Soul of the Age (35 page)

The Basel
National-Zeitung
has managed to highlight a nasty and coarse remark about my publisher S. Fischer: in the new edition of a book by Annette Kolb, the “Jewish publisher” cowardly omitted a positive footnote about the Jews.
261
Well, I happen to know the prior history of this footnote,
262
and I'm also well acquainted with Annette Kolb, her book, etc. It's a small episode in the quiet struggle that we are waging to preserve intellectual life in Germany; for example, my pieces in Fischer's
Rundschau
are the only efforts by a German critic to review and occasionally promote Jewish books. I wish to continue this activity, and have just agreed to write a twice-yearly review essay on the state of German literature for the main literary review in Sweden.
263
Here is the story of the footnote: Nobody even noticed it in the first printing—the publishers courageously permitted its inclusion, which was dangerous for them. Then, perhaps through a denunciation, a German court discovered the passage in the book, and our publisher was forced to choose between dropping the footnote in future printings or having the book banned and existing supplies immediately confiscated. Even then the publisher didn't agree to this right away, as every other German publisher would have done, but took the time to think the matter over, traveled to Paris for a discussion with Annette Kolb, who naturally agreed that the passage should be dropped. And now the
National-Zeitung,
no less, mocks the publisher for his noble, courageous behavior by calling his firm a cowardly, kowtowing Jewish publishing house! It would normally be possible to defend oneself against such charges by presenting the facts; the newspapers would then be forced to retract their calumny. But in this case the publisher can do nothing of the sort. If this leaks out, a Nazi spy will be sent to the firm, which will even have to pay him, and the publisher may end up in a concentration camp.

I get to see all these cases, or many of them at least, and I have to investigate them, furtively and in private, since my current role somehow is to work for Germany while remaining Swiss and European. I don't expect to have much impact on a large scale. I'm just hoping to preserve a tiny group of thinkers and readers who have kept clean and could transmit a legacy of intellectual honesty beyond the chaos of the present. And it's even difficult to quell the fighting and hatred between people who ostensibly share the same convictions. Take, for example, the man responsible for that disgusting comment in the
National-Zeitung.
I suspect that he is a fervent democrat and an enemy of the Nazis who deep down also hates Jews. The filth everywhere! And I'm stuck in the middle of it and would like to stay clean. There are some sources of consolation, but one wishes at times that everything was over and done with.

Enough. I shouldn't really allow myself the luxury of such long letters. But I wanted to give you a glimpse of the stuff piling up each day on my desk, and on me, too.
Addio,
heartfelt greetings from your Papa

TO HERMANN HUBACHER

[
February 16, 1935
]

Caro amico,

Your letter has taught me something new about you: like so many of my friends, you hate writing letters. That's unfortunate, since it upsets the balance in our relationship. People like Schoeck, for instance, who spend hours each week in public houses and have perfectly healthy eyes, wait until I have been writing and sending them letters, poems, books, etc., for over a year before they pull themselves together sufficiently to write a postcard. Yet they can all write marvelously, as posterity will discover when it comes across the rare letters of these seeming illiterates. This is awful for me, since I'm far away and all alone, and even though I try very hard to inform my friends about my current work and thinking, I seldom hear any echoes. In this respect, Switzerland, and the Swiss artistic world, closely resembles the flailing heroics of the German barbarians: Away with pen and ink! To hell with scribblers! Their ideal image is more or less the following: blue eyes and a coarse fist, a throat thirsting for some Neuenburger, perhaps some talent as a card player. Well, I haven't altogether given up hope, and am still expecting a few words conveying your impression of
The Glass Bead Game.
264
Your opinion will not influence me, but I look forward to hearing it. The Germany of 1810 or thereabouts, especially the circle around Schlegel and Novalis, would have had less difficulty with this work and understood it better. It's remarkable how vehement the two camps have become! Some people—often they are loyal, old friends of mine—dismiss
The Glass Bead Game
quite adamantly. Some of them also objected rather vociferously to
The Journey to the East,
which they called a mistaken excursion into the intellectual sphere, as if there were a place for everything in literature except the intellect! Then there are others who are so fascinated by the main idea that they more or less swallow the whole thing in one gulp, but they are not well enough educated or sufficiently well read to discern the finer nuances of
The Glass Bead Game.

