon
Her lips were so rosy, like bendy roses, when one infected them while playing with dice or during a tug of war with a rope, but her gaze was bitter like the peel of a lemon.
Corner – emphasis – character – drawer – flat
On the corner – he said it with emphasis – I saw a character that was flat like a drawer.
Pipe – border – booty – busy – skinny
The pipe at the border was a place for robbers. This is where they brought their booty, since the path was not busy. In the moonlight, the figures appeared skinny.
Pretzel – feather1 – pause – lament – doohickey
Time curves like a pretzel through nature. The feather paints the landscape and, if there is a pause, then it is filled with rain. One hears a lament because there is no doohickey.
—
Translated by Esther Leslie.
First published in Die Literarische Welt, 3 December 1926; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 802–3.
CHAPTER 34
Wall Calendar from Die
literarische Welt for 1927
Flower Family V (Blumenfamilie V), 1922.
Wall calendar from Die literarische Welt, 1927, from which these verses were taken
Verses by Walter Benjamin Drawings by Rudolf Grossmann
JANUARY
The year 1927 is announced
In tones to be heard in North and South
(and in Free City Danzig).
For German readers of this almanac
Aquarius is the sign of the zodiac.1
FEBRUARY
Next the month of February
Presents the fishes’ canopy.
S. Fischer though lives here on earth
And offers you his peace for all it is worth.2
MARCH
The Querschnitt mag is cheap basically,
Springtime3 creeps up only reluctantly.
To the joy of every good snob
Both are ruled by Wedderkop.4
APRIL
April is the month of the bull,
But Grossmann won’t draw one at all.
(Probably a result of some complex)
So here instead is Fridericus Rex.5
MAY
Laurels are usually evergreens,
Writers squirt out thoughts as streams.
For the twins in May
It doesn’t matter either way.
JUNE
The June animal, beloved of the Pen-Club member,
Is right here – the crab – on the agenda.
But who, you might ask, is that nought?
It is Ludwig Fulda and none ought.6
JULY
Bab is essentially the name of July
(the lion growls and says bye-bye).
Many a lion with polemics to deliver
Belongs to Neustadt on the Dosse River.7
AUGUST
Prague, which usually in August is bare,
Today bakes fresh bread from cornfields there –
Authors who all too quickly give in
Result from the sign of the zodiac which is the virgin.8
SEPTEMBER
September –
Libra or scale is the astrological sign
The question being –
Filth or grime,
Let us weigh it up quite precisely
Lulu or Gneisenau – which will it be?9
OCTOBER
Scorpio stings from his rump
Head-on, Siegfried Jacobsohn delivered his thump.
October lets us him revere
With Sternheim’s astral-premieres.10
NOVEMBER
The man in November with arrow and bow,
is called Arno Holz. Heaven does not know
Becker, who is his rival.
Herr Külz has a tricky pedestal.11
DECEMBER
Quite badly crumpled is his beard,
Through which the purrs of the poet are heard,
Still (if as pacifist, he is inadmissible)
He remains, as a Capricorn, quite permissible.
—
Translated by Esther Leslie.
First published in Die literarische Welt, 24 December 1926; Gesammelte Schriften VI, 545–7.
CHAPTER 35
Riddles
Watchful Angel (Wachsamer Engel), 1939.
The Stranger’s Reply
Some of our readers have perhaps already heard the joke which the ancient Greek Sophists (a school of philosophy) invented in order to demonstrate the complexity of human thinking. The joke is called ‘The Cretan’, because in it appears a man from the island of Crete, who proposes two statements. Firstly: all Cretans are liars. Secondly: I am a Cretan. So now what should we believe about the man? If he is a Cretan, then he is lying and is (because he maintained that he was one) not one. If he is not a Cretan, then he spoke the truth and so is one. It is not clearly evident from this little joke that a debate developed in relation to it, in which significant minds have participated up until our day. One of the last ones to occupy himself with this question is the Englishman Bertrand Russell, who is still alive and who devised a whole number of such puzzle questions, which are named ‘Russell’s Paradoxes’ after him. They have a very serious background, but that does not prevent them from sometimes taking a jokey form, as, for example, the following: a barber lives in a small town, and in front of his shop he has a sign: ‘All those who do not shave themselves are shaved by me.’ But what happens to the barber himself? If he does not shave himself, then according to his own announcement he must shave himself. If he does shave himself, then according to his announcement he is not allowed to shave himself.
Now perhaps our readers might like to devise a joke like this themselves, and, to help them along, we include the following story:
A stranger came across a pretty garden and wanted to go in. But the gardener said to him that this garden was a special case. Because, namely, everyone who wanted to enter it had to advance a claim. If it is a true one, then he has to pay three marks. If it is not true, then he has to pay six marks. But the stranger, who was not keen on either, thought for a little while and advanced a claim that made the gardener as perplexed as th
e little jokes we just told made the reader. In this way the stranger gained admission without payment.
What was his claim?
Solution: The stranger, ‘I have to pay six marks.’ If he really has to pay six marks, then his claim is true and he only has to pay three marks. If he doesn’t have to pay six marks, then his claim is false and he has to pay six marks.
Succinct
The famous Viennese man of finance L counted among his friends the actor Mitterwurzer, whom he had once helped with a loan. As its repayment was a long time coming, and after several reminders had borne no fruit, L sent his friend a ticket on which stood nothing other than ?.
The Storyteller Page 12