The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  Oh, I am tired, cried Chamberlain, and threw himself onto the club chair in Downing Street, his rigid hat, his umbrella falling to the floor; he tore open his wing collar, Henderson and Halifax uttered a few encouraging words. Such moments of worry in the face of transactions of tremendous responsibility gave the figures in the second-rate crime novel a human quality; with his exhaustion upon being called to the window to wave to the excited masses, England’s prime minister demonstrated just how much he had struggled to avert the threat of war. And it was not just in England and France that the leaders were receiving gratitude and good faith: in Germany as well, there was overwhelming certainty about a favorable outcome to the crisis. Since the suggestions communicated on Thursday, though, the German demands had already been increased, the bomb squadrons were ready for combat, and the armies were awaiting their marching orders. The feudal lords of Poland and Hungary had also underlined their demands, and the Soviet Union warned that in the case of an advance by Polish troops, they would annul the nonaggression treaty between the two countries. That Czechoslovakia had mobilized on Friday the twenty-third did not diminish people’s belief in peace; on the warm, late-summer evening, the café terraces and bars on Boulevard de Clichy were jam-packed, and on the promenade, under the still-green foliage of the trees, people were crowding around a street performer who was gulping down live frogs, washing them down with water and throwing the whole lot up with a grimace. A little girl was banging along on the tambourine and dancing, with a monkey on her shoulder. Watching the procedure, as the head, the twitching legs of one frog after the other appeared between the lips of the performer among the spray of the water, Katz said that his artistic talent consisted in feigning the swallowing and the gagging while stowing the creatures in his mouth. When, to the disgusted pleasure of his audience, he declared with a convincing act that a frog had chosen to stay in the warm, dark chamber of his stomach, this ensured him increased earnings when the child went around collecting coins. Later he would surreptitiously transfer the tree frog that he had kept pinned down with his tongue into the glass jug. Van Gogh, said Katz, would have been able to appreciate such a way of earning a living. He walked toward us from a steep alley, in his sheepskin coat, with his rabbit-fur cap, with a bristly red beard, a painting still wet under his arm, one he had painted in the morning at Place Pigalle, and for which he wanted to find a place on the overcrowded walls of the Café du Tambourin. We wandered after this apparition, this shadow, in which a face flared up and died out again. Here, in Montmartre, according to many, it was supposed to be possible to sense the heart of the city. This is where the red light bulbs on the blades of the small windmill were, stuck between roof gables; the glass doors stood open to the jinglejangle all around, figures rushed in and out as swarming daubs of paint, the glasses and bottles were bundles of light, eyes and mouths flitted open, remained effervescent for a few seconds, before being washed away in the breaking waves. If there was a heart beating here, it was the heart of a spinning, whining, artificial market, the heart in a formless heap of shards and junk. People crawled around its outermost stratum, burrowed into it, lodged themselves in it here and there, between tatters of backdrops, themselves hastily decorated and painted. Let’s not lose sight of him, said Katz, we’ll follow him into that restaurant there, number sixty-six, Boulevard de Clichy, into all this yellow, green, blue, into these reflections, these flashes of zinc, enamel, porcelain, let’s barge into the throng and drink a glass of wine at the bar. Van Gogh’s ghost had evaporated, there was no longer a view into the frothing, the sludge of time, we were orbited by nothing but the present; everything that was perceptible shifted so quickly and slightly that even we now scarcely seemed to exist and threatened to disappear in an instant, to drift into oblivion. And then, suddenly, he did appear, a group of drinkers at the bar had stepped to the side and there he was, sitting at a small, round table, beneath Japanese woodcuts, still lifes in luminous yellow, orange-colored strokes, sitting in silence, bent forward with his mouth clamped shut, a furtive, almost malevolent expression, the picture placed in front of him, holding it with his paint-stained fingers, waiting for people to take note of him and his work. But Lautrec, Pissarro, Gauguin were carousing, messing around with the hostess, the dark-featured, plump woman from Rome; then, all of a sudden, a commotion broke out. Bernard, a friend, had