Soul of the Age
Page 27
And now they have also gone and destroyed what I was trying to do for German literature, which is in a sorry state; I had buried myself in that work, but cannot keep it up for much longer.
This isn’t particularly interesting, and doesn’t surprise me in the least. But I thought I should let you know.
Bernhard’s assertion that I am a contributor to the Frankfurter Zeitung is an utter fabrication.
Addio.
TO GEORG BERNHARD, EDITOR, “PARISER TAGEBLATT”
Montagnola near Lugano, January 24, 1936
You mentioned me and my work in an article criticizing the Fischer Verlag; you were not just disparaging, but downright nasty, and, unfortunately, your comments also distorted the facts.
I have no wish to dwell here on my work as a critic, which has been acknowledged by the presses of the German émigrés. As a contributor to Die Neue Rundschau, the only German journal for which I still write, I am the only critic in the entire German press who is always prepared to discuss books by Jews, etc., in a most sympathetic manner.
Just in case you haven’t forgotten your obligation to the truth in the heat of the battle, I would like to point out that your remarks about me bear no relationship to the facts.
First of all, I am a Swiss citizen, not an émigré, and have lived continuously in Switzerland for the past twenty-four years.
Second, contrary to your assertion, I am not a contributor to the Frankfurter Zeitung. I don’t know where you dug up this lie.
Occasionally, however, German papers, usually smaller ones, have published old feuilleton pieces or poems of mine. Those are reprints, and they got the texts, not from me, but from a licensing agency, which purchased the rights to these old, short pieces years ago. If, contrary to all its traditions, the Frankfurter Zeitung published a reprint of something by me, which I very much doubt, I was entirely unaware of the fact.
Fighting is fun, but it can have a negative effect on one’s character. The world war has taught us that the communiqués of every army are riddled with lies. It would be beneath the dignity of the German émigrés to adopt those tactics. Otherwise, why keep on fighting?
Your article makes statements about me that bear no relation to the facts. I wanted to draw your attention to this matter.
TO THOMAS MANN
March 12, 1936
Thank you for your letter, which I found enjoyable and comforting. You were right to suspect that I might need something of the sort. We’re good friends with J. Maass, and perhaps it was he who told you I’m not feeling well.
My three years of book reviewing have proved very disappointing. All I received for my well-intentioned and, in the end, utterly strenuous labors was a slap in the face from both sides—i.e., Germany and the émigrés. This disappointment has shown me the extent to which my activity as a sympathetic commentator on German literature was also an escape, an escape from having to be a passive onlooker on world events, and an escape from my own work, from which I have been separated over the past two years by an increasing vacuum.
I shall first cut back on my critical activity, reduce it to a minimum, in the hope that I can thus recuperate from the exhaustion and saturation brought on by excessive reading. It will be harder to resume work on my book, which has suffered such prolonged neglect. The idea of writing the book is still there; I have been thinking about it a lot, but have not felt the urge to be productive, to work on the details, and make the spiritual become visible and tangible.
I’m glad to hear that they haven’t been bothering you in the Reich. If your works are banned, I shall be distressed by the thought of carrying on my little business all alone over there. But time will tell; it’s still conceivable that we shall be banned together, and that would please me, although I ought not provoke that. Our work nowadays is illegal. It is in the service of causes that irritate all fronts and parties.
I think of you rather often and am glad to know that you are spending some hours each day in Egypt.283 I, too, am again hoping for a journey to the East. Without that, it would be hard to put up with this soulless world.
TO THE MARTIN BODMER FOUNDATION
Montagnola, March 29, 1936
Dear Gentlemen,
Today, on this beautiful Sunday morning in spring, I received a kind letter from Herr Martin Bodmer with the surprising news that I have been awarded the Gottfried Keller Prize.284
This unexpected news reaches me at a time when I am sorely tried by the enormous crisis confronting German literature, and I am therefore doubly pleased to receive this award.
Although I tend to view my literary achievement quite skeptically (my character is, on the whole, more moral and religious than artistic), I feel that there is at least one quality of mine that meets the requirements and objectives of your foundation: Ever since childhood, my Swiss identity has been closely linked to my being German in linguistic and cultural terms. Grandson of a Swiss-French woman, son of a Balt who became a citizen in Basel around 1880, I heard, learned, and spoke in my childhood the Baltic German of my father and also the dialects of Basel and Swabia.
Gentlemen, I should like to convey to you my heartfelt thanks for the support, honor, and joy that the award of this prize has brought with it.
With an expression of sincere appreciation, yours
TO ALFRED KUBIN
[September 1936]
Thanks for your letter. I had just arrived back from what I consider a long journey; I was way up in northern Germany, where I consulted my ophthalmologist again and spent fourteen days undergoing treatment. There is nobody else doing these treatments, and he is seventy-five years old and can no longer meet me someplace along the way, as he formerly did.
Officialdom treats me the same way it treats you, with hostility, interference, and suppression. On several occasions they were all set on banning my books, but up to now the head person at my publishers has prevented this from actually happening. The publisher, which was once a leading house in the Reich, has dwindled in size and is now quite impoverished.
