The Weimar Triangle (11 page)

Hanni decided to ask me a question I could not answer.

“And how would the allies have dealt with the German revolutionaries who were as opposed to Prussian militarism as they were?”

“I have no idea,” I confessed. “I suppose they would have fought about that among themselves, depending on the degree to which they themselves felt threatened by revolutionaries. Why don’t you ask me an easier question?”

“Such as?”

“How come Ludendorff and Hindenburg lost their heads and threw in the towel before they had to?”

“All right,” said Hanni, with a smile. “Why did the two generals lose their heads and throw in the towel too soon?”

“Because they were taken by surprise when their offensive failed. They had never thought of such a possibility. Their propaganda had been so successful that they had convinced themselves. They were certain beyond any reasonable doubt that they would achieve peace through victory. Any other outcome of the war was absolutely inconceivable to them. So they could not think of anything other than giving up, temporarily. And blaming others.”

A B
ONE TO
P
ICK

I have always thought that memoirs are particularly unreliable in matters of love and sex. The obstacles to accuracy in this area are, of course, the bread and butter of my friend Erich Fromm and the other Freudians at the Institute for Social Research. The rest of us know that love and sex are outside the sphere of rational discourse and that the best way to deal with them is through art and literature. There, questions of accuracy do not arise. I remember what I want to remember. My past was not filmed. My version of it cannot be shown to be nonsense.

By the time of the music exhibition in the summer of 1927 Germany had, however temporarily, regained a degree of stability. This meant a return to an attenuated form of pre-war respectability. The first rush of exhilaration brought about by the lifting of social and sexual inhibitions caused by war, revolution and inflation had abated. Some of these inhibitions had now returned, such as the inhibition against showing oneself in public evidently on good terms with another man’s wife.

I knew that Hanni Geisel was three years older than I. I was a bachelor of forty-two and she a married woman of forty-five. I had had many affairs and had come close to marriage on at least three occasions. Before Hanni and I joined forces, however, I had always successfully avoided any involvement with a married woman. The only exception was sex in the aftermath of a masked ball, which, according to universally accepted custom, does not count.

A day or two after we first made love in my apartment, we sat in the lounge outside the Soviet exhibit discussing when to do it again. Any observant passer-by who looked closely
—
and certainly anybody who knew either of us
—
would have detected that we were more than good friends. The rules governing society dictate that a respectably married
grande dame
has more to lose if she strays than does a bachelor. Hanni did not care.

The Soviet exhibit included a touchingly evocative photograph of Tchaikovsky’s studio in the Moscow Conservatory as well as excellent stills from Eisenstein’s superb
Battleship Potemkin.

A man came toward me with an outstretched hand. He was tall and completely bald, and had a straggly long neck and a pronounced Adam’s apple. He looked disreputable and vaguely familiar.

“Don’t you recognize me?” he asked in strong Frankfurt dialect.

“I do, but please forgive me. For the moment I can’t think of your name.”

“Fritz Amberg,” he reminded me.

“Ah, of course. How could I have forgotten.”

Fritz Amberg was a film distributor who made a lot of money with sex films after the abolition of war-time film censorship. Most of them, such as
Frauen, die der Abgrund verschlingt
[
Women Engulfed by the Abyss
] and
Hyänen der Lust
[
Hyenas of Lust
] were disguised as educational films.

I had consulted Fritz Amberg for an article I wrote about cinema attendance since the war. I wrote that between 1918 and 1920 the number of cinemas in Frankfurt had risen from twenty-five to thirty-four, not least because of his contributions. I had the impression of Amberg that he was no fool and at heart a decent man. He was giving the public what it wanted, he said, and no one, high or low, could demonstrate he was doing anybody any harm. He did not mind that he was not received in good society.

He rubbed his chin and then said, “I have a bone to pick with you.”

This is a phrase to which all newspaper critics have become accustomed. I assumed he was going to chastise me, as others had, for the lukewarm review I had written the previous week of the popular Emelka film
Klettermaxe.

I was wrong.

