by Joshua Cohen
A blue eye, a German skull,
youth’s grace in her countenance,
a well-built girl from the Rhineland—
but she fences like the devil.
Plaster-of-Paris statuettes of her, Greco-Roman in modeling, sold wildly. Heil He—pronounced “hey”—was her cheer.
Mayer arrived at the 1932 Los Angeles Games as excited to tour Hollywood as to repeat victory, but she lost, placing fifth. Just two hours before the final matches, she’d been informed that a German team ship, the Niobe, had sunk, drowning all sixty passengers, including her boyfriend, Dr. Alexander Gelhar. Disconsolate and contemplating retirement, Mayer made the lucky choice to stay in Southern California, enrolling at Scripps College, where she founded a fencing program and studied European languages, idealistically hoping for a job with the German Foreign Service.
In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler; in April, the Offenbach Fencing Club rescinded her membership, citing newly passed Nazi legislation that, while it excluded Jews from the civil service, did not extend its reach to private organizations. No outcry ensued, however. The Reichstag was burning. With a physician father who was Jewish and a Protestant mother, Mayer wouldn’t be spared, not even in California, the even harsher laws soon ratified in Nuremberg.
The Olympics, Hitler had said, are “a ploy inspired by Judaism that cannot possibly be put on by a Reich ruled by National Socialists.” But by late 1933, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels induced a rare change of heart. The Berlin Olympics would be a means of introducing the new Reich to the world: At a cost of 20 million reichsmarks, and in the span of only three years, unprecedented stadia and infrastructure were built; for the duration of the Games, no anti-Semitic media were broadcast or published (though the indefatigable Der Stürmer managed one commemorative issue); huge Nazi flags were hung from balconies (though Jewish households were only allowed, or compelled, to fly the Olympic rings banner); Leni Riefenstahl filmed the proceedings.
The Jewish Question of the 1936 Games was whether Jewish athletes would be allowed to compete. In early 1933, the Nazi delegation assured the IOC that Jewish athletes would be permitted, at least, to qualify—a stipulation that could have camouflaged rigged results. (Ultimately, Nuremberg’s ban of Jews from training facilities and shuttering of Jewish sports clubs made such meddling extraneous.) The Amateur Athletic Union, the governing body of the American team, proposed a boycott; the American Jewish community petitioned President Hoover to condemn “the Naziad.” Fearing an international incident, Hitler and Goebbels relented. Two token “Jews”—athletes hastily determined to be Mischlinge, or mixed-blood—were invited to join the German team: Mayer and high jumper Gretel Bergmann. (Similarly, Mischlinge ice hockey player Rudi Ball competed in the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen; 1936 was the last year that Summer and Winter Games were held in the same year and same country.)
Mayer, now residing in the Bay Area, maintained silence until she was formally invited, at which point she chose not to celebrate but to act—and not with a thrust or a parry, but with a “riposte,” the conversion of a defensive maneuver into an offensive strike. Using the official letterhead of Mills College, where she was teaching German, Mayer wrote to inform the Nazi government that she’d join the German team only if her full rights as a German citizen were restored. But was this a daring ultimatum? Or merely the desperate lunging of a young woman separated from her family and fans? Neither the government nor the Reichssportführer responded: Inaction, which is dangerous on the piste, is frequently the cunningest diplomatic tactic. Eventually Mayer decided to accept and join her homeland anyway—perhaps reasoning that her performance could convince the authorities in a way her correspondence couldn’t.
Over one hundred thousand Israeliten had fled Germany since Hitler assumed power, and here was one woman, wielding a toy sword, wanting in. She was naïve, opportunistic, ignorant, a selfish, frivolous girl. It often seemed as if Mayer was as excoriated by American Jews—the Yiddish press enjoyed calling her “calculating” and “cynical”—as she was in Germany. Or would have been, had the German public been allowed to know of her presence. Goebbels embargoed her: She was not reported on or photographed; “no comments,” he decreed, “may be made regarding Helene Mayer’s non-Aryan ancestry or her expectations for a gold medal.” The Führer shook her hand as he greeted all the German athletes; apparently, not even he could identify her.
