by Peter Weiss
The composition of the notes documenting these conversations was dictated as if by a chorus. It was not just Rogeby’s or Ström’s voices I heard but the voices of all those who were named, who had appeared and were now taking on form. I began my new occupation as a chronicler who reproduced collective thought. Books, picked up from the library, lay in piles on my table, and I filled in the blanks of the things that I had vaguely intuited. To begin with I found nothing more than scarcely visible signposts appearing in a thicket, but from these points I could make measurements, draw connections, from which I gained a rough notion of expansive, previously unknown realms. From now on, my consciousness was filled with the process of writing, which included registering impulses, statements, recalled images, moments of action; everything that had come before had been a preparatory exercise, all the hesitation, all the fragments and ambiguities, the seething monologues, became the medium in which my thoughts and reflections resonated. I gained a glimpse into a mechanism that sifted and filtered, that brought apparently unconnected elements together into segments, that organized what I had heard and experienced into sentences, that was continually searching for formulations, striving for clarity, ceaselessly forging ahead to new heights of vividness. The moment I woke up first thing in the morning and during my hours in the factory, I was exposed to combinations of words that I jotted down once I was back in my room during those days of melting snow. The monstrous gulf between those of us who were bound to the time clock, where we punched in each day, and those who were able to dedicate themselves independently to literature, to art, was no longer agonizing; it was instead as if the very pressure of real conditions had suggested to me the things that I wanted to express. Because I found something universal in translating the material that was rooted in the language of this country into my own language, the gulf between the languages vanished, and the language that I used became nothing more than an instrument, an element in a global science. While I carted the tin ingots, heated up the ovens, lowered the centrifuges into the acid baths, I fitted together pieces of the recent history of Sweden, turned my mind to Engelbrekt and sketched out the concluding scenes of the epic, even if Brecht had entirely lost interest in it. Engelbrekt had to set off on his journey. From the castle with its four squat, round towers, surrounded by expanses of water, he had to be carried to the stepped slope of the shoreline, to the landing steps, and lifted up into the long, narrow, tarred rowboat that was tethered there. The boat could not stay in Örebro; it had to be pushed away from the stone and steered under the bridge, down the Svartån toward Lake Hjälmaren. It was the morning of the twenty-seventh of April, fourteen thirty-six. Along with a number of faithful followers, the annals recounted that Engelbrekt was accompanied by his wife, whose name was unknown and who was otherwise never mentioned. To the rhythmic beat of the oars, the boat glided past the banks and the freight ships sitting beside their forts. Engelbrekt had not been ill enough to stay in his castle and yet was too weak not to sense an uneasiness, a chill shiver, at the thought of the purpose of his journey, his meeting with the Council of the Realm in Stockholm. The boat could not turn back; it had to set out onto open waters. Spring was beginning, a yellow-green shimmer had been deposited upon the skeletons of the trees. In the evening, the boat landed on an island in the strait, perhaps Västra Sundholm, Valen, or one of the other small skerries. The cliff climbed up on an incline, and the oarsmen appeared from behind, carrying Engelbrekt on a stretcher. They made a place to sleep out of fir branches, Engelbrekt was put to bed, a fire lit. One of the men pointed back into the darkness, said there were lights there, on the southern shore, over there, toward Castle Göksholm, of the House of Night and Day. Shortly afterward, as they were eating their meal, the sentinel called out that a boat was approaching from the other shore. They probably want to invite us over to stay with them, said Engelbrekt, to reciprocate my hospitality; bring them over. The sounds of the boat landing, the clattering of the oars, then footsteps, ominous jangling. Måns Bengtsson appeared, in full armor, a battle-axe in his hand, followed by archers with crossbows. Engelbrekt got up with a groan, stood hunched forward, leaning on his crutches, ready to greet the squire amicably. When Bengtsson failed to say anything, Engelbrekt