Authors: Peter Weiss
etched in the glossy clarity of this picture, high in the air the flying boy with the little red umbrella, blown along over the trees and the green field and the white church, and behind him the black cloud with the slantwise bursting squall of rain. Struwwelpeter and then the wicked, sad fairy tales, these were part and parcel of the world in which I grew up, in them was expressed a distressing, suffocating truth. These clearly displayed terrors and cruelties were better than uncertainty. It was better to stand quite close in front of the danger and look it in the eyes, it was better to see that it was really there than to lie painfully in the dark and only to guess at it. My feeling of abandonment also decreased as I saw that others too were subjected to similar experiences, so that I was no longer quite so lost, I belonged to a community of the bewitched, for whom everything was strange and phantomlike. I belonged to a group of wanderers who had gone into the land of horror. The gruesome was my special province. Protectedness and snug peacefulness repelled me, I felt downcast when I heard about lovely children, kind parents, rich rewards. Depictions of protectedness, of warmth and content evoked in me a searching pain. Perhaps somewhere this security did exist, these rooms that smelled of freshly baked pretzels and in which a friendly old grandmother sat in the rocking chair and a cat played with the ball of wool, but for me it was old Aunty Lenelies, out there in the wavy, headily scented fields, the spooky Corn Witch who suddenly ran out to the edge of the path and kidnapped the child, for me there was losing my way in the
forest, the morass with the will-o’-the-wisps and the witches’ cabins. I knew what it felt like to crouch in a cage and to hold out through the bars to the witch a bone instead of a finger. I knew the fearful suspense when, right in front of me, she felt out the bone, when I heard her bleating that she wanted pretty, fat little children, nice juicy morsels, to slaughter. The parkland around our house assimilated all the fairy tales, it was enchanted, and amid its mosses, its thick bushy places, its gnarly roots like cartilage, lived animals that talked, gnomes, robbers, and fairies. Here I saw the red-bearded dwarf Rumpelstiltskin dancing, saw how he split himself in two, and here in a tumbledown farmyard at the edge of the wood, the head of the horse Falada was nailed to the wall and I heard a hollow voice within him call out, If your mother knew, if your mother knew, her heart would break. In one of these books there was a picture of two children, a boy and a girl, sitting high up in the branches of a large tree. They had lost their way in the forest and had climbed up the tree to keep a lookout. But all around there was nothing to see but green impenetrability and so they had fallen asleep, snuggled up next to each other. The picture expressed that there was no longer a way back, the lostness of the two children was so absolute that all their fear somehow vanished. Their clothes were ragged from their long wanderings, their faces showed signs of their privations, but now they were completely given up to sleep, completely shut off from the world. In this picture I found something that lay beyond witches, ghosts and monsters, complete
stillness, quiet and solitude, comfort and strength. I remember another book, with bendy, gray-green covers, a child’s Bible with illustrations in the style of the Old Masters. I see before me a picture that depicted the princess on the banks of the Nile finding the basket in which Moses lay. The princess is clad in a veil through whose transparence the shape of her body may be guessed, a female slave holds a protective fan of palm branches over her. In my sketchbook I drew a copy of the princess, originally her whole figure with her sexual features strongly emphasized. Then just her face, a face that became ever more immense until finally the whole sheet was filled with her dark profile and her huge, spying eyes. Next to the first page, which reveals that I had given much attention to the structure of the female body, was a pair of scissors wide open in readiness to cut, and, as if to soothe my fear of the menace, I had painted a jumping jack head between the gaping blades of the scissors and on the sprawled-out puppet legs put long boots. It was as if my own knowledge was frightening me, and then the princess’s face began to look like my mother’s, the domineering dark eye, that was my mother’s eye, the eye that missed nothing. On another page of the Bible was depicted the building of a pyramid. Amid whiplashings by the guards the slaves lugged massive stones up the sloping ramps, here and there one broke down and perished in the dust. My fantasy was nourished by this picture’s emanations, I lived among guards whose thongs lashed me to pieces, I savored all the sorrows of humiliation and later, when I found
Ben
Hur