approached van Gogh, placed his hand on his shoulder, sending the painting flying through the air, a brawl broke out, the waiter, his white apron flapping, wrapped his arm around the neck of the man in fur, a frenetic twisting in the direction of the door, Gauguin, encased in his cape, in the shadows cast by his broad-brimmed hat, didn’t look up. We walked out, a police whistle could be heard, we couldn’t allow ourselves to be grabbed and led off to be interrogated, arrested, kicked out of the country because of a punch-up caused by a painter drunk on absinthe. Though he had only one thing in mind, said Katz, to ensure that he and his comrades could subsist, to struggle so that he and they could possess means of production: a bit of paint, a piece of canvas, a few paintbrushes. He wanted no more than his right to work, ownership of his own work, he wanted the free association of artistic workers, rebelled against the ignominy of having to cart his productions to the junk dealer time and again. If this was the heart of the city, then it lay buried under dust and rubbish, a mountain had grown over it, layer upon layer, a fetid draft blew toward us from the heights, through the troughs and hollows. Van Gogh had been tossed into the stream of pedestrians, stood stunned at first, wanted to go back into the bar, but then changed his mind, staggered on, into the arms of Corot, Monet, Seurat, whom he didn’t recognize, walked across Place Blanche, up Rue Lepic. This Place Blanche, this meeting place of nocturnal flâneurs, this circus, which had seen Sue, Bretonne, and Nerval, Hugo, Balzac, and Vigny, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud flitting past, this square, where hurried business was carried out and furtive liaisons emerged that found sanctuary in the alleys branching off it, this Place Blanche, white from the footprints of the workers from the chalk pits, white from the sluggish processions coming down the hillside, climbing up from the chalk factories on Rue Blanche, intersected by a hefty stampede of horse hooves, this white square, over which the horse swept with its rider, disappearing behind bobbing green omnibuses, this square was now a raucous, filthy cauldron from which we fled, in pursuit of a fugitive. At the spot where Rue Lepic described an arc before heading up to the summit, in the third story of the building at number fifty-four, van Gogh lived with his brother. From his window with the low, iron railing, he could look out onto the Moulin de la Galette, behind the picket fences, among the shrubbery, the skewed huts on the embankment. Fifty years later, only one of the mills was left, as an ornament on the tower above the wooden walls of a cabaret, in whose courtyard people danced under paper lanterns. If he wasn’t cowering up there in his dark room, between the large closet and the base burner stove, then he had gone running up to Place du Tertre, having elbowed his way through the crowd, through the dense flocks of families, groups of friends, old and young, sitting at the wooden tables under the trees, celebrating in their own way with food and drink this evening of peace, and the thought of the unshakability of this peace, was holed up over in the building site around the basilica of Sacré-Cœur; we thought we could hear his whining coming from over near Saint-Pierre. The door to the oldest church in the city stood open, a few people knelt in prayer on the pews, more than a millennium lay stacked up in their stone. The construction of the cloister had been ordered in commemoration of the martyrs who had hidden from the Romans in the mountain caves by Louis the Fat and Queen Adelaide, whose straw-covered country estate was located in the neighboring woodlands. Built on the foundations of a Roman temple, held up by Roman arches and Gothic pillars, interspersed with masonry which still bore traces of being burned down during the great revolution, pieced back together and given a roof by the stooges of the counterrevolution, there stood the abbey, which in the spring of seventy-one had served as a munitions de
pot and field hospital. Though the figure with a pig’s head riding a billy goat and the sanctimonious patron saint of the city, Genevieve, mocked all the efforts which had been expended on the heights of the mountain, and most things up here had been turned to ashes and rubble, it was still the place where the Commune had entrenched itself. Perhaps because of this, the thought had emerged that the heart of the city beat in this pile of debris, because this is where the fleeing had found their hideouts, the insurrectionists their defensive positions. Not just the saints Denis, Rustique, and Éleuthère but Marat and the insurgents of eighteen thirty-four and forty-eight had also escaped their pursuers in the chasms and shafts of Mons Martyrum. The cathedral made of frosting had been nothing in the