The Torch in my Ear

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  Part One

  Inflation and Impotence

  Frankfurt 1921-1924

  The Pension Charlotte

  I absorbed the changing locations of my earlier life without resistance. Never have I regretted that as a child I was exposed to such powerful and contrasting impressions. Every new place, no matter how exotic it seemed at first, won me over with its particular effect on me and its unforeseeable ramifications.

  There was only one thing I felt bitter about: I never got over leaving Zurich. I was sixteen and I felt so deeply attached to the people and places, the school, the land, the literature, even Swiss German (which I had acquired despite my mother’s tenacious resistance), that I never wanted to leave. After just five years in Zurich, I felt, at my tender age, that I should never go anywhere else, that I should spend the rest of my life here, in greater and greater intellectual well-being.

  The break was violent, and any arguments I had put forward to my mother about remaining had been derided. After our devastating conversation, which decided my fate, I stood there, ridiculous and pusillanimous, a coward who refused to look life in the face because of mere books, an arrogant fool stuffed with false and useless knowledge, a narrow-minded, self-complaisant parasite, a pensioner, an old man who hadn’t proved himself in any way, shape, or form.

  The new environment had been chosen under circumstances that I was left in the dark about, and I had two reactions to the brutality of the change. One reaction was home-sickness; this was a natural ailment of the people in whose land I had lived, and by experiencing it so vehemently, I felt as if I belonged to them. My other reaction was a critical attitude toward my new milieu. Gone was the time of unhindered influx of all the unknown things. I tried to close myself off to the new environment, because it had been forced on me. However, I wasn’t capable of total and indiscriminate rejection: my character had become too receptive. And thus began a period of testing and of sharper and sharper satire. Anything that was different from what I knew seemed exaggerated and comical. Also, very many things were presented to me at the same time.

  We had moved to Frankfurt; and since conditions were precarious and we didn’t know how long we’d be staying, we lived in a boardinghouse. Here, we were rather crowded in two rooms, much closer to other people than ever before. We felt like a family, but we ate downstairs with other roomers at a long boardinghouse table. In the Pension Charlotte, we got to know all sorts of people, whom I saw every day during the main meal, and who were replaced only gradually. Some remained throughout the two years that I ultimately spent in the boardinghouse; some merely for one year, or even just six months. They were very different from one another; all of them are etched in my memory. But I had to pay close attention to understand what they were talking about. My brothers, eleven and thirteen years old, were the youngest, and I, at seventeen, was the third youngest.

  The boarders didn’t always gather downstairs. Fräulein Rahm, a young, slender fashion model, very blond, the stylish beauty of the Pension, had only a few meals. She ate very little because she had to watch her figure; but people talked about her all the more. There was no man who didn’t ogle her, no man who didn’t lust after her. Everyone knew that, besides her steady beau, a haberdasher who didn’t live in the boardinghouse, she had other gentleman callers; and thus many of the men thought of her and viewed her with the kind of delight one feels at something that one is entitled to and that one might someday acquire. The women ran her down behind her back. The men, among themselves or risking it in front of their wives, put in a good word for her, especially for her elegant figure. She was so tall and slender that your eyes could climb up and down her without gaining a foothold anywhere.

  At the head of the dining table sat Frau Kupfer, a brown-haired woman, haggard with worry, a war widow, who operated the boardinghouse in order to make ends meet for herself and her son. She was very orderly, precise, and always aware of the difficulties of this period, which could be expressed in numbers; her most frequent phrase was: “I can’t afford it.” Her son Oskar, a thickset boy with bushy eyebrows and a low forehead, sat at her right. At her left sat Herr Rebhuhn, an elderly gentleman, asthmatic, a bank official. Although exceedingly friendly, he would scowl and get nasty whenever the conversation turned to the outcome of the war. He was Jewish, but very much a German nationalist; and if anyone disagreed with him at such times, he would quickly start carrying on about the “knife in the back,” contrary to his usual easygoing ways. He grew so agitated that he’d get an asthma attack and have to be taken out by his sister, Fräulein Rebhuhn, who lived with him in the boardinghouse. Since the others knew about this peculiarity of his and also about how terribly he suffered from asthma, they generally avoided this touchy political subject, so that he seldom had a fit.