thanked him for his visit and explained once more that he could not stop in at his family’s house, since he had to set off early the next morning. I have come, said Bengtsson, to put an end to your journey; and Engelbrekt’s wife, staring at him, placed her hand over her mouth in horror. For otherwise, cried Bengtsson, we will never have peace, and he raised his axe. Peace, Engelbrekt managed to get out during an infinite moment, but we have secured peace. Then time was split by the slash of the axe. Engelbrekt raised his crutch in defense, the honed iron hit his hand, knocking off three fingers. Engelbrekt turned to his screaming wife, Måns Bengtsson raised his arms once more, and the weapon whistled down onto Engelbrekt’s throat. As he tumbled forward he was caught by the third blow, on his bare head. The soldiers shot at the small band; Engelbrekt’s body was also perforated by arrows. The dead and the still living, Engelbrekt’s wife among them, were dragged up the slope, Engelbrekt by his feet, drenched in blood, one hand clamped around the handle of his crutch, and then pulled down into the depths. And, after this fall, the ascent to the concluding image, one that showed nothing of the people, only the elite, in all their power, once again front and center. On a wide pedestal in the middle, the three bishops, Thomas of Strängnäs, Sigge of Skara, and Knut Bosson Night and Day of Linköping, in glittering regalia, shrouded by the smoke of swinging thuribles. They held up the parchment letter with the list of all the privileges they and the worldly lords had assigned themselves. The cluster of seals dangling from it. To their right stood Lord High Constable Karl Knutsson Bonde, the brothers Nils, Bo, and Bengt Stensson Night and Day, Måns Bengtsson Night and Day, Nils Erengislesson and Erengisle Nilsson Hammarstad, Bo Knutsson Grip, and Magnus Gren; to the left, Krister Nilsson Vasa, Knut Karlsson Örnfot, Gustav Algotsson Sture, Knut Jönsson Tre Rosor, Karl Magnusson and Greger Magnusson Eka, Magnus Birgersson and Guse Nilsson Båt, along with Nils Jönsson Oxenstierna. And then there were Engelbrekt’s comrades in arms Herman Berman, Gotskalk Bengtsson and Bengt Gotskalksson Ulv, Johan Karlsson Färla, Claus Lange, and Arvid Svan. Only Plata and Puke were missing. That which stood up there in iron and silver, in purple robes, presenting itself as the ultimate unity, was riven by jealousy, avarice, and bloodlust, concealed bitter feuds for the greatest estates, the strongest castles, the most important posts, the throne; and behind them, in the windows of the gable-fronted houses, the haute bourgeoisie, dressed in velvet and furs, were awaiting their share of the spoils. A prisoner was then hurled at their feet, a peasant, his arms and legs bound with ropes, followed by a second. There they are, the last of them, cried Bengt Stensson Night and Day, they wanted to set fire to Göksholm while we were paying a visit to the knight Nils Erengislesson. They wanted to avenge a certain Engelbrekt. Who was Engelbrekt, cried Karl Knutsson, to bawdy laughter. Never heard of any Engelbrekt. A nobody, like this lot here, he said, pointing at the prisoners. One of them sat up. Hans Mårtensson is my name. One of the soldiers below dealt him a blow with a lance. You are nameless, cried Karl Knutsson. My name is, said the peasant once more, and fell down under the weight of another blow. My name is, said the other prisoner as well, and: your name is nothing, yelled Karl Knutsson, and the lances rained down on the peasant. Each of them is to have a hand and a foot hacked off, ordered the lord high constable. Hans Mårtensson stood up. Engelbrekt’s murderers, he cried, had fled to the knight Erengislesson. For him, ordered Karl Knutsson, both hands and both feet. Where are the people, cried Krister Nilsson Vasa, where are they, they were making so much noise just a moment ago. We are they, said Mårtensson, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Uproarious laughter. Away with them, cried the bishops Sigge, Knut, and Thomas. The peasants were dragged away, Engelbrekt’s wife was shoved in, her hands bound behind her back. It’s the wife of Engelbrekt, cried Färla