Things aren't going particularly well for me. I have been overworked for months, which has been getting me down. Quite a lot of the work was in vain. As a way to make a living, I used to contribute to a journal that ultimately swindled me.
265
Even if they paid up, my earnings would hardly cover even half my living expenses, and the trickle from Germany is dwindling constantly. I'm eating up my savings, which may tide me over the worst. I occasionally get rather depressed when I think of how difficult it is to earn a living, despite all the hard work. But then again, I like seeing signs that I'm thoroughly dispensable as far as the contemporary world is concerned, and I regard that indifference as a privilege and an honor.

I'm expecting Carossa this evening, for one day only.
266

Good luck with your recovery, dear friend, and greetings to your family

TO ALFRED KUBIN
267

[
Early summer 1935
]

I was delighted to receive your kind letter and the beautiful little sketch. Life isn't easy these days, I have lots to worry about, and I suppose you are in much the same situation. So it's great to receive something positive and comforting.

I just got hold of a copy of the new book by Heinrich Zimmer, whose formulations are often brilliant, although he occasionally sounds too much like a virtuoso.
268
Nobody writing in German has ever captured so well the aesthetic side of Indian culture, its amoral and entirely playful devotion to spectacle, and the eternal flow of images.

I'm enclosing a new poem from
The Glass Bead Game.
You already have several of them. I wrote this one at Pentecost.
269
Intellectually, I have been living for over three years in the world of
The Glass Bead Game
and the mythical cycle around it. This imaginary world began to crystallize in my mind as a kind of sequel to the saga in
The Journey to the East.
I often inhabit that realm, as if the cycle were a genuine saga or even religion rather than something purely imaginary. But even though I live there, I seldom add more words to it; although I certainly haven't lost my appetite for daydreaming, I don't feel the same urge to be productive. At times I only write one or two poems in an entire month. Of course, I'm doing some other literary work on the side, book reviews, but I don't count them, since that sort of work is purely intellectual, not creative.

I'm delighted to hear that you're going to be illustrating
Faust,
and think you're right to focus more on the folk tale than on Goethe.

It's decently hot at long last, and all I do most days is the daily work in the garden. A heavy hailstorm has just destroyed virtually everything; there's quite a lot to do, and when I'm watering tomato plants or loosening the ground around a beautiful flower, I don't have that terrible feeling so familiar to artists: Does any of this make sense at all? Is it a permissible activity nowadays? No, I'm happy to be doing this, and that's always a nice feeling.

My youngest son will be coming to see me soon; I hope that he stays at least two or three days. He is really an architect, but hasn't been able to find any work for two years, so he has taken up photography, works as a newspaper photographer, etc., and barely manages to make ends meet. He's a courageous, decent fellow. Well, that's it for now, and many thanks for the drawing.

TO WOLFRAM KIMMIG

[
Received October 18, 1935
]

Thank you for your kind letter. I'm having no luck at all with the German Reich. The people who owe me money did not pay me when I could have used it, and when some of them eventually started paying, I was denied access to those funds. I have lost virtually all my savings (the earnings from
Steppenwolf
and
Narcissus and Goldmund
); they were in German Gold Bonds, which are absolutely worthless nowadays outside the Reich. The highest I got was a fifth of the value, even less for the rest. I have hardly any income, and am witnessing another “great era” as a mourner.

I would prefer to let you decide how to handle payments to my account.
270
Even if I cannot buy a crumb of bread with all that money, I can occasionally use the account to purchase a book for my sisters.[ … ]

Unfortunately, there are no more copies of
Hours in the Garden.
271
Such luxuries are a thing of the past; otherwise I would certainly not have forgotten you. This year, I received an honorarium of one hundred marks for
Hours in the Garden
and a few marks for the latest issue of
Corona,
plus roughly the same amount for my book reviews (which eat up three-quarters of my time). Sales of my books are virtually nil. I lost the savings that I had sentimentally invested in local German stocks (Württemberg, the city of Stuttgart, etc.). So we are doing without a few nice luxuries; food may be next. Fortunately, I can go on living in this beautiful house, nobody can say a peep, since I don't own it, am just a guest.

As for
Hours,
it will most probably appear in pamphlet form a year from now—if it's still possible by that stage to publish anything poetical.