, I experienced as a chained galley slave the pleasures of direst distress. There was the captive warrior, who, bound naked to the back of a stag, was driven into the thorn thicket. There were the gladiators who wrestled with lions in the arena, there was the Foreign Legionary who lay wounded in desert sand, beset by prowling hyenas. The pictures that I found in the Bible, all these pictures of persecutions and tortures, of plunderings and murders, of slanders and penances, all these formed the groundwork for new visions which blended with my destructive games. I read of steel warships blown to pieces by grenades, of torpedoes launched from a U-boat in which the crew listened with bated breath as it steered toward the enemy ship’s side, leaving behind it a telltale trail of foam on the water’s surface, I read of the bloody bodies of the wounded, of comrades rescuing each other from the flames, of heroic captains who stuck to their posts on the bridges of their sinking ships and allowed themselves to be sucked down with the wreck into the depths of the ocean, I read of adventurous pirateering expeditions that landed on distant shores, I read of fights in snowstorms on high and rocky mountain peaks, of troops who charged out of their trenches at night in downpours of rain, to butcher each other in close combat in the mud, I saw the picture of the Lancers who rode out in the pallidly luminous dawn, and in brief doubt I asked myself where these Lancers were riding to, and why, as the song said, they rode to an early death, and I foresaw their folly, I felt something of the intangible horror that was the purpose of all my
reading, when I saw the picture of the Indian prisoners brought to execution bound to the mouths of cannons and read the caption underneath that said that with such a death not only the body but also the soul is destroyed. There are scenes in a book of which I hardly know the title or author, scenes that are as unforgettable to me as scenes from
The Red and the Black, Hunger, Pan
, and
The Idiot
. There is a river in a jungle and from one bough that stretches far out over the river hangs an Indian, ready to throw himself onto the approaching canoe, a moment of extreme suspense. There is a room in a house in a provincial town, I do not know what happened in this room, nor who is in this room, there is only this room with a cupboard, a bed, and closed shutters, perhaps it is Sunday and everyone in the house is sleeping, and someone is eavesdropping here in this muffled room and is planning something and is full of expectation. There is the island on which the shipwrecked of the Pacific have landed, their reed huts rise, clearly outlined between the tall, slender palm trunks. My thought of flight to far-off lands was concentrated in this picture. The curious thing was that, considering the out-of-the-way places and sights, something like recognition arose in me, nothing was so surprising and exotic that it did not find an understanding echo somewhere within me. My reading was not selective. I was attracted or repelled according to hidden laws. Countless books I merely skimmed through, I had scarcely thumbed through their pages before I knew that they were nothing for me, many that were later to be of value to me
passed meaningless through my hand. Others captivated me with a single word.
The Possessed, The Insulted and Injured, The House of the Dead, The Devil’s Elixir, Black Flags, Inferno
—these were the titles that suddenly flared up in front of me and lit up something within me. There was something magical about these titles, they went straight to my heart. Reading them, the fumbling and searching that I had experienced in front of the door with the red and blue panes and upstairs in the loft matured. My whole life was a fumbling and searching. I penetrated into music, into the architecture of fugues, into the tortuous labyrinths of symphonies, into the hard structure of jazz, into Oriental chimes, nothing was unfamiliar to me. I understood the wailing of Chinese flutes and the solemnity of medieval songs, I was filled to bursting with music, when I moved it was as if a veil of sound jingled within me, my steps evoked throbbing drumbeats, interior instruments played continuously. At home I lived like someone besieged. My room was like a fortress. I had filled its walls with pictures of masks and demons, and with my own drawings whose shrieking figures frightened off the intruder. I felt the explosive force within me and knew that I had to devote my life to the expression of this explosive force, but at home my attempts were regarded as aberrations of which one did not have to take serious account. Driven by imperious inner urge I left my room at night, naked and in nameless excitement. I heard the mattresses creaking under my parents’ bodies, heard their heavy breathing, perhaps they were lying sleeplessly, thinking
of my misery. I, however, crept naked into the room where my sister Margit lay. She saw me come in, sat up in bed, a street lamp projected the broken image of the window and the filigree work of the pattern on the curtains, across the wall and ceiling. Noiselessly I came to Margit’s bed, sat next to her, and noiselessly we explored each other with bated breath, and Margit too stripped off her nightdress and my hands glided over the small swellings of her breasts, passed over her soft but slowly hardening nipples, spread over her belly and the childlike smoothness of her genitals, and then we lay side by side, pressed ourselves close to one another and my penis stiffened and pressed itself against the warm part between her thighs, and so we lay, mouth to mouth, while our parents in their bedroom breathed and groaned. On other evenings, when our parents had gone out, I approached Elfriede, who had been hired by our parents to take care of us. In my room we practiced something we called gymnastic exercises. Gymnastics is useful and strengthens the muscles, gymnastics refreshes the mind, no one can object to it if we place ourselves side by side and bend backward and forward or if we lean back to back with our arms linked and hoist each other into the air. That is sport. That I only wore a towel about my hips was to allow the body to breathe more freely. And Elfriede took off her dress only in order that it should not get rumpled in the course of our exertions. If we placed our hands on each other’s belly or thigh, this was only for support, and if Elfriede stripped off her slip and rolled down her stockings she