Mayer won silver in her main event, individual foil. Thirteen “Jews”—most of them uncomfortable with that distinction—medaled at the Nazi Olympics, many in fencing. Endre Kabos of Hungary won two golds in sabre; the female fencers who won gold and bronze in individual foil, Ilona Schacherer-Elek of Hungary and Ellen Preis of Austria, were also “Jewish,” and they stood solemnly with Mayer atop the medal platform as Mayer upstaged them both in a dramatic white outfit, bedecked with a swastika. At the conclusion of the ceremony, she, with that long limb, gave the Nazi salute—memorable, public, her one moment captured on celluloid. Returning to the States directly after, Mayer refused to explain her behavior; later, she’d claim it might have helped protect family still in Germany (her brothers, Eugen and Ludwig, survived the war in labor camps).
After Berlin, she was ranked number one in foil in America eight times between 1934 and 1946. But there were no Olympics until 1948, by which time Germany was decimated; Mayer’s longtime relationship with an industrial designer, Joseph Sinel, had come to an end; and her health was failing. She’d quit Mills College, citing clinical depression, and was teaching at San Francisco City College when the diagnosis came: breast cancer. She immediately sought out an advantageous marriage. By the time she’d wed Baron Erwin Falkner von Sonnenburg—a former indifferent Nazi and flight engineer—and repatriated to Germany in 1952, the cancer had metastasized to her spine. She died in 1953, at the age of forty-two, and was buried in Munich.
It’s a strange and inexplicable fact that more major Jewish fencers were murdered in Nazi camps than were accomplished athletes of any other sport. Otto Herschmann died in Izbica; János Garay and Oszkár Gerde in Mauthausen; Lion van Minden and Simon Okker, veterans of the 1908 London Games, in Auschwitz. Attila Petschauer was recognized as an Olympian in the Davidovka concentration camp by the commandant, Kálmán Cseh von Szent-Katolna, who’d competed for the Hungarians as an equestrian. But this was not Amsterdam 1928, it was Ukraine 1944, a milieu less renowned for fair play. Von Szent-Katolna’s torture of Petschauer came to resemble, consciously or not, competition’s darkest perversion: Guards forced the champion to climb trees naked while they hosed him with freezing water until he succumbed to hypothermia. (Endre Kabos, the 1936 Berlin gold medalist, died when the lorry he was using to ferry ammunition for the resistance exploded on Budapest’s Margit Bridge.)
The next time the Olympics were held in Germany, it was 1972 and the country was called West Germany. A Palestinian terror squad massacred eleven Israeli team members: two wrestlers, a wrestling coach and referee, three weightlifters and a weightlifting judge, a shooting coach, a track and field coach, and Andre Spitzer, the fencing coach, who’d co-founded Israel’s fencing academy. He was shot in the head. To be a Jew after the Holocaust would mean, for better or worse, to sharpen one’s blade.
SPEAK EASY
ON BOHUMIL HRABAL
ONCE UPON A TIME A friend of a friend was drinking at a pub in Prague—U Zlatého Tygra (At the Golden Tiger). That this friend of a friend was a Fellow American should tell you that this was post-’89—after the Velvet Revolution, when hordes of Czechs and Slovaks revolted against Sovietism, jingled their keys on Wenceslas Square, and elected a literocracy: a playwright-president (Václav Havel), who appointed other writers to portfolio positions: poet-ministers, novelist-ambassadors. This Fellow American had arrived in Prague to witness history, get drunk for cheap, and get laid (perhaps he was also writing a novel). Alienated but empowered by Reaganomics, eager to to
ur the ruins of the Cold War—his generation’s only war—this latter-day Hemingway was to participate in the mass capitalization of the Eastern Bloc’s capitals: Once the Baltics had rebelled, the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact went, and with it went Moscow. Soon the USSR had no satellites, save those used transmitting TV footage of it all.
Plzeňský Prazdroj (aka Pilsner Urquell, Bohemia’s definitive pilsner), Krušovice (a more refined, smoother beer, stereotypically “for the ladies”), Staropramen (“the workers’ choice”)—this friend of a friend consumed them all and eventually had to urinate. An old man leaned in the doorway to the surely dim graffitied bathroom. He had his hand out and was demanding twenty crowns—in German since he didn’t think our hero understood Czech: Zwanzig koruny, bitte. Did the friend of a friend find this strange? Maybe not: To this day the bathrooms of many postcommunist countries are superintended by older people—pensioners, most of them women—who subsist on the few koruny, złote, forints, or rubly required for a urinal or stall, loose squares of toilet paper, a palmful of pink powdered soap.
