Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  It is not much Marx. It is rather very Morris—though no one fesses to having read News from Nowhere, so there must be some intermediary, a vector. They place great value here upon handcraft, the thing well made, no more complicated than it needs to be. The perfect emblem of Arndtheim is the honey-dipper: a curious curvaceous elongated knob, carefully lathed and grooved, that emerges from the pot impregnated with oozing sweetness. Thus Arndtheim: a well-earned bounty, an earthly abundance, with just that twist of oddity, those funny grooves running right through the grain. An essential stickiness.

  I don't know what it is about these people that annoys me so.

  They dress as they imagine good German peasants might dress, or ought to dress, or dressed once upon a time, in some golden agrarian age: loose-fitting smocks, wide britches, leather moccasins, wide-brimmed hats, all made by themselves.

  They labor together, that is true. Whether they labor equally or not? Not only the cynic suspects an unacknowledged hierarchy.

  They plant their herbs and food crops in keeping with the cycles of moon and planets, using complicated charts marked up with astrologic formulae. Further, there are mysterious preparations to vitalize the soil, draw the appropriate cosmic energies, or deflect negative influences back to the Underworld—don't enquire too closely about this unless you have an afternoon to spare. It's all very Madame Blavatsky, I think, though they make it out to be scientific.

  They do not like squares. For them, it must be the circle, the conic section, the hexagon (shape of a honeycomb—and yes, of course, they keep bees, great wood-framed enclaves of this earnest and Socialist-minded insect). The village is laid out in alignment with the poles and with the exact directions in which the sun rises and sets on the summer and winter solstices. This gives six bearings—hence, six lanes webbing out from a central green or common. The innermost structures are workshops, a mule-powered grain mill, a smithy, and a pleasant timbered edifice that should very much like to be a village inn or pub but is obliged to call itself the Community House, a library–cum–school–cum–dining hall. Second ring out, cottages of the permanent residents or, as they call themselves, ‘settlers,’ as though this were Jamestown 1609, or Erewhon 1890. Subsequent rings house the less permanently situated (hard to tell who lives here, actually, even the residents themselves don't seem to know). The living is rustic but comfy enough. Marty and I have got a little cabin in which one hears a stream lapping pleasantly through the night.

  13. SEPT

  Chilly, these last mornings.

  Book shelves, don't you find, are mercilessly revealing. In the Gemeindehaus (loitering, shirking our kitchen duty) we discover Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer: well enough. Freud of course. Spengler in successive editions. The usual moderns, Kästner, Hesse, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, the Manns. Wyneken, Blüher, Baden-Powell (in translation), canon of the Youth Movement. Waist-high stacks of magazines, pamphlets, journals, broadsheets, most badly written, execrably designed, amateurish in every way. Others less so.

  Then, the odd things. Last, the worrisome things.

  Among the former, highly colored romances by Guido List, a Walter Scott of the Ring Cycle set. Wise chieftains, fearless warriors, ‘runic magi.’ And of course a stable of blond Frauen of fulsome breast, ready and happy to (as the saying goes) throw the babies.

  Among the latter—who is Raoul Francé? He would seem to be a Monist. (Whatever that is.) His Discovery of the Homeland, 1914, entreats men of German blood to quit the cities, those dens of filth and ‘cosmopolitanism’— i.e., Jewry—and return to the fields, the forests, the good rich earth of their ancestors.

  And who, pray, is Ernst Haeckel? A biologist of some kind, one gathers, though what kind one cannot guess. He is all over the shelf, some of his writings quite dusty indeed. From 1866, ‘Oekologie,’ a term I don't recognize, a monograph having to do with Nature and the intricate relationships therein. Relationships chiefly fratricidal. The fellow seems to take fiendish glee in the prospect that certain organisms shall surely exterminate their fellows, and that (if one reads him correctly) the same applies to certain races. One looks in vain for a clear definition of ‘race.’ Is he talking about the hated French? The Lapps, trespassers on Nordic ground? No, one suspects one knows whom he is talking about.

  From Haeckel, a short hop to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Who at least comes right out with it. ‘We must save the sacred forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.’ This in 1853! Right-wing tree-worshippers espousing the ‘rights of wilderness.’ How could this possibly be understood in America?

