by Peter Weiss
The brown suburban train traveled past the clinker-brick stadium, crowned by its towers, and the expansive, fenced-in complex of the free port. The large ships from the Baltic Sea sat in the basins; trolleys full of coal were transported over the street with winches and up to the industries surrounding the gasworks; heavy, acrid smoke ascended from the smokestacks of the factories and drifted over to the forested banks of the island we were approaching via the narrow bridge with its iron arches. Lidingö, out past Värtan, had a rural look about it. Nestled at the foot of the slopes and on the edge of the forests were conglomerations of opulent villas; passing through gorges and fields, we finally arrived at the village station. From Riddarvägen, the house that had been provided to Brecht by the sculptor Santesson could already be glimpsed behind the rocky ridges, between pine trees and a few birches; it was taller than it was wide, though the clunky, oddly proportioned form was partially concealed by the shrubbery. Jasmine bushes stood by the white posts of the gate, their fragrance mingling with the aroma of elderflower. I walked toward the house through a flittering of foliage, grasses, and daubs of sun; curved gray boulders protruded from the mossy ground like half-buried elephants. Leaves brushed across my face as I looked for the entrance to the studio, which was built onto the rear of the house. Behind a trellis there were two steps leading to the open door of the work space. As I entered, I heard Tombrock announcing my arrival with my first name. Despite the whitewashed walls and tall windows, the workshop was shrouded in a dusky darkness, the light stolen by the surrounding trees. It was difficult to make out the size of the room because of the numerous tables dotted around it. In the corner near the door to the hall was a balustrade on wooden posts, with a narrow stairway leading up to it, a sofa bed at the top and a bookshelf affixed above it. Those present sat in a semicircle on stools and boxes; somewhat off to the side, beneath the little mezzanine, with his back to the window, a narrow-shouldered figure was huddled in a deep leather armchair. I sat down on a chest, next to Bischoff. We were still waiting for a number of visitors to arrive. Once my eyes had adapted to the subdued light, I estimated the size of the studio at about seven meters by five meters. There was a workbench, on trestles, running beneath the windows on the longer wall, packed with bundles of paper and newspaper clippings; at a right angle, a long table on tall legs jutted into the room, laden with manuscripts, books, and an old-fashioned typewriter with a worn ribbon. Farther along stood tripods—the kind used for modeling clay—platforms, and frames, one of them holding a model of a stage pieced together from little sticks, sheets of cardboard, small boxes, and scraps of cloth. Beside the armchair, a woman with short, light hair sat straight-backed, wearing a loose-hanging burlap robe, and made stenographic notes upon the sudden commencement of the discussion, usually at a wave, a nod from the person sitting next to her. Brecht was smaller, wirier than I had imagined. His face was pale and pasty. He was wearing a collarless brown jacket made of slick leather. Behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, his red-ringed, close-set eyes had a frozen, slightly teary gaze, which was interrupted every so often by a heavy blink. He tapped the ash from the cigar that he was sucking and chewing on into a large copper bowl. Bowls of the same kind were distributed among the tables in the room. One of the guests was reporting on the conditions in the camps near Perpignan. At first I hadn’t recognized Branting. He had just returned from southern France, where he had been looking into possibilities for evacuating children. His speech was fatigued, stuttering. It was as if he were straining to express something unimaginable. The listeners didn’t move a muscle. His words permeated into the sensory realm of every one of them. Many of us possessed memories of that ocher-yellow, sun-bathed town in the lowlands on the edge of the Pyrenees. The shores of the Mediterranean lay an hour and a half away by foot. After a day’s walk, the border crossings in the hills and foothills could be reached. Thousands had set off from there to sneak past the border guards and join the Republican army. We looked at the city and its fortifications from various perspectives, from the Roman ruins through to the forts and citadels of later centuries. Almost one hundred fifty thousand people had now been penned up behind barbed wire, some under open skies, some in makeshift barracks. The collection points were located a few kilometers outside the city, on the edge of some dried-out fields. As winter drew to a close, in the cold, the downpours, the people had traipsed northward, demoralized by the aerial assaults on Barcelona. Corpses lay on the edges of the paths; some of the women were carrying their dead children in their arms. There was hardly any food left in the villages, and their first, meager meal didn’t come until they arrived at the emergency quarters in Figueras. Starving, exhausted, some still shaking at the thought of the massacre that the Falangist colonial troops had carried out on the streets, the expelled had wandered across the mountains and were met at the border by the Senegalese soldiers of the Garde Mobile and shoved into livestock wagons with rifle butts. The Africans from the old slave colony, forced into the army, gave back what had previously been doled out to them. Under the pretense that they