The Storyteller (10 page)

At this point my friend broke off. His story seemed to have escaped him. And only his lips, which were still speaking a moment ago, bid farewell to it with a lingering smile. I glanced pensively at the marks that were smudged in the dust by our feet. And the undying verse wandered majestically through the arch of this story as if through a gate.

—

Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski
.

Written c. 1929; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime.
Gesammelte Schriften IV
, 780–7; also translated in
Radio Benjamin
, 260–6. As the editors of this volume note, ‘Benjamin borrows the title of his novella from Goethe's poem, “Nicht mehr auf Seidenblatt” (No longer on a leaf of silk), a verse posthumously added to the
West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan)
, “Book of Suleika”. Benjamin refers to this verse in “Goethe's Elective Affinities”.'

Little Castle in the Air (Luftschlösschen)
, 1915.

I
f, between the years 1875 and '85 Baron X stood out in the Café de Paris, and if, as with the strangers of distinction, like the Count de Caylus, Marshall Fécamts and the gentleman rider Raymond Grivier, attention was also drawn to the Baron, it was not because of his elegance, his parentage, or his sporting achievements, but rather quite simply the recognition, indeed the admiration of the loyalty with which he had held to the establishment through so many years. A loyalty which he would later retain for something completely different and highly unusual. That is just what this story is about.

It begins, strictly speaking, with the inheritance which the Baron should have received at some point over a period of thirty years and was due to receive and which indeed finally came to him in September 1884. At the time, the inheritor was not
far off his fiftieth birthday and was certainly no longer a bon viveur. Had he ever been one? The question did indeed crop up. Were someone to insist that he had never once stumbled across the name of the Baron in the chronique scandaleuse of Paris, and even that the mouths of the most unscrupulous club denizens and the most gossipy coquettes had never referred to him, it would be impossible to disagree: the Baron, in his shepherd's plaid trousers, with his puffed-out Lavalliere cravat, was more than a swanky apparition; there were a few wrinkles on his face which bespoke a connoisseur of women who had paid for his wisdom. The Baron had remained a riddle until now, and to see this large, long-awaited inheritance finally in his hands effected in his friends, alongside their unbegrudging goodwill, the most discreet, most spiteful curiosity. What no fireside chats, no bottle of Burgundy had been able to do – lift the veil from this life – they believed they might be able to expect from this sudden wealth.

But after two or three months, they were all of one mind: they could not have been more thoroughly disappointed. Nothing – not a shadow – had changed in the Baron's clothing, mood, the way he divided up his time, even in his budget and accommodation. He was still the noblest idler, whose time appeared as filled to the brim as that of the most minor clerk. Whenever he left the club, he took his quarters in his bachelor apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo, and never were any friends, who wanted to accompany him home of an evening, dismissed with excuses. Indeed, it sometimes happened that, right until five o'clock in the morning or even later, the man of the house acted as banker at a green table that was just where a wonderful Chippendale cabinet once stood in his parlour. The Baron liked to play by fluke – that was clear from the rare occasions when he had appeared at the card table in the past.
Now, though, even the most long-standing players could not recall experiencing such runs of luck as those that the winter of 1884 brought. It lasted all through the spring and remained as the summer streamed across the boulevards with its rivulets of shade. How could it be, then, that by September the Baron was a poor man? Not poor, but floating indefinably between poor and rich, just like before, though now robbed of the expectation of a great inheritance. Poor enough that he began limiting himself to visiting the club only for a cup of tea or a game of chess. No one dared to wager a question. What would have been questionable anyway about an existence that took place within its narrow, sophisticated limits in front of everybody's eyes, from his morning ride, to the hour's fencing, and lunch until the bell rings a quarter to six, when he left the Café de Paris in order to dine two hours later with company at Delaborde? In those intervening hours, he did not touch another card. And yet these two hours of the day robbed him of his whole fortune.

It was only years later that people in Paris discovered what had happened, after the Baron had retreated to Lord knows where – what would the name of a remote Lithuanian manor mean here? – and one of his friends, in the middle of the most aimless strolling one rainy morning, winced in shock – he himself did not immediately know in response to what – a sight or an idea? In truth, it was both. For the monstrosity which swayed down at him from the shoulders of three transport workers on the flight of steps at the Palais D…y was that precious Chippendale piece, which one day had given way to the talismanic gambling table. The cabinet was splendid and could not be mistaken for any other. But it was not only because of this that the friend recognised it. Just as waveringly, his broad shoulders shaking, did the mighty back of its owner
appear and disappear that day when he departed for the last time, before the eyes of all the waving people on the railway station platform. Hastily the stranger pushed past the removal men up the low steps, stepped through the open doorway and came to a halt, almost vertiginously, in the vast bare entrance hall. In front of him the stairway went up in spirals to the first floor, its massive balustrade nothing but a single unbroken marble relief: fauns, nymphs; nymphs, satyrs; satyrs, fauns. The newcomer composed himself and searched through the halls and the suites of rooms. Everywhere empty walls yawned at him. No trace of any inhabitants except for an equally abandoned but opulently decorated boudoir, filled with furs and cushions, jade gods and incense jars, grand vases and Gobelins. A thin layer of dust lay over everything. This threshold had nothing inviting about it, and the stranger wanted to begin the search anew, when behind him a pretty young girl, dressed like a lady's maid, prepared to enter the room. And she, being the only confidante of what had occurred here, told her story.

It was now one year since the Baron had rented this palace for an inconceivable interest from its owner, a Montenegrin duke. Right from the very day that the contract was signed, she had taken up her duties, which consisted of two weeks overseeing the craftsmen and receiving deliveries. Then followed new instructions, sparse but strict specifications, which for the most part concerned the care of the flowers, which had still left something of their perfume in the room, in front of which they were both now standing. Only one, the final instruction, made reference to something else, and precisely that one seemed to the girl bound to a fairy tale–like reward, which was now promised to her. ‘Day in, day out, not one minute before, not one minute after six, the Baron appeared', she said, ‘on the flight of steps, in order to ascend, slowly, to the doorway. He
never came without a large bouquet.' But in what order the orchids, lilies, azaleas, chrysanthemums appeared, and in what relation to the seasons, was inscrutable. He rang at the door. The door opened. The maid, the one from whom we know everything, opened it, in order to receive the flowers and to accept an enquiry, which was the cue for her most secret duty:

‘Is Madam at home?'

‘I am sorry', replied the maid, ‘Madam has just left the house.'

Pensively the lover then headed back on his return path, only to return once again the next day to pay his respects at the abandoned palace.

And so it became known how riches, which so often served the common purpose of fanning the embers of strange love, for this one time ignited those of its owner to the final flames.

—

Translated by Esther Leslie
.

First published in
Die Dame
, Berlin, June 1929;
Gesammelte Schriften IV
, 725–8.

Cat Lurking (Katze Lauert)
, 1939.

Franz Hessel
, Secret Berlin,
Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1927

T
he small flights of stairs, the front halls supported by columns, the friezes and architraves of the villas in Tiergarten are taken at their word in this book. The ‘old' West End has become the West of antiquity, whence the westerly winds reached the boatmen, who slowly floated their barges with the apples of the Hesperides up the Landwehr Canal in order to moor at the bridge of Heracles. This district lifts itself so unmistakably above the urban sea of houses that its entrance appears to be guarded by thresholds and gates. Its
poet is well acquainted with thresholds in every sense – except for the dubious one upheld by experimental psychology, which he does not love. The thresholds, however, which separate and distinguish situations, minutes and words from each other, are felt more keenly by him under the soles of his feet than they are felt by anyone else.

And precisely because he feels the town in this way, one expects to find in his work descriptions or atmospheric portraits. What is ‘secret' about this Berlin is not a windy whisper, no vexatious flirtation, but simply this strict and Classical image-being of a town, a street, a house, even a room, which, in the manner of a cell, accommodates the measure of events throughout the book, just as it does the moves in a dance.

Every architecture worthy of the name lets its best element fall not to mere views, but rather to the sense of space. That is also how that narrow strip of bank between the Landwehr Canal and Tiergartenstrasse exercises its power over people in a gentle and conducive way: hermetic and Hodegetric. In dialogues they stride off, every now and then, down the stony slope. And just as he did with the fourteen fictional figures of his
Seven Dialogues
,
¹
so here through these fragile children of the world does the author move the Roman heart to beat, the Greek tongue to speak. It is not Greeks or Romans in modern costumes, nor is it contemporaries in humanistic carnival dress; rather this book is close to photomontage in the technical sense: housewives, artists, worldly ladies, merchants and intellectuals are sharply overlapped by the shadowy outlines of Platonic and Menandric mask-wearers.

For this secret Berlin is the stage of an Alexandrine musical comedy. It inherits from Greek drama the unity of place and
time: in twenty-four hours the entanglements of love are knotted and untied. From philosophy it inherits the great abrogated question of morality, which previously the poet has treated in its Classical formulation – with a piece of verse about the Matron of Ephesus.
²
From the Greek language it inherited its musical instrumentation. Today there is no author who approaches the Germano-Greek inclination to composite words more freely and with more understanding than this one. In his mouth the words become magnets, which irresistibly attract other words. His prose is shot through with such magnetic chains. He knows that a beauty can be ‘northernblonde', a cashier can be a ‘seatedgoddess', the widow of a barber can be ‘cakebeautiful', a bland do-gooder can be a ‘donothingevil' and a dwarf can be a ‘gladlysmall'.

In another sense, however, the lovers who wander through this novel and who are never twosomes, but are always, always hemmed by friends, are only links in a well-placed, magnetic chain. And whether we are here or there reminded of the story of
The Magic Swan
or the tune of the rat catcher – Clemens Kestner is, here, the name of that rat catcher – it remains the case that, however un-exemplary each individual may be, however unenviable his path through life, this procession of young people from Berlin pulls the reader along behind it on the narrow street alongside the bank, past the ‘bank-side landscape with the curved pedestrian bridge, the forked branches of the chestnut tree and the three weeping willows', which have ‘something Far Eastern about them, as do too, in certain moments, a few of the small lakes of the Mark'.

From where stems the narrator's gift to expand the tiny territory of his story so mysteriously with all the perspectives of
distance and past times? In a generation of poets, barely one of whom remained untouched by the appearance of Stefan George, Hessel put the years to good use with mythological studies, Homer and translating, while for others the years disappeared into the spread of dogmas, in the context of an already wobbly structure of education. Whoever understands how to read his books senses how – between the walls of aging cities, the ruins of the past century – they all conjure up antiquity. Yet even if the far-flung circles of his life and work traverse Greece, Paris and Italy, the needle of his compass always rests in his parlour at Tiergarten, which his friends seldom enter without knowing of the risks of being transformed into a hero.

—

Translated by Esther Leslie
.

First published in
Die Literarische Welt
, 9 December 1927;
Gesammelte Schriften III
, 82–4; also translated in
Selected Writings 2.1
, 69–71.