The Weimar Triangle (18 page)

Jay, Hans and his girlfriend, Hildy, and the red-haired Cella were sitting together in the crowded and noisy pub in front of Hans’s garage-warehouse-office on the Textorstrasse, drinking beer and excitedly talking about Herzberg’s autobiographical fragments.

“It’ll be better than
Premonitions,”
Cella prophesied.

“It’ll sell well in Bucharest,” Hans declared. “You’re a great comfort to me, Cella. I’ve always known Bucharest is a hotbed of wife-swapping and immoralities of all kinds. The Paris of the Balkans.”

“Like Weimar,” an elderly, pleasantly professorial-looking gentleman at the next table interjected. He had been following the conversation with ever-increasing interest, consuming a succession of schnappses. “I mean Weimar in Goethe’s time. Not the sober, post-communist Weimar we have now.”

“That’s a somewhat fresh view of Goethe’s Weimar,” Hildy laughed. “Please explain yourself,
mein Herr.
That’s certainly not the way we learned it at school.”

“What do you think was going on in the house of Baron Fritz von Stein, whose bluestocking wife Charlotte carried on with that shameless poet from Frankfurt who had ingratiated himself so disgustingly with the local duke? Three letters a day for about ten years.”

“What’s wrong with writing letters?” Jay asked. “Nobody does it any more, so I don’t know anything about it. Was that all that happened
—
writing letters?”

“That was all,” the gentleman said. “A thoroughly frustrating arrangement. Until Goethe said ‘enough is enough,’ ran away to Italy and had a splendid time with a number of prostitutes.”

“I don’t see any similarities with our story,” Hildy said with a heavy frown.

“Well, I do,” the gentleman said, ordering another schnapps. “You don’t seriously think
Herr Doktor
Geisel was happy in the role of the Baron von Stein, do you?”

“We haven’t heard from him yet,” Hildy observed.

“Sooner or later you will. I don’t suppose anybody in your potboiler will want to compete with Goethe, who was a virgin until he was thirty-eight
—
even though in his twenties he wrote a bestseller about a Byronic love triangle that ended in suicide and he became a world celebrity. You can imagine how women adored him. No, don’t talk to me of Goethe.”

“Nobody did,” Jay said amiably.

“And after he was thirty-eight and the ice was broken, so to speak,” the professorial gentlemen went on, ignoring Jay, “what do you think of a man who couldn’t go to bed with a woman of his own class, only with women of what used to be called the lower classes such as his wife, whom his mother called his
Bettschatz,
his treasure of the bed. With others, of whatever class, he was apparently often a non-performer. Except with his pen.”

“What disgusting things did he do with his pen?” Cella inquired.

“Listen to this,” the gentleman said. “One day,
en route
to somewhere or other, he had to spend the night in a tavern in the country. First, he had to have his supper. The buxom waitress liked him. After he went up to his room, getting ready to go to bed, there was a knock at the door. It was the buxom waitress knocking
—
a situation we all dream about it. They embraced. He took off her clothes. They went to bed. He couldn’t do it. In the morning he wrote a poem about it in his diary, and explained he couldn’t do it
because he was thinking of his wife
. Can you imagine!”

The gentleman rose, asked for his bill, and said to the group at the table “Sorry to have butted in.
Au revoir.
”

Jay was present when Hans cross-examined Gisela Hanauer,
née
Geisel, in her comfortable apartment in the Schumannstrasse in Frankfurt’s west end. She was a psychologist whose job as guidance counsellor to several schools gave her time off during the summer. Gisela and her husband were separated. The apartment was on the top floor and there was no elevator.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

“A vital part is still missing before the book makes much sense,” Hans said. “Your grandfather’s part.”

“I realize that,” Gisela said. “Would you like another piece of
Zwetschenkuchen
? It’s not as good as my mother’s plum cake, but it’s the best I’ve found.”