had not paid any customs duties, what was left of the refugees’ belongings was taken from them: watches, jewelry, fountain pens, even reading glasses, headscarves, combs. Having arrived in Perpignan, the men were separated from the women, the women had their children torn away from them. Day and night, the crying, pleading, and whimpering could be heard issuing from the train station. On the siding at the station stood the rows of freight cars that hadn’t been let into Spain by the French government, fully loaded with machine guns, cannons, anti-aircraft artillery, and munitions stamped with Soviet postage markings. From the city, over which the Cathedral of Saint Jean and the Moorish castle loomed, the masses of people had been forced into the different enclosures. The most terrible place of all, said Branting, was in the special camp for children; not even our appeal to the local populace led to an alleviation of the misery, and the few who responded weren’t able to prevent the deaths from exhaustion and emaciation. Children lay on the earth in tangled groups. With the arrival of the Republican army, which had provided cover for the retreat of the civilians, hope raised its head again for a few days before giving way to even greater demoralization. The soldiers had crossed the border in ordered columns: they didn’t view themselves as defeated, and their posture still bore the stamp of their just struggle. Women had broken through the gates of the camp, walked out to look for their sons, to find their husbands. They were chased back into the pens with gunfire. Even those who had managed to reach Perpignan in automobiles and find accommodation in hotels or private homes were arrested, robbed of their money, and put in the camps. The Republican troops had to accept the jeers and mockery of the French units to whom they had handed over their weapons, and by whom they had expected to be taken in and shown support. For the first time, Brecht’s voice could be heard. Turning to Trepte, the director who had staged a new production of the piece about Señora Carrar in Sweden and who had requested from Brecht a prologue and epilogue adapted to the altered circumstances, he said sharply, croakily, that the broader context surrounding the plot was no longer tenable, had to be rewritten. So he had relocated Señora Carrar, her son, and her brothers to the French camp. In order to pass the time, a few guards asked them questions about the lost war, which were then answered with the plot of the play. The conclusion was supposed to teach the audience that the struggle, despite the current defeat, had to be continued. He had believed he could convey the resilience of the figures in this way. The impression was created that French soldiers and Spanish workers, the one lot as guards, the others as prisoners, could talk to each other. Perhaps it was also important to maintain this class-centric hypothesis. If it were still possible to bring about changes at all, they would have to be built on the foundations of this solidarity. However, according to Branting’s report, such a solution no longer reflected reality. What was now revealing itself was the turning point in the phase of the preliminary battles leading up to the great war of annih
ilation that would engulf the entire continent, the entire planet. The degradation of individual reactions had been initiated, and had already left behind profound traces. The simple dramatic fable of the kind that had only recently still been possible to write suddenly belonged to a world buried under rubble. The French workers had allowed Blum to smash the Popular Front and Daladier to institute a regime of terror. Those fleeing Spanish fascism were greeted by the fascism taking hold in France. Brecht saw that what was now taking shape no longer fit in the space of a chamber play, but rather in the landscape of Dulle Griet, or of the Triumph of Death, as Brueghel had painted them. He had the open, wide-format book brought over from a table. For a while it seemed as if the only thing that interested him anymore was this skeletal woman, this rural Fury who, with a frozen gaze and gaping mouth, a breastplate over her apron and a sack full of loot slung over her shoulder, swinging her sword amid flames and fumes, hurried through exploded cities populated by lascivious, slobbering, trunk-bearing, fish-like, reptilian beings; or that red, sandy shoreline brimming with hosts of skeletons, who, to the clang of bells, fanfares, and kettledrums, descended upon the people in amphibious wagons and other armored vehicles, in rectangular shock-troop formations behind tall shields, oozing out of bunkers, laying into them with scythes, hoes, fire tongs, pitch torches, grindstones, nets, throwing them headlong into ponds, forcing them into cages, caves, and onto the barren hills, breaking them on the wheel, beheading them, and stringing them up on rows of gallows. But then he suddenly wanted to know how the Popular Front had held up in the Spanish combat zones. As the ensuing reports were delivered, it became clear that he had called together adherents of various political groups in order to draw conclusions about the causes of the Republican collapse from their conflicting viewpoints. It was as if his isolated position in the room also mirrored a reservation toward the attendees. His gaze at the guests was cool yet exhibited extreme concentration. Often he impatiently steered digressive remarks back to the topic with a nervous shrug of the shoulders. And you really managed to pull together, he asked upon mention of a troop made up of socialists, anarchists, Social Democrats, and Communists. His