There it stood, “IM,” I didn’t want to believe it but my body believed it right away—my heart started pounding, I was soaked in sweat, emergency! emergency! alarm bells, flight reflexes, I would have been glad to run away all the way to the edge of the world. Is Santa Monica the edge of the world?
Yes, Sally said. When you look at it that way, it is.
It doesn’t help, though. Running away doesn’t help, old folk saying. Standing your ground doesn’t help either. I don’t know anymore what the first thing was that I thought, when I could think again. But I do know the first thing I felt, without words. Translated into words, it was: You can’t tell anyone. At the beginning I knew I would keep it to myself, while I also knew that that was the wrong thing to do, and useless in the long run, and to understand that, Sally, you had to be there back then. You had already been through the first wave of the witch hunt—you had written a book describing a day of your life under surveillance, which had already been the occasion to subject you to a level of condescension and presumption you could never have imagined, even in a dream. I couldn’t withstand another wave right then, Sally. Again I was faced with the choice between two impossibilities and I chose the one that seemed to hurt me less at the time.
That’s what we all do, Sally said with a sigh. But did you have any obligation to talk about it at all?
That is exactly what I asked myself too, I said, when I was able to ask myself questions again, and my answer was no. No, I said to myself, I did not have a duty to talk about it. Anyway, I was scared.
You can’t let any of that show here, Sally said. When they smell the scent of fear on you they pounce. Like wild animals, I’m telling you.
The overcoat of Dr. Freud came to my mind. I wished it could protect me.
On the contrary, Sally said. It’s there to take your self-defense mechanisms away from you.
In a dream I was being driven down a deserted street on the top deck of a dilapidated freight truck. Apparently my task was to unload the freight from the top of the truck to get down to the actual truck bed, it was very difficult, and treacherous while the moving truck was shaking back and forth, but finally I did it, I was on the truck bed, but then, to my disappointment, it was totally empty. I woke in darkness with a feeling of hopelessness, which the dream alone was not enough to explain, and it came as no surprise when I then, in the middle of the night, asked myself: What am I doing here? I had given myself over, almost greedily, to the excitement of the first few weeks, I had almost consciously avoided taking stock of my time here; now that I thought about it, I had accepted it as something I’d earned, without that word ever occurring to me, I thought, deeply breathing in the mild California night air that came in through the big open window, filtered, like all the air in all the rooms, by the small-mesh screen windows, which were there to defend the clean, pure, immunized interior spaces against any insects that might contaminate them, or worse: make them unsafe. This bottomless need Americans have for safety, certainty, security.
But what did I know about Americans. I should just admit to myself that I was homesick. I listened in on myself, prepared to find the pain of homesickness, but it wasn’t there, it had left me in the lurch. The truck bed is empty, I thought with a little self-mocking laugh.
Why wasn’t I homesick? It wasn’t natural, in a foreign country, the thought came to me. I hadn’t wanted to live in a Greater Germany again, the thoughts went on, unreasonably, but night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness, which defends itself, feebly, with the counterquestions I knew all too well. Would I really have preferred that smaller Germany in the long run, with all its shortages and deprivations—what am I saying: with its afflictions and faults—with the seed of collapse inside it, which I had, after all, been feeling for a long time? I was moving again, back on well-worn tracks, all I had to do was keep quiet and let the argument and counterargument inside me run their course, I wouldn’t learn anything new, but on the other hand I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep, this was tried and tested, there was no point in hopefully shutting my eyes.
Until, half-asleep, I heard the soft tinkling of bottles, it was the homeless man who lived on the corner of the alley behind the building and spent the nights scouring the garbage containers for bottles he could redeem for the deposits. I listened to the tinkling and didn’t notice myself falling asleep.
A new day with the old tape recorder in my head, running on endless loop and bringing up the same question again and again: How could I have forgotten that? I knew, of course, that no one would ever believe I had forgotten it—they threw it in my face as my own offense. Vergehen, what a beautiful German word, both “misdemeanor” and “the fading into the past”!
