Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  Better make tracks! was my first thought – a kingdom for a camel or a dromedary or whatever! But there was no ship of the desert in view! Instead – imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had crawled after me out of the egg, a kind of mummy all wrapped up in bandages and rags. The lady – or do you suppose it was a gentleman? – spoke to me in a language which, strangely enough, I immediately understood, even though I had never heard it before – picture it as a kind of music without a scale – communicating the following:

  ‘Impudent, gullible, fearful, but not altogether antipathetic human! Chance, oh harmless mortal, has honoured you! Till now, wandering across the pitiful surface of the sick secret of my desert, having already been touched by my breath, you are no longer insignificant enough to misunderstand my intentions. Know that the desert is the same (only more so) as the rest of the earth, leonum arida nutrix; has been almost barren ever since the egg, the principle of fertility, was wrenched out of the centre of its sphere, lying dried out and unshelled at the surface, and I, the soul of souls, have been electrified into a mummy by you, oh sublime idiot! You’ve outdone yourself by your own deed! Complete it now! Just press that button again once I’m back in the egg and the tip will fly shut. By the same degree as slowly, slowly, but unfailingly this egg will sink to the centre of the earth, it will become smaller and smaller; its fertile potency, however – all the more concentrated once having arrived at the centre and having been expunged and pummelled into pure centre – will deliver up that fertile potential luminously outwards and upwards all the way up to heaven. You too, my good man, though now still nothing but an insignificant dog, will feel it: to live is to realize your genius, to feel and act like a god! Now then!’

  Do you know perchance that precious old baron who under similar circumstances had the habit of repeating ‘Amazing, amazing!’ a hundred times in succession? So I let the mummy hop quietly back over the edge of the eggshell. And just as quietly, I gladly admit, I heaved the fragile lid shut again. But the button? Never did I go near it again! I pulled up the tail of my coat that had become all yellow and dusty from being dragged around the egg’s interior, took it under my arm and got out of there as quickly as I could. What the hell’s this supposed to mean anyway: ‘principle of fertility’? Shall I be the cause of the world’s overpopulation? Shall I allow a putrid mummy to involve me – me of all people! – in some unsavoury business? God knows, the world is no egg-beaten omelette, no crêpe aux confitures! Can the world’s salvation be dependent on an incidental gesture? The press of a button? The fact is, I wouldn’t be able to find the egg again. But if the reader feels like it, this egg would be a commendable object for your next Easter hunt! So what if I ran off like a coward! Who knows! Maybe it takes greater courage to have a close call with a new incarnation of the inconceivable than to brave great dangers for an inkling of some abstract good. Test yourself! Just think, would you now this very moment want to bring about the good of humanity, the salvation of the whole wide world by the mere press of a button? Would you not be seized by a terrible bout of fear, as before, in the case of one of those easily arrangeable martyr’s deaths? And even so I let a tear or two fall in my mind’s eye over that desert egg; I should have – yes! I should have pressed the button!

  A New Kind of Plaything

  1913

  Mynona*

  ‘But leave me now to this nursery, my own private lair, where every childish whim is welcome.’

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  Let our beloved little ones get to know the real thing, life as it is really lived! Don’t tell me they’re too young to grasp the indelicate details. Or are you perchance afraid to rouse their slumbering consciousness of it all – lock, stock and barrel? How pathetic! Do you want to raise a pack of cowards?

  It’s absolutely ill advised and disastrously dangerous to take the little darlings for incomplete. They’re just as complete as we grown-ups, only in every respect more compact, smaller, more sensitive, weaker; but nothing human is strange to them, nor could it possibly be so!

  Consider this! The pedagogical principle whereby we are supposed to keep children for as long as possible sheltered from the real, full, round life with all its rough edges, is absurd. It’s not by cloistering their consciousness that we best raise them to live deliberately, but rather by letting our children playfully paddle about and fly around in the thick of that fearful element from early on and thereby learn to overcome and master the terrifying or repulsive or evil or base or malevolent.

