Ostend
Page 7
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In 1933 she was supposed to appear in the Nazi propaganda film Hans Westmar, but she declined and accompanied Ernst Toller into exile. As soon as she turned eighteen, in April 1935, they married in London.
Wherever she goes with him, writers almost go crazy at the sight of her youth and her beauty. The German writer Arnold Zweig is even supposed to have climbed through her window in Nice one night. “It must have been really hard for the poor thing, because first of all he was too fat and second of all he was too blind to climb in or out of anywhere,” she says later. She doesn’t think much of the émigrés’ evening palavers: “They would argue, and sometimes the writers read out their poems or pieces. I knitted all my opinions into beautiful angora pullovers for E.T. I had a lot to say, mainly that they were all too old and too boring and they kept saying the same things and most certainly they would never be right. But they often were, so then I knitted a bit quicker and made mistakes in the stitches.”
But she’s happy to be here at the beach with Gisela Kisch and Irmgard Keun, passionate swimmers all three. And on good days Ernst Toller goes swimming with them, athletically proud, and he swims far out, farther and farther, until Christiane fears for his life.
At all other times he barely lets her out of his sight and is unbelievably jealous. Besides which he worries about her fragility, her heedlessness, her absolute belief in people’s goodness. For example, he forbids her to talk to Erika Mann. She’s depraved, he says. She’s allowed, on the other hand, to talk to Klaus Mann—she’s even a friend of his. But the Mann children are not in Ostend this summer; a few days ago they drove through Spain in their sports car with their friends Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Fritz Landshoff and lay on the same beach in Majorca where bombs will fall later in the summer. Otherwise the two Manns are always present wherever more than three émigrés meet on a beach, only to disappear again as quickly as they arrived.
The second person Toller has explicitly warned his wife against is, however, here, but the worried playwright deems the situation to be unthreatening. Later Christiane writes, “I was allowed to meet Joseph Roth, although he was a sadist; because he already had his victim, a ravishingly beautiful woman, E.T. saw no danger for me. He shielded me and taught me to see what was behind people’s façades.”
Joseph Roth—a sadist? Egon Erwin Kisch once puts it this way over the course of the summer with a laugh: “Sepp always expects a certain submissiveness in women.” But he picked the wrong one in Irmgard Keun. “We’re driving through the night, all the lights swaying along with us. My head is lying in Franz’s lap. I must make myself seem weaker than I am, so that he can feel strong and able to love me.” She wrote that in Ostend, in her novel After Midnight. She is a strong young woman and cunning. And the passage in her novel fits most of the women who belong to the ever-growing group this summer in Belgium. Showing oneself to be weaker than one is, so that the men can feel stronger, is also true of quiet Lotte Altmann, Gisela Kisch, and Christiane Grautoff, of course, with her clever knitting; even Willi Muenzenberg’s wife, Babette, from a high-bourgeois family in Potsdam, beautiful and cool and patrician and speaking High German without a trace of a dialect, often observes her Thuringian bear with an ironic eye but would never dream of contradicting one of his rapid, vehement theories and calls to action.
ONCE AGAIN THEY’RE ALL SITTING in the Flore, this company in free fall, trying one more time this summer to feel like a group of vacationers. Trying to pretend that they’re carefree. Really, it’s just a great long trip they’ve been on for years. Far from home, traveling with friends, in Paris, Nice, Sanary-sur-Mer, Amsterdam, Marseille, Ostend. And at some point there’ll be a return journey. But when? The more urgent this question becomes, the less often it is posed. With every day of this vacation that goes by, any return becomes less plausible. They all know it. But it’s never discussed. Optimism is a duty. There’s a length of rope in the suitcase, but nobody talks about it.
Today once again they’re all trying not to turn immediately to politics and pore over the ominous news of the day. But it’s hopeless. There simply isn’t anything to talk about that is not political.
