Authors: Peter Weiss
window. Max told me once how in the World War and in the Spanish Civil War he had heard dying men calling out to their mothers, Mamma, Mamma, they had shouted. There lay these finished men, perhaps fallen for something they believed in, and the last thing they screamed for was the abyss from which they once had crawled. One cannot live unless one loves this great crack. Oh life, oh great cunt of life. In the moment of death we scream for you. Such realizations came with lightning rapidity and immediately afterward I could no longer conceive them. But they left their mark behind. They occur again. I shout, Yes, that is how it is, and I no longer know what I meant. Oh cunt of life. Now I can throw my arms around my mother again, can weep on her riddled body, can cover her sunken mouth, her decrepit cheeks with kisses, can stroke her worn hands, can now press close, close to her naked body, to her sucked-out breasts, to her scarred belly, press between her vein-swollen thighs, close, close to the hole whence I came. In Prague, in this first place where I wanted to find my way to freedom, I found only darkness and self-destruction. When my appointed time was at an end after this year, the pressure of the outside world had fiendishly grown. In a preliminary practice for later disaster the sirens had wailed and in the blacked-out city invisible crowds pressed into the streets with clattering footsteps and murmuring voices. Here and there shone the dancing glow of a cigarette, and suppressed shouts and whistles rose up out of the ebbing and flowing throng. The inhabitants of the city were like one single
widely branching black body, wholly given over to one single uncertain expectancy. When the siren sounded again we stood still, as if beneath the rushing wings of some mythological monster. We stood in darkness in the foreboding of an apocalyptic time. When the lights in all the streets flamed on again all at once, we greeted them with a thousandfold cry of hope in life renewed, yet for a long time we had been conscious of lawlessness and disintegration lurking in the streets. And on one of the last days I stood with Peter Kien, a friend from the Academy, in a bright street and we held between us a large picture I had painted, a picture that showed a burning city, and Peter Kien stared up into the air and drew in his breath with a sobbing sound, and I saw a dark mass of rags come falling down from above, and as the rags smacked onto the stony pavement of the street I saw what sort of rags they were. The dark pile of rags had a head, and blood streamed from the head, and the rags were a body that huddled itself together, that waltzed over on its side, pressed knees hard into its belly, and then lay still, stiffened, like an embryo in a great pregnant mother made of stone. People came running from all sides and we held up the burning city to them. Peter Kien’s breath came in sobs. Flee, Peter Kien, don’t stay here. Flee, hide yourself, you with your hopelessly open face, with your disconcerted staring gaze behind the thick prisms of your glasses, flee before it is too late. But Peter Kien remained behind. Peter Kien was murdered and burned. I escaped. I sent my pictures to my parents, packed my knapsack and wandered south, I
found a village by a mountain lake, then I went up to the north where my parents had escaped with their possessions. When I was tramping along the road to the south, it seemed continually as if the dark rag was falling from a great height and I saw above me the open window, high up in a house in the stone city, and I imagined the room through which a living man had just run, I saw the window from inside the room, the blue pool of the window, I experienced the irrevocable decision, the overcoming of the last resistance. Alone with my own footsteps on the smooth ribbon of country road, I rushed through the room, this last room of a life, a red carpet with a Persian design lay on the floor of the room, and in front of the sofa stood an oval table with carved bowlegs, and on the table stood a violet crystal vase, and on the wall hung a mirror with an ornate gold frame and the window could be seen in the mirror, and my rush to the window. I imagined the second in which everything solid vanished, the second in which I rushed up to the window sill and hurled myself out into the blue waters of emptiness. In the very first instant after crossing the frontier from which return was no longer possible, I flew as in a dream, it was as if I could fly upward, light as a bird, I would mount and mount, with outspread arms, how had I summoned up the energy for this leap, whence had I taken the courage for this leap, in the very first instant after the second of the explosion I flew on without gravity in an ecstasy; the air rippled around me, I breathed no more, I was enraptured, my eyes were closed. It was Death that had seized me, it was the power