  Only Herr Schutt—whose war injury was in no way less critical than Herr Rebhuhn’s asthma and who walked on crutches, suffered awful pains, and looked very pale (he had to take morphine for his pains)—never minced his words. He hated the war and regretted that it hadn’t ended before he got his serious wound; he stressed that he had foreseen it and had always regarded the Kaiser as a menace to society, he professed to being a follower of the Independent Party, and, he said, had he been a member of Parliament, he would have unhesitatingly voted against the military loans. It was really quite awkward that the two of them, Herr Rebhuhn and Herr Schutt, sat so near one another, separated only by Herr Rebhuhn’s oldish sister. Whenever danger threatened, she would turn left to her neighbor, purse her sweetish old-maid lips, put her forefinger on them, and send Herr Schutt a long, pleading look, while cautiously pointing the forefinger of her right hand at an angle toward her brother. Herr Schutt, otherwise so bitter, understood and nearly always broke off, usually in midsentence; besides, he spoke so low that you had to listen very hard to catch anything. Thus, the situation was saved by Fräulein Rebhuhn, who always heeded Herr Schutt’s words very alertly. Herr Rebhuhn hadn’t yet noticed anything; he himself never began. He was the gentlest and most peaceful of men: it was only if someone brought up the outcome of the war and approved of the ensuing rebellions that the “knife” came over him like lightning and he blindly threw himself into battle.

  However, it would be all wrong to think that this was what meals were generally like here. This military conflict was the only one I can recall; and I might have forgotten it if it hadn’t grown so bad that, a year later, both opponents had to be led from the table, Herr Rebhuhn as always on his sister’s arm, Herr Schutt far more arduously on his crutches, with the help of Fräulein Kündig, a teacher, who had been living in the Pension for a long time. She had become his lady friend, and actually married him later on, so as to provide a home for him and take better care of him.

  Fräulein Kündig was one of two teachers in the boardinghouse. The other, Fräulein Bunzel, had a pock-marked face and a somewhat whining voice, as though lamenting her ugliness with every sentence. They were no spring chickens, perhaps fortyish; the two of them represented Education in the Pension. As sedulous readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung, they knew what was what and what people were talking about; and one sensed that they were on the lookout for people to converse with, people who promised not to be too unworthy. Still, they were by no means tactless if they couldn’t find a gentleman with something to say about Unruh, Binding, Spengler, or Meier-Graefe’s Vincent. They knew what they owed the landlady and they would then keep still. Fräulein Bunzel’s whining voice never showed even a trace of sarcasm; and Fräulein Kündig, who seemed a lot bouncier and tackled men as well as cultural themes with great vivacity, would always wait for both possibilities to overlap; a man she couldn’t talk to would have been interested only in Fräulein Rahm, the model, anyway. A human being whom Fräulein Kündig couldn’t enlighten about this, that, or the other was out of the question for her. And, as she confessed to my mother tête-à-tête, this was also the reason why she, an attractive woman in contrast to her colleague, was as yet unmarried. A man who never read a book was, so far as she was concerned, not a man. It was better to remain free and not have to run a household. Nor did she yearn for children; she saw too many of them anyhow, she said. She went to plays and concerts and talked about them, usually adhering to the reviews in the Frankfurter Zeitung. How strange, she said, that the critics always shared her opinion.

  My mother had been familiar with the German cultural tone since Arosa; and, in contrast to Vienna’s aesthetic decadence, it appealed to her. She liked Fräulein Kündig and believed her; nor did she find fault with her when she noticed Fräulein Kündig’s interest in Herr Schutt. He may have been much too bitter to get into conversations about art or literature. He had nothing to offer
but a half-stifled grunt for Binding, whom Fräulein Kündig esteemed no less than Unruh (both authors were frequently mentioned in the Frankfurter Zeitung). And when Spengler’s name came up, unavoidable in those days, Herr Schutt declared: “He wasn’t at the front. Nothing is known about it.” Whereupon Herr Rebhuhn mildly tossed in: “I should think that’s unimportant for a philosopher.”

  “Maybe not for a philosopher of history,” Fräulein Kündig protested; and one could see that, with all due respect for Spengler, she was taking Herr Schutt’s part. However, the two men didn’t get into an argument; the very fact that Herr Schutt expected active military duty from someone, while Herr Rebhuhn was willing to overlook it, had something conciliatory about it; it was as if the two of them had traded opinions. Still, the actual question of whether Spengler had been at the front wasn’t settled in this way; and I still don’t know the answer even now. Fräulein Kündig, it was obvious, felt sorry for Herr Schutt. For a long time, she managed to hide her pity behind free and easy remarks like “our war boy” or “he got through it.” You could never tell how responsive he felt. He acted as neutral to her as if she’d never said a word to him; nonetheless, he greeted her with a nod when he entered the dining room, while he never even deigned to glance at Fräulein Rebhuhn to his right. Once, when my brothers and I were late from school and still not at the table, he asked my mother: “Where’s your cannon fodder?” Which she later reported not without indignation. She said she had angrily replied: “Never! Never!” And he had mocked her: “No more war!”

  However, Herr Schutt did acknowledge that my mother stubbornly opposed war, even though she had never experienced it personally; and his baiting remarks were actually meant to confirm her stance. Among the boarders, there was a very different sort, whom he ignored altogether. For instance, the Bembergs, a young married couple, who sat to his left. Herr Bemberg was a stockbroker with an unflagging sense of material profits; he even praised Fräulein Rahm for being so “able,” referring to her knack for maneuvering countless suitors. “The chicest young lady in Frankfurt,” he said, and yet he was one of the very few men who wasn’t after her. What impressed him about her was “her nose for money” and her skeptical reaction to compliments. “She won’t let anyone turn her head. She first wants to know what’s on your mind.”

  His wife, composed of fashionable attributes, with the bobbed hair looking the most natural, was easygoing, but in a different way from Fräulein Rahm. She came from a solid middle-class background, but there was nothing incisive about her. You could tell she bought anything she felt like buying, but few things looked right on her; she went to art exhibits, was interested in women’s clothing in paintings, admitted to having a weakness for Lucas Cranach, and explained that she liked his “terrific” modernity, whereby the word explain must sound too deep for her meager interjections. Herr and Frau Bemberg had met at a dance. One hour earlier, they’d been perfect strangers, but both knew—as he confessed not without pride—that there was more to each of them, much more to her than to him, but he was already considered a promising young broker. He found her “chic,” asked her to dance, and promptly nicknamed her Pattie. “You remind me of Pattie,” he said. “She’s American.” She wanted to know whether Pattie had been his first love. “It all depends on what you mean,” he said. She understood and found it terrific that his first woman had been American, and she kept the name Pattie. That was what he called her in front of all the boarders, and whenever she didn’t come down to a meal, he said: “Pattie isn’t hungry today. She’s watching her figure.”

  I would have forgotten all about this inoffensive couple if Herr Schutt hadn’t managed to treat them as if they didn’t exist. When he came hobbling along on his crutches, he acted as if they weren’t there. He ignored their greeting, he overlooked their faces; and Frau Kupfer, who put up with his residing in the house only in memory of her husband, who had died in action, never once dared to say “Herr Bemberg” or “Frau Bemberg” in his presence. The young couple put up uncomplainingly with this boycott, which was started by Herr Schutt but spread no further. They sort of felt sorry for the cripple, who seemed poor in every respect; and although their pity wasn’t much, it nevertheless countered his scorn.