face of the cannons of the national guard that had once been assembled here. The mountain had always been a site of refuge, of perseverance, of dogged resistance, the picturesque cladding had only been applied by later generations; the bohemian milieu, the bandits and cocottes, formed part of its temporary seizure by the bourgeoisie; the mountain itself, with its secret heartbeat, was the property of those who went about their work in silence. Van Gogh had disappeared, but in the houses someone may still have been living here or there who had seen him skulking through the alleys at night. The smell of mildew and decay predominated, and yet suddenly it no longer seemed as if we had climbed a burial mound, we didn’t turn back when we thought of those who had lived here, they had left behind traces, signs of resistance, objects of extreme mental concentration. The political vanguard and the artistic avant-garde had been based on this mountain. The connection with the people who had been at work before us always bore the same significance as an opening up of the path into the future. In that sense we are traditionalists, said Katz. We can’t believe in anything that is to come if we don’t know how to appreciate that which has gone before. Thus, the people who were eating and drinking on Place du Tertre in that moment, as the world was threatening to fall apart, held tight to the continuity of life. Generals and foreign ministers were flying back and forth between London and Paris, in their briefcases the documents for their bargaining and conning, the big players were at their rotten business, the small fries were sitting at narrow tables rammed into the earth, and by gathering together here they announced their contempt for everything that was objectionable, which didn’t belong to them. For a few hours, threatened with death, they praised tranquility. We had arrived at Rue Ravignan via a narrow alley that opened out onto the sloped plaza of the same name. Here, scrawny trees stood around one of those fountains, of which there were so many in this city, made of cast iron, painted green, sheltered by a dome which held up nymphs in a round dance. The streetlamps illuminated the low wall of the building on the edge of the square, it was all scratched up, patches of plaster had fallen off it; the entrance, with its gates sagging in their hinges, led past a set of wooden steps and a rusty drain into an angular courtyard covered in scraggy scrub. Beside Rue Garreau was a sprawling, roughly patched together building, with ladders leading up aslant to the upper levels and matte windows, some with cardboard nailed over them. On the roofs, which ascended like steps, between tall, tin chimneys, there were fixtures for skylight panes. Nothing could be more crumbling, rotten, expired than this shed-like housing, which had been nicknamed Bateau-Lavoir after the floating laundries on the Seine, and which resembled a river steamer stranded between the cliffs of the firewall. Once upon a time, washing had been done here in a particular way; behind this splitting wooden cladding, cleaned of slag, our century of painting and poetry had unfolded. A stay in the sheds couldn’t have been idyllic back then either, in summer it was hot as an oven in there, icy cold, drafty in winter. The outsiders of culture had scampered into these nooks and crannies because they offered cheap shelter. Utrillo, Picasso, Gris, Braque, Herbin, Apollinaire, Laurencin, Brancusi, Severini, Modigliani, Derain, Reverdy, Salmon, Gertrude Stein, and Max Jacob had been housed in the stalls or visited them; there, beneath the cracked glass, on the top level of the tattered roof, the Demoiselles d’Avignon had glimpsed the hazy shimmer of the world, and below, on the ground floor, the size of a barn, held up by rough wooden posts, the fabulous feast had been held in honor of the customs officer, Rousseau. He was enthroned on a chair placed on a crate, surrounded by foliage and bunting, playing a child’s violin. It was as if the celebrations on Place du Tertre were for him as well, and as if they were commemorating the Communards up above, and under the echo of the laughing voices I felt at home in this city. It was only back in the library in Rue Casimir-Périer that I found myself back on unstable terrain. The Soviet Union had asserted that, in the event of a German invasion, they would fulfill their duties to defend Czechoslovakia. The French reservists had been called up, on Saturday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the enlistment orders were stuck to the walls of the municipal buildings, tens of thousands of working men headed to the railway stations to wait for the military trains. Daladier, accompanied by General Gamelin, reported to the press and pointed out the extreme gravity of the situation. The stocky petit bourgeois with the bull’s neck struck patriotic