This friend of a friend, probably too drunk to realize that twenty crowns was too much, paid the man, went in, unzipped. While he’s pissing, let’s remember that Czech has creative genteelisms for male genitalia that measure up to any other language’s: “Feather,” “pen,” “chimney,” “bird and eggs” are all in routine usage. Upon emerging, our hero noticed the same man teetering at the farthest corner of the bar, surrounded by journalists and photographers. To be an American abroad is to be taken advantage of; all expats must expect some shaving off the top, a bartender’s trimming. Back at his table he asked a waiter who the erstwhile attendant was, to which the waiter raised an actor’s eyebrow: “Bohumil Hrabal,” he replied. “Nejlepší česk´y spisovatel”—“the best Czech writer.”
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THAT STORY IS ESSENTIALLY un-fact-checkable, which is appropriate for Hrabal, king of the drunken anecdote. Hrabal perfected the genre during all those nights spent at U Zlatého Tygra, where, as he told his wife, Eliška Hrabalová, he performed research by the liter, studying his stoolmates, who were, practically, his literary collaborators.
Before street addresses were introduced in Prague in the late eighteenth century—it proved easier to collect taxes from a numbered house—the city identified its establishments by heraldry lintelled over doorways. A golden tiger still prowls above the entrance to 17 Husova Street, formerly a brewery. The tiger is a violent animal, a symbol of strife, the sneaky counterpart to that nobler feline, the lion, official mascot of the Czechs, of Bohemia.* By the way, the bar where this anecdote came to me was U Rotundy (the Rotunda), or U Černého Vola (the Black Ox), or, I don’t know—anyway, sometime in winter 2001.
But “anecdote,” which term Hrabal’s critics used to both praise and denigrate the informal form of his writings, is inaccurate. “Anecdote”—cognates exist in every Slavic language—derives from the secret chronicles of Procopius of Caesarea, biographer of Justinian I, and last of the historians of Antiquity; anecdota means “unpublished writings.” Officially unpublished for nearly a decade in Czechoslovakia, censored for almost his entire life, Hrabal suggested another word for his works: pábení, Englished by the writer Josef Škvorecký as “palavering,” meaning “idle chatter” or “flattering babble,” here intended to characterize looping, loopy conversation, as evinced by its Latin root, parabola, source also of that recursive form the parable. This is talk, or talky writing, that begins somewhere, goes elsewhere unrelated, only to return to its origins: its original subject and also, regardless of the intellectual flights taken, an earthy humor.
Pábení has a secondary definition: It’s the word used for any conference conducted between parties with varying conceptions of civility, as in a parley between natives and foreigners. Hrabal’s sense of pábení encompasses both meanings, as his fallen narrators—born bourgeois, reassigned to manual labor—meander between collegiate discussions of Goethe and the lowdown talk their factory colleagues employ, the ramblings of the un- or antiintellectual proletariat.
How Hrabal’s palavering diverges from this second sense is that it’s never dialogic: His books, most lacking quotationmarks, can be read as a single monologue, delivered by one man, half conquered and half conqueror—the pábitel, or “palaverer.” “As a rule, a pábitel has read almost nothing,” Hrabal once explained, “but on the other hand has seen and heard a great deal. And has forgotten almost nothing. He is captivated by his own inner monologue, with which he wanders the world, like a peacock with its beautiful plumage.”