did so only for the sake of greater freedom of movement. She was still decently dressed, in brassiere and panties. Kissing was out of the question, I was not allowed to touch her breasts, though she felt my chest to test the beating of my heart. Once when I was bending over backward my loincloth came loose and Elfriede rushed out with a shriek, I ran after her through the dark corridor, the towel hanging over the stiff-out phallus, followed her into her room, which was situated next to the hall leading to the door of the flat, but just as I had leaped over the threshold of her room, I heard the sound of a key being turned in the door and I turned about, fled back through the corridor, back into my room, slipped on a dressing gown, then on a sudden inspiration charged into the sitting room, switched on the radio and was sitting there, subduing my panting with difficulty, when my mother entered in a rustling evening gown and in glittering jewelry. It seemed to me that my flight must still be visible in the hall outside, the imprint of one single great leap transfixed in timelessness. This period of my existence, full of bottled-up disaster, seems to lie endlessly far back, further back than the earliest days of childhood. I look at that time as if from another life, a stranger before the I from which I have emerged. I see the endless columns, hear the monotonous march beat, the clatter of nailed boots, the jingling of daggers on their belts. Again and again came the flags and the standards, the extinguished anonymous faces, the mouths opened in song, again and again came the drums, and above the city a vast fire seemed to glower.
Ceaselessly the march beat throbbed, like a pulse in the city’s intestines, something was being charged and gained ground, seized me, seized all of us, a force that had throbbed for as long as I could remember, and even earlier, at the time of my birth and of the mythical years when the bombardments lay dully muffled along the horizons, when the wounded bled to death in field hospitals. I too was trapped in a merciless development, and even if I was one of those who fled, I too was melted down into this ceaseless marching, it was as if I had stood here from the beginning at the curb and had seen the mass pass by, linked together and grim, my brothers were with them, armed with knotty sticks, with a look of entrancement on their faces, with steel helmets and the emblems of a new and terrible crusade. Even if, in secret, I sought after other truths, the compulsiveness of a feeling of solidarity with this marching got hold of me, the compulsiveness of the crazy idea of a common destiny. The voices of dream were suppressed by the shouted commands of reality. My anxious protests, my tiny attempts at rebellion were nipped in the bud. I could not recognize my position. Recognition only comes later when it’s all over. Later I could understand and assess, but at the time I was blindly drawn along by the current. At that time I thought only of my poetry, my painting, my music. Had I not suddenly been faced with a drastic change I would have been borne along in the torrent of marching columns, into my destruction. This sudden change took place after hearing one of the speeches which in those days spewed out of the loudspeakers and
which before my realization possessed an inconceivable power over me, but which afterward seemed like an incoherent screaming from hell. Next to me sat Gottfried, my half brother, and we listened to the hoarse screaming, we were overcome by this screaming, felt only that we were overpowered, we did not grasp its content, indeed there was no content, only emptiness of unprecedented dimension, emptiness filled with screaming. So overpowering was this emptiness that we completely lost ourselves in it, it was as if we were hearing God speaking in oracles. And when the hurricane of jubilant summons to death and self-sacrifice, which at the time seemed like so much cheering for a gold-gleaming future, had run its course, Gottfried said, What a pity you can’t be with us. I felt neither surprise nor fear at these words. And when Gottfried then explained that my father was a Jew, this came to me like the confirmation of something I had long suspected. Disclaimed awareness came to life in me, I began to understand my past, I thought of the gang of persecutors who had jeered at me in the streets and had thrown stones in instinctive obedience to a tradition of persecution of those who were different and had inherited contempt for certain facial features and essential characteristics. I thought of Friederle, who was one day to become a model of the heroic defender of the Fatherland, and at once I was entirely on the side of the underdog and the outcast, though I still did not understand that this was my salvation. I still only grasped my lostness, my uprootedness, I was still far from taking my fate into my own hands, and