  It is precisely in this precious period of innocence and guileless gumption that all those things that will later be deemed dangerous, liable to lead astray, the source of endless guilt, as it were, can, rather, be so finely filtered through the purest puerility that, finally, if generations of our precious progeny were truly prepared for everything – I mean, really everything that lies ahead – then their whole life would be lived in childlike innocence. Permit me, in the spirit of such ruminations, to make a few recommendations regarding children’s playthings.

  The toy has heretofore been conceived by … cowards. Of course we do, for instance, have enough toy soldiers, castles, cannons, armour and weapons to fill the air with the bang bang and boom boom, the hiss and crackle of bloody battle. But there’s no blood in it, the whole business of play remains too dry. Just introduce a little blood (artificial, of course!!) and, boy, oh boy, what a time they’ll have. It’s perfectly simple: just manufacture hollow soldiers with perforated holes. Knock them over and they spill red-tinted water. To achieve grenade-like effects all you need are magnetized little soldiers whose limbs dislodge on impact; you can reassemble them easily enough. Injured aviators and infantry primed for pulverization can best be blown out of glass, like Bolognese bottles and vials. A revered commanding officer, say Hindenburg, in the form of a spinning top, would work wonderfully well: he’d just have to be outfitted with radial sickles. Wound up and dropped by a miniature Zeppelin, just let him loose on the enemy. And as he mows down the masses of cannon fodder, the Hindenburg spinning top intones the melody ‘Hail, the Conquering Hero!’ or ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. It’s the optimal way to prime our German tots with patriotism from the start. Mass graves are a must in every box of toy soldiers, as are a miniature military recruiting office and a field hospital in which the little doctors can perform operations, amputations and such. How in heaven’s name do we hope to make the real battlefield engagement of the future a matter of child’s play if it hasn’t first been tried out in the nursery? I had a finely crafted field hospital, complete with corpses, wounded, doctors, nurses, attendant widows, orphans and other personnel, including little figurines dressed in black, fashioned for my kids, and it proved to be a great success! In this way, early childhood impressions help to transfigure and mitigate the future effect of real mourning. And how profound! How small, for instance, are our sufferings before God, for whom we grown-ups are but children after all.

  Playing firing squad is a splendid game; which is why a sizeable civilian population ought also to be included in every military toy-box, along with little barricades, or you couldn’t play ‘revolution’. Every mother would then instantly stop tearing her hair out, relieved of the torment of worrying what to give little Helmut for Christmas.

  No doubt about it! Children’s playthings can never be realistic enough in design. What is my son supposed to make of a cow that can’t be milked? Just insert a miniature rubber balloon udder and it works, and it’s a lot of fun too.

  And Aunty Paula still wrings her hands, fretting: should I enlighten the little ones about the birds and the bees? Yes, of course, Aunty, you should! And to help, you need a woman-in-childbirth doll. Precisely because children so innocently process such impressions, they should be acclimatized early, and thereby protected against later lies: playthings are prophylactic. It’s a shame that a false decency makes me mince my words. Modesty is no doubt a lovely virtue, but its automatic connection wit
h cowardice, instead of pluck, is repulsive, it’s prudery. In life there is a modest and an immodest denuding of the human body. True modesty is not at all applicable to the thing itself, but rather to the manner in which such things are revealed; the thing itself is so much a veil over all indecency that, viewed objectively, it can dispense with all veils, and, rather, stand naked, with complete modesty.

  Our initial inclination is prematurely to disapprove of the notion of a doll’s house bordello. Why? Because it exists in real life? Cowardice! It ought not to exist?! Very well! If you will. Then, precisely, for that very reason, better immediately to diminish its insalubrious effect on the under-age. The enticement of sin depends on surprise. So why not make Buster blasé about the forbidden? Indeed, why not open the entire Pandora’s box of the illicit as a toy!

  What an enchanting idea! A charming miniature morgue, the whole works; a dissection table; a maternity ward for the unwed with midwives on hand, but no trace of the father. Wonderfully effective little assassinations, complete with explodable, easy-to-reassemble princes. Department stores with perfectly functioning arson attacks, burglaries, little pickpockets primed at will. All-purpose murder victims along with the accompanying murderer dolls outfitted with the appropriate tools of the trade.

