Read Aladdin's Problem Online

Authors: Ernst Junger

Aladdin's Problem (7 page)

BOOK: Aladdin's Problem
6.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Why was it that within a few years, Uncle Fridolin's modest firm enjoyed that incredible, virtually uncontrollable boom?

55

It began, as so often, with car trouble. Together with Kornfeld, the sculptor, and Edwin, the chauffeur, I was driving to Verdun, the
Capitale de la Paix,
where we had some business. Edwin was a good driver, but unreliable — an "airhead." I am quoting my uncle who had threatened him several times, saying that "the fifteenth is going to be the first." He also said: "Edwin is the sort who calls in sick on a Monday." That was true, but Edwin made up for it during the week.

And today was Monday; we had spent the night at Kleber's in Saulgau and tasted the wines that thrive along the Neckar. Edwin had neglected to fill the tank; we ran out of gas on one of the hills outside the Black Forest. It was a lonesome place; no car passed, so Edwin had to take two canisters and go on the road. Actually, we did not mind our sojourn; it was a beautiful morning—we were in the mood for a stroll, a pipe, and a good conversation. A chapel stood on the hill; it reminded me of the chapel on Mount Wurmling near Tubingen — Uhland wrote a beautiful poem about it. A gray wall enclosed the chapel grounds; we entered through the gate and found ourselves in a deserted cemetery. Kornfeld said: "Lo and behold — the lure of the relevant."

Kornfeld was a renowned sculptor, but he no longer practiced. He said: "We sculptors are like the butterfly collectors who hang up their nets because the butterflies are dying out. For us, it is heads that are growing rare. We would have to go to the Africans, and even they..."

He added: "For me, a tyranny would be advantageous, though naturally, I can't say that out loud."

"But Herr Kornfeld — our experiences would tend to confirm the opposite."

"My dear Baroh, you are confusing tyrants and demagogues — that is a common error in our time. The demagogue stirs one and the same dough; he is a pastry chef, at best a plasterer and painter. The tyrant supplies individual shapes. Down to his bodyguards. Think of the Renaissance tyrants ruled everywhere, from every small town up to the Vatican. That was the great era for sculptors, for art in general."

That gave me food for thought. In any case, Old Gunpowder-Head would agree. "Caesar Borgia as pope."

Kornfeld had worked chiefly in marble; he had also studied the ancient kinds, touring the Greek islands in quest of forgotten quarries. One ofhis favorite books was President de Brosses's
Confidential Letters,
which so often talks about marble. Critics and academics are reluctant to
mention Kornfeld's name; nevertheless, it pops up precisely when it is ignored. The museums contain some good heads ofhis. But ever since he put down his chisel, he had been doing architectural consultation and designing parks, gardens, and cemeteries. Our trip was linked to such a commission.

No one had been buried on this hill for a long time, and, as Kornfeld said, the place was about to be plowed under. Soon the countryside would consist purely of roads and gas stations. We peered at the headstones, deciphering the inscriptions. One of the deceased had been a hundred years old. We had to lift the ivy off a humble monument and saw that it commemorated the single military casualty that the village had suffered in one of the campaigns of the previous century; the Iron Cross surmounted his name.

The headstones of the parish priests were lined along the wall of the chapel. The dates reached all the way back to the Thirty Years' War. Chalice and wafer were reiterated in red sandstone from Baroque style to Art Nouveau. A sovereign judge, a seminarian, a man who had been struck by lightning, many children, but mostly peasants who had tilled the soil. Perhaps their families had died out, but the stone preserved their names, stirring the reflections of strangers who, like us today, happened to pass by. They had even memorialized a tightrope walker who had plunged down in the village square.

56

When Edwin had returned with the canisters, and we were driving back to the highway, Kornfeld said:

"Now that was a graveyard worthy of its name. When I think of the cemetery in my hometown, where I may end up: a switchyard, worse than in New York."