. She spat at him. A soldier slapped her. Into the tower with her, cried Färla. No, let her walk, cried Bengt Stensson, may she ramble across the countryside, never finding peace, ostracized, with nowhere to take refuge. I have taken Englikohof. And I’ve got Tjurbo, cried Knutsson Grip. Then I get Snäfringe and Siende, said Karlsson Örnfot. No, cried Grip, they should go to me as well. No, me, cried Örnfot. Karl Knutsson waved impatiently for the woman to be taken away. Take her into the soldiers’ quarters first, cried Berman. Bellowing laughter. Then Claus Plata and Erik Puke were tossed in, in chains. Silence. So you two wanted to band together against us, said Karl Knutsson. You weren’t content with Kastelholm and Tälje, Puke, with Rasbo Hundare and Rossvik in Rekarne, what more did you want. Are you listening to me, Puke. Puke kept his head bowed. A soldier wrenched his chin up. You wanted to get rid of us, cried Karl Knutsson. You and your father, you were waiting to take in this cripple, what was his name again, and to continue on with him to Stockholm. You had called upon the peasants in Rekarne to fight. But he didn’t come, he yelled. I get Rossvik, yelled Guse Nilsson Båt. And Tälje returns to me, cried Bengt Stensson Night and Day. And I’m taking over Kastelholm, yelled Karl Knutsson Bonde. Your power will be taken from you, said Claus Plata. Shrill laughter. To the rack with him, disembowel him, quarter him, cried Svan, Berman, and Färla. So it shall be, said Karl Knutsson. And this one here, he said, pointing at Puke, shall be treated according to the privileges to which he is entitled. I renounce the privileges of my birth, cried Puke. You who call yourself Bonde, peasant, he said, you who are the greatest tormentor of the peasants—let me die like a peasant, on the wheel, at the stake. He’ll go to the scaffold, said Knutsson. And we shall invite everybody to the festivities, where they can watch on stage how a head that refuses to think right falls under the swing of the sword. And he waved, and Plata and Puke were dragged out, with a few more blows for good measure. And the aristocrats who had been carried to victory by the people strained skyward, stood there backed by the bourgeoisie of finance, the way rulers always stand there, smiling distortedly with clenched teeth. They stood there with feet spread wide, the earth solid beneath them; it would be a long time before it would fall out from under them. They raised themselves up in splendor, the owners of the soil, the buildings, and the heavens, around them a hissing and slapping of birch rods accompanied by groaning and whimpering, and Karl Knutsson Bonde raised his voice once more, praise be to justice, may the land be cleansed of the revolters. Wherever one of theirs is still to be found, may he be slain like a rabid dog. Peace be to us. Triumphal chorus of the nobles and bourgeoisie, freedom and peace, broken up by the beating of the birches, the cries of agony, peace, and beating and crying, and peace, freedom and peace.
Serfdom, however, was something the Swedish peasants were spared. Though they had been conquered, feudalism was unable to carry out its ultimate violence on them. Never again would they allow themselves to be cast back into the humiliation that held sway before Engelbrekt’s great campaign. What fell into oblivion and lay covered over, swamped by new struggles, rose up time and again as confidence, as a strengthening of consciousness, until it became the foundations of the workers’ movement. Brecht wasn’t listening to me. He was pacing back and forth between the tables. Steffin was arranging manuscripts, diaries, notebooks, newspaper clippings, slips of paper into piles. Inside the house, Weigel, her friend Lazar, Santesson, and the children were making a racket with the furniture, drawers were being pulled out, stuffed rucksacks and suitcases dragged down the stairs. Brecht had been utterly abandoned by sobriety. Hodann, Goldschmidt, Ljungdal, Matthis, and Branting stood helpless in the face of the terror emanating from the forty-two-year-old, who had otherwise always been capable of accepting the necessity of a hasty departure. It was as if only he had been affected by the catastrophe, as if he alone had to bear the burden of persecution. But it was his work that he was worried about. Here lay everything that he had written during his seven years of exile, most of it unpublished. Here lay the value that would confirm his standing in literature. He was almost unknown, ignored; few understood him, even in the Party that he supported. And following the liquidation of his Soviet advocates Tretyakov and Koltsov, he was shown nothing but mistrust and rejection by the first workers’ state. He still had to provide the proof that his thinking was crucial for the development of the literary craft. This enormous store of material had to be salvaged. Tuesday, the ninth of April. We heard the news at seven o’clock in the morning. German troops were in Copenhagen. The city had capitulated. Fighting had broken out on the Norwegian coast. Squadrons of bombers were flying over Oslo. A German attack on Sweden was expected. German cruisers were stationed at the maritime borders. There