concerted attention became the focal point for the divergent analyses being offered up. Were his curiosity to wane even slightly, the circle would have fallen apart. Discord had already begun to emerge between the proponents of the view that it was the failure to wage guerilla war, a revolutionary civil war, that had led to the defeat, and others who defended conventional static warfare as the only possibility, even if, given the material superiority of the enemy, it had no chance of producing victory. Most agreed that the lack of involvement by the Social Democratic leadership, as well as the stance of the French and British governments—with their policies of noninterference—was tantamount to a sabotage of the Republican cause and bore the lion’s share of the blame for the capitulation. The leadership of the German Party was represented by Warnke, Verner, and Mewis. Verner said that, even in the wake of the decision to dissolve the International Brigades, the will to fight had by no means been broken. Even in February, before Casado’s coup, there was still so much confidence that Modesto, who had pulled out of Barcelona after its fall, initially withdrawing with his troops to France, would return to the country to establish a new defensive front. It was only because France refused to allow the weapons in—despite the fact that Germany and Italy were not honoring their agreement to withdraw their troops—that it was no longer possible to carry out campaigns on a larger scale. The Soviet Union, said another, should never have allowed the Western powers to pressure it into ceasing its military aid. An altercation broke out between one speaker, who blamed the collapse in Spain on the discord in the Soviet Party, and Warnke, who saw the Soviet Union as the prerequisite for maintaining peace. I had been drawn from my spot to the table near the window by the flickering of the images in the book that had been returned to the woman with the ash-blond hair and which she had since set back down. I pushed a kitchen chair toward the table, turned the book toward me, and inspected the reproductions. Almost two years earlier, in the bookstore in Warnsdorf, I had had these pictures in front of me; now, after my experiences in Spain, they emitted a new force. Often I had asked myself how it could ever be possible to convey impressions of war, since even in precise descriptions they always lost something of their essence. There was something alien that clung to the experiences being conveyed, realistic depictions were only able to cover a tiny detail, under which lay the nightmarish terror, the panicked confusion, unresolved. Here, everything was erupting from beneath the earth, enticed by the figure of Megaera. There was the swirling ash, the brittle earth, there were the tree branches withered by the heat, the demolished walls, there were the helmeted heads of the scouts behind shutters, there was the carnage in gateways and caves, the search for shelter beneath boulders, there was the familiar—excessively clear in every detail—and there was the brooding, the plotting; there was the phantasmagoria of deceitfulness, of betrayal, of shamelessness and disgraceful deeds; everything was equally palpable in the tumult. The combination of the spawns of madness with the gestures and movements of startled, agonized individuals created a situation that approximated that derangement and clairvoyance we had sometimes felt, if only for a few seconds. In those moments, staring at sand dunes and piles of stones, faces would emerge from furrows and holes, roots, charred beams would transform into bodies lying in wait, dust-gray shrubs on the edge of paths turned into the raised barrels of guns, and from this threshold between flash-like impressions and delusions other apparitions proliferated, characterized by the disgust that was never far from fear. Forced into the position of murdering out of self-defense, we had struggled not to lose our minds, not to allow them to be deformed, in the face of this image that bore down on us irresistibly, licked us, fondled us, stroked our skin gruesomely, strained its bristles, trunks, suckers, fangs, and claws toward us. Here, drastic and brazen, everything was gathered which pursued the business of forging rumors, stacking decks, sowing intrigue; apish, feathered vermin crouched in dangling baubles, under bell jars, in hollow, giant eggs, their snouts and beaks wide open, ready to spit bile, tar, to rain down lead shot; on one roof a demon sat with legs splayed, his clothes bunched up, baring his ass, a spoon stuck in the budding excrement. These scrambling slurry buckets, these insects with hats and fishing rods, these spiders, weaving harp strings to catch their prey, these hybrids of maggot and fish, insect and rodent: this was the brood that otherwise kept itself hidden from us, which was constantly at work, these were the parasites, the plague bringers; they almost seemed comfortable, displaying bloated, priestly mugs; though they seemed to lie there sedately they could disappear in an instant, and whoever dared to try to squash them and managed to actually do it would soon have to watch as they multiplied into swarms of bugs as they burst. People suffering from the fever brought on by infected wounds were most capable of recognizing the intrusion of this hellish reign; we had often heard people whose eyes had been shot out, whose arms, legs had been ripped off, pleading for us to get that animal there, that goat, that owl, that snapping carp or whatever it was away from their bed, to swat away those blowflies. Once the threshold to the unreal had been crossed, the apparitions, as