I called my friend in Zurich. You’re a psychologist, you must know: Can someone forget something like that? That they gave me a code name? That I wrote a report? He kept calm. And? he said. What else? And by the way: A person can forget anything. They need to, in fact. Don’t you know the line from Freud: We cannot live without forgetting? —Repressing! I said. And he said: Not necessarily. We also forget what we don’t think is very important. —But that can’t be what happened to me in this case. —Who knows? It was such a long time ago. —Thirty-three years. —Oh dear God. And what makes you think you know what was important to you back then? —That’s what I want to find out. —How? —I’m crawling back down into the mineshaft. —Good luck. But please, be careful. Right now you’re the only one looking after yourself, remember that. No one will take that responsibility off your shoulders. And also, excuse me for saying so, you are going through a psychological crisis. —So what do you think I should do? Go into therapy? —That would probably be the best thing.
But there was no question of that. I didn’t need help, I wasn’t allowed to need help, I had to “get through it” alone. Only much, much later, maybe only today, do I understand that this stubborn insistence had more than a little in common with the old way of thinking, the one that, as Peter Gutman later said, had gotten me “into this mess.” I paged through books in search of relief. I found Brecht’s lines about the city I was living in myself:
Reflecting, so I hear, on hell
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live not in London but in Los Angeles
Find, reflecting on hell, that it must be
Even more like Los Angeles.
City of Angels, I thought, amused. I got my fire-engine-red Geo out of the garage—a test of courage and skill every time, though I tried to make sure that no one could tell by looking—and drove to Twenty-sixth Street again. Brecht’s cube-shaped house, where he had had long discussions with Adorno and Eisler and Laughton and reflected on the insoluble ethical problems of the Galileo play, was now occupied by a man I sometimes saw on his front lawn and who definitely did not know who had lived there before him. How many times would Brecht have left this house to drive downtown? Or to visit the Feuchtwangers at Villa Aurora, high above the Pacific cliffs at Paseo Miramar, which my Geo brought me to as well? Where once, years before, on an unforgettable afternoon, Marta Feuchtwanger had shown you and G. her husband’s library and where there were now contractors in clouds of stone dust busy in the emptied rooms. Where Brecht could discuss political and literary problems, and agree about them, with the “little master” who, with iron discipline, dedicated all his days to his work. While Brecht avoided the other master, Thomas Mann, as much as possible. Had it ever happened in modern Europe that a country’s intellectual elite, almost without exception, had had to flee? Weimar Under the Palms. Where did I hear that term?
Oh, an old actor said to me on the green lawn behind the Schoenberg house on North Rockingham Avenue, where we were standing together, each holding a margarita glass, I’m Norman, and he introduced me to his
wife, Peggy, who looked straight out of a Chekhov play: white hair pinned up in a hairdo from the turn of the century; long, old-fashioned strings of pearls around her neck; heavily made up with deep purple lipstick; her blouse and dress also typical of that era. Norman, with blue, amphibian eyes and white hair with a precise part, and a rather small face, still unlined, was dressed in a correct suit and tie, even in the heat of this winter day. He didn’t look like an actor, but that changed the moment he started to talk. His voice still carried and he delivered his stories accompanied by well-chosen gestures. He had something he needed to tell me: He had worked with Brecht. He was one of the managers of the theater in Beverly Hills where the second version of Galileo was premiered. He knew stories about the rehearsals with Laughton, not entirely suitable for polite company, that he enthusiastically told me anyway: How Laughton, as Galileo at the dress rehearsal, his hands in the deep pockets of his roomy robe, “was playing with his genitals.” How Brecht then instructed him, Norman, over the phone to make Laughton stop, which he, Norman, refused to do, even when Helene Weigel joined Brecht in making the request. The next day, though, before the performance, a furious Laughton was seen chasing the costume director, who insisted that it wasn’t his fault: The pockets had been removed from Galileo’s robe. And, Norman asked, do you know who was responsible for the costumes? Helene Weigel!
