Authors: Eric Koch

The Weimar Triangle (16 page)

BOOK: The Weimar Triangle

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He was spending most of the year in Paris.

With his many ties to the Institute for Social Research, which used this café in the Bockenheimer Landstrasse regularly, we knew he would feel at home there. Among those present was Teddy, who was eleven years younger and considered Walter a major influence in his life, and the sociologist Gottfried Salomon-Delatour, who had tried, and failed, to use his influence at the university to have Walter’s doctoral thesis accepted. After working on it for six years, Walter withdrew it before it could be rejected on the grounds, so he was told, that his approach ignored the established borders among academic disciplines. Besides, he was told that, quite apart from that, the work was unintelligible. In 1928 he published it as a book
— The Origin of German Tragic Drama —
which was respectfully received, not least because of the implied parallels between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.

The subject of Walter’s thesis was the baroque theatre of the seventeenth century and the origin of German tragedy, specifically the use of allegory, which was basic to seventeenth century theatre and is still, often in diluted form, an essential ingredient in much imaginative literature. The relationship between truth and the representation of truth had always been at the centre of his thinking. He was particularly interested in the communication of messianic messages. These are, of course, not hard to find in Marxist writings.

The non-acceptance of Walter’s dissertation put an end to the possibility of an academic career but enabled him to become an independent
homme de lettres.
This gave him more freedom than he would have had at the university. The price he had to pay for this freedom was that he found it extremely hard to make ends meet. He did not accept any money from his family. I did my best to help him with assignments to write reviews and essays for the
Frankfurter Zeitung.

Walter was of medium height, slightly stooped and very short-sighted and looked, with his often unkempt hair, eminently professorial. He came from a wealthy Jewish family, wore a bushy mustache and was a proud Berliner. There was a peculiar intensity in his conversation. By now he had a modest reputation as a literary critic and a few fellow intellectuals who appreciated radical thinking
—
radical in the sense of going to the root of things
—
recognized him as exceptionally gifted. They were particularly impressed by Walter’s responsiveness to metaphysical aspects of concrete objects. Reading him I often think of something someone once said
— Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail
[Dear God is in the details]. One of his admirers was Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet and dramatist who had written librettos for Richard Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
and other operas. Hofmannsthal was overwhelmed by the brilliance of Walter’s penetrating analysis of Goethe’s
Elective Affinities.

Walter had published translations of Proust on which he had worked with Franz Hessel. He was a close friend of Bertolt Brecht and a great admirer of Franz Kafka. In his younger years Walter had been involved in the Jewish section of the German university youth movement. His great Berlin friend Gershom Scholem went to Palestine in 1923 and had not given up trying to persuade him to join him there. In short, Walter was torn between Brecht’s Marxism and Scholem’s Zionism.

Before meeting everyone at the Café Laumer, Hanni and I accompanied Walter to the exhibition to inspect the contents of Robert Schumann’s work room, which the museum in Schumann’s native Zwickau in Saxony had shipped to Frankfurt. I did not know Walter had a special weakness for Schumann, ever since 1911 when, at the age of nineteen, he published
In der Nacht: Gedanken bei einem Schumann’schen Stück
[
At Night: Thoughts During a Piece by Schumann
]. With his customary eye for detail Walter scrutinized the exhibit through his thick glasses
—
the physharmonica that Schumann’s fatherin-law, Friedrich Wieck, had bought in 1823 on Beethoven’s recommendation, parts of Schumann’s library, the writing utensils on his desk, a drawing of Schubert on his wall and framed maxims by Goethe. In the catalogue it was mentioned that the child prodigy who later became Clara Schumann had played the piano for the old Goethe in Weimar. Walter was thrilled.

He was in an expansive mood after dinner at the café when he began to talk about Moscow. We sat around him in a semicircle. When speaking in public, and even to a small group of about ten friends like ours, he rarely looked at his audience but kept his eyes on a fixed point near the ceiling.

“I was in Moscow for two months,” he began, “from the beginning of December to the end of January this year. A number of German publications had given me advances for pieces about the intellectual life of the Soviet Union I was to write. These paid for the trip. I also had an assignment from the
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia
to write an article about Goethe, which required discussion with the editors. I had introductions to a few of the leading writers and theatre people. Since I do not speak Russian I was dependent on interpreters. This was less of a problem than I expected. I should add that I also wanted to see whether there was a possibility for me to become a German contributor to some of their literary publications. If this worked, it might in some way take care of the question that has occupied me for the last two years of whether or not to join the Communist Party.”

“Walter,” Teddy interrupted him, “what do you mean ‘in some way’? In what way? Do you mean that if this worked you could tell yourself you would not have to join the party?”

“Something like that,” Walter replied with a smile. “I am sorry, Teddy. I can’t be precise about this. I admit we are here in the area of the irrational.”

“So it seems. But it did not work?”

“No, it did not. I discovered I am not the man to take that on. Not sufficient sympathy both ways, I suppose.”

Gottfried Salomon-Delatour tried a different tack.

“Did you get an impression of how Marxism worked in practice?” he asked. “So that you can eventually be equipped to make the big decision?”