tones, attempting to tauten his bloated face and present himself as a respectable man burdened by the obligations of France’s alliances. He needed the tension surrounding the question of whether France would stand by Czechoslovakia, whether it would come to all-out war, in order for his later breach of faith to transform into a relief. His composure, his dignity, his readiness to take historic actions were to be remembered when the hour of retreat arrived, dressed up as a clever act of statesmanship. He presented himself as the courageous man who had already raised his old service rifle, had the enemy in his sights; and this is how he would be remembered, when he had been reduced to a mere puppet show of cowardice. This shrewd game would lead the people from hope to sudden fear and back to hope again; the same occurred in England, the haggard old man with the thickly trimmed moustache above his crooked, grinning mouth, with the golden watch chain dangling from his vest, and the lord with the greyhound face beside him, announced the preparations for mobilization; in Hyde Park, in Saint James’s Park, in Green Park, trenches and dugouts were excavated. Thus, in order to confront growing unrest in France, the rulers had placed the male population under the spell of military service; the reminder of national pride trumpeted by the press impeded any possible attempts at disruption. The halls of the Cercle des Nations were abuzz with arguments; Scandinavian union representatives, representatives of the Spanish relief efforts, politicians, and Party functionaries debated with one another in the rooms decked with expensive tapestries; the word was that Pieck had come from Moscow, the Central Committee had issued a call for a collective struggle against fascism, the metaphysically overblown defensive will of the Western powers coincided with the outbreaks of hysterical defamation with which the Greater German Reich sought to demoralize Czechoslovakia into surrendering the Sudetenland. In addition, rumors were spread that England and France, now united with the Soviet Union, would stand up to the aggressor. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, I sat once again in the park on our street, on a bank among the well-trimmed shrubbery, accompanied by the tolling of the bells of Saint Clotilde. The families were heading to Mass in their Sunday bests, the children scrubbed clean and groomed; soon, prayers would be echoing out from the pulpits for the protection of the system for whose downfall the rebellious had gathered together so often and in vain. The city towered monstrously, what dwarves we were within it, what audacity it had been to erect barricades here in the streets, to hold off the owners of the arsenal behind them for a day, a couple of days. I was some kind of straggler, who, like countless others now and before, was crouched in a corner, cursing their inferiority, plotting their revenge for the annihilation of their kin. But they wanted to see us this powerless, shoved into the bushes like this, those bloodsuckers, their well-salaried blowhards had managed to get the masses of millions to keep quiet, fall into line, while up above them, out of reach, the speculation and extortion continued apace. Once more I hu
rried along the quay and over the bridge, perhaps I would only be granted one more day to see what I longed to see. And again, upon visiting the hideout, I asked myself whether this was a form of evasion, of delaying other, important decisions, whether all of my earlier hesitation about joining the Party couldn’t be traced back to my tendency toward doubt, my rejection of completion, of finality, which was immediately followed by the justification that I first of all had to be sure of myself before I could venture to take on other responsibilities. The rows of images were endless. In a small painting by Meissonier, I saw the power relation between the inhabitants of the streets and the masters of the arsenal depicted even more convincingly than in Delacroix’s work with the figure of Liberty at the barricade. No wider than the span of a hand, without decorative embellishments or noticeable composition, as soberly as a piece of reportage it conveyed what the painter had seen in June of forty-eight: an alley, its windows and doors barricaded and shutters down, where, between the cobblestones that had been tossed together into piles, the blood-covered corpses of the insurrectionaries lay. The image bore the stillness that followed the catastrophe. The murderers were nowhere to be seen, they kept their distance in this hour of ignominious victory, only their sorry victims lay there, their clothes shredded, in the foreground, a man on his back in red trousers, one foot missing its shoe, another with his hand pressed on the wound in his chest, on the curb, a boy lying on his stomach, next to him a lost cap, an old