The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (35 page)

“Yet he saw again and again that no argument worked like this so simple question.”

*

“It is the age which you love, Hermann. It was also his age. Do understand that,” she said once. “Another couple of years and you would have”—she interrupted herself—”and he would have perhaps remained your friend, but you would no longer have loved him. No longer thus.”

He looked at her startled and surprised. That smile of hers appeared, as so often, on her lips:

“Would you love him if he had a mustache?”

And when he, entirely absorbed in thought, still did not answer:

“For he would surely have had a mustache one day, wouldn’t he?”

He did not smile back, but it seemed to him that a curtain parted before his understanding.

Ridiculous, absurd, inconceivable—but the truth!

*

Once he said (and in the old torment):

“I don’t know if I still love him. I hardly know any more, if I loved him. And that is probably the most frightening of all! I only know, I will never be able to forget him, if—if I can ever think about him again.”

“That you should also not do. Only think about the beautiful hours with him. It is all that we will one day have, the memory of such hours. Cherish them. But don’t bury your whole youth in useless brooding. Consider: only this hour is yours.

“How many happy and beautiful hours you can still have and will have, if you only will.”

“And if I no longer find the strength and the courage for them?”

“Courage and strength will return under your will. Will it!”

*

“For it is your destiny, as it was his. Neither oppose it, nor bow down under it. Neither one will help you to the only happiness that there is for you. Make a peace treaty with it, and direct it! Then you will conquer it and only in that way. He could do it. You can do it. Everyone can, who will!”

My destiny, he thought, my undeserved destiny! But in the night that followed he looked at it for the first time firmly in the eyes and it appeared to him no longer so unconquerable.

*

And again on the last day: “Since it is passing, let it be light—your love! Let it be light—you cannot load your burden onto young shoulders, who neither want it nor are able to carry it! Let it be light: like a day in spring, like a glimmer of summer, like an hour of happiness. And do not question! Do not question! Since it stands outside of all laws and morals of people, it is freer and—perhaps also more beautiful for it. For if it is burdensome and deep—”

“It is ruin and death!” he chimed in.

*

When after eight days he took his leave, he knew that he might return and would return. For his home was here from now on.

He did not travel toward the south.

He traveled back to Berlin.

13

As a young man who knew almost nothing of life and little about himself, Hermann Graff had come to the metropolis a year ago.

As a man who wanted to know and master life as it was, he returned again.

He had to show himself who was the stronger.

The train rolled and rolled. The nearer he came to the goal, the more strongly he felt that the wounds in his breast had not healed over. They pained him anew.

The wounds had been given him by life through a young hand that did not suspect where it was striking. They bled and would bleed until another young hand closed them.

Was it already stretching out to him—one among millions—this other young hand?

14

As chance or destiny—so variously do people name the same thing—would have it, on the same day another train was carrying two people from an entirely different region of Germany to an entirely different goal (and far past Berlin).

They were Gunther and his guardian.

Because for some reason his conscience had begun to bother him the man had shown up at the institution one day. Since he came with stamped papers and as a sort of official—vice-mayor of his village—after a long debate and endless annoyances, they had delivered his ward to him.

Now they were sitting opposite one another in an empty third-class compartment. He was a tall, coarse man with boorish features and manners, seeing red from rage over the long and costly trip, the loss of time, and all the expenses that the boy here had brought him.

From time to time he spit and gnashed his teeth at him:

“Just wait, little boy, you won’t run away from me again! We’ll quickly take you down a bit! Such a lousy brat, you run away from home and gallivant around out there for a whole year! Well, just wait, when we get you home again. You dirty, dirty boy, you!”

He had nothing to fear.

For what was sitting opposite him, this little heap of misery, was no longer thinking of flight; he no longer thought of anything at all. The boy was staring listlessly with his red-bordered eyes in the gray face before him, and he appeared to see and hear nothing that went on around him. His head was again shaved entirely bald and his lip, which usually turned up so remarkably at every excitement, no longer twitched. It was now constantly drawn up, and behind it, where a tooth had been knocked out in a fight, the ugly hole gaped.

Indifferent and apathetic, he sat there and chewed on a piece of bread.

The train rolled and rolled.