  Finally, the namesake, Ernst Moritz Arndt—hence ‘Arndtheim.’ Queerest of a queer lot. A treatise from 1815, Darwin barely out of diapers, sounds radical even today. On the Care and Conservation of Forests: ‘When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important—shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity.’

  Sounds cozy and warm, for those who enjoy their panentheism. Yet a paragraph down, one chokes upon dire warnings against miscegenation and, a few pages later, scurrilous diatribes against the usual villains: Slavs, Mediterraneans, and… need it be said?

  The message, ringing and clear: We belong to this world, our natural place is here, like the stag, the eagle, the oak. Our bodies are meant to thrive on this hard continent, our souls shaped by this climate, these mountains, a quality of sunlight, a sharp scent of tannin in the air. And so it is our sacred duty to defend this place, this German soil, this German water, these German trees, against all that is alien, corrupting, industrial, ‘civilized’— not for our own sake, for we are merely part of the whole, but for the sake of that greater, unified thing, the living body of Germania.

  A stirring vision, and so very dangerous. Over a century old yet very much alive here, evolving, ramifying, in this ‘model hamlet.’

  Oh, and did you know, this Arndt man wrote also fairy tales. There is a book of them and they appear very common indeed.

  14. SEPT

  Talk of leaving. Talk of staying. Talk of politics. Talk.

  Last night late—too late to record, now half forgotten—a disputation over Hesse, whose recent novels are enjoyed in Leipzig arguably to excess. Minds here divided. These people approve the author's mystical aspect, likewise his iconoclasm. His focus, however, upon the singular man, the lone wolf, emphatically they do not. Hesse lacks völlig social consciousness, they say. At which point, roughly, the Demian was adduced. This slight auto-Bildungsroman is taken by these credulous folks (in such matters more conventional than they suppose) at face value: Max Demian, mini-Übermensch, meets sensitive but unenlightened narrator and shows him the Way.

  Here the Expat, mildly intoxicated, essayed an alternative exegesis: the Demian as daring (though botched) attempt at homosexual confessional. Admittedly, one hoped to shock. One hoped also, however, to make a gesture of goodwill toward Marty's old friend, whom we have here unkindly called the Invert, who does not, for all one's chumminess, show signs of warming toward ourselves. And so, with muddled intent, we began ticking off the points (which, need it be noted, have the striking feature of correctness).

  In the throes of Pubertät, whilst his comrades speak coarsely of women, pseudonymous young Emil thinks only of his friend Max Demian. Consistently, through all his changing moods, he employs the term Sehnsucht (yearning, desire) to characterize his feelings—though the word never appears in the text when Max is more than two sentences away. The friend's striking looks are (redundantly) detailed—variously called ‘womanly,’ or weiblich, and androgynous. In a stuffy classroom, Emil stares fixedly at the back of Max's neck, rapturously inhaling the ‘soft smell’ there. Max gives as good as he gets, referring pointedly to the ancient Greeks, who held in honor certain (unspecified) things now felt to be abominable. He confesses himself to be ‘interested in’ th
e younger boy for no obvious reason—or rather, one obvious reason that is nowhere openly acknowledged. He quivers once at the edge of a great declaration, only to retreat as, indeed, does Hesse himself, into silence and misdirection. The only female character of note (Max's mom!) enters late and serves merely as a double and stand-in for her son, whom she looks and talks exactly like. Once, yes, it is true (we were obliged to respond to a predictable objection), Emil glimpses in a public park a Real Girl, and thereupon fixates implausibly upon her slender, small-breasted, and suspiciously boylike image. But this flimsy narrative ploy serves two purposes. First, Emil's chaste daydreaming about this girl, whom he never tries to meet in the flesh, excuses him from the opposite-sex involvements of his schoolmates, which he finds crude, dissolute, and unappealing. Second, it impels him to create art, starting with a portrait of his comely Muse— which, when it is done, depicts not the nameless Mädchen but the mädchenhaft Max, right down to his full, sensuous mouth. And of course the story closes with a boy-to-boy, lip-to-lip kiss, concerning which the author, in his haste to explain it away, makes his feeblest and most craven showing to date.