“The answer is no, I did not,” said Walter. “From what I saw I could draw no political or philosophical conclusions. The revolution can go either way, I decided. It can succeed or it can fail. I can make no predictions. But I can say that in the intellectual and artistic world in which I was interested I had a strong feeling of discomfort much of the time. I saw nothing that impressed me very much, with the one exception of an extraordinary production of Gogol’s
Inspector General
in the Meyerhold Theatre. But I was told the party came out against it. I don’t know why. For that reason perhaps the applause was restrained. I found generally there was an atmosphere of cautiousness when it came to expressing an opinion.”

“Does that not suggest,” Gottfried asked, “that people are afraid and that the party exercises some form of subtle or, perhaps, not so subtle tyranny?”

“Yes, Gottfried, it does. But I cannot say that this is necessarily a direct consequence of applied Marxism. This, of course, is the big question. There are some who say that applied Marxism necessarily leads to tyranny because the state cannot assume control of all means of production and distribution without being a tyrant. Rosa Luxemburg did not think so, and she was no fool. And nor do many others, including Bertolt Brecht. They think there is more tyranny, exploitation and injustice, not to mention poverty, under our present system. Nothing I saw in Moscow threw light on this fundamental question.”

“If you had visited Moscow before the Revolution,” Hanni asked, “do you think it would have looked very different?”

“You mean, without talking to anybody?”

“Yes, I mean the superficial look of things from the outside.”

“I am sure it looks very much the same. There are no doubt less well-dressed people in the streets where the rich used to live. There are still very few motor cars on the road, and those, I was told, are being used mainly for weddings and funerals. And I am sure the streets with their narrow sidewalks were as crowded then as they are now. The streets of Berlin with their wide sidewalks would have looked empty, and the people lonely, in comparison. Having seen Moscow I now look at Berlin in a new light. All the buildings in Berlin seem covered in fresh paint, are spotless and therefore boring. It would never have occurred to me, before I saw Moscow, that Berlin’s wide, generous sidewalks are a luxury that make even the poorest of the poor look like
grands seigneurs.
But it is a luxury without the human touch. Moscow’s narrow sidewalks, freezing and covered in snow and mud when I was there, are overflowing with people, with lots of children
—
and with things to buy from itinerant vendors, such as shoes, ladies’ lingerie, coloured towels, stuffed birds, nuts, candy, apples and oranges, brought up from the Crimea, presumably
—
and wooden toys of all kinds that seem to have been gathered by a loving grandmother to delight her grandchildren.”

“Is it not the state that is the loving grandmother?” someone asked.

“The state is invisible like You Know Who,” Walter smiled. “The state licenses the vendors. But I understand some of them are too poor to pay for the licence. They are obviously tolerated. As are the beggars, some of them priests who beg for their churches. The begging profession may be the only one that has remained the same since tsarist times. The rest of the social structure has been transformed. I assume people give them a few coins only out of pity, not, as is the case here in Germany, from a guilty conscience.
That
the Soviets have abolished.”

“Naturally, since they have abolished religion,” Gottfried said. “What happened to your article on Goethe for the
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia
?”

“Ah,” Walter sighed, “that is a sad story. They rejected it on the grounds that my description of Goethe’s world did not correspond to their understanding of the class struggle engendered by the French Revolution.”

“And there was nothing you could tell them to make them change their minds?”

Walter laughed. “No, Gottfried, there was nothing I could do. You know what I think of the use of force.”

From the
Frankfurter Zeitung
:

Walter Benjamin is not a pacifist. He recognizes that force is required for law enforcement. He understands that peace within nations and between nations is based on a common consensus not to use force to solve disputes. Most of us consider this self-evident, but for a philosopher such as Walter Benjamin these notions require radical dissection. This he did in a long essay titled
On Criticism of Violence [Zur Kritik der Gewalt]
that he published in 1923. Unlike other philosophers, Benjamin avoids systems, categories and abstractions. He follows Plato and scholastic thinkers in studying not so much the diversity of phenomena but the diversity of ideas. When dissecting the uses of violence he ponders the relationship between the idea of force and the idea of justice. He draws our attention to the use of force in our society to enforce laws that are not just. As soon as he comes to the relation between law and justice, he finds himself in the area of religion. He differentiates between the use of force to achieve an end
—
“instrumental” violence
—
and the use of force to protest injustice
—
“expressive” violence. An example is a general strike, which is inherently a use of force, whether or not it leads to violence. Only God uses force, he suggests in his conclusion, that is neither instrumental nor expressive. Benjamin used some of these ideas in a harsh review of
Flügel der Nike [Wings of Nike]
by the playwright Fritz von Unruh, the Prussian officer who has converted to pacifism. In this review Benjamin criticized the author for basing his pacifism merely on a shallow, secular agreement not to use force rather than on the concept of divine peace. He finishes by recalling that von Unruh had published this verse in August 1914:

Standarten hoch und vorwärts nun,

Zu reden gibts nicht viel —

Die heilige Pflicht, wir werden sie tun,

Paris ist unser Ziel.

[Raise the flags and forward march,

Enough of all the talk —

There’s a high duty to perform,

Paris is our aim.]

F
RANZ
R
OSENZWEIG AND
M
ARTIN
B
UBER

From
Showcase: Jewish Music

Lewandowski, Louis:
Tod W’Simrah
, Toda W’Simra choirs for four voices and solos for Jewish services, Berlin, 1875–1882.

Zimrath Yah: Liturgic Songs, Consisting of Hebrew, English and German Psalms and Hymns
, Baltimore, 1875–1886.