Egon Erwin Kisch tries it with sports. Which these days means Max Schmeling. Kisch has known and admired him for a long time. They were neighbors at the Scharmuetzelsee near Berlin, Kisch has attended many of his fights, and from a distance he has recently watched Schmeling refuse to bow to Nazi pressure to separate from his Czech wife and his Jewish manager, Joe Jacobs. And Kisch has of course read everything about the fight in New York on June 19 and has been getting on everyone’s nerves for days with his vocal admiration. The way Schmeling decked the “Brown Bomber,” Joe Louis. And most of all, the way he impressed America even before the fight began with his bold, cool remark about a weakness of his opponent’s: “I have seen something.” That’s the classic Schmeling understatement that Kisch loves so much. “Ha! ‘I have seen something’! As if I’d prepped him in advance!” cries Kisch. “Modesty, self-possession, and mystery, all in one sentence! Max is one of us.” And he explains to the table all over again just what Max saw: that after attacking, Joe Louis lets his left hand drop a little, and that this brief hole provides the critical opening for a counterattack. After twelve rounds the supposedly unbreakable Joe Louis went down, and Kisch loves to imitate the decisive punch, the way he thinks it must have been. “And now he’s an advertisement in America for the criminal Olympics,” Kersten yells back, while Kisch is still in full flood. Which brings them back to the usual theme. The leading news out of Berlin these days is the preparation for the Olympic Games. The whole world will be coming to the German capital. The regime has been busy donning a disguise for weeks, divesting itself of the visible signs of anti-Jewish and anti-foreign policies and presenting itself as a civil state committed to international friendship. All “Forbidden to Jews” signs have been taken down. “And have you heard?” asks Toller. “Der Stürmer has been censored for weeks. Not to remove any statements, just the anti-Semitic passages.” “Wonderful! So now they’re selling blank paper!” is Roth’s bitterly mocking retort.
In truth, this is the nub of their anxiety: that the world will allow itself to be deceived this summer in Berlin. That Goebbels will succeed in convincing the world of the Nazis’ peaceable intentions and putting it to sleep, confirming its belief that Germany is harmless. England has just announced it intends to shrink its navy. The League of Nations has lifted the sanctions against Italy that had been imposed in the wake of the conflict in Abyssinia. Mussolini’s Italy celebrated, and Germany celebrated along with it.
The world will sleep, in order to live in peace. And the little group in Ostend hates its own powerlessness to the point of despair.
They prefer not to talk about the news that reached them from Geneva at the beginning of the month. The Czech journalist Stefan Lux, who is Jewish, committed suicide during the General Assembly of the League of Nations. In front of the packed plenum, to protest the league’s and the world’s inaction vis-à-vis the crimes being committed in Germany. The reaction was brief horror, a certain distaste for such fanaticism, some shoulder shrugging, and then things went on. Disarmament, negotiations, preparation for the Olympic Games in Berlin. It is appalling. Even suicide as a signal leaves this world indifferent. No, the name of Stefan Lux will preferably not be mentioned this summer.
Things are rather different as regards Etkar André. The Communists in particular, and Kisch most particularly, have been closely following the reporting on his trial. André is a Communist, born in Aachen in 1894; then, after his father’s early death, he was raised in an orphanage in Belgium. In the Weimar Republic he was a member of Ernst Thaelmann’s*1 closest circle and a much-loved leader of the workers in Hamburg. After the Reichstag fire he was arrested, just like Kisch. But unlike Kisch, he remained under arrest and still is. The charge: high treason and attempted murder of an SA man in Hamburg. The proof is laughably thin. Moreover, numerous foreign journalists a
re already in the country in advance of the Olympics, and they are following the trial attentively and reporting on it extensively. No one here in Ostend had expected his conviction. The death sentence shocks them all.