I have just sent you a short essay285 about Green; I mailed the same essay to you once before, but it must have got lost. Please return it (no big hurry).
My wife has read Green’s book Minuit and likes it a lot; I no longer read anything in foreign languages and shall wait until a translation appears.
You got my little garden poem;286 I wrote it for my sister in the summer of 1935; I gave it to Dr. Bermann, Fischer’s son-in-law, to help him out a bit, since he’s setting up a new publishing house in Vienna; apart from that, I’m still bound by contract to the old publisher in Berlin.
I want to publish a little volume of new poems287 there next year. That is all I have by way of new material. After completing The Journey to the East, I started fiddling around with a new work, and this has been going on for years now; every now and then I add a short passage.[ … ]
Caro amico, the journey through Germany was less than gay; they are busy rooting out more and more of the things that people like us love and cannot live without. However, some of the values we worked for and upheld in our lives will survive this whole mess, and they will act as a narrow bridge connecting the humanity of tomorrow with the world that preceded us. This is our one task, and it is certainly sufficient.
TO FRIEDRICH EMIL WELTI
[September 1936]
A very beautiful book has just come out, which I would like to recommend to you, if you haven’t seen it already: The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt in a Kröner paperback edition. I have already read the editor’s biographical foreword,288 which is affectionate but poorly written, and a good portion of the letters. I had seen some of them before, but when arranged chronologically in this manner, they serve as a substitute for a biography, and what an exquisite substitute it is! As I read, I realize once again just how pervasive the spirit of Burckhardt was in Basel around 1900, while I was living there; I used to socialize with many of his disciples, Wölfflin, R. Wackernagel, Haller, and others.
> Even though I was more strongly influenced by Nietzsche at that stage, I had already read The Civilization of the Renaissance with great enthusiasm in Tübingen, and then, gradually, with the appearance of Meditations and the cultural history of Greece, I realized how much I had profited from Burckhardt’s mind and vision. I have learned more from him than from any other historian.
May things go well for you, despite the evil times!
TO VICTOR WITTKOWSKI
[January 16, 1937]
Thanks for your letter. I enjoyed some of your poems (the “dedications” are the only things I might have advised you to leave out), and I’m sorry I no longer have the opportunity to write a few favorable lines about it anywhere. For years, I have been doing these “summarizing reviews,” as you call them, and the young writers used to court me, then boo if I didn’t find their books altogether delightful. The years since 1933 have been difficult, and that kind of work has completely ruined my eyes and made me neglect my own writing. On average, I earned around one franc for a full day’s work, only to be branded in Germany as a “traitor to the Volk” who had accepted “Jewish pay”—not an unexpected charge—and I have also been libeled by the émigrés and the Jews, even though I risked my neck for their authors and publishers. At the top of the list were people like Bernhard in Paris and Schwarzschild in Prague. The experience has taught me a lot, and I don’t have any regrets. But it would have been suicidal of me to keep up that activity.
Yes, my experience with German reviews is similar to yours. Previously, when a book of mine appeared, there would be reviews in over a hundred German papers, nowadays only in three or four.
I shall try to devote my remaining energy to The Glass Bead Game. It gets a bit longer each year.
For me, the most attractive poems were those in which you conjure up your home territory, the cathedral, Clerics’ Pond, etc.
That’s enough, Christmas and the New Year have put me hundreds of letters in arrears.
TO OTTO KORRADI
[December 24, 1937]
I was glad to get the books,289 once again many thanks. The first book we are going to read in the new year is Buchwald’s Schiller. At the moment we are reading the beautiful volume by Strowski on the “French mind.”290
In your recent letter, you inquired about my interest in Chinese culture. That goes back quite far. But before Wilhelm’s first Chinese editions started appearing, I was far more interested in India than in China. Since then—i.e., 1911 or 1912—I have often sought out the ancient Chinese (just in translation, of course). You can spot traces of that preoccupation in many of my earlier essays and books—e.g., in “The Way to Art,”291 the fairy tales, and elsewhere. I am thinking about devising a Chinese “Life,” which would appear after the Indian one (I mean the fictional “Lives” of Josef Knecht).292 China enters into The Glass Bead Game (Die Neue Rundschau, December 1933)293 through the long quotation from Lü Bu We.294 Moreover, there is a remarkably worthwhile and insightful book by a contemporary Chinese woman about the essence and distinctiveness of Chinese culture; the author is Lin Yutang, and it was published by the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart.