  Just imagine lovely little hearses and the cute coffins that come with toy cemeteries and crematoria, with tiny graves and urns, tombstones with replaceable inscriptions, little pastors and other dolls of mourning.

  And why should the child not have his own little museum? It would help introduce presentiments of the value of paintings, sculptures etc. Our little progeny can hardly be fortified with enough presentiments!!! The child must not be kept in a state of ignorance, he must experience everything.

  And why, come to think of it, withhold his own airy Reichstag? Why leave him without a feather-light embalmed body of a monarch to mourn? My children recently laughed themselves silly over the sweet little Socialist gathering that came complete with general strike and crying mothers, on which they let loose one of those deadly spinning tops. I was truly touched to see with what character-strengthening disdain they learnt to take in and look down on everything human. Do you think this bird’s-eye perspective might weaken their resolve? Nonsense! Does it hamstring the eagle, that lofty symbol of all winged important persons (WIPs, if you will)?

  Even epidemics and famines can be enacted for instructional purposes. Hungering rubber dolls with bellies designed to swell and shrink would be a blast! Abscess- and blister-pocked dolls would be terribly funny. At least my children will no longer do without their own guillotine and gallows. And while we’re at it, a homeless shelter is a most tantalizing thought. Ought we likewise (with the aid of stink bombs) give our dear little ones an appreciation of little rotundas and subterranean establishments for the satisfaction of bodily needs? On this I dare not insist. On the other hand, I am definitely in favour of a play paradise where children can re-enact man’s fall from grace; I’m for toy churches (snappy little synagogues for the Jewish juniors), miniature mosques, etc.

  Toy trains without the capacity to enact a train crash are only half the fun. If we ever want our children to become complete persons, we must not keep anything human from them. Their innocence already innately sets limits; and later in life, when these limits are little by little extended, their pre-primed spirits will be prepared for new temptations. The fact that the little darlings can laugh at everything, even at the underbelly of life – that is precisely the splendid elaboration of their blessed capacity callously to shrug off the unseemly, that would otherwise, were they to dwell on it, burden them with unnecessary sadness. It is the kind of healthy humour of future generations reared in this fashion, from whom nothing more will be withheld!

  Let me not refrain from touching upon a solemn matter: no nursery should henceforth be without a memorial plaque for its present resident already nailed on the wall!

  The Seamstress

  1894

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  It was in April of 188—. I was obliged to change lodgings. My landlord had sold his house and the new owner was determined to rent out as a single unit the entire floor, including my modest little room. For a long time I searched unsuccessfully for another. Finally, tired of looking, I took, almost sight unseen, a room on the third floor of a building whose length occupied no small part of the narrow side street.

  From the very first days, my little cubicle already seemed downright cosy to me. Through my two little windows (whose panes, made of myriad morsels of glass, attested to the considerable age of the house) I looked out far and wide over grey and red rooftops, over sooty chimneys, onto the blue mountains in the distance, and could see the sun rise, a luminous ball balanced on the hazy ridge. My own furniture, which I had had brought over from my former residence, made the cramped confines more liveable, as I had hoped it might, and the housekeeping provided by the wife of the concierge left nothing to be desired. The staircase was not overly steep and could be climbed without thinking; indeed when I alighted, lost in thought, my feet were enticed to clamber all the way up to the attic. In short, I was pleased with the place, all the more so since neither children nor organ-grinders played in the dark courtyard below.

  Years have since elapsed. The time of which I speak is lost to me in the dusk of bygone days, the glaring colours of experience have faded and blurred. It is as if I were speaking of things that happened, not to me, but to someone else, perhaps to a very close friend. Consequently, I need have no fear that vanity will induce me to lie; I will write it out openly, clearly and truthfully.