He expounded: "You see, I maintain a family vault that I inherited, it dates back to my great-grandfather. I don't know how much longer I can afford it. No year goes by without my being pestered by the administration. The very word 'inherit' annoys people today like 'destiny' or 'the Good Lord.' I'm afraid that the North German lowland has become a seismic area. Now one headstone wobbles, now another, although they're located along the wall and most likely wobble only when some sort ofviolence is inflicted on them. I get bills from stone masons, cemetery gardeners, miscellaneous fees yet one hundred twenty years ago, my great-grandfather paid for the spot once and for all — and in gold. Evidently, more land speculators are at work there than death watchers; that's why most of the old families are giving up their rights."

Kornfeld went on: "The family vaults are then replaced by rows of uniform stones. Those people arrogate authority for themselves even in questions of taste. But just take a look at the Campo Santo in Genoa. It teems with examples of poor taste — and they all combine into a wonderful tableau."

I had to agree. The ahistorical person knows no peace, especially eternal peace. He has adjusted even his graves to his chauffeur style. Like all structures, they are meant to last thirty years. The mourners are content with a standing order at a gardening center. Such is their piety. I was acquainted with it from my job.

"That's the way it is," said Kornfeld, "the old washerwoman who saved up for her funeral, taking her shroud from her chest every Sunday in order to caress it —you'll find her only in half-forgotten poems."

He mused: "And yet something has remained — you discover it when you scratch the polish: a grieving in November, when the leaves are falling and yet seeds are already stirring in the earth. Believe me: a loss is felt here, a need slumbers here, unsettling everyone, moving everyone."

57

That was how it began, during the drive to Verdun, to one of the great cemeteries. The conversation lodged in our memories; we felt we had touched on an important issue. We then saw a great deal of one another in Berlin, socially too, and developed the theme.

I would like to say to our credit that we initially did not think of business. Kornfeld planned as an architect and artist; his ideal had long been to create harmonious landscapes outside the workaday world. They were meant to inspire pure well-being and meditation — and perhaps also have ritual meaning — preferably both in unison. He frequently quoted a forgotten historian, von Rotteck: "A compilation ofburial customs would be the counterpart of a collection of theories of immortality."

Richly illustrated works, from Vitruvius and Piranesi to Lenôtre and Prince Puckler, were to be found in Kornfeld's library, which led into a map room. I enjoyed being in these rooms. The work wing also included a studio and a drafting room, with an array of marble steps set into the walls. A garden led down to the Spree. In the garden, there were sculptures from the period when Kornfeld had been an active sculptor. Now he employed draftsmen, who also worked for Pietas from time to time. It was in the context of such a commission that I had made his acquaintance.

As regards myself, I was initially moved by only a vague passion. What appealed to me was something general, which I could serve if only by contributing a single stone. With that stone, I would confirm that the Pharaoh is immortal, and everyone carries a pharaoh inside himself.

I thought of great buildings, Kornfeld thought of forests and plains near the Polar Circles. We were united by the conviction that we were on the trail of a yearning. If a need is to be aroused, it has to exist; one cannot talk people into it. Only that which slumbers can be awakened.

We had an idea, but, like any inventor, any author, we had to go and find a reliable partner in order to make it come true. Clearly, we first turned to Uncle Fridolin, but he flatly refused. He was a good businessman, but averse to fantasies and with no appreciation of art. Furthermore, he did not much care for the thought of eternal resting places. After all, his livelihood depended on as many burials as possible, virtually in rotation. Like many conservatives, he was at the cutting edge when it came to business. Thus, he viewed cremation as a great advance, although he rejected it personally.

58

Sigi Jersson was one of my new friends, perhaps the only one to whom I can really apply that word. We had met in a Jewish cemetery that had been opened only recently. The headstones gave me pause to think: each was shaped like an open book with one or two names inscribed in it; underneath stood a list of the missing — not people who had fallen in battle, but people who had been deported and murdered. Sigi's father was one of them.

We exchanged only a few sentences; but with a genuine affinity, this often suffices to begin a friendship. It can be a wink, an ironic silence that reveals a spiritual rapport. And here there was a lot that had to be veiled.