man, his pointed red beard sticking up in the air, up front, a little light on the shattered stones, in the background of the empty street, deepening darkness. And yet it wasn’t this unassuming image that I took with me as my final impression as I was driven out of the temple but rather the thought of a panel, also almost miniature, in which Saint Rainerius flew through the air, in front of the smooth wall of the prison in which he had blown a hole, with a wave of his hand, in order to free the paupers who had been thrown into the cellar. The saint wasn’t floating: he was roaring around like a bullet, his legs disappearing in a flaming cloud. The wall that he was set against was of a cool gray, a few of the prisoners had already escaped from the hole at its juncture with the smooth earth, fleeing toward the left on the square and into an alleyway off in the distance, while another, in gown and belt, was in the process of heaving himself out of the dungeon. There was a tiny, dark door in the foreground, above some steps on the short side of the building, with the opening revealing the thickness of the stone walls. The bleak, cube-like building took up two-thirds of the space of the image, the gray scale was divided into three, from the light gray of the shadowless, regular surface of the ground to the muted gray of the front with the protruding staircase. The building in the background on the corner of the alleyway, half castle, half market hall, exhibited arrow slits at the top, and beneath, a row of arched, shuttered windows bore slanted awnings which sheltered the stalls, the doors of which were pulled shut. The patch of sky in the upper left and the halo of Rainerius were rendered in gold leaf. Off in the distance I had heard the ringing of the handbells; now their tinkling was approaching, mixed in with yells, a babble of voices, and the scuffing of steps. The guards appeared, swinging their bells, pushing a swarm of visitors in front of them. They laid their hands on the lingerers, shaking a shoulder here, tugging at an arm there; after years of drawn-out, bitter waiting, they had remembered their authority. They had an important task to carry out today, emptying the Louvre for the evacuation of the images. Through the Trecento, the Quattrocento the little bells clanged, the increasingly hostile commands, the whistles, the clicks of the tongue, the clapping of hands, past Martini, Fra Angelico, one of the guards, with an olive-colored face, had stopped beside me in admonishment, another had made it to Martorell, to the triptych of Saint George, who, naked but for a loincloth, was kneeling at the post, his hands bound in front of him, and, his mouth half agape, was staring into the distance with a somewhat foolish expression while four dignified, bearded men with devout expressions on their faces took to him with knotted cords and rods, and the panels left and right showed how he was dragged to the execution site and his head lopped off. This small picture, which the guards pushed me away from, suddenly took up more space in me than Géricault’s painting; it contained little in the way of deliberate confrontations with an entire epoch, didn’t seek to unfurl everything that was questionable and the complexes associated with the creative process, it was just there, existing completely for itself, as a symbol, formed once by Sassetta, who lived from thirteen ninety-two until fourteen fifty in Siena. I couldn’t yet define what the image had stirred within me, but it had to do with the simplicity of expression, the freshness and directness of the vision, the combination of objectivity and abstraction with the sharpness and clarity of the colors and forms. Walking backward, my gaze directed toward the horizontal, flying figure, I drew away, feeling relaxation, levity; ladders were already being carried over; the demounting began, and we were tossed out into the mobilization, into the expectation of war. Hang him, hang him, came the familiar roar from the loudspeakers on Monday, as the ringleader baited the people against Beneš. Our patience has run out, he bellowed, the Sudetenland has to be given back to the Reich now, and then, with booming conviction, he had been a frontline soldier himself, knew how dreadful war was, hoped he could spare the German people the same. Then on to the king of England, keep your spirits up, have faith in your government, who with God’s help will find a just and peaceful solution. The great bluff was taken to extremes. The Western powers declared themselves willing to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, the British fleet mobilized, Berlin also announced their plans to mobilize on Wednesday, and under the cover of this deceptive maneuver, England’s and France’s large corporations sold their Czech shares, at a profit, to the firms in Germany that were ready and waiting to take over the