“Yes, please. We must find out what he really thought of your grandmother’s rather bizarre vacation with Herzberg. Readers will want to know.”

“So do I,” she said. “When my husband started straying, I left him. In all other respects he is a perfectly nice man. It’s hard to imagine that we take marriage more seriously today than they did eighty years ago.”

“Maybe we do. Some of us anyway. So you say you are sure there were no clues in that leather case where you found Hanni’s diary, or in the story. And the photographs. No letters of any kind?”

“None.”

“And there is nobody around in Frankfurt who remembers him?”

“Look
—
they left in 1935! By the way, that’s the same year Herzberg left. For New York. Most likely they also saw each other there.”

Hans was deep in thought.

“There must be people
there
who remember them … Do you know what he did in those years in New York? It must have been hard. Geisel couldn’t take any money with him, could he? And he was not young. He must have been in his mid fifties. Too old to go to law school again. Did your father ever talk to you about that period?”

“Oh yes,” Gisela replied. “My grandfather wouldn’t have managed if the people in the New School at Columbia University hadn’t given him a small job to lecture on German jurisprudence. But that didn’t happen right away. The New School consisted largely of transplants from the Frankfurt Institute. But Teddy Adorno didn’t come until 1938. And he later went to California.”

Hans turned to Jay.

“Maybe you can find an excuse for your bank to send you to New York for a week and snoop around,” he suggested.

“I wish I could,” Jay said, shaking his head sadly.

There was silence.

“And Hermann died in 1939. And Hanni moved to California, where so many other refugees went, taking all her belongings with her, including whatever papers Hermann left behind. Did she know Thomas Mann?”

“Not until she went to the States. She met him in Los Angeles through Adorno. And she died in 1949, four years after my father returned to Frankfurt. The year I was born.”

This conversation clearly went nowhere.

The next day Nicola had a bright idea.

“Let’s simply put an ad in the paper and see what happens.”

And that’s what they did
—
with spectacular success.

A brewery worker in Sachsenhausen by the name of Franz Graubner replied. He was the grandson of Fanny Graubner, the Geisels’ cleaning lady.

He had inherited from her a brown envelope of letters and papers Hermann had given to her before they left.

With the brown envelope he also inherited a draft of a play and some notes for an operetta.

“This will be worth a million marks,” he said to his grandmother as he gave it to her. “When all this horror is over somebody will want to write my biography. Half of it will be yours.”

Part Three:
The Anti-Republic

S
ELECTIONS FROM
H
ERMANN
G
EISEL’S
P
APERS

A Letter to Konrad Elder

Monday, July 11, 1927

I
did not have time last night when we met at the Max Reger concert to thank you properly for the material you sent me on the Gerhard case. Now I can document that, in the first two years of the Republic alone, from 1919 to 1921, the twentytwo political murders committed by left wingers led to thirtyeight, not thirty-nine, convictions. But the fact remains that there were about three hundred political murders of left-wing, mostly working-class, victims committed by the right, the vast majority of whom were never prosecuted at all.

Hanni and I were dazzled by your virtuoso performance in the case of Beethoven’s Lock. Our ingenious friend Erwin Herzberg thinks of you as a mystery man with a genius for detection whose source of income is unknown, in order to squeeze you into his metaphysical theory of the detective story. One day you may clear up that mystery for him.

At the moment I am making a few notes for an after-dinner speech at the Savigny Club next Tuesday. As you know, I can never resist talking about the things that matter most to you and me when addressing lawyers and it occurred to me that the circumstances when we first met may be a good starting point.