  —All of which, one had hoped and rather expected, might have earned at least a friendly nod from Ingo. To the contrary! Said Kerl avoided one's eye from ‘homo-’ onward and slunk from the common room during the ensuing spirited discussion. Thus was the Expat left to defend an unpopular (but honestly unassailable) position with no one to hand him ammunition. So much for gratitude. So much for wearing one's tolerance upon one's sleeve.

  We shall carry on, though. We shall not be so easily blinked out of this fellow's eye. Where the Brunette goes, we mean to follow. And thus far, she seems devoutly disinclined to go anyplace without our Ingo tagging along.

  16. SEPT

  The evening meal here is the high point of the day, communally speaking. People are done with their labors in the garden and the vineyard and the workshops and the mill (my own day's assignment: shepherding! which gives one time to think and write), and everyone has a pent-up impulse to socialize. Usually there is something on for the evening—a topic for discussion, lessons in folk dance, a musical recital—so dinner is, you might say, the last open slot of the day. ‘The boys,’ as Marty calls them, are not present, unaccounted for since midday, their movements lately hard to keep track of. Quite the oddest trio imaginable, but there you have it.

  The big hall where we eat is a curious mix, Arts & Crafts with a touch of barrier-free Gropius functionalism. Socialist interior design: no rugs on the pale wood floors, but a superfluity of wall posters, Blue Rider prints, portrait of Rosa Luxembourg, her coiffure in itself a form of torture.

  At our table is one of the Big Men About Arndtheim (which pretends to be a pure democracy, but strikes one as more an ideocracy, led by those with the strongest opinions)— a fellow named Alwin. Tall, bright-eyed, articulate though given to talking in slogans, his distinguishing affectation is dark hair worn long and straight, past his shoulders, and a deerskin waistcoat. Rousseau's homme sauvage, or his German cousin. Who falls to discoursing, this night, on the calamity soon to befall Western civilization. The nature thereof, unspecified. The signs, the auguries, however, unmistakable. One hears this kind of thing everywhere, of course, but Alwin gives it a twist. He sees cracks in the cultural edifice where other observers—Yanks above all—might see breadth and novelty.

  Look, says Alwin, at the chaos of art. There is no true subject matter, no world-vision, not since the Pre-Raphaelites. Today's artist seeks only that which is instantaneous, effortless, which relates to nothing and means nothing, which lacks both antecedent and consequence. The topic of art is art itself, nothing more.

  While he speaks, a young girl pops up beside him, flaxen hair in two long braids, just big enough to clamber onto his lap. Alwin steadies her with a hand but otherwise pays her no heed. His mind is on higher things.

  Observe, likewise, the decadent state into which literature has fallen. The writers of our age have nothing to offer beyond the most minute self-absorption. This Irishman with his huge novel about a Jew who leaves his house, walks around Dublin, and returns home again. Or the Frenchman with his seven volumes about eating dinner and falling asleep. Even our own Professor Mann, feeding us sickly tales of a stage magician or a pervert by the sea.

  The girl says, Daddy, please, we are so bored, there is nothing to do, will you tell us a story?

  And God in heaven, says the Big Man, do not speak of music! Shush now, Hildi. Without doubt, we bear witness today to the death of composition. Better the degraded mewling of Berlin cabarets than the tuneless fiddle-scratching of Schoenberg!

  Onward in this vein he goes, quite vividly. The girl twirls fingers in his long hair. He speaks once to her, in annoyance. Come, Hildi, calls a woman across the room, leave your father in peace.

  Is this the mother? Wife, mistress, brood mare, we are not sure what categories exist here in the Great Experiment.

  ‘Perhaps then’ (when at last the Ideocrat pauses, the Expat ventures to suggest) ‘what is wanted is a unifying theory, a sense of where we stand in history, what is required of us. For instance, Marx suggests—’

  One is permitted nothing further.

  ‘We need no more ideology!’ the fellow shouts, or rather, shrieks. Somehow one senses: he is quoting somebody. ‘Spengler tells us’ (of course, one knew Spengler was coming, sooner or later) ‘we need hardness. We need fearless skepticism. We need, above all, a new class of socialist overlords!’ Actually, for overlords, Herrenvolk, a word the Hitler party takes pleasure in.

