The Weimar Triangle (6 page)

This remark was, of course, greeted with universal laughter, including Teddy’s.

According to her research, Luise went on, when the institute was set up four years after the war, it was, like the university, financed by private funds. But then the inflation wiped out most foundations and fatally weakened most possible benefactors. The few that survived did not want to support an organism like the Institute for Social Research, which made no secret of its left-wing ideology, quite apart from the high incidence of Jewish scholars who had found a home there. Fortunately, there was one family left that had retained much of its wealth and was interested in the project, the Weil family. Hermann Weil had been a grain merchant who had made his fortune in Argentina before the war. He had returned for health reasons. During the war he gave his views to the Kaiser, as well as to Ludendorff and others on the general staff, on the devastating effect of the grain shortages on the enemy. In 1916 he told them that the British could only survive another six weeks, at the most. In other enemy countries, he reported, there would soon be a revolution. His son Felix went much further than merely predicting a revolution, as his father had: he took part in bringing one about, or so he hoped. In 1919, while working on his doctorate in economics in Tübingen, he was expelled from the state of Württemberg because of his participation in revolutionary agitation. Four years later he invested much of his inheritance in the institute. Its purpose was to study social life in its entirety, theoretically and empirically, on the unspoken assumption that sooner or later there would be a real revolution, unlike the events of 1918 and 1919, that would not leave much of the pre-revolutionary social and economic power structure intact. Empirically, Luise added, meant studying social life itself, however sordid, directly, tangibly
—
and not merely going to a library and reading about it in books.

Teddy gave us an amusing example. A little while ago, Joseph Dünner, a scholarship student at the institute who had communist sympathies, met a tramp, a
clochard,
in Paris, by the name of Gérard Montbleu. The circumstances were not entirely clear, but probably after a happy night of debaucheries he met the tramp in a bistro near Les Halles at five o’clock in the morning, while he was enjoying his onion soup. The
clochard
(oh, how he, Teddy, loved the sound of that word) told him lurid stories about the oppression and exploitation of the poor. So the empiricist Dünner invited him to visit him in Frankfurt, at his expense. No more theory
—
this was the real thing! The
clochard
arrived. Dünner introduced him to his director and suggested that the institute officially invite him to spend a month or two with them, as a resource for students whose French was good enough and who were working on the
Lumpenproletariat
and related subjects. The director thought this was a splendid idea and did so. But he advised those who had expensive coats to keep them in locked cupboards. The
clochard
is still in Frankfurt, occupying a guest room in the house of Dünner’s parents in the Bremer Strasse, wearing brand new clothes, behaving impeccably and no doubt inspiring some of the best work the institute has ever done.

E
NTRY 6:
S
ATURDAY
, J
UNE 25, 1927

As I take my pen in hand before going to bed, I ask myself once again
—
for the hundredth time
—
why am I writing these things down? Why have I kept a diary since I was fourteen? Why is it as natural and necessary to me as breathing? I have no secrets. No, I would not object if Hermann looked at it. But it would never occur to him, just as it would never occur to me to look at his private correspondence.

I am not writing for posterity. When I said this to Erich Fromm the other day at a dinner at the Institute for Social Research he laughed and said “Let me be the judge of that.” I suppose that is what a Freudian would say. Moreover, I have no illusion that it will be of any historical interest to anybody.

But is it connected with my story writing? Do I keep a diary for purposes of doing five-finger exercises like Czerny’s? Perhaps. One of these days I hope I will be ready to offer my stories to a publisher.

However, I do not think that is the reason. I have simply told myself that until I have written down whatever it is that I have experienced or observed or overheard
—
or even said myself
—
it has not really happened. It is real only when it is on paper. Let the Freudians make of this whatever they want. To say that I am writing things down in order to help me remember them is a crude simplification. I write things down in order to make them worth remembering in the first place.

I am now ready to record the table talk at today’s
déjeuner
.