Oh, madam, he said, how grateful we are to you for sending us all that German culture! Such men and women they were! Brecht. Feuchtwanger. Thomas Mann. Heinrich Mann. Hanns Eisler. Arnold Schoenberg. Bruno Frank. Leonhard Frank. Franz Werfel. Adorno. Berthold Viertel. And on and on. Oh, madam, what seeds they planted! And the best thing about them was their sense of humor. How they made you laugh! Hanns Eisler, for example, Norman’s neighbor on the Malibu coast, once had a circulatory collapse and Lou Eisler, worried, called them to come over. Eisler was lying on the ground, Norman said, and I asked him, Hey, what’s wrong? How do you feel? Eisler told me: I feel like a thousand frogs are having sex on my tongue! That man’s life is not in danger, we thought.
Norman still admired Brecht’s appearance before the McCarthy committee and Eisler’s statement refusing to denounce anyone, with the remark: They are my colleagues.
The guests had all arrived and we were called to the table. The house, where Arnold Schoenberg had lived for fifteen years worshipped by his student, Eisler, was now occupied by Schoenberg’s son Ronald and Ronald’s wife, Barbara. Walking into their dining room was like walking into a Vienna salon: Nothing has changed here! Norman exclaimed. They served beef soup with bread dumplings and boiled beef with baby carrots and various sauces and boiled potatoes, and for dessert Sacher torte with whipped cream and strawberries, of course. Guests were led past a display case where Barbara had preserved the few remaining mementoes of her father, the Austrian émigré composer Eric Zeisl; she said with a certain melancholy—the daughter in the famous father-in-law’s house—that her own father had been forgotten.
I remember how, near the end of the dinner, I worked up the courage to bring the conversation around to the argument between Thomas Mann and Schoenberg about Mann’s use of elements of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music in the twenty-second chapter of Doctor Faustus, which Schoenberg had sharply criticized. Had they been able to get past their disagreements in the end? Well, Schoenberg’s sons said, the two men had exchanged some letters, in other words come to an understanding, as it were. Had they met again afterward? Barbara, the peacemaker, said: Schoenberg did die in 1951, only a short time later.
The reasons why Doctor Faustus had so enraged Schoenberg were cataloged once again; the sons reported that the Author’s Note in the later editions of the book had hurt their father’s feelings too. Both the German and the English versions were brought out for Barbara to read aloud from. Schoenberg had even said, in fact, that if Mann had talked to him beforehand he would have composed a piece especially for him and the book.
I unexpectedly ended up in another argument that evening, with a German literature professor who called Doctor Faustus an “allegory of the Nazi state.” I insisted that the book was an analysis that went much deeper, of the German character through history and the way German intellectuals and artists became entangled in the catastrophe that this history had led to. The professor did not understand what I was saying and wanted to prove he was right with quotations from the book; I was amazed at how flat and superficial his interpretation was. I forced myself to stay polite but didn’t back down.
The same thing happened when the professor said he was in favor of the death penalty, after Norman described a case where some teenagers had brutally killed three children. Why should we let these teenagers live? The others at the table were in favor of the death penalty too. Here I could not stay neutral. For our own sakes, I said, that is why we should let them live. Locked up, of course, so that they can’t hurt anyone else. But not killed. Would I talk that way if it had been my own child? Then someone else at the table said you can’t ask that … Where was the dividing line, actually? I would sanction the execution of Nazi mass murderers. Still, I said: But we can imagine a society where these three teenagers would not have ended up so deeply perverted. Was I imagining things, or did this comment earn me mocking looks? I realized that most Americans see such crimes as part of human nature, not circumstance: there is simply a moral code everyone has to follow.