I have one question: what was the full name of the carpenter-apprentice the
Freikorps
men threw into the back of their truck on January 14, 1919, and then beat to death in the cellar of the Scharnhorst barracks? Every detail has to be right. Was it Franz or Wilhelm Bauer? You may remember that the murder was discovered by a reporter from the
Generalanzeiger
, so the police had to take notice. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds of insufficient evidence and never called the reporter as a witness. What upset you so much, as I remember, was that the judge said there was no question the victim had admitted he sympathized with Rosa Luxemburg, who had been murdered in Berlin a week earlier. The Bauer case opened your eyes. You were young and innocent
—
I think you were eighteen and intended to study law
—
and you were not prepared to discover that for the judge, not the murderer but the victim was guilty. By then I was already collecting clippings and whatever documents I could find about the way the judiciary was behaving in cases of this nature, in order to publish the facts later. Which I did. You offered your help in gathering the material I needed. I accepted and have been grateful for your help ever since.

I intend to add in my little speech that by then I was already in my late thirties, was married to Hanni, the father of two boys, and had been excused from further military duties during the war after having been conveniently shot in the shoulder at the Battle of the Marne in early September 1914. As a wounded war veteran our undefeated patriots considered me
persona grata.
I was working in my father’s successful and profitable law practice. Since he was
—
and still is
—
more interested in justice than in law, he did not object to my spending so much of my time on important matters. On the contrary. Hanni encouraged me, too. You may also remember that you found out that in the Bauer case the murderer’s name was Franz von Ollwitz. The learned judges were administering class justice as well as political justice.

Don’t worry
—
my language will be guarded. Rhetoric has never been my thing. I prefer cold facts. One of these facts is that in those years without close but well-concealed relations to the
Reichswehr
[the small military force permitted by Versailles], the volunteer
Freikorps
could not have operated at all.

At the end of my speech, before I sit down, I will ask this question:

Can we have a democracy without the rule of law?

T
HE
T
ELEPHONE
C
ALL

Extract from Hermann Geisel’s

1925 Unpublished Memoirs

Katrin’s father was the director of the Frankfurt Opera and had been a guest several times at Hanni’s
déjeuners.
She was fifteen years younger than I, but we got on splendidly from the moment she decided that I was Radames and she Aida. I found this immensely flattering although I have nothing in common with a handsome Egyptian captain of the guard with a tenor voice.

Katrin had opera in her blood but her education about other things
—
literature, politics, history
—
left a good deal to be desired. I do not think she quite realized this until she met me. She had a very high opinion of me
—
naturally I did nothing to disabuse her of that
—
and was very good about listening to me talk. She was nearly twenty when the war ended but only remembered the basic facts and was fascinated when I told her the details and their implication.

One day, as we inspected the opera exhibits together, she made a discovery (that was amazing to her): at least five of Friedrich Schiller’s plays, all on historical themes and highly political, had been turned into operas:
Wilhelm Tell, Die Jungfrau von Orléans, Maria Stuart, Kabale und Liebe (Luisa Miller)
and
Don Carlos
. So why didn’t I write a play about the end of the war about which I was always lecturing her? Then we could proceed together to find a composer to set it to music
—
Richard Strauss, of course, or perhaps Kurt Weill, about whom everybody was talking, or Paul Hindemith, or Ernst Krenek, or even Hans Pfitzner. Too bad Puccini had died in 1924. After all, Katrin’s father had all the right connections.

I protested vehemently. I had never written a play, I said, and I simply did not have the talent. Nor the time. But she would not take no for an answer. Terrified that I might lose her, I eventually softened and sat down to sketch out a scenario. I could not call the play
Two Days that Shook the World,
because that title, substituting ten for two, had already been taken by John Reed in relation to events that had taken place in 1917 in Petrograd exactly thirteen months before our two days in Berlin in 1918. Our play would have two acts: the first would take place on November 9, the second on November 10. I decided to make the Groener-Ebert telephone call the pivotal event, rather than the Kaiser’s abdication. I did not wish to create sympathy for that kitschy nonentity.
À propos
kitsch, I would refrain from inventing a love story, the stock-and-trade of opera, because, frankly, I could not think of any that would make sense, nor could I think of any female roles, certainly not in the preliminary sketch I undertook to write. If later the opera people insisted on squeezing in a love story or two, and female roles, I may dream up something.