were German freight steamers berthed at the docks on the river that could not be boarded and that might have had weapons hidden on board, under cover of national sovereignty. Sweden still had not mobilized; only an increased readiness had been ordered, but Branting, like other members of parliament and of the government, had made preparations to leave; a plane, it was said, stood ready for those whose safety was under threat. Because the American visa for him and his family had not yet arrived, a few weeks ago Brecht had received an invitation from the writer Wuolijoki to go to Finland. Branting and Ström had secured the necessary papers for him, but the real question was whether a ship would still set sail for Helsinki. Brecht had made the decision to leave Sweden in March, when the woman who owned the house had run in panting to announce that some officers from the security service were there to see him. They wanted to know if he was hiding a Communist, a woman by the name of Rosenbaum. It was only after ascertaining that this woman was in fact Steffin, who had earlier taken the name Rosenbaum through marriage, and after a guarantee from Swedish friends had been given and doctor’s certificates confirming her pulmonary ailment were provided that the warrant for her arrest was revoked. Even during that first visit the police had shown an interest in the books on the shelves, the newspapers and writings lying around, though not before clarifying the question of the position Steffin occupied in his household, and whether Brecht paid her a wage, which because he was a foreigner he was forbidden to do, and by receiving which she, a foreigner herself, would also have been committing a crime, no, no, they explained, she was like a member of the family, received no wage, lived in a furnished room in the neighborhood, although yes, Brecht did pay for the rent. It seemed likely that they would be back, and so Brecht had a portion of his political literature packed into boxes and taken to the plumber Andersson, who lived on the other side of Lövstigen and was willing to store the dangerous goods in his cellar. There were discussions about what was to be done with the other books. Ljungdal had called the royal library and offered them Brecht’s collection, which they had rejected. I was tasked with packing a selection of books and sending them on to Brecht when he reached Finland; the remaining items were to be taken by Santesson and the young doctor Ek who lived nearby. Greid, who Brecht summoned during the night by telephone, wailed that now all was truly lost, hysterical, ruffling his hair, unintentionally caricaturing Brecht in the process. And yet he wanted to accompany Brecht on his trip, along with Ljungdal. If she managed to escape to Sweden, Berlau—who had gone to Denmark shortly beforehand to work in a theater—was to join them in Finland. The plan was to travel on—a prospect that made Brecht tremble—through the Soviet Union to the United States; or, should this prove impossible, to Mexico or Haiti. The thought of what would become of us others and all those interned, those living in illegality, was of no importance. The only consideration now was what Brecht could take with him on his journey. The most important manuscripts, notebooks, and journals were placed in a black seaman’s chest along with an extremely pared-down selection of books. In the list I wrote down the Georgics by Publius Vergilius Maro, in the translation by Voss; the epic On the Nature of Things, by Titus Lucretius Carus, in the version by Knebel, from the year eighteen twenty-one; a collection of poems by Ovid and Catullus, in an edition for use
in schools, published in eighteen eighty-two by Teubner, Leipzig; The Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso, printed in Berlin by Mylius, seventeen ninety-one; Plutarch’s Lives, in a leather-bound volume from the publisher Langen Müller, dated nineteen thirteen; The Satires of Juvenal, published by Langenscheidt; Pindar’s Victory Odes, put out by Diederichs, nineteen twelve; Panegyric in Praise of Trajan by Plinius Secundus, published in Leipzig, seventeen ninety-six; The Letters of Plinius, in an edition from eighteen twenty-nine; The Letters of Cicero, from the publishing house Langen Müller, nineteen twelve; a volume of Aesop, Hesiod, and Quintus, from the Langenscheidt Library; two volumes of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, with satires and odes; the Annals and Histories by Tacitus; two rebound, tattered volumes of Homer, published by Cotta; a collection of the writings of Confucius, translated into English by Waley; also by Waley a translation of poems by Li Po and an anthology of Chinese poetry; a