The Weimar Triangle (17 page)

“This is an absurdity,” Hanni said. “An exhibit about Jewish music without any reference to Mendelssohn. Or to Meyerbeer.”

We were having dinner in the Geisels’ dining room at their house on the Untermainkai. I was always a little inhibited in the presence of Hermann, especially in their house, but neither he nor Hanni showed any sign of discomfiture at my presence. The other guests were the Jewish scholar Martin Buber, who was living out of town, not far from Kronberg, and the wellknown Doctor Richard Koch.

“There is nothing Jewish in Mendelssohn’s music,” Buber said emphatically. He had a Viennese accent, with Yiddish overtones. Born in Vienna, he spent much of his childhood in his grandfather’s house in Lemberg [Lviv]. Buber was nearly fifty and had a full black beard. “Nor in Meyerbeer’s, who was as French as Mendelssohn was German. The exhibition people were perfectly right to exclude them.”

“Ah,” Koch said, smiling. “The German-Jewish mix in a nutshell.”

“Are you saying,
Herr
Buber,” I asked, “that there should have been no separate showcase for Jewish music at all?”

“That is certainly not what I am saying,
Herr
Herzberg. I am saying that to define it merely in exclusively liturgical terms, to connect it only to Jewish religious services, is far too narrow. They should have highlighted the truly Jewish folk music of Eastern Europe, where Jews are Jews and not Poles or Russians or Ruthenians, and so on. Their music is genuinely Jewish. They have their own language, Yiddish. There is no ambiguity about this at all. But these people here”
—
Buber waved his right arm contemptuously
—
“would of course take the same position as the dominant Jewish community and find a thousand Talmudistic reasons for giving Mendelssohn to the Germans exclusively.”

Buber had put his finger on the exposed nerve of the Jewish situation in Frankfurt and elsewhere in Germany, the self-serving resistance of the local Jews to the many thousands of newcomers from the east, the so-called
Ostjuden,
who had settled in Frankfurt, many of them during the war, after escaping pogroms in Poland and Russia. The locals saw them as a threat to their hard-won social position a century after their own emergence from the ghetto. Most Jews in Frankfurt’s West End had little contact with them. The newcomers were usually poor, spoke imperfect German and lived in the east end of the city, many of them stuck there on their way to the United States.

“We do not want to be reminded,” Hermann declared, “that a hundred years ago we were all like them. We have come a long way. We do not want our neighbours to put us all in the same pot. Who can blame us?”

“You all want to believe,” Martin Buber remarked, “that
homo sapiens
did not descend from apes but was born wealthy and smelling of
eau de cologne,
speaking perfect German and living in the West End.”

“True,” I said. “Please,
Herr Doktor
, do not rob us of our illusions.”

“No one knows better than I that we all need illusions,” Buber replied, “just as we need dreams. But certain illusions are better than others. The mythological folk tales of my ancestors are full of stories about illusions. A young man’s belief that he will marry Rebecca, the rabbi’s beautiful daughter, may well be an illusion, though not necessarily so. But his belief that sooner or later the Messiah will come is not an illusion. That is a matter of faith and therefore, in a religious sense, true. When I was a child, I read an old Jewish legend that I could not understand. Outside the gates of Rome there sat a ragged old beggar, waiting. A Jew asked an old Roman who passed by, ‘What is this man waiting for?’ The Roman said, ‘He is your messiah. He is waiting for you.’ The Roman was telling the old Jew the truth.”

The reason the Geisels invited Martin Buber and Richard Koch on the same evening was that they wanted to hear news about their friend, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who had been suffering for five years from a fatal degenerative disease and was no longer able to speak or write. Buber was working with him on a translation of the Hebrew bible, and the first part had been published two years earlier. Koch was Rosenzweig’s friend and physician.