of Death that had taken hold of me in the room and hurled me out of the window, the leap was inconceivable if Death had not become voluptuousness, then a current enveloped me that sucked me downward, suddenly I got no further, the heaviness of the whole world hung upon me, and ever stronger and stronger was the force of the current that sucked me into the depths. Landscapes revolved past me, I heard the beat of my footsteps and felt the falling and the terror at suddenly realizing that it was too late, and then I lay smashed and shattered in the city’s stony womb, I rested at the roadside, drank water from brooks and wells, stayed overnight at hostels, and after weeks reached the lake, ran through thickets and down pebbly slopes to the shore, threw off knapsack and clothes, and plunged into the tepid water. I lay on my back, moving my hands and feet only slightly, and around about rose the mountains in the haze of twilight. White villages shimmered out of the violet-green shadows and everywhere bright bells were ringing. It was as if I were floating backward, I hovered in the depths of a vast chalice, whose rim dissolved in the gold dust of the sunken sun. All heaviness and oppressiveness passed away, washed off by the light embraces of the water, absorbed and evaporated in the mother-of-pearl light. Here by this lake I found an intermediate kingdom, here arose the beginnings of another relaxed, almost happy existence. It was an existence that hung from a single thin thread, but curiously enough I found in this outwardly ever more uncertain state of things a tinge of inner harmony. Previously I had felt no contact with the
countryside, rather I had felt lost in it, an outcast and abandoned to transience, and only in towns could I feel as if I belonged, but there in this mountain scenery, these vineyards, deciduous woods and ancient villages pieced together out of rough stones, here in the mildness of early summer, which would soon become a shimmering tropical warmth, I experienced hours of vegetative peace. I lost the manic need to be active, and could lie on the shores of the lake in the sun or in the dry grass of a clearing in the wood without being troubled by a bad conscience. And when I wanted to draw or write something, I could wait for a long time and meditate beforehand, and drawing and writing were not so important, I could also leave them be, it was more important that I existed, that I was alive, and before working I had first to learn how to experience. I strolled through the thick, dark green woods, and even though at times, faced by this luxuriant growth and the fragrance of rotting vegetation, a sudden fear rose up in me, this was outweighed by a desire to explore, a
joie de vivre
under whose influence I often found myself singing and laughing in utter solitude. And here in a warm, starlit night for the first time I got into a woman’s body, we stood embracing on a balcony overlooking the lake, and she drew me into her room, onto her bed, and there was no struggle and no strain, it was effortlessly easy, life played with us and I no longer rebelled against it. Early the following morning I stood below in the courtyard, I washed my face and my hands in the trickling water and on my genitals I still felt the warmth of the inside of the
female body, and in the village a cock crowed and animals were stirring in their stalls, and I straightened and stretched myself in a new self-awareness. But after the elation came the depression. It was not the daily increasing pressure of the outside world that led to the extinguishing of these days, the break took place within me, I could not endure in such brightness. Incapable of living on my own energy, I had to return to my parents’ home. My father had transferred his factory with the machines and capital to the new country and the accustomed home had grown up again under my mother’s hands in the interior of the new house. I came back as the Prodigal Son, to whom was offered the grace of a place to stay. A folder with drawings, a couple of notebooks with notes were my sole possessions. My pictures, which I had entrusted to my mother, were no longer there. When she was preparing to move, she had carried my pictures into the cellar, chopped them up with an axe, and burned them in the furnace. She explained this destruction as a safety precaution. She had feared that my gloomy, weird pictures would arouse the suspicions of the frontier authorities. She had saved the home. The pictures, an expression of disease, had had to be sacrificed. I returned to this home and I had been robbed of the only signs of my strength. With her own hands she had destroyed the picture world of my youth, the dances of death, the apocalyptic visions, and the dream landscapes. With this destruction she had freed herself from the threat that these pictures had exerted on the orderliness and protectedness of her home. I stood there empty-handed like a tramp. I had no other choice but to