Sigi visited me in Steglitz, and I visited him in his bungalow at Wannsee Lake, in the Western sector of the city. Bertha was not edified by this acquaintanceship, which contributed to our drifting apart. "He's not your kind — did you see the way he eats asparagus?" This hardly troubled me; after losing Jagello, I was starved for conversation with a historical and literary grounding. Sigi could oblige with both. I could tell from my very first visit to his library that he possessed an inner order. For literati, books are the costumes by which they judge one another. Hume, Machiavelli, Josephus Flavius, Ranke in long, brownish golden rows — there is a mood in which books directly radiate substance.

In time, I needed these visits as much as an old Chinese needs opium. Exhausted, I drove from my dreary office on Potsdamer Strasse to my new friend, if only for a few minutes, and when I left, I was refreshed. Occasionally, I missed dinner and stayed past midnight. Bertha conjectured that I had strayed from the path of virtue and in a way, I had.

Inevitably, we also exchanged personal memories. In our century, almost everyone who has escaped has an odyssey behind him. Sigi came from a family that had lost everything and then become wealthy again. They must have had a natural relationship to money. In this regard, Sigi was no chip off the old block; he was considered a sponger by his rich kinfolk, but his life was free of care, for he had married within the family.

Sigi's wife was a Jersson by birth, the only daughter of the well-known banker. Her name was Rea, she had dark hair and a very delicate figure. She could have come straight out an Egyptian frieze as one of the slave girls stretching out their arms to offer Pharaoh a gift. Thus, when we were sitting in the library, she would come in, serve fresh tea, and empty the ashtray. I could imagine her breasts. She entered and vanished like a shadow; all that was lacking was for her to knock as on the door of a
chambre separee,
where one does not wish to disturb a loving couple.

59

Indeed, he and I soon grew intimate. Our conversations attained the proper detachment. Strangely enough, it was precisely the skeptical minds that contributed to it: Montaigne, Stendhal, also Lichtenberg — and, among the philosophers, Schopenhauer and Old Gunpowder-Head. Often, hints sufficed, sometimes we became impulsive. One midnight, we embraced and began using the familiar form.

Our intimacy was different from the one I had had with Jagello — there was always a touch of skepticism, as ifwe were poking fun at ourselves. Self-irony is deeply rooted in Jews; it has contributed to their survival. When your life is at stake, the comic role is preferable to the tragic one. Fortune and reputation can be regained, but not life.

Sigi enjoyed discussing such topics. He once said: "If he hadn't done such a good job of helping to boot out the kaiser, then my old man would be alive today."

Sigi's father had run one of the major newspapers. His name, as I have mentioned, was inscribed on one of the marble books.

It had been a strange, yet perhaps not entirely unusual circuit from the Konigsberg Councilor of Commerce to the liberal father and then to Sigi, who had not only frequented revolutionary circles, but also agitated in them. That period had left him with a precise knowledge of the leading figures and the political entanglements, as well as semi-military habits like riding horseback in the Tiergarten every morning.

Overnight, Sigi had discovered conservative tendencies in himself; it took place by one of those meandering routes that seem arbitrary, yet lead to a specific destination. He had studied the trial of a pastor named Schulz, who, partly because of his book,
Proof of the Infinite Difference between Morality and Religion,
had been tried by the Prussian Supreme Court. Sigi had unearthed this trial in the diaries of old Marwitz, which in turn had led him to Friedrich Wilhelm II, a weak and vice-ridden monarch, under whom the kingdom of Prussia had achieved its greatest expansion. When I first met Sigi, he was absorbed in Vehse's
Tales of the Court;
he confirmed Heine's opinion of the book: "Pure caviar."

Through his new publications, Sigi had, surprisingly, increased his literary renown; the conservatives like it when an outsider joins their ranks. The switch from the extreme left wing to the right wing is not rare in history: it seems to make people's characters sharper, more inci
sive. It is the switch from idea to pragma, from opinion to facts. It is repeated in both universal and personal history and must reach deep into the material dimension.

BOOK: Aladdin's Problem
6.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Teresa Medeiros by Nobodys Darling
The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute
The Time of the Clockmaker by Anna Caltabiano
The Mad Lord's Daughter by Jane Goodger
Filthy Bastard (Grim Bastards MC) by Shelley Springfield, Emily Minton
A Donkey in the Meadow by Derek Tangye
Master Zum by Natalie Dae
The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney
The Forbidden Wish by Jessica Khoury