  I didn’t spend much time at home in those days. Early, at 7.30, I went to the office, dined at noon in a cheap restaurant and, as often as possible, spent my afternoons at the home of my fiancée. Yes, I was engaged at the time. Hedwig – let’s call her that – was young, kind, educated and rich – a quality that my contemporaries valued above all else. She issued from an old, enterprising family that had finally succeeded, through industry and thrift, in establishing a household even the young gentlemen of note were glad to visit, for, all its elegant trappings notwithstanding, a free and easy joie de vivre held sway which kept any latent ennui from wafting up over the rim of the teacups. The youngest girl, Hedwig, was, moreover, everybody’s darling, as she combined with her cultivation a lovable frivolity that somehow made the most inconsequential chatter interesting and stimulating. She possessed more spirit and spunk than her two older sisters, was sincere, cheerful and – there is no doubt that I loved her.

  I can speak openly now. A year after we broke off our engagement, she married a young officer of noble lineage, but died bearing his first child, a curly-blonde-haired little daughter.

  I usually stayed till six o’clock at her parents’ home, where a big group gathered every day, and then took a stroll, attended the theatre and returned home at ten o’clock, only to repeat the same ritual all over again the following day.

  Early every morning, slowly descending my three flights of steps, I ran into the concierge wiping the white flagstone floor in the hallway downstairs. He greeted me and started a conversation. Every day the same. About the weather first, then how I liked my apartment, and such. Since the old man never wanted to end the conversation, I invariably asked after his children, whereupon he sighed and snarled between clenched teeth: ‘It’s the cross I have the bear! They give me much worry, sir!’ That was the end of it. Once, on a Tuesday, just to make small talk, I asked who lived next door to me. The question was answered the same way it had been posed: just like that, in passing. ‘A seamstress, a poor thing, an ugly one …’ he muttered without looking up from the floor. That was all.

  I had long since forgotten this bit of information, when I met her – it was indeed the seamstress, as I rightly surmised at the time – in the dark vestibule downstairs. It was on a Sunday morning. I had slept late and was just stepping out, while she, with a small book in her hand, was probably just coming home from church. What
a pitiful creature: between her pointy shoulders, draped with a shoddy green, almost floor-length coat, a head bobbed back and forth, the most striking features of which were a long, thin nose and hollow cheeks. Her narrow, slightly parted lips revealed filthy teeth, her chin was angular and protruding. The only remarkable feature of this face were the eyes. Not that they were beautiful, but they were big and very black, albeit lustreless. So black, in fact, that her pitch-black hair looked almost grey in contrast. All I know is that the impression her appearance made on me was by no means a pleasant one. I believe she avoided my gaze. I had no time, in any case, to dwell any longer on this inconsequential encounter, since right outside the door I fell upon a friend, in whose company I spent the entire morning. I subsequently forgot altogether that I even had a neighbour, since, though we lived practically back to back, next door everything remained perfectly still night and day. And things would well have gone on that way, if not one night, by chance – or what else should I call it? – the unexpected, the never suspected happened.

  Towards the end of April, my fiancée’s parents held a party which, having been discussed and prepared far in advance, came off splendidly and lasted late into the night. That evening I found Hedwig ravishing. We sat and talked a long time in the small green salon, and I listened happily as, half ironically but with a fervid, childlike naivety, she sketched the contour of our future life together, painting every little joy and sorrow in dazzling colours, anticipating our happiness as a child anticipates a Christmas tree. A pleasant sense of satisfaction infused my breast with a comforting warmth, even Hedwig said she had never seen me so happy. The same mood, moreover, was shared by one and all; toast followed toast. And so it happened that we only reluctantly broke up the party at 3 a.m. Carriage after carriage drove up to the door. The few pedestrians soon dispersed in all directions. I had more than a half-hour’s walk ahead, and so I hastened home, all the more quickly since the April night was cold, dark and foggy. All wrapped up in my own thoughts, it didn’t take me half as long as I’d imagined before I found myself at my front door. Slowly I unlocked the door and carefully locked it again after me. I struck a match to light my way from the lobby to the foot of the stairs. It happened to be my last match and soon went out. I felt my way up the stairs, still thinking about the pleasant hours I’d spent that evening. Then I reached the top of the stairs. I put the key in the lock, turned once and slowly opened …