enter my father’s factory. The factory was still encased in scaffolding. Next door in a small green shack the temporary office and warehouse had been set up. Here stood the machine parts and precision instruments, packed in wood shavings and corrugated paper, here stood barrels and cans full of paints and chemicals, and in the piled-up boxes lay the materials that would later be colored and printed in the factory. The cement mixer rumbled the whole day outside in the courtyard, and inside in the hut everything rattled and trembled with it. I sat at my typewriter and hacked down the almost incomprehensible words that my father had dictated. Although I had to invent half of the business letters, everything developed according to plan. Answers came with the mail and were acknowledged, the building of the factory progressed, through the cracked windowpane I could see the walls growing. Agents and future clients appeared, collections of patterns were worked out, contracts signed, while the door was being wrenched open and shut with a crash, while laborers, skilled workers and engineers came in, spread out and discussed construction blueprints, while dust rose in whirls and the naked bulb on the ceiling, fed by the factory’s own generator, shook, flickered and from time to time went out. It was a dark time of year with much rain and mist, and it was hoped to have the building finished before the winter. And everything went according to plan. We lived here in the Wild West, but a few yards away from us machines were mounted onto their bases, cables, steam, and water systems were laid, a few yards away from us a huge, functional composition in glass and concrete
arose, wrapped up in a network of wires and rods. With the first snow we shifted into a new world that smelled of paint and polish and that still resounded to the sound of hammers and saws. The workmen and clerks were inspected and introduced to their new activities by a handful of specialists. In the dyeworks, in the scouring mill, in the finishing rooms and in the printing rooms, in the laboratories, in the room where the colors were mixed, in the pattern room, in the warehouse and in the office everything was set in motion, at first slowly and fumblingly, but full of confidence and enthusiasm. This was my new music, the song of the machines, and statistics and schedules were my poems, I was a workman among workmen, but I was not one of them, I was the owner’s son. But I had nothing to do with the owner, so I remained a foreign body among the large throbbing machinery that steadily grew into its melody. I lived in a vacuum between the world of my parents and the world of the workmen. If I had been anonymous and unanchored to my home, I could perhaps have struck up a friendship, a communion in physical work, with a girl perhaps, one of the weavers or a female warehouse clerk, a simple bodily relationship, but that too is a dream, in this dream I deny myself, in this dream I deny that there is only one thing for me, the struggle for the independence of my work. So long as I suppressed this struggle, everything else was bound to be bleak for me, I comprehended nothing of the living conditions of the workers, of their struggle, their problems, for the most elementary thing was not granted me, the chance to carry out my own work. But who here carried out his own work.
Sometimes I looked into the organization of this structure in which each of them was cocooned in his movements, but in which no one inwardly participated, I saw these absent-minded faces, these mechanical activities, and the extraordinary lostness and extinction of the lunch hours, people played cards, solved crossword puzzles, and such personality as there was in them dissolved into a shapeless pulp. Here one found a livelihood, one could earn what one needed for the rent, food, and a few pleasures, and perhaps there was nothing more, perhaps this was all, no one seemed to ask for more or at most only a better flat, richer food, and new means of amusement. In this existence, with no chance of starting discussions about problems of self-expression and formation where one could feel concerned about more vital matters, all my personal projects fell victim to the doubt that they no longer had any
raison d’être
, and that it was only diseased selfishness on my part that had ever led me to concern myself with them. Perhaps I lived in this factory as all the others lived, in the mornings I came in with the stream of workmen and carried out my appointed tasks and in the evenings I left again, in the stream of the others, and a dull dissatisfaction and vague dreams filled me, just as all the others were filled with them. By day there was only work, nothing but being harnessed to the production process, by day only this unique, important business of manufacturing fabrics for curtains and clothing, and sometimes this uniqueness and importance took on feverish proportions, as I saw it then, whereupon I experienced in depth the way things were made, how the raw material was