popular edition of Hölderlin’s poetry by Cotta; the poems of Shelley; Tristram Shandy by Sterne; Ulysses by Joyce, in two paper-bound volumes by Odyssey Press, Paris, from nineteen thirty-nine; The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War by Hašek, three volumes; Grieg’s piece on the Paris Commune, Nederlaget, the title underlined, with an exclamation mark added; and then The Commune, by Margueritte; The Paris Commune, by Jellinek; Histoire de la commune, by Lissagaray; and The Paris Commune: Accounts and Documents from Contemporaries, published in Berlin in nineteen thirty-one. Some books, which Brecht didn’t think he could go without, were to be stashed in other suitcases, to ensure it didn’t get too heavy; the only things that could still be packed in the seaman’s chest were his little radio, the three painted Japanese face masks, the camera, a silver canteen, a collection of knives and his Chinese parchment picture, fastened to two bamboo poles. The skeptic was curled up, with his bristling beard, sitting and tugging his robe around himself, staring angrily, yet inspired. To a suitcase that Weigel and the children had already half-filled with items of clothing, Brecht added the Confessions of Saint Augustine, bound in leather; the Ulenspiegel by de Coster, from Borngräber Verlag; The Social Contract by Rousseau, in a little Reclam edition; a few cheap editions of Descartes, Kant, and Taine; Herodotus’s Histories of the Oriental Kings, published by Ullstein; Kleist’s Collected Works, from Verlag Bong; the short stories of Poe; Barrack-Room Ballads by Kipling; Disraeli by Maurois, published in nineteen twenty-eight by Fischer; Emil Ludwig’s book about Hindenburg, titled The Sage of the German Republic, Querido Verlag, nineteen thirty-five; the Chess Manual, by Dufresne; and the Tobacco Book by Cudell, expensively bound by Verlag Neuerburg, nineteen twenty-seven, with the chapters “The Introduction of Tobacco to Europe,” and “The Culture of Tobacco Consumption.” On top, probably because the book had reminded him of the necessity of smoking, he placed two packets of Batavia brand cigars, each packet containing twenty-five cigars and costing seven kronor fifty, a day’s wage for me. Wherever there was a sliver of space in the suitcases and cardboard boxes that were to be sent to Helsinki, in which Weigel was stashing copper bowls, teapots, pots, and frying pans, Brecht stuffed books which he pulled from the piles that we had stacked up all over the place. While I was dismantling the library I noticed that the volumes were ordered neither alphabetically nor according to subjects, yet they were clearly not arranged without rules, but rather according to relationships of affinity, a system of mutual sympathies or of relation through argument. Often hefty contrasts resided side by side, which could then lead to unexpected, covert agreements. Brecht appreciated Kafka because Kafka didn’t mind if a book received its conclusion or not, because he had left most things unfinished, lending a flawless completion to the fragmentary itself. With The Trial and the novel Amerika in his hand, sticking the books between the casts of his face in plaster and ore, he said that in actual fact it was only the fragment that bears the imprint of authenticity, because it comes closest to the most intimate function of production, namely a production that reflected breath, bare being, and gave expression to a fleeting period of consciousness that had just been lived through. Kafka lived beside Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, in an Erfurt edition from eighteen thirty-nine; Thackeray’s Book of Snobs, from Reclam Verlag; Les Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire; My Prisons and My Hospitals by Verlaine; The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde in a German translation by Schölermann; the dramatic poem Manfred, by Byron, in Seubert’s translation; Malte Laurids Brigge and The Book of Hours, by Rilke; The Last Days of Mankind, by Kraus, published by Verlag Die Fackel; the collection of poems Burning Earth, by Mühsam; and the Songs of a Silesian Miner by Bezruč, from Kurt Wolff Verlag, on the one side, and on the other, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by Locke, two volumes; The New Organon by Francis Bacon; On the Improvement of the Understanding by Spinoza; Letters for the Advancement of Humanity by Herder; Phädon: or, On the Immortality of the Soul, by Mendelssohn; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Darwin, printed in Stuttgart, eighteen seventy-seven; and a volume of Freud, On the Technique of Psychoanalysis. All of these works were actually notebooks, full of