The moment when they hear word of the sentence is one of those situations when all cynicism and all internal rivalries are stilled. As they were after the death of Stefan Lux. It is in moments like these that the émigrés are fully aware of their powerlessness and the all-powerfulness of their enemies. White-faced hatred and fear and the hope for eventual revenge are the predominant emotions of the refugees. They have all read Etkar André’s final words to the court. The pathos, the pride, the self-assuredness of a believer who knows himself to be innocent. “Your honor is not my honor, for we are divided by our worldviews, divided by class, divided by an abyss. If you are going to make the impossible possible here and send an innocent man to the block, then I am ready to walk that hard road. I want no mercy! I have lived as a fighter, and I will die as a fighter, and my last words will be: ‘Long live Communism!’ ”
What is there to say? None of them doubts that the sentence will be carried out. Just as none of them doubts, deep down, that everything is going to end badly. The only thing is not to show despondency. Defeatism is a crime here at the shore.
It’s better to bitch around together. The later the evening, the greater the sniping, the laughter, and the mockery. Of Klaus Mann, for example. Nice that he’s not here for once. That announcement of his new novel in the Pariser Tageszeitung! Kesten is beside himself with laughter: the editors had announced the prepublication excerpt of Mephisto in the issue of June 20. The entire exile community had already known that Mann was writing a novel in which he was portraying his former brother-in-law Gustav Gruendgens in barely veiled terms as the prototypical opportunist of the present day. But the book’s announcement by the Tageszeitung under the heading “Roman à Clef,” with the name Gustav Gruendgens helpfully supplied as the key in question, was a real embarrassment. And that Klaus Mann, urged on by his friend and publisher Fritz Landshoff, then inflated the embarrassment to enormous proportions by sending a telegram flatly denying this, is the trigger for their universal derision and scorn. “My novel is not a roman à clef. The hero of the novel is a fictional character without any connection to specific persons. Klaus Mann.” First to write such an obvious novel of revenge, then to promote it so provocatively before publication, and then helplessly to deny it all—it’s a combination of naïveté and audacity that’s too much for the seasoned writers around the table here in the Flore. Although they all like the driven, sensitive, handsome son of Thomas Mann. But he writes his books a little too fast, and he’s too quick to fall into enthusiasms. A hothead, a fighter, and they can’t help making fun of the emotionalism in his books, most particularly Mephisto, which is still being excerpted in the exile newspaper in Paris. Only Stefan Zweig admonishes the mocking Kesten in midflow to just say it to him in person instead.
He won’t. And Zweig knows why. The reason Kesten is making sport of his friend’s ineptitude is first and foremost that what Klaus Mann has written is effectively his, Kesten’s, book. All of it—the idea, the story, the characters—were suggested to Klaus Mann by Kesten as material for a book more than six months ago. And the former wrote it at top speed, far too fast yet again, in Kesten’s half-mistrustful, half-envious opinion. He can’t come to grips with how quickly Mann has thrown the whole thing down onto paper. And now, in his cockiness, his indifference, and his well-intentioned naïveté, he’s calling the success of the whole thing into question.
On November 15, 1935, Kesten had written the following to Klaus Mann in Amsterdam: “Because Landshoff told me you were looking for fresh material for your new novel, and because I myself am looking around for something for my own, I came up with this and that, and then something I think I would do very badly and you would do very well. In brief, I think you should write the story of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, and what I had in front of me was the figure you’ve already been toying with artistically (or so they tell me) in your mind, the Intendant of the State Theater, Gruendgens. (Title: The Intendant.) I’m not thinking you should write a high political satire, but—almost—an apolitical novel, the model being Maupassant’s ‘Bel Ami,’ which already inspired your uncle to discover the wonderful ‘land of Cockaigne.’ So no Hitler and Goering and Goebbels as characters, no agitprop, no Communist subversives, no Muenzenberg flourishes, but in some fashion the assassination of this Berlin actor whose name seems to be escaping me just at the moment. The whole thing in the ironic mirror of a hidden but easily detectable passion…To sum up: the Capital tells the story of how one becomes the Intendant.
“I think some story of this sort would work very well in your hands and with its description of the world of the Third Reich would offer great opportunities. I spoke with Landshoff about it, and he agreed with me.”