There will not be many more occasions with Paul Hindemith before he leaves for Berlin, where he will teach composition at the Hochschule für Musik. It is a loss for us here in Frankfurt. He was only twenty when he became concertmaster at the Opera in 1915, and by 1917 he was already a prolific composer, having completed, among several other works, a cello concerto and his first string quartet. The same year also saw the first performance of his Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, with texts by Ernst Wilhelm Lotz and Else Lasker-Schüler. But I’ve listened to him perform cinema music, military music, operettas, dance music and even jazz.

To please him I also invited my friend and fellow chamber musician Elise Gutmann. who I know never misses a concert by Hindemith’s Amar Quartet. Another guest was the cellist Wolfgang Herzog, who was strangely silent. I also invited Beate Ullmann from the Bauhaus in Dessau because I thought Paul would like her, even though she says she has a tin ear. She certainly has none of the unsmiling missionary zeal of those Bauhaus people who keep reminding us of Gropius’s 1919 manifesto, telling us that Bauhaus stands not merely for the new functional architecture and design but for an entirely new way of life. Beate wore the shortest skirt I have ever seen. One inch shorter and the men would have been in heaven! Good thing we were all sitting down while consuming our artichokes, our
entrecôtes
with
Pfifferlinge
and our raspberry
crêpes
. Minna has become highly skilled in spotting a half-empty glass and filling it without anybody noticing. That helps the conversation immeasurably.

I was right: Beate and Paul liked each other. Was it true, she asked him, that he gave
Gebrauchsanweisungen
at the top of his scores, instead of the usual
Allegro con brio
or
Andante con moto
? Yes, Paul nodded, sometimes it is necessary to provide explicit instructions. Was it also true that on one occasion he had demanded that the performer look at the piano as a percussion instrument and act accordingly?

Yes, it was true, Paul said. “Like this.” And he tapped his fingers on the table in a wildly irregular rhythm. Everybody laughed. I observed that it all came under the general heading of the “New Objectivity,” which really means nothing other than making a lot of noise and being unromantic and unsentimental.

To which Elise Gutmann added “and non-suffering.” Suffering artists were out of fashion, she said. All his life Richard Wagner suffered so much that he could never work more than two hours a day. He suffered from a nervous condition. One hardly dared to imagine how long his operas would have been if he had been in good health!

I asked Elise what she was going to do now that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was leaving Dessau. I knew she had been studying photography with him. She did not seem to mind very much since she had begun designing furniture with Marcel Lajos Breuer, constructing variations on the theme of his Adler bicycle with its tubular steel handlebar. The Bauhaus crowd liked new technologies but would not allow the machine to enslave them, she said. They are artisans. They use whatever means they could to serve their purpose, whether they’re designing lamps or houses or rugs or pots or books. They make no distinction between artisans and artists. And she rhapsodized over Breuer’s tube and canvas chair. Nobody has done anything like it before, she said. He gave the first one to his friend and colleague Wassily Kandinsky
—
the rumour that Kandinsky himself designed it is untrue. Elise added that it looked the way Paul’s music sounded.

Paul insisted on relating his amazing war experiences. His talking style is like his musical style: no nonsense, direct and straightforward, sometimes in spurts, sometimes zigzagging, until it hits an unexpected obstacle or breaks into a passage of lyrical sunshine. He has a rough voice and I am not surprised that he regularly tells musicians that tone colour does not matter.

I had heard his reminiscences of 1918 before but the others had not. After he was called up in 1918 he was assigned to the Resident Infantry Regiment 222 in Tagolsheim in Alsace, to play military music. The war was taking place elsewhere, far away. His commanding officer was Count von Kielmansegg, who loved chamber music much more than military music. The count particularly loved Debussy. They happened to be playing the Debussy quartet when news reached them that Debussy had died. Nothing, said Paul, his voice rising, illustrates the insanity of the war
—
no, of war itself
—
as well as that scene. And the horror of it
—
he exclaimed
—
was that the count himself was killed near Amiens only a few months later.