underlining, annotations, at times Brecht would forget the panic of his exodus, began to read, showed us Goncourt’s book about Gavarni, the two tomes of Brueghel’s pictures, or the biography of the Viennese actor Alexander Girardi. He couldn’t part with this goliard and comedian, who came from the provincial stages and had appeared in lowbrow farces and operettas. His Torelli in Artist’s Blood, the singspiel, he said, must have been Kafka’s inspiration for his characterization of the painter Titorelli in The Trial. The thin volume published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in nineteen hundred five also had to go into the seaman’s chest, as did Jewish Theater, selected by Eliasberg, nineteen nineteen, The Sagas of Classical Antiquity, by Schwab, and the small Reclam edition on the Bänkelgesang before Goethe. The literature related to the Caesar novel was packed in a special crate. It consisted of the two volumes by Mommsen, Roman History, published in eighteen fifty-seven; the book by Meyer, Caesar’s Monarchy and the Principate of Pompey, in which Brecht had written his name all the way back in nineteen nineteen; the three volumes of Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, in an edition from nineteen twenty-one; the Danish book by Brandes, Cajus Julius Caesar, which bore the stamp of the Svenborg Public Library; as well as the work by Bang that Ström had mentioned, Catilina: En portraetskitse paa kulturhistorisk baggrund; Weinstock’s version of Sallust, titled The Century of Revolution, published in nineteen thirty-nine; The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, translated by Stahr; Appian’s Roman History, published by Langen Müller Verlag, nineteen eleven; Roman Agrarian History by Weber; Letters from Cicero’s Time, edited by Bardt, Leipzig, nineteen thirty; Cicero through the Centuries by Zielinski, eighteen ninety-seven; and the play Catalina by Ibsen, from the Copenhagen Library. We had put together a list of the names of the politicians, generals, and industrialists, these enumerations conveyed to us something of the compulsive violence that threatened our thinking; the books on the other hand—every one of them—opened up a path, leading here or there, the books were our allies in the struggle against hostile forces. And yet it was the hour of their burial. They had to be lowered into the boxes. Many had accompanied Brecht since his youth. Time and again he hesitated, held up a work by Grosz, The Face of the Ruling Classes, The System of Nature by Mirabaud, his volumes of Hegel, his Leibniz, his Lichtenberg, wanted to explain his connection to this book or that one, wanted to read something out, but people yelled out, urging him to hurry. The contraband was over at the plumber’s, Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia, The History of the Russian Revolution, My Life, Literature and Revolution, Germany: The Key to the International Situation, The Soviet Union and the Fourth International, Stalinism and Bolshevism; Zinoviev, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, The ABC of Communism; the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, of Spinoza, and Dialectical Materialism by Thalheimer; the complete works of Korsch; the trial reports from Moscow; and packed
in with them, Marx, Engels, Lassalle, and Bebel, along with Lenin’s Selected Works and a few volumes of Stalin. Brecht brought over the thick German dictionary by Grimm, which he just couldn’t do without, and he wanted to take the Encyclopædia Britannica as well, which would take up two boxes all on its own, and I had to promise to at least send the German-English and English-German dictionaries straight away, with their black-and-red dust covers. And then, in the midst of the chaos, the two secret police officers showed up in the doorway, displaying their order to search the house. They were taken aback when, upon asking to see our papers, they found themselves face-to-face with Branting, who asked them derisively if the right-wing military coup had now been carried out. My personal details, my address, my place of work were taken down, they hinted that in the near future I should expect an interrogation. And once again, this moment in which danger edged closer to me was strangely free of fear; I saw myself, as I had discussed with Rosner, on the trek to Lapland; I would pass myself off as a forester, with sparingly used Swedish no one would suspect me of being a foreigner, everything I wanted to take with me could fit in a small bag or in the pockets of my jacket. The officers asked about political publications. Agitated, Brecht yelled at them that he only stored his artistic property here. He positioned himself in front