  The Expatriate finds no words to suit the occasion. Across the room little Hildi laughs, entertained by some antic of Isaac's. The woman— wife, mother, martyr, none of the above?— sighs, brushing hair out of her eyes. Already a few strands of silver there.

  Thus the state of progressive Germany, in these last months of the decade.

  17. SEPT

  A night of lovemaking and faraway dreams (a dance hall; shouting at père de famille) yields to ‘morning-red,’ the fiery dawn.

  There are fists on the door. Then, in the room, the German boy. I am not awake, not really, and the boy is shouting. Where did all that stony self-possession go? Marty clicks on like a switch. She asks him: What's the matter?— in English of course, and he answers in German, but by now we understand each other as well as we ever shall.

  ‘You must get out quickly,’ he says, in which tongue I do not recall. ‘They have come. Look, they are just there.’

  Who, where—always a headache when there hasn't been enough sleep.

  Marty a swirl of motion, whipping a sheet around her nakedness, crossing the room. ‘Hagen—you're bleeding.'

  At this one's eyes do rather pop. Blood it is: a long cut down one arm, a double-slash, elbow to wrist, as though he'd yanked it from a dragon's teeth. No tasty Blöndchen today, Herr Drache—but a close-run thing.

  ‘My god, you're dripping all over. Butler, come here, do something!'

  Such as?

  Something, that is all. Here is a problem, a débâcle, it can perhaps be fixed, perhaps not, but for god's sake don't just sit there. The essence of Marty. One loves her for it, even at such times.

  Young Siegfried does not care to be fussed over. ‘You must go, quickly. I will be all right, it is not serious.’

  You feel he has been practicing all his life to say this. Meanwhile dripping like a Polish faucet all over the cabin floor. The Expat, upright finally, finds his clothing in the still half-dark cabin, a gauze of muslin floating at the window in dawn's cool breeze. Some kind of ruckus outside, toward the center of the Dorf. Doors bang open, or shut—voices not quite raised to a shout but urgent, agitated, charged with adrenaline, you can feel the rawness of fear and anger as clearly as in a shortwave broadcast.

  ‘The Jungdo!’

  At last the Expat understands.

  Nod from the boy.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I could not tell. A dozen, perhaps. Enough
.’

  Marty's eyes flare. ‘What about Isaac and Ingo?’

  The boy sets his mouth. He will not answer. But you see it there, the unsaid thing, in his eyes.

  ‘I'll find them.' Sic, Expatrius. ‘You two go down to the stream, I'll meet you by the footbridge.'

  One does not, please understand, wish to be heroic. So what is one doing, then? Maybe not much. Maybe one is just curious—one does not wish to leave the theater while the third reel is snapping before one's eyes.

  Ingo and Isaac and Hagen share a cabin that sits off some way to itself, near a line of poplar trees. Getting there unseen should not be too difficult, if one moves with suitable speed and stealth.

  From the village center, a woman's scream, the watery splatter of glass breaking, a lot of it at once. You picture the large windows in the Gemeindehaus. Sturdy wooden chairs—a table even—lifted and hurled. Now more of it, crashing, wood cracking, children's wails, dull thumps. DO NOT think of chair legs pounding into flesh.

  Reaching the poplars—fl uttering leaves like a thousand tiny pennants, pea-green brightening to yellow in the upper branches—and suddenly here is Hagen again, puffing, a hand to his side, pressing the ribs. Injured there as well? Seemingly so, a rip down his shirt. In this light he looks half murdered. But the face is weirdly calm, the eyes fixed. Resolution in that face. Age-old strength, a warrior nation. Yet a child's flesh, easily mangled. You think of all those schoolboys memorizing the ‘Death Song’ and imagining themselves in that burning castle, last stronghold of the Burgundians, glorious stench of smoke and blood in their nostrils, their little fingers strumming the fucking minstrel's harp, croaking out a ballad of vengeance and honor. Then ‘destiny's footsteps,' and Dietrich, NOT you, is the last man standing: so mote it be. Die for the joy of it.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the Expat honestly wonders.

  The boy does not reply, he does not even look. You would not understand. No, well, all right then. We step quickly forward and gain the nearest wall of the cabin, shielded from the village—safe so far. Nothing to be seen through the window. Creep around the corner—motion in the distance, a disturbance, is that fire? Then in through the door.