The very next day, I remember, I drove up to San Remo Drive again to look at Thomas Mann’s house from the entrance, “where,” he writes, “I lived and worked for more than a decade. I was exposed to the pressures of the often strangling afflictions of the time, of course—the same there as I would have been anywhere else—but still, under relatively mild and bearable circumstances.” I decided to once again drive down the road he often walked, to the Ocean Park Promenade, to Hotel Miramar, where his wife, Katia, would pick him up in the car. On the other hand, he would torture himself with the news from Germany. December 5, 1944: “Irritating and crude article by Marcuse about my Atlantic essay … Foolishness.” The article where Marcuse challenged Mann “just once, at some point, to write the unvarnished truth about his own past—as mercilessly as all great converts did.” He meant the “past” that Mann had documented in his World War I essay “Reflections of an Unpolitical Man.” It had caught up to him too, as an admonition even after his emigration, after all his radio speeches to the German people, in the middle of his work on arguably the most unsparing analysis of the “guilt of the German intellectuals” ever written, Doctor Faustus.
* * *
Memory images: The color in fashion for female officials seems to be crimson. It sometimes happens that Hillary Clinton and Barbara Bush and Al Gore’s wife and other female congressional candidates appear on one and the same stage before the American television public in that same color. But the red that CBS used on election night, to indicate the states that had already gone to Clinton, is darker. Actually, by five in the afternoon when I get back to my apartment, everything has already been decided, the polling places have closed on the East Coast, the results are supposed to be withheld until it is eight o’clock here on the West Coast too but of course there is no question of that in this media society. We are sitting, more than fifteen of us, at Pintus and Ria’s place, with red wine, bread, chicken, and cheese, and we hardly glance at the TV screen anymore, it’s chaos, everyone is shouting, the Americans are trying to explain to us Europeans the indirect elections in the American system, with electoral votes, and only when the victorious protagonists appear before their followers do we become interested again. The cheer when Clinton and Hillary come out on stage; my delight when Hillary pulls Clinton’s speech out of her suit pocket. The decisive blow against Bush was said to have come on the Friday before the election, when it came out that he had not only known about the shipment of weapons to Iran but had in fact approved them; when he had then brushed aside the question with a wave of his hand and gone so far as to say that his dog knew more about foreign policy th
an “these two bozos,” Clinton and Al Gore: that was the nail in the coffin … We celebrate.
But as early as the following day, I heard a Christian caller to a radio program urge all Americans not to pay any more taxes until this fiend has left the White House. Reagan, yes, when he was still there everyone knew he was a father. “Maybe he made mistakes. But we all felt his energy: He was our father…” “Robert,” the radio host, who was actually a preacher, had exactly the same opinion. Then someone named Sharon called, a woman who had been abused by her husband, and “Robert” curtly informed her that she has to be patient and loving with this husband, above all she always has to make him feel like a MAN, and when Sharon tried to get a word in edgewise, “Robert” screamed at her: I’m talking, you need to listen to what I’m saying! He managed to work some hate-filled remarks about Clinton into his tirade, and he told a later caller, apropos of nothing, what a good, religious person he was, he had never done anything bad in his forty-five years, but even he was hated. Shut up! he shouted down a woman who was trying to raise objections, until she hung up. A deeply paranoid man, who was allowed to come before the radio audience once a week and let off steam.
* * *
To continue. I reached for the red folder, the letters from this L. whom I would never meet and who was nonetheless so close to me. I saw her before my eyes, her figure, her face, her haircut—I heard the way she talked, her voice, emanating from the letters to my friend Emma with no date, but probably from sometime in the late seventies:
My dear,
Don’t pressure me. I know you want someone at your side who can give you back a little of your lost sense of home. I can well imagine that people can feel homeless even when they’re not in other countries, in the emigration, and that it might be even worse to have to feel that way in your own country. When we were still in France—before the war, when most of the French still clung to their belief in appeasement and stayed away from us with our frightened, threatening prophecies—my dear gentleman said once: It’s so painful to see the old continent go under, even if it probably deserves it. And it did go under, didn’t it, old Europe? Yes, I know—it was largely destroyed but is working to rebuild itself, and maybe, with the help of God and the Americans, it will succeed.
City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel Page 20