of the stacks of books as if seeking to protect them with his body; his face was a greenish white, distorted by disgust. He followed every movement of their hands in the pages of a book; careful with that, he cried in his mishmash of Danish and Swedish, don’t lick your thumb. Matthis attempted to placate him; he pushed him back and said in German that here too, barbarism was now descending upon literature. Hodann and Goldschmidt had retreated into the corner under the balcony, Goldschmidt sat tiredly, sunken in the leather armchair, which did not belong to Brecht but to Steffin, and which was supposed to go to Hodann, along with the rustic chairs, tables, and chests brought from Denmark in furniture trucks, except for the ones that had been assigned to Santesson. Lazar and Weigel stood clasping one another, the children beside them. Lazar was still expressing her outrage that the officers were not familiar with her pen name, Esther Grenen. I was married to a son of Strindberg and Frida Uhl, she yelled, but one of the officers just waved her off. Only Steffin continued working calmly, placed the bundled papers into numbered folders made of gray cardboard. The police officers could not find anything that seemed suspicious. Finally they paused for a moment, flicking through Sandström’s book about the North’s first epoch as a great power, depicted for young and old, while we lowered Grimmelshausen and Cervantes, Petronius, Benedetto Croce, and Machiavelli into their common grave; in they went, crammed next to Boccaccio, Savonarola, and Erasmus. What a fidgeting, giggling throng in the darkness; on top of them came Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare, how their blank verses rolled, how the figures they created proliferated, what a world of power and hellish descents enveloped them; Villon and Rabelais and Swift lay down on top of them, no end to the ghostly laughter, the gallows spectacle, the wild dreams; and Goethe came to rest next to the unforgiving Schiller, who shielded him from Novalis, Grabbe, Lenz, and Büchner; Blake was lifted up once more, no burial place could do him justice, but Keats, Burns, and De Quincey consoled him; and Diderot, Voltaire, and Stendhal followed, reminiscing on their melancholic adventures they sprawled beside Hoffmann, Kierkegaard, and Heine; and Hugo, Balzac, and Zola crashed down violently; they had to deal with the fact that Sue too came to join them, and Lesage, and the bedraggled Bretonne, and poor old Nerval, who had hanged himself from a streetlamp; and they also had to accept being outshone by Rimbaud, lying in the desert dust. With Stevenson and Melville, an age surged toward us whose breath was already pervading our present; this age was an ocean which also carried Defoe, Marryat, and Conrad. And Gogol came too, accompanied by Goncharov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Gorky; with Jessenin, Blok, and Mandelstam falling beside them, and the howling Mayakovsky, tearing himself apart; and the two-faced Ehrenburg was lowered down, who saw almost everyone fall around him yet was able to protect himself, blessed be he, who would have been worthless as a dead man but who alive would one day be able to bear witness. Now they came from all sides, the chorus leaders Hauptmann, Nexø, Rolland, and Wedekind; the trombone players, Heym, Trakl, and Loerke; the whistlers and drummers, Dehmel, Mombert, and Werfel, Kantorowicz, Kaiser, Pinthus, and Sternheim, announcing the death of an old epoch, the birth of a new one; and Brecht was already with them, he was a survivor, in terrifying proximity to the silence surrounding Toller, Ossietzky, and Tucholsky, and around Mühsam, who they strangled, strung up in the lavatory in Oranienburg. And Lorca came from a sandy pit on the edge of the village of Víznar, near Granada, drenched in blood; along came Horváth, who was so anxious that he preferred climbing all the steps in a hotel to taking the elevator and who, in broad daylight, with a brief gust of wind on the Champs-Élysées, was decapitated by the falling branch of a tree; and Roth, killed by desperation and drink in the expanses of Paris, where Döblin, Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig, Heinrich Mann and Benjamin, Polgar, Neumann, Frank, and all the other drifters and homeless, the outcasts and the defamed, waited for a visa to go somewhere; and there was Broch, who scraped by in New York on poor relief and the outlandish Lasker-Schüler, dancing at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem; and old Marieluise Fleisser, holed up in Ingolstadt; and Jahnn, playing the organ on the island of Bornholm, hoping the Germans would take him for a Dane; and Musil, alone