He had forgotten everything. Forgotten were the hungry and the overfed days of this year; forgotten his partying, dancing, and drinking through the nights; forgotten the countless faces that had shown up in them, the old and the young, the friendly and the angry, which had all raced by him in a mad whirl; and forgotten, forgotten was the great and patient love, which had shone over him so long like a warm and bright light and which had still been unable to rescue him, not from himself and not from the others.

Only an oppressive and dull rage still boiled in him: against Max, who had lured him there; against Atze, who then had really brought him into this life. Against everyone and everything: against those guys, the johns, who used and misused him, to throw him away like a cigarette butt; against the Count, who had treated him like a pet dog and then had chased him out; against the other boys, who had all exploited his good nature; and against him, who was the only one of all to love him—against him not the least.

Why did he, after all the other stupid things, write such a foolish letter!

What could have been in it! They had never shown it to him, but they nearly tortured him to death with their questions. The best thing had been only to say yes to everything. Only then did he get any peace.

This advice of Tall Boy he had then also followed in Berlin, where they had taken him for a day, in the room with the many strange people. There, too, he had nodded to everything and said yes, even when he had not at all heard and understood what they really wanted from him.

Had he been there, his earlier friend? He did not even know. He had not seen him. He had not heard his voice. He had not looked up, because he did not want to look up. One only looked into cold and mean eyes and faces.

It was also not at all true that the man had loved him, as he said so often. If he had truly loved him, then he would have helped him get out. But in another way. Not with such letters.

They had brought him back again. And then this shithead had come there to take him home again.

They could just as well have left him there. It was all the same, like everything was. Just now it had become somewhat better for him there since Tall Boy had taken him as his steady and jealously assured that nobody else came too close to him.

But in the end—it was all the same. His rage sank again into dullness.

He could be indifferent to everything that still happened to him now. Already tomorrow he would be standing behind the counter again, in a blue, fatty apron, selling herring and soap to brawling farmers’ wives, with hands red from the cold and an eternally growling stomach. Only on Sundays would they probably go again to the nearest villages. Then the other boys would interrogate him. But he would certainly tell them nothing. He had nothing to tell. And then—what would they understand of it!

The train rolled and rolled.

It stopped at every station. At each his guardian jumped up, spit out, shot an angry look at the runaway, coughed out verbal abuse, and fell again into his drowsy sleep.

Always other passengers got on and got off again.

The sounds of their speech became more familiar. Already place names he recognized were striking his ear.

The train stopped again.

*

They got off, the boy last.

The short springtime of his life was over.

AFTERWORD 

The Hustler,
Mackay’s second long novel, appeared in 1926, a quarter century after his first,
The Swimmer.
The two novels have great historical value: both are set in Berlin and describe scenes that have nowhere else been documented in such exemplary fashion.
The Swimmer
describes competitive swimming and diving in the formative years of those sports in Germany.
The Hustler
(the original German title,
Der Puppenjunge,
will be explained below) gives us a view of homosexual life in Berlin in the 1920s; the accuracy of its description is vouched for by Christopher Isherwood, who wrote: “I have always loved this book dearly—despite and even because of its occasional sentimental absurdities. It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic” (letter of November 1983 to Sasha Alyson, publisher of the first English translation of
The Hustler).
But both novels are of far more value than their witness to history.
The Swimmer,
the story of the rise and fall of a world-champion swimmer, while on the surface an exciting sports novel, also gives a penetrating insight into the nature of a gifted individual who is consumed by a single-minded ambition; it was written without propagandistic intent at a time when Mackay was best known as an anarchist propagandist.
The Hustler,
on the other hand, is clearly propaganda—written from an anarchist viewpoint, it pleads for the acceptance of man-boy love. It gives a view of human sexual nature that has been brutally suppressed—not least in our own day. Not surprisingly the novel was first published under a pseudonym. Who was Mackay/”Sagitta”?