industries. On Wednesday, there was no longer any mention of a coalition between England and France with the Soviet Union nor of carrying out a general mobilization; instead, the so-called four-power conference was announced, that intimate gentlemen’s gathering that was to take place in Munich on the twenty-ninth of September. Amid all the menacing clamor, the patriotic pledges, the business had been settled, Czechoslovakia had been left with no other option than to cede the regions being demanded. It became evident that a political strategy that had been carried out for two decades was now nearing its fulfillment. For England and France, and all the countries allied with them under the pretense of neutrality, the desire to isolate and cut off the Soviet Union possessed greater weight than the fear of fascism. When the governing politicians of Western Europe spoke of peace, washing their hands as they did so, for them this peace meant the crippling of socialism, and when, before flying out, Chamberlain and Daladier let it be known that no price was too great when it came to salvaging peace, they were counting on the possibility of being able to confine the conflict to a clash between Germany and its only foe, which for them, lying in wait, could work out to their advantage, to their eventual triumph. The Soviet state alone would not be able to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia; it had to prepare itself for its own defense. All pacts of mutual defense fell apart. The English and French hypocrites met with the chief thief and his Italian sidekick in order to organize the skyrocketing of the stock prices, and during the night, at twelve thirty, they arranged themselves behind the table with the unfurled map of Czechoslovakia, strewn with circles drawn with brightly colored pencils, for their historic snapshot, all lined up, staring out at us the next morning from the front pages of every newspaper with their sinister, pinched faces. It wasn’t just Czechoslovakia that they had sold off, they had thrown all of Europe into the bargain bin. Yet this elicited jubilation, rapture, people embraced each other in tears, in speechless delirium. Heil Chamberlain, they cried out over in Germany, and, everything is all right, said the old man with the top hat upon his arrival in Croydon, peace for our time, he pledged, pulling into London, and now the crowds streamed onto the streets of Paris as well, onto Le
Bourget Airport, onto Rue La Fayette, onto Boulevard Haussmann, to greet their miracle worker and shower him with flowers, to celebrate the victory of the ruling classes. Once more, capital had transformed its eternally brewing bankruptcy into an aggressive display of power, enveloped by the flashes of the reflection of the sun, the trustees of the businesses waved graciously from their black limousines to the seduced and the duped, who tried to break through the police lines at the intersections. They all wanted peace, they wanted to live in tranquility, and they didn’t dare ask about the kind of peace, they merely marveled at what they had been given, something they hadn’t brought about themselves. It was small-business owners, employees, petit bourgeois who were gathering there in throngs, they had rushed out of their shops, offices, government departments, even from the odd workshop; a couple of bricklayers lingered on the scaffolding as spectators, otherwise workers were few and far between, they were out in the factories; we traveled with the metro to the north, into the outskirts; there, a despondent silence prevailed, the intoxication of relief hadn’t made it out that far. A dull, restrained rage could be felt, but also exhaustion, consternation, resignation. Those who lived here knew that this was not the peace they had sought, and which corresponded to their being. They knew that this peace was merely staving off the war, buying time to build up arms, for even more looting and pillaging. Without them, no war could be waged, but they hadn’t yet reached the point of shaking off the inhuman coercion which lay upon them. They who hated war were forced to work for the war. To stay alive they had to produce the material which could only bring them mutilation and death. The call to come together, to hold firm, had petered out, the fetid stench of the addiction to wealth was brewing, the flowers which had been tossed to the oppressors were laid on the grave of the unknown soldier, forming a mountain, honoring the millions of coming sacrifices. This system, which was maintained by the profiteers and which brought abasement and subjugation to its populations, to smash this system once and for all, that was the task that still awaited us, that demanded all our strength and that drove us in this hour of defeat and exhaustion to continue looking for the only weapon with which the enemy could be defeated, the weapon of unity.