Brueghel had depicted them, assumed an immediate tangibility. The materialization of the huge, scaled faced, with one empty eye, the other glittering darkly, the eyelids propped open like shutters, the hideous rat’s tail coiling out of one of the nostrils, a watchtower sprouting out of its stony brow, the gaping gob, from which a teeming cloaca was gushing forth, it was the tyrant who had installed his reign in all countries in which the struggle was being carried out, smothered, rekindled again; ringed by shot-up walls, the bastion of power rose up, clashes ensued all over the place, blazes broke out, captives lay bundled together; off in the distance, behind gorges, unreachable, in the mountains against the red sky stood a giant jug, promising coolness, relief. Dulle Griet trounced through the field like a sutler, holding her bag of stolen ware
s in her iron-clad hand; she lived from war, extracted profit from it, the seam of her skirt brushed over a horde of women who hewed into advancing mongrels with flails and pans, slitting open their bellies, ripping out their innards, plundering a shop as they fled, making off with sacks of flour, loaves of bread, ham, only to be overwhelmed at the next corner by other beasts. These faces were still etched into my retina when Mewis asked me to recount my activities on the front. Only three months after the end of the war, many of our memories already seemed to have become unreliable, the things we wanted to hold on to had already become enveloped in a dense web of mendacious chronicling, the events were disappearing into a world of myth, and this was true for both sides, ours and the enemy’s. Any object we wanted to pick up and study had been deformed; it was not just the fear of violating a truth that had been determined from above that impeded us in retrieving its tangibility but also the desire to allow our own failure to fade into oblivion. Thinking about the infinite patience, the courage, the exertion of every individual, the defeat of the Republic seemed inexplicable. The possibility of defeat had been unimaginable, there had been nothing but perseverance, enthusiasm; the imputation that the sacrifices had been made in vain was unbearable. But if we now had to identify reasons for the collapse, then we had to attempt to trace it back to the insufficiency of our imagination. We hadn’t been sufficiently initiated into the all-consuming conspiracies, we had held out in our hideouts, had relied upon our good will, our ideal of justice; our understanding of the manipulations that were being carried out all around us was not sharp enough; no, that’s not how it was, it was precisely the quarrels, the deceptions, the outbreaks of enmity between the parties, the smoke and mirrors of propaganda, the forked tongues of diplomacy, the evidence of our own weakness and disorganization that had besieged us, and we had denied these unsettling realities in order to carry on. The feigned confidence, the belief in the resilience of our actions, so highly praised, held up so high as an example, became our demise. Yet how could we have been capable of anything else, I asked myself; after all, there was only ever the one day standing before us, there was no room for anything but trust in the military and political leadership, who were engaged in the same efforts at perseverance as we were. And while I was straining to express something of these thoughts, through the window I saw a gaunt, dark-haired woman behind the bushes, a cigarette in a long holder between her lips, washing laundry in a zinc tub. In the summery warmth, she was wearing only a pink petticoat, she meticulously rinsed every item, rung it out, hung it on a line strung between a birch and an apple tree, and then climbed into the foaming soapy water, sat still, leaning back, pulling her knees toward her, smoking a newly lit cigarette, staring up into the glittering foliage. Later, while other people were talking and my gaze was gliding back and forth between the woman in the garden and the secretary with the demure, girlish face; and then from her to a third, athletic woman who had sat herself by Brecht’s feet, I felt as if I was getting a sense of what Tombrock, the buccaneer, referred to as his bond with Brecht. The assistant with the light blond hair, whose features called to mind a drawing by Kollwitz, waited patiently for Brecht’s instructions; resigned, the woman outside remained in her isolation; and the one who had laid her arm on his knee, as if she wanted to make a special claim to him, also signaled with her alertness, her continual observation, that she was willing to subjugate herself to him. If the painter’s relations with women mirrored his often amateurish, brutal, slapdash products, then Brecht’s patriarchal air was unaffected, could scarcely be distinguished from absolute self-confidence. Without knowing more about his personality than the posture he assumed in that armchair and his cold, demanding voice, I thought that Brecht, with the right that was founded in the compensation of his achievements, presumed that everyone he waved at should come to him, that everyone should help and support him, everyone let him pick their brains and bring him what he needed. I struggled against the thought that it should be enough of an honor to be allowed to enter into his house, and thought that he might at least have offered us a glass of water. In the smoke-filled, oppressive humidity, and under the aftereffects of the tension of offering an opinion on contentious, dangerous questions before all these authorities, I was dripping in sweat. The green outside was calling to me like freedom.