John Henry Mackay was born in Greenock, Scotland, on 6 February 1864. His father, John Farquhar Mackay, was a marine insurance broker, who died when his son was only nineteen months old. John Henry’s mother, nee Luise Auguste Ehlers of a well-to-do Hamburg family, returned to Germany with her young son, who thus grew up with German as his mother tongue. He later learned to speak English—and even published a volume of translations of British and American poetry—but he never wrote it very well. Following an unsuccessful year as an apprentice in a publishing house, he was a student at three universities (Kiel, Leipzig, Berlin), but only as an auditor. He early considered himself a writer, and although never very successful commercially, did gain a certain esteem. Already in 1885, following a visit to relatives in Scotland, he published an epic poem,
Kinder des Hochlands
(Children of the Highlands), which is inspired in part by Walter Scott’s poetry (as discussed by the Germanist Edward Mornin in “A Late German Imitation of Walter Scott” in
Germanic Notes
17.4 [1986]: 49-51). In 1887 he went to London for a year, a London filled with German refugees from Bismarck’s anti-Socialist law, and there he moved to the extreme left with his interest in the “social question.” His collection of anarchist poems,
Sturm
(1888), was acclaimed as revolutionary. Then he read Max Stirner’s
Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
(
The Ego and His Own,
as the title was given by the publisher, Benjamin R. Tucker, to the English translation in 1907). This strengthened Mackay in his own individualistic views, which were then seen in his book The
Anarchists
(1891; Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999; also available on the Internet:
http:// dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist Archives/macan/macan.html).
Mackay also determined to write the biography of this forgotten philosopher of egoism; his biography of Stirner appeared in 1898, the same year as the 636-page volume of his collected poems.

Mackay’s sports novel
Der Schwimmer
(The Swimmer) appeared in 1901. (A “Centenary Edition” English translation was published by Xlibris in 2001.) He was at the height of his literary power. But the death of his beloved mother the following year brought on a depression from which he only recovered by dedicating himself to a new cause. Using the pseudonym “Sagitta” (Latin for “arrow”), he began a literary campaign in 1905 for the acceptance of man-boy love—Mackay himself was attracted to boys 14—17 years old. He later said of his works under that name: “I was Sagitta. I wrote those books in the years in which my artistic strength was believed to have died out.” In fact, he never regained the literary esteem that he had earlier enjoyed under his real name. The edition of his collected works in eight volumes in 1911 contained little that was new—two short stories and a few poems—and drew little attention from the literary establishment, especially since he published it himself. Following World War I
Der Freiheitsucher
(the Freedomseeker) appeared in 1920, but in contrast to the attention given his earlier anarchist work, it was largely ignored. Mackay’s mother had generously supported him and left him enough to live on the rest of his life, so that he was not dependant on the sale of his books, but the runaway inflation of 1923 wiped out the value of the lifetime annuity he had purchased. After that he wrote for money, but never regained the attention of the reading public, so that he died in Berlin in relative poverty on 16 May 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power.

Mackay, who had been living in Berlin since 1892, first appeared as Sagitta with five poems in the journal
Der Eigene
in 1905. In his effort to keep his identity secret, he even had the poems sent to the editor in the handwriting of his friend the Dresden actress Luise Firle (1865—1942; Mackay may have met her when she was appearing on the Berlin stage before she moved to the Dresden State Theatre in 1896). Rejecting as derogatory all the names previously used for his love, he called it the “nameless love.”

Six “Books of the Nameless Love” were planned, to be sold by subscription, two each year. But after the first two were published in 1906, objections were raised that led to a long court battle that ended only in 1909. It is fortunate that Mackay was able to keep his identity as Sagitta secret, for otherwise he would probably have gone to prison. But the result was bad enough: The offending “obscene writings” were ordered destroyed and the publisher was fined and sentenced to pay court costs—all paid by Mackay, of course. He reported the result to his American friend Benjamin R. Tucker on 12 October 1909: “That means, that
everything,
I did as Sagitta, is absolutely destroyed and stamped out. The work of years is lost and, besides, it costs me about 6300 Marks loss” (in
John Henry Mackay: Autobiographical Writings,
Xlibris 2001).

In fact, Mackay persevered and was able to publish a complete edition of the
Books of the Nameless Love
in 1913, in which he also included a history of his fight as Sagitta. The title page gives the place of publication as Paris, but it was prepared by him in Berlin and sold by him underground. In a further irony, the first two books were not destroyed, but were kept in the publisher’s warehouse as “confiscated”—and were forgotten. Following the revolution of 1919, Mackay was able to retrieve and sell them. Five years later he published a new edition—in a handier format, as requested by friends in the Wandervogel movement—and, in the freer atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, sold it openly. But the “window of opportunity” in 1924 was brief: What was impossible ten years earlier was just as impossible ten years later, for all the writings of Sagitta were put on the Nazi list of forbidden books.