“I read you regularly and I have come to the conclusion you are the wrong man for the job. Philosophers should stay in the university where they belong. I think your boss should assign you to write about politics or sports or cooking. The first requirement of a film critic is that he should understand what real people who live in the real world want. People like you do not.”

“This is not quite true,
Herr
Amberg,” Hanni rushed to my defence. “My friend understands this very well. You cannot have read his recent reviews of films with
—
now let me think
—
with Asta Nielsen, Harry Piel, Lil Dagover, Henny Porten and
—
who else?
—
oh yes, Harry Liedtke.”

“I have read them all,
gnädige Frau
,” Fritz Amberg said. “I do not mean the reviews. I can take them or leave them. I’m talking about his big pieces.”

He turned back to me.

“I don’t see why you do not see the obvious,
Herr Doktor.
The film business is a business like any other. You may have heard of the laws of supply and demand.”

I hesitated for a moment before replying. I have had arguments before with people who took this line. They usually made me say things I regretted later. Also, I wanted Hanni to see me at my best.

“The laws of supply and demand,” I said in my most reasonable tone, “apply to what people want, not to what people need. I think that what people need is the truth. You think what people need is dreams
—
escape. You are quite right, of course. There is nothing wrong with that as long as the public can also have access to the truth. They do not. Not in the cinema. The reason why
Battleship Potemkin
is such a good film is that Eisenstein does not forget for a moment that the action he depicts has profound significance today. Actually, it took place in 1905. I take the view that people do not need nostalgic stories about the dukes and duchesses we thought we had deposed, even if you think they want those stories. People do not know what they want until they know what they can get, until they can make intelligent choices. We now produce hundreds of films in Germany every year but most of them are fifth-rate. I have been trying to say in my articles that German films, with only a few exceptions, implicitly support the institutions we have inherited from the Kaiser, as though 1918 had never happened. They systematically whitewash the social evils that you and I know exist,
Herr
Amberg. The aesthetic, imaginative quality of German post-war films, which made such a big impression abroad, has gone down disastrously since 1924. It is my job as a responsible journalist to point this out.”

Fritz Amberg was spared the need to think of a suitable reply because the man who now emerged from the Soviet exhibit was none other than my boss, Heinrich Simon. He was delighted to see Hanni although he seemed a little surprised to see her with me.

“Hello, Hanni,” he said. “What luck to see you here. And in such good company.”

We shook hands.

Heinrich Simon and his brother, Kurt, were the grandsons of Leopold Sonnemann, the founder of the
Frankfurter Zeitung,
and its majority owners. Heinrich was the active head, a cultivated, complicated, somewhat enigmatic man of superior intelligence. Since the newspaper, founded in 1856, was one of Germany’s great papers, and was upholding a unique tradition of liberalism, he was an important figure nationally. Kurt was mainly concerned with business and administration. Both had to deal with seemingly insurmountable economic problems. There were three editions every day and revenues were in sharp decline.

Heinrich Simon lived on the same block on the Untermainkai as the Geisels. He and his wife also hosted
déjeuners
— they called them
jours fixes —
on Fridays. It was a matter of policy for them never to invite staff members. Occasionally Heinrich joined the Geisels’ chamber music sessions. When he did so they stayed away from modern music, for which he had little taste. But he was not rigid. His political tastes, too, were eclectic and included conservatives as well as left wingers. One never quite knew where he stood. A regular guest at his Friday table, I was told, was the tall, slim, elegant, languid, old-fashioned. somewhat mannered writer, war diarist and former cavalry officer Rudolf Binding, who wore a monocle and was surprisingly witty at times. His pieces often appeared in the paper. Another frequent guest was the vigorous expressionist playwright Fritz von Unruh, whom Heinrich consistently promoted. Von Unruh was the son of a general but a passionate anti-militarist.

I was head of the feuilleton section of the paper. My own relations with Heinrich Simon were correct but somewhat distant. He probably sensed that I was not always in agreement with his decisions. But he never questioned my judgement. For example, he never objected to the radical views of the literary critic Walter Benjamin, who occasionally appeared in my feuilletons. I had been with the paper since 1918 but I still never felt entirely secure.