Do you know Ernst Wiechert’s moving essay “Building a Wall Around Us”? It has just been published in a limited de luxe edition by the Werkstatt für Buchdruck in Mainz. Wiechert spent a couple of hours with me in the fall, along with the physiognomist Picard, with whom I am on friendly terms. We are having beautiful sunny days, thanks be to God. The only snow to be seen is at around 1,400 meters and above, apart from a few shady slopes. We are celebrating Christmas this evening. A friend from Berlin295 is here with us for a visit. She is very young, and has completed a good dissertation on Novalis this year; some time ago she wrote the supplementary pages for the second edition of Ball’s book about me. Gunter Böhmer, the artist, is coming tomorrow with his mother; and then, the day after tomorrow, Emmy, the widow of Hugo Ball. With very best wishes for the New Year
TO MARTIN BUBER
[Early February 1938]
I have been told you’re probably in Jerusalem already, so that is where I shall send best wishes for your sixtieth birthday.296 My first wish is that you, and also your wife, have managed to retain the flexibility and energy that I so often admired. My second wish is that you are enjoying your work and that your appetite for life and work is being whetted anew. I imagine that the existence there of a community and the need for hands-on, constructive work must be a source of strength and support, regardless of what you have had to endure. Whereas I often feel that I lack a sense of community and have nothing on which to lavish my efforts, worries, and love. All I have is a vague, far-flung diaspora, consisting of people who, like me, have no fixed abode amid the present upheavals; we have only a dim feeling that we are here to transmit at least some portion of the tradition to a future which is not yet visible.
Although I can only form a very incomplete picture of your present surroundings and current work, my thoughts and wishes are with you; my wife and I often think of you.
TO OTTO BASLER
March 11, 1938
Thanks for your letter. I read about the new attack on Thomas Mann by Krieck297 in the newspaper; I am not prepared to read the essay, life is too short for that. I am quite sure that it’s awful. Something happened recently which I found far worse: Wilhelm Schäfer, who is now seventy, couldn’t resist putting some nasty comments about Mann and the Nobel Prize into a speech of his, which was actually very beautiful otherwise. When one sees a decent writer—a decent and responsible seventy-year-old like Schäfer—making a gaffe like that, one realizes the impact that a diabolical leadership can have on the morality of an entire people.
Robert Walser’s298 sister wrote to me yesterday. He is really in need of help, since there is a danger he might have to enter the poorhouse. If you happen to know of anybody who might be willing to make a donation, tell them about the situation. We would like to ask the Writers’ Club for a donation in his honor. Although Switzerland has, for once, produced a writer who could really write German, we have to send the plate around to help him eke out a very frugal existence, in third-class institutions for the most part! The cost of the bombs dropped by a single plane in one sortie in Spain is probably greater than the sum needed here.[ … ]
You’re right about Kassner’s299 book. He isn’t easy to read (which, by the way, is also true of Picard), but he is not at all a professor. He is one of the few sages of this era who write in German. However, he is esoteric, and his language is platonic.
Addio, please consider the enclosure300 a belated Easter greeting, yours
TO THE COMMISSIONERS OF THE ALIEN POLICE
April 28, 1938
Please permit me to put in a word for my esteemed colleague Albert Ehrenstein.301 He was deported from the canton of Ticino, and his only crime is that he has an Austrian passport.
Although I realize that the Alien Police has the task of protecting Switzerland against an influx of foreigners, I cannot understand why the lower echelons often take brutal measures against individuals who have earned a reputation in the arts or sciences, devote themselves quietly to their work, and are not a burden to anybody.
Rather than feeling ashamed or threatened, Switzerland ought to feel honored that it is being sought out as a refuge by a highly gifted artist such as Albert Ehrenstein, at a time when the political world has gone berserk. There is absolutely no reason to think that the further presence in Switzerland of a man such as Ehrenstein can cause the country the slightest harm. We Swiss artists and intellectuals are becoming more and more ashamed of the raw force that our authorities and police forces are employing against colleagues whom we greatly admire.
Herr Ehrenstein, who was an Austrian citizen until the invasion of Austria, is seeking to become a Czech citizen, but the formalities will last another couple of months. I would like to lend my most heartfelt support to his request that he at least be allowed to stay in Switzerland until then.
TO GEORG REI
NHART
Montagnola, May 28 [1938]
Thank you for your letter. I am enclosing Dr. Schäffer’s302 letter, which I found very sad.
Unfortunately, your assumption that there might be charitable institutions for dealing with such cases is mistaken. There are thousands of similar cases, and I know of some that are just as complicated as your protégé’s. But there are simply no organizations capable of providing assistance. Occasionally, in desperate cases, somebody manages to rustle up a Nansen passport for some poor unfortunate by, say, getting the League of Nations involved, that’s all.
Dr. Schäffer is afraid he might be arrested by the Gestapo while in Vienna, but that’s probably an exaggeration. Nobody is entirely safe, of course, but I do know quite a number of authors living in Austria who have greater reason for such fears yet can move around without hindrance.
But the other complaints of my poor colleague are entirely justified. I know some people living under similar conditions—a lot worse, actually, since they have nobody to support them; people who have been living in a country for months without any papers or indeed anything much to eat, then are deported and have to start the whole process all over again on the far side of the border; emigrants who have been moving back and forth between Prague and Barcelona since 1933, with long intervals in prison—but those are all younger people, who can if necessary endure such an adventurous and dangerous life. For older people like Schäffer, the situation is almost hopeless. If he were a friend of mine, I could only say something along these lines: “Like so many others, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to the hopelessness of your situation; just wait stoically and see what happens when your passport expires; let yourself be shoved across the border, then sent back by the police over there. Entrust your fate to states that have gone crazy, and be happy that, for the moment at least, there is a good spirit, a patron, who is keeping you from starving. Resist suicide until the situation has become absolutely unbearable; there will always be time enough for that.”