TO HIS SISTER ADELE

Baden, November 28, 1935

Yesterday was Marulla's birthday, and yesterday you wrote enclosing a little letter for Hanno,
272
which I still have. I haven't had the courage to hand it to Frida.
273
Something awful is happening there. Our dear Hans has long feared losing his job
274
and his livelihood, and during the past few week this anxiety has developed into a fixation. He began to interpret everything at his workplace in a negative and hostile manner and became suspicious of everybody. The young office girls would occasionally poke fun at him, and he imagined that they were conspiring against him and informing on him, so that he would be fired. He felt each word he overheard was a confirmation of his theory. He had said much the same thing to me recently; I felt that he was exaggerating a bit and told him so, and he seemed quite willing to accept this. But he was in a far worse condition than anybody had suspected; his behavior in the office occasionally astonished his boss, but he pulled himself together when he was with Frida. He woke up from a nightmare once and screamed. On another occasion, he claimed to have heard a woman on the floor below crying, and he said she was crying because she knew he and his family would soon be penniless.

Well, briefly, Hanno left a little earlier than usual yesterday morning, but failed to arrive at the office. As I write, he has been missing for about thirty hours, and nobody has any idea of his whereabouts. We don't even have any clues; yesterday we called in the police, who are out looking for him. I was at Frida's a few times; she is a wonderful person with lots of courage, but she broke down yesterday. They left the light on the whole night, and somebody was always up, just in case Hans came home. I was last there this morning; unfortunately, it's quite far away. I got in touch with an acquaintance of mine; his wife is going to call on Frida this afternoon and look after her. Her sister from Freienwil has been with her for the past couple of hours.

 

the 28th, evening

I have just returned from Frida's; her two sisters are there now. Well, they have found poor Hans, and his troubles are over. I have been running around and been so busy all day (I also had a literary visitor today, and Emmy Ball has been here since yesterday) that I have not been able to absorb all of this.

God be with you, dear Adis, be brave, and here's a kiss

TO HIS COUSIN FRITZ GUNDERT
275

[
December 1935
]

Hans seemed to be leading a quiet, uneventful, happy life ever since he got married (1918); he no longer suffered from bouts of anxiety and despondency, at least as far as others could tell. Apparently, he was indeed happy, and his friends, also his in-laws, were particularly fond of his sense of humor, his delight in puns, puzzles, occasional verse, etc. Of course, all of this helped mask his tendency to get depressed, and twelve years ago, when his boss tried to get him to accept a somewhat different job, which would have offered better chances for promotion to more responsible positions within the corporation, he rejected the offer. He said that he was having enough trouble coping with his clerical position and his own expectations of himself. His latest and final crisis began when the corporation lost some business and started cutting back on the work force: he had long been afraid of losing his job and the wherewithal to feed his wife and children. Over the last two to three months this anxiety got out of hand, particularly the crazy notion that his younger fellow workers were trying to get rid of him. He thought that they were talking to the boss behind his back, etc. After losing control of himself, he called the office, and said in a fit of anger that he was fed up with everything (this was six weeks or so before he died). He thought afterward that they would soon be giving him notice. Then he reproached himself for having jeopardized everything. He brought up these matters occasionally, but only piecemeal. It was only thanks to hindsight, after we had pieced together the things he had said, that we realized how severe his mental condition must have been. His work at the office had become somewhat inaccurate and unsatisfactory. But on the day before he disappeared, after consulting his wife he went to see his bosses, who assured him emphatically that they weren't thinking of laying him off. Those comforting words came too late; he was no longer able to believe them. He left for work on November 27, but never turned up at the office. They realized right away that he was missing and started looking for him, and came to my hotel to let me know. We spent a day and a half looking for him. The light was on in the apartment all night, and there was always somebody up, in case he came home. They found him the second day. He had apparently been dead for hours, having slashed his wrist with his penknife. We buried him on Saturday, and if the previous days were horrible, the funeral itself was beautiful. We spent a consoling hour in the rainy cemetery at Wettingen. Many friends were there despite the season and the rain; Hans's little choir sang,
276
Pastor Preiswerk spoke beautifully and consolingly, and it was quite clear that many people were fond of our Hans.