Nowhere is this palavering better developed than in Hrabal’s autobiographical trilogy, translated only now in its entirety by Tony Liman, and in Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, which, though it was Hrabal’s first published novel, in 1964, is pretty much the last word in Hrabalovština. That term was invented as both a description and an embodiment of Hrabal’s invented language: an amalgam of acrolect book Czech and Bohemian and Moravian slangs, infused with trade vernacular and ideological verbiage traduced from German and Russian. The trilogy—among the last texts Hrabal wrote and a fresh discovery for Anglo-American readers—is surely one of the supreme attempts at autoanalysis by a European writer under communism, while Dancing Lessons, translated by Michael Henry Heim (the title should really, if less mellifluously, be Dancing Lessons for the Elderly and Advanced), is a lighter, idiosyncratic affair: a nimble foxtrot through a sparsely punctuated hundred pages in which a period or question mark, an exclamation point or even a semicolon, would seem to interrupt the intoxicated flow of language like the pinch of the bladder that precurses the breaking of the seal:
Bondy the poet once went to see my nephew, with his two babies in their baby buggy and because the pub closed after they’d drunk only three buckets of beer they took one home for the night and poured it into the washbasin and went on with their academic debate till they fell asleep, and my nephew woke up thinking a pipe had burst, but it was only poor Bondy pissing his two buckets onto the rug, after which he tumbled back into bed and didn’t get up until morning when the babies began to bawl, and he looked around and shouted Eureka! out of the blue and started cheering and jumping up and down on the pisssoaked rug and shouting, Listen, everybody, not only people who aren’t with us are with us, no, even people who are against us are with us, because you can’t cut yourself off from your times, there you have it, ladies, now you see why poets love to drink and meditate, and just when things are looking grim the heavens open up and out comes a thought making its way to the light.
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TURNING FOODSTUFFS TO DRINK, brewing takes that which sustains and makes it debilitating. Turning water to wine is a comparatively meek transubstantiation. Wine is quaffed in Europe’s sophisticated West; vodka—“little water”—in the cruder East; whereas bloating the Middle is beer. That beverage begins as grain; the land’s bounty of wheat and oats and hops are gleaned (hops were introduced to brewing in the same century the Slavic tribes received an alphabet: the ninth) and fermented. Much in the same way, Hrabal harvested the floor talk from his day jobs—the iron and steel foundry at Kladno, the paper-compacting plant on Spálená Street in Prague—and pulled from that raw jawing, literature.
Born in 1914 in Brno, in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hrabal reached drinking age while living in Nymburk, in Bohemia, and working behind the walls of his stepfather’s brewery, which, like all Czechoslovak businesses, was nationalized after WWII. Hrabal was a lusty adopter of Bohemia in every sense. Leaving Moravia’s religiosity and folkways behind, he headed for more modern, Germanic precincts: the capital of a free Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1939, and again after 1989, and of the Czech Republic after an independent Slovakia deaccessioned in 1993—Prague was his ultimate destination.
Innumerable poems, stories, and shoddy ad campaigns have fantasized that the river running th
rough Prague, the Vltava—the Moldau in German—is a river of beer. On one bank is the city’s administrative center; on the other, the nation’s—the Castle, apostrophized by another son, Franz Kafka. Prague is a city of churches where no one goes to church, a city of synagogues without Jews. Literary Prague—aping the literary life of the empire’s imperial cities, Budapest and Vienna—once enjoyed more of a café culture, conducted not in Czech but in German. Kafka and his future executor, Max Brod, along with Oskar Baum and Franz Werfel, were ersatz Viennese who aspired to the capital’s caffeination, taking their beans with a dash of cream. Not for them the Slavic demimonde, the twilit taverns strewn with sawdust, their rusty tanks and taps—the Eastern accents of this Western metropolis were too gauche for the authors of The Metamorphosis and The Song of Bernadette.
Hrabal’s literary predecessor was not Kafka but Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Good Soldier Švejk (often Germanized as Schweik), whose hero is the prototypical inscrutable “fool.” Švejk, cherished paragon of Czech consciousness, is either a moron or a crafty subversive, as he manages to evade action in WWI by being taken captive, in a stolen Russian uniform, by his own side’s troops. Hašek, no shrunken consumptive, was bibulous and monumentally fat; his supranovelistic scribble wasn’t a rarefied diary or excruciatingly psychological correspondence like Kafka’s—Kafka and Hašek were exact contemporaries, born in 1883, twenty blocks apart—but rather whimsical items about murders and rapes for the local Czech press. Hrabal was the educated heir to the Germans, but he was more temperamentally suited to Hašek’s company of syphilitic prostitutes and, as it were, syphilitics. German Kaffeekultur gave rise to expressionist and Symbolist texts, whereas Czech beer culture, pivní kultura, was defiantly narrative and lurid—as if coffee served as a cipher merely to center talk, and beer was talk’s incitement.