They reported that Rosenzweig, who had been expected to die within a year of his diagnosis, could now barely swallow. But his mind was still as alert as ever and, thanks to his wife’s ingenious intermediary efforts, he was able to work productively. He spent most of his time fully dressed at his desk. He was still able to move his little finger and they had worked out a code system of communication.

Rosenzweig’s first symptoms appeared in 1921, a few months after his masterwork
The Star of Redemption
had appeared and been greeted as a major work of Jewish philosophy. He had written it at the Macedonian front in 1917 and 1918, on postcards sent by
Feldpost
to his parents in Kassel. Before 1922 he had been a favourite guest at the Geisels’
déjeuners
.

“I have never seen a similar contrast between body and soul,” Koch said, “The body wishes to die. The soul follows the commandment to hold life sacred and will not grant the body its wish. It is extraordinary.”

“I am surprised at you, Richard.” Hermann waved his finger. “That is not the language you learned at medical school. How can a doctor talk about body and soul?”

“A doctor can’t but a friend can,” Koch replied. “His case is unique in many ways. In a curious way he is a happy man. When he finished his book, he thought the work he was meant to do had been done and the rest of his life would be nothing but an afterglow. But then he became ill. The conquest of his disease, and the conversion of an afterglow into a period of extraordinary intellectual creativity was his second achievement. In some amazing sense he is grateful for it. He does not accept any compliment for his heroism or his patience. He implies he was just following orders. In fact, he is the most impatient of men. But most of the time he is in a good mood and finds a lot in life that amuses him.”

“I can testify to that,” Buber said. “Translating from the Hebrew is a source of enormous pleasure for both of us and the occasion for a great deal of laughter since we are trying to reproduce the sound and rhythm of the Hebrew in the German language. I am sure we are having much more fun than poor old Martin Luther, who was merely concerned with the meaning of words. Besides, he worked alone. Our purpose is to give German Jews the means to regain a sensual contact with their religion. That was not exactly Martin Luther’s purpose.”

“No,” Hermann laughed. “Certainly not. He thought Jews were emanations of the devil.”

“Oh, by the way,” Buber continued, “Franz and I have decided to forgive Richard Koch and you”
—
he pointed at me
—
“for the misguided things you both wrote about our translation.”

I knew the two authors had been stung by the long piece I had written in the
Frankfurter Zeitung,
in which I remarked that their style, and especially the many words they invented, reminded me of the
Ring of the Nibelungen.
And Koch’s critique ran along similar lines.

We both thanked him for his generosity and asked him to pass our sentiments to Franz Rosenzweig.

“I would like to tell you how I first met him in 1913,” Buber said. “I was living in Berlin, writing and editing. I was thirtyfive years old, I had had my personal crisis, had broken with Jewish traditions and read Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I had also been moved by the earthy piousness [the word he used was
Frömmigkeit
] and folk-wisdom of the Chassidim whom I remembered from my childhood. In 1906 I published the
Tales of Rabbi Nachman
, and two years later
The Legend of Baal-Shem.
I had become a Zionist but, unlike Theodor Herzl, thought of a renewed, national Judaism in social and spiritual terms, rather than in political ones. In 1913, I met Franz, who was twenty-seven and came from a different world. He had written his doctoral dissertation on
Hegel and the State
and had just narrowly escaped conversion to Christianity, which his cousins and friends had urged. He had decided to remain a Jew. He quickly distanced himself from the emphasis on reason among the most important Jewish philosophers at the time and became an adherent of the philosophy of revelation, for which his model was Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. In the spring of 1915 I asked him to contribute to a volume of essays I was editing. He wrote a sharp criticism of my thinking in a piece he called
The Theology of Atheism.
It was not published until later. He had no use at all for my idea that Jews should renew their Jewishness by thinking of themselves as a people. He put down his own ideas in
The Star of Redemption.
”

“I tried to read it several times,” Hanni said. “I couldn’t understand a word of it.”

“Yes,” Koch said. “It is a difficult book. I am afraid I had the same trouble. Please explain it to us.”