I introduced Fritz Amberg, who, of course, knew who he was. I told Heinrich that Amberg was an old acquaintance who had been of great help to me a few months ago for an article I wrote.

“I am delighted to meet you,
Herr
Amberg,” Simon said amiably.

He turned to Hanni.

“Hermann is in court?” he asked.

“Alas, yes.”

“You certainly show good taste in picking a deputy.”

“I am pleased you think so, Heinrich.”

He turned back to Amberg.

“Are you also one of
Herr
Herzberg’s many fans?” he asked him.

As I mentioned, Amberg was at heart a decent man.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I would not know how to get through the day without reading him at breakfast.”

P
ARTY
T
ALK

At the reception in the Frankfurter Hof given by the German Section of the Society of Contemporary Music, the acerbic music critic Arno Loeb was holding forth on the subject of Paul Hindemith.

“I regard him as a musical artisan with extraordinary dexterity,” Loeb said. “He can write music with lightning speed for any instrument, and any combination of instruments. But he is no more than a clown, a jokester who wants to shock. He has no depth. Did you know that a year or two ago he was working on three one-act operas?”

We did not. “We” was Hanni, me and Teddy.

“I am not sure whether he ever published them. The first had an expressionistic libretto by Oskar Kokoschka, which Hindemith tackled only because nobody, least of all he himself, had any idea of what it was about. The subject of the second was a prince of China or Burma whose sex organ was bitten off by a monstrous alligator. The third opera dealt with a nun who had an orgasm whenever she looked at a painting or sculpture of the crucified body of Christ. That opera saw the light of day long enough to be condemned by the Catholic church.”

Our next conversation was with Gretel Köllner, a handsome dark-eyed violinist whom we did not know. She was talking about the Mendelssohn violin concerto.

“It is perfection itself,” she said. “Everybody knows it. Who would want to live on this earth without it?”

We agreed such a prospect was unthinkable.

“Still,” she went on, “would the history of music during the last hundred years be different if Mendelssohn had never lived? No, he did not change the course of music for a single moment. He was not an innovator. Merely a marvellous composer.”

“And who do you think has been an innovator since Wagner?” Teddy asked.

“Debussy,” Köllner replied after a moment’s hesitation. “Every composer you hear this week owes his musical life to him.”

“How interesting that you should say that,”Teddy remarked. “I was afraid you might name Stravinsky.”

“As a matter of fact, I was thinking of him,” Köllner admitted.

“Good thing you didn’t,” said Teddy. I admired his selfassurance. “In my view Stravinsky is the exact opposite of an innovator. Instead of developing and varying his themes, he gets his effect by displacing accents and improvising on rhythmic units. His music is inventive and effective. But it will lead nowhere. What a contrast to Schönberg, who is opening up entirely new worlds while working within the established tradition. By the way, are you going to hear Alban Berg’s
Kammerkonzert
tomorrow?”

“Yes, certainly,” Gretel Köllner said.

“Good. It will be the high point of the festival. I am so sorry he is not here. I just heard from him. He is in Baden-Baden where his
Lyric Suite
is being performed. May I tell you of other events you must not miss? Ernst Toch’s piano concerto, Kaminski’s Magnificat, and Janacek’s Concertino.”

Teddy omitted to alert us to another important event that we later attended, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, which Furtwängler conducted. It had become public knowledge that during rehearsals Furtwängler disregarded the composer’s objections to his interpretation
—
so it was said
—
in a pompously cavalier manner. The work did not make much of an impression on us, unlike Bela Bartok’s extraordinarily violent First Piano Concerto, with Bartok himself at the piano. He treated it as a percussion instrument. There were no melodies.

“Oh, and tonight there is a concert you must not miss,” Teddy told us. “The richly polyphonic three-hour
a capella
oratorio
The Life and Works of Saint Cyril and Methodius
by the Croatian composer Bozidar Sirola.”