Now, after Zweig has called him to account, Kesten tells the whole circle where Klaus Mann got the subject matter and the idea for this book. And when.
This in turn prompts Roth to tell his collected friends how, at Kesten’s instigation, he reviewed his first novel for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Roth read it, didn’t think it was very good, and fundamentally incomprehensible. That’s what he wrote, and before publication he gave the piece to Kesten to read. The last two sentences ran: “I don’t understand the novel. Perhaps Kesten is a great comedian.” Kesten cut the penultimate sentence and excised the word perhaps from the last. Much better that way, he said to Roth, who allowed the text to appear in Kesten’s version.
“Where would you be today without this text, Hermann?” Roth exclaims to the circle at large, and laughs. They all laugh too. They know that almost no other writer has as good connections to reviewers in the Weimar Republic and almost no one works them as intensively as Kesten. And they know that Joseph Roth actually reads very little but reviews a great deal. He doesn’t need to read, he tells stories around the books and adds what he feels to be a somehow appropriate judgment. He likes writing about his own books too. And when he’s in a particularly good mood, he pans them.
Right now he’s actually reading something again. Not to write about it, but because it’s a book that shares his worldview: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It came out four years ago in English, and in German under the title Whither the World? Roth regularly gets on the nerves of the rest of the circle by reading aloud quotes from the book about how surveillance will be the norm in the world of the future. “The embryo factory! The new man! Sexually mature at four, fully grown at six and a half! A triumph of science!” Roth’s laugh is bitter, and he keeps returning to the same passages.
“Sepp! Enough! We know already!” Kisch tries to check him. “Your Huxley’s a reactionary amateur! Chaplin’s the genius of our time!” And now Kisch takes the floor. He recounts his visit to Chaplin, when the latter showed him every film in his private screening room that Kisch had never seen before, and laid his hand on Kisch’s knee in the half-darkness of the screening room and searched his face for signs of approval and enthusiasm. “How insecure he was, and proud at the same time,” cries Kisch, and then talks about Chaplin’s new masterpiece, Modern Times, which most of the group have already seen in Paris. But not Roth, of course. The moment Kisch started in about it again, he pulled a face. The cinema is the anti-Christ! The devil! “Modern Times—doesn’t make me laugh!” he sneers. But Kisch refuses to be provoked, talks about the feeding machine on the assembly line, and acts out Charlie, as he calls him, falling into the machine or leaping, in his swimming trunks, into the shallow water. It’s Kisch’s star turn. The group in the Flore is almost flat on the floor with laughter. Even the corners of Roth’s mouth twitch.
Roth hates the cinema, even if he keeps encouraging Zweig to get an American agent to handle the movie rights to his books. He needs the money, and nobody pays more, or faster, than Hollywood. They’ve already filmed Job.*2 Roth hasn’t seen it but Zwei
g has told him about it and now reports to the whole circle that the movie version is a scream. The story has simply been turned into an American melodrama. “You have to see it, Roth! You won’t recognize a thing! But it’s hilarious!” “No, I won’t.”
That’s how the evening goes. One bottle of Verveine du Velay follows another. The mood is boisterous but also strained. You have the feeling that one wrong word, and the whole table would explode. Kisch keeps up his lecture on Modern Times for a bit: the hero isn’t Charlie, of course, the hero is/are the modern times themselves, the exploitation of the workers, the universal surveillance, American capitalism as the enemy. Then they talk about the general strike in France and Belgium. Here at the seaside you notice almost nothing, but the country is crippled. A hundred thousand people have stayed away from work for weeks; in France it began at the beginning of June. “They’re going to triumph!” cries Kisch. Vacation entitlement, a forty-hour week, higher pay—it really looks as if the concerted power of the unions will force the state and the industrial concerns to their knees. “Paid vacation! What do you think is going on in summer here?” cries Kesten. “We can hardly get around in all this vacation mob as it is.” Roth and Zweig and the women laugh. Kisch finds it less funny and tells Kesten to keep his cynicism to himself. There’ll always be room somewhere for him and his stomach.