and starving in Zurich; and all the travelers, Kisch, Olden and Graf, Bredel and Renn, Regler, Klaus Mann, Seghers and Uhse, on the way to Haiti, to Mexico. And now and then, lone individuals who didn’t fit anywhere tumbled toward us, Cabet with his book about the ideal communist realm of Icaria, published by Dreiländerverlag; Thomas More, with his Utopia, published by Rascher in Zurich in nineteen twenty; More, the heretic, had lingered in the Tower, where he was decapitated; Weitling, one of the first German theorists of Communism, member of the League of the Outlaws, then of the League of the Just, founder of the magazine Republik der Arbeiter [Republic of the Workers], with a few tattered books, prison poetry, and Humanity: As It Is and as It Should Be; or Gregor Gog, present in a small book, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Road, with Verlag der Vagabunden, from nineteen twenty-eight. And where, we asked ourselves, should we put the magazines, Die Neue Zeit [The New Era], from eighteen eighty-three through to November nineteen seventeen, Der Jüngste Tag [Judgment Day], Die Fackel [The Torch], Die Weltbühne [The World Stage], Die Linkskurve [The Left Curve], Die Sammlung [The Collection], Die Zukunft [The Future], Das Wort [The Word], what to do with these inscriptions, these impressions of the history of half a century, this writing on the wall; now, a new decade was dawning, the decade of total deracination, Deinon was beginning, Brecht’s teeth chattered in fear. Briefly, I had the narrow, green, leather-bound volume of the Divina Commedia open, with its bible-paper pages; it was the same edition from Cotta that I read with Heilmann and Coppi in Berlin. Finally I was able to check my recollection of the lines about the noise that arose, about the moaning and the woe and the howling reverberating through the air all around, the various languages, the harrowing babble, the cries of pain and wrath, the screeching and creaking and the slapping of hands; then I heard shrill laughter from Brecht, he had kept the officers from getting at his manuscript folders, Steffin had opened some of the covers, Branting had said he vouched for the fact that the sheets contained exclusively aesthetic texts; yes, screamed Brecht, almost sobbing, beautiful poems, songs, chiseled prose. Indecisively, the police officers strutted around for a while between the tables before heading off. The detective novels, cried Brecht, you’ve forgotten the detective novels, rushing up the steps to the little mezzanine where he slept, jumped down with stacks of the cheap, dog-eared books that he liked to read in the evening, tore open the window, threw them after the police, and there they lay in the garden, Wallace, Doyle, Christie, Chandler, Carr, Carter, Quentin, Sayers, and all the rest, lying in the puddles and the moldering leaves. And in the studio a fight h
ad broken out between Brecht and Maria Lazar, who, a Social Democrat, was blaming the policies of the Communists for the situation that had arisen. Your Party paper, she yelled, called the British minefields a provocation and has already provided a defense of any German counterstrike. Germany must act to protect Denmark and Norway, you lot say, I don’t understand why you are all so worked up, the friends and allies of the Soviet Union are on their way. Brecht leapt up at her, as if he wanted to hit her; Weigel rushed to protect her, who could have been her twin sister; she snapped at Brecht, but they’d already moved on to another topic; she didn’t want Berlau to follow them, didn’t want to have to put up with the Dane any longer. And then Branting came rushing over from the telephone; just this minute, he cried, he had received word from the foreign ministry that cabin spots had been booked for the next departing ship; when, then; on the seventeenth of April; a whole week, think of everything that can happen in a week. My work with Brecht ended with the same reservation with which it had begun. Only Steffin hugged me, Brecht took my hand briefly, Greid, obsessed by his fear of germs, drew his hand away from me, Weigel urged me to send the boxes and suitcases with all the things she needed for the household as soon as possible, here’s the address, Havsgatan seven-A-twelve. One last wave to Hodann, who, standing at the open window, sucking in the mild air, already with a hint of spring to it, turned to me with his dark, indestructible smile, before looking back out the window. At the bridge, which at this hour late in the afternoon was now manned by guards with machine guns, I had to show my papers once more. The reason for my visit to the island. Taking leave from a friend—well, not my friend, my teacher.