He had to stop. (I only learned later that Paul’s father had been killed early in the war.) He then swallowed a full glass of wine in one gulp.

Throughout the meal Wolfgang Herzog had said almost nothing. But Paul’s story seemed to trigger his own memories. He told us how in the late summer of 1918 he fled to Kronberg because of the ’flu epidemic. But at the end of October he returned to Frankfurt, attracted by news of revolutionary rioting. He was determined not to miss the city’s equivalent of storming the Winter Palace, almost exactly one year earlier. Why should Berlin have a monopoly on history? He had even heard that the boys at the Goethe Gymnasium had refused to rise when the teacher entered the classroom. No more bowing and scraping to authority, any kind of authority, ever again!

I remember meeting Wolfgang on the Goethestrasse around that time. I remember it because he told me, as though it was the most important thing in the world, that he had taken up the three Suites for Solo Cello by Max Reger. It was pure joy, he said. They made him forget the turnips he had for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We were both delighted to see more excitement in the streets than we had seen since August 1914, this time for the opposite reason. The sailors had occupied the
Hauptbahnhof
, filling the train station with men and machine guns. Naturally everyone stayed away. I heard the next day that in other places several people had been shot. I remember for a few weeks it was not safe for any former officer to walk around the streets in his old uniform. His épaulettes would invariably be torn off. For the next five years, the men of the
Freikorps
took revenge for the humiliation they suffered in those turbulent weeks.

All this now seems a century ago
—
and not a mere eight years! What progress we have made!

E
NTRY 7:
S
ATURDAY
, J
ULY 2, 1927

Lothar Kornfeld was our guest again today. This time he told us about his Hindenburg adventure. Lothar has captured the roar of a stag on his new recording device. Since President Hindenburg likes nothing better than hunting stags he let it be known that he would like to hear it. So Lothar rushed to the
Reishpräisdentenpalais
in the Wilhelmstrasse with his little machine. The president was intrigued. But he said the roar was not loud enough, he could hardly hear it. Could he, Lothar, do it again and make it a little louder? So he did and the old man was enchanted. He kept him there for hours and told him stories about his life. This was most uncharacteristic because the old titan is made of iron and hardly ever speaks.

Among the other guests was our voluble old friend and fellow string quartet player Irmgard Sommerfeld, who had considerably expanded her father’s collection of priceless musical documents, first editions and autographs that she inherited from her father. Many of them can be admired at the Exhibition, among others the Telemann scores. Telemann lived in Frankfurt before he went to Hamburg, Irmgard told us. This was a surprise to me. He was here for nine years and when he went to Hamburg he wanted to retain his Frankfurt citizenship. [Ed. note: Frankfurt was a free city until 1866.] In Frankfurt he composed at least eight hundred cantatas and who knows what else and acquired his second wife, Maria Katherina, the mother of his ten children. Her maiden name was Textor, the same as Goethe’s mother. We all speculated whether they were related, but no one knows.

We proceeded to talk about Telemann’s relationship to Bach and Handel, after which Lothar told us that he sang bass in more than one Telemann cantata when he still had a singing voice. But then he changed the subject and asked Irmgard what her father’s criteria were as a collector of printed manuscripts and books.

Four things, she replied. The items had to be well preserved, they had to be rare, the typography had to be up to the highest standards of the time and, most important, they had to be pleasing aesthetically. As to autographs, her father had no principles at all other than to buy anything by the Great Names before anybody else could snatch them. He had started collecting when he was nineteen when he browsed through a box of dusty old scores in a music store in Augsburg. He found the first edition, in perfect condition, of all three parts of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Opus 11 originally written for clarinet, but now often played by a violin.

The whole thing cost twenty-five pfennige. Even thirty years later, by which time Irmgard’s father was the head of a thriving steel company, he would have been delighted by such a find. By that time he could afford to spend most of his time on his collection and leave the steel business to others.