  At the farthest end of the table, the contrasts were less sharp. There was Herr Schimmel, a department-store official, radiant with health, sporting a stiff mustache and red cheeks, an ex-officer, neither embittered nor dissatisfied. His smile, never vanishing from his face, was virtually a spiritual state; it was reassuring to see that there are spirits that always stay exactly the same. His smile didn’t change even in the worst weather, and the only thing at all surprising was that so much contentment remained alone and needed no human companionship to survive. Such companionship could easily have been found: not far from Herr Schimmel sat Fräulein Parandowski, a salesgirl; proud, beautiful, with the head of a Greek statue, she was never discomfited by Fräulein Kündig’s reliance on the Frankfurter Zeitung, and Herr Bemberg’s praises of Fräulein Rahm rolled off Fräulein Parandowski like water off a duck’s back. “I just couldn’t,” she said, shaking her head. That was all she said, and it was clear what she couldn’t. Fräulein Parandowski listened, but barely spoke; imperturbability suited her. Herr Schimmel’s mustache (he sat diagonally across from her) looked as though it had been brushed into shape just for her. These two people were virtually made for one another. Yet he never spoke a word to her, they never came or left together; it was as though their nontogetherness was always precisely planned. Fräulein Parandowski neither waited for him to get up from the table nor hesitated to come to a meal way before him. They did have something in common, their silence. But he always smiled without giving it a second thought, while she, her head raised high, remained earnest, as if always thinking of something.

  It was clear to everyone that there was more here than met the eye. Fräulein Kündig, who sat nearby, tried to get to the bottom of it, but foundered on the monumental resistance of these two people. Once, Fräulein Bunzel forgot herself and said “caryatid” just within earshot of Fräulein Parandowski, while Fräulein Kündig cheerily greeted Herr Schimmel with: “Here comes the cavalry.”

  But Frau Kupfer instantly rebuked her: she couldn’t afford personal remarks at her boardinghouse table, and Fräulein Kündig used the reproach to ask Herr Schimmel point-blank whether he objected to being referred to as “cavalry.” “It is an honor,” he smiled. “I was a cavalryman.”

  “And he’ll remain one till his dying day.” That was how scornfully Herr Schutt reacted to any escapade of Fräulein Kündig’s before it was settled that they liked one another.

  It was only after about six months that a superior mind appeared in the Pension: Herr Caroli. He knew how to keep everyone at bay: he had read a great deal. His ironic comments, which emerged as carefully candied reading-fruits, delighted Fräulein Kündig. She couldn’t always hit on where a line of his came from, and she would humble herself to ask for enlightenment. “Oh, please, please, now just where is that from? Please tell me, otherwise I won’t get a wink of sleep again.”

  “Where do you think it’s from?” Herr Schutt then replied in place of Herr Caroli. “From Büchmann’s Dictionary of Quotations, like everything he says.”

  But this was way off target and a disgrace for Herr Schutt; for nothing that Herr Caroli uttered derived from Büchmann. “I’d rather take poison than Büchmann,” said Herr Caroli. “I never quote anything that I haven’t actually read.” This was also the boardinghouse consensus. I was the only one to doubt it, because Herr Caroli took no notice of us. He even disliked Mother (who certainly had as good a background as he): her three boys took away seats from adults at the table, and one had to suppress the wittiest remarks because of them.

  At that time—I was reading the Greek tragedies—he quoted Oedipus after attending a performance in Darmstadt. I continued his quotation, he pretended not to hear; and when I stubbornly repeated it, he whirled toward me and asked sharply: “Did you have that in school today?” I seldom had said anything; his rebuke, to muzzle me once and for all, was unfair and felt to be unfair by the others at the table. But since he was dreaded for his irony, no one protested, and I held my tongue, humiliated.