Although Mackay’s name was on the first published list of signatories of the petition for revision of the German anti-homosexual law § 175 (in
Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen
1 [1899]; Mackay’s name is on page 256), the petition circulated by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee directed by Magnus Hirschfeld, Mackay soon came to see the limitation of that effort, especially with regard to his own fight for the right of men and boys to love one another. In “The History of a Fight for the Nameless Love” in the 1913 edition of the
Books of the Nameless Love
(in English in
Fenny Skaller and Other Prose Writings from the Books of the Nameless Love,
Southernwood Press, Amsterdam, 1988) he wrote: “My fight is ended. But I cannot take my leave from a cause to which I have given the best years of my life without having a word yet for its fate in the near future. Mistakes and errors have been made that must absolutely be avoided.
Two above all.”
The first mistake was that of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of

Self-Owners), the group organized around the journal
Der Eigene.
Despite his closeness personally to several members of this group, Mackay had sharp criticism of them:

“In a reaction to a persecution that had increased until it was unbearable, it has been sought to represent this love as special, as ‘nobler and better.’ It is not. This love is a love like any other love, not better, but also not worse, and, if it is truly love, results in blessings as rich as any love. The fight
for
it should never degenerate into a fight
against
another, for every love is entitled to its nature and the same source of life nourishes all. And from similar, often only too understandable feelings, it was sought to promote the freedom of man’s love at woman’s expense. This, too, is an error. However false the position of the other sex (in all classes) still is today—to prevent and to deny that sex its possibility of developing does not mean making friends out of enemies, but rather making the enemies of today into the implacable enemies of tomorrow and forever, and it is above all a complete misunderstanding of the great law of the future. This law is called freedom. Freedom includes all and excludes none.”

But Mackay’s strongest words were directed to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee:

“Finally, however, a mistake has been made that, in my eyes, is more disastrous than all the others. This love, persecuted by judges and cursed by priests, has fled to the medical doctors as if it were a sickness that could be cured by them. But it is not a sickness. Doctors have as little to look for and examine here as judges, and those who have accepted it as a sickness are mistaken if they believe they can free it from the clutches of power by making a pact with this power. This—making a pact—they are doing, and by doing it they seek to save some at the expense of others. Knowing well how very much ‘public opinion’ (whose influence above all appears to them so important) opposes precisely the love of the older man for the younger of his sex, since the thoughtless always are able to see here only ‘seduction’ while they are more and more inclined to the thought of a ‘legalization of love between adults,’ these dangerous helpers consent to, yes, advocate, a law that legalizes the one while it condemns the other. And this they do, who can claim for themselves no excuse of ignorance and bias, but rather know, and know precisely, that here not the age but rather the maturity alone can be decisive, and who know and teach the inborn nature, the inevitability, and the immutability of this love for the same sex as a scientifically grounded fact!

“Is this their science? Then I shudder at it and them, and the quicker and more explicitly a clean-cut separation takes place here, the better—for them and for us!”

In a foreword to the 1924 edition of the
Books of the Nameless Love
Mackay once again complained of the latter group:

“For it has been shown again in these years [since the first edition] that this love has to look for its worst enemies precisely among those not outside, but within its own camp. Again those who call themselves ‘leaders’ in this fight, and as such label themselves as responsible, have publicly advocated, in one of their ridiculous and degrading petitions to the currently ruling powers, an ‘age of consent’—not in the case of a child, but rather for the mature boy and youth!—and with it the prosecution and punishment of those who they, like no others, know are exactly as innocent as themselves. Once again those who love a higher age have thus sought to save themselves at the expense of the comrades-in-destiny of their time; a betrayal of the cause more harmful in its intentions and more terrible in its results cannot be imagined. Once again here, as the only opportunity offered to me, just as before in the history of my fight, I would never be able to forgive myself for not having branded it as such.”

I have quoted the above statements of Mackay at some length, not only to make his position quite clear, but also to point up how remarkable was the reception of his novel
Der Puppenjunge
only two years later—and precisely from those he criticized most severely. Already before publication of the novel the
Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitaren Komitees
(Communications of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee) of October/November 1926 called attention to it: “With this seventh in the series of his ‘Books of the Nameless Love’ Sagitta is entering into a completely new area of international belles lettres—that of male prostitution. Once selected, possession must be taken of it with a fearless hand if the description of its marginal and nocturnal depths is to have a genuine and convincing effect. Thus, already because of its subject matter perhaps the most fascinating of his books, it will amaze, revolt, enthuse—depending on the attitude of the reader.”