“My dear
Herr Doktor
Koch, you are asking for a lot! I am not Rabbi Mordechai of Pinsk who thought he had all the answers. Since it is quite a long way from my own approach to Jewishness, all I can convey to you are some of the elements, the way I understand them. The ideas are presented as new philosophical thinking, a break with the idealism of Kant and Hegel and with the philosophical idea that reason provides the key to understanding. The book is profoundly Jewish, in the sense that it treats God as a fact, not as fiction or some projection of our wishes. Revelation is at its centre: God reveals himself when he creates the soul. Revelation is for him the beginning of all law and ethics and of love. If that is not Jewish I do not know what is. Even if Franz was inspired by Schelling.”

“Once again, the German-Jewish mix in a nutshell,” Koch observed.

“Please, Richard, now you tell us how you first met Franz Rosenzweig.”

“Nothing I would like better,” Koch said. “It was after the war, in 1920, I believe. The first symptoms did not appear until a year later. He was thirty-four, I was four years older. We both came from similarly assimilated backgrounds. Quite independently from him, and for my own reasons, I had become convinced that the time had come for assimilated Jews to return to Judaism. I had a younger brother, a gifted poet who had Zionist sympathies. He was killed in the war. Franz had decided, now that he thought he had nothing more to write, that he would continue the work of the much revered, charismatic Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel, who had just died. Franz was going to organize a centre for the study of Judaism, with adult education classes that would be held on a rotating basis in various Jewish and non-Jewish institutions. It would have no formal link to the Jewish community, nor with the university. There was plenty of talent in Frankfurt. One of our common friends was the chemist Eduard Strauss, who was an inspired amateur bible scholar whom Franz had recruited. I remember a conversation about Zionism with Strauss around that time in which I said I thought Judaism was too big a thing to become the determining element of one state. Strauss told Franz about me. So one day
—
there Franz suddenly stood opposite me in our music room, just after lunch, leaning against the Steinway, blond hair standing up, blue eyed, with a tidy little mustache. He looked like a high school teacher. I do not remember whether he had telephoned first. We liked each other from the first moment. He came straight to the point. Neither of us sat down. He invited me to lecture at his centre. I said I had absolutely no qualifications. He said, never mind, I could teach anything I wanted. He was very forceful. After some to and fro, I yielded. One of my early seminars dealt with biology. I tried to demonstrate that there was nothing in the structure of living things that contradicted traditional religious teachings.”

“Did you ever hear him lecture?” Hanni asked.

“Yes, I did,” Koch laughed. “He was abominable. I don’t remember the subject. Only the location. It was in the auditorium of the
Elisabethenschule.
It was as though his genius had dissipated entirely into thin air. He was boring and pedestrian. Of course it is entirely conceivable that he was already suffering from the first symptoms of the disease, without being aware of them. A few weeks later, when he came to me asking me to examine him
—
he had already received the grave news from a neurologist
—
I became his doctor. One of the consequences was the slow decline of the centre. It would have declined anyway
—
there was something wrong about it conceptually. It was too academic and its purpose was not well enough defined to achieve what it was meant to achieve.”

“For a return of the Frankfurt West End to Judaism,” Martin Buber said cryptically, “other teachers will be required.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The Cossacks.”

Interlude Two

E
xactly one week after the disastrous interview with Sigmund Pfeiffer, Jay had a call from one of the financial journalists he had consulted telling him that it was no longer a secret that the Littmann Bank was discreetly looking for ways to survive and that a number of senior executives, among them Pfeiffer, had been asked to take early retirement. Jay immediately phoned Pfeiffer’s secretary to ask her to whom he could now speak.

“Oh, Mr. Gordonson,” she said. “I am so glad you phoned. I never did ask you where you were staying. Otherwise I would have called you.
Herr
Walter Grossmann is assuming all of
Herr Doktor
Pfeiffer’s responsibilities.”

He made an appointment with him for the following Monday at eleven.