Alma, on the other hand, recalled everything. Names, dates, places. . I don’t know how she did it. I asked her many times to write it all down, but she never took the suggestion seriously.“There’s no need,” she’d say. “It’s not important.” And now all that’s left is what I’ve been able to retain. Not necessarily what she would have held onto, but just what, for some reason or another, has survived in one of the nooks of my memory.
After working with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, where she performed works by the young Expressionists she was so fond of and took part in the Schall und Rauch evenings, Alma’s political engagement took a more radical turn, especially when Hitler came to power. “I can’t find any compelling reason to hide my head under my wing,” she would say. And, instead of fleeing to save herself problems, like so many of her colleagues did, she decided to stay in Berlin to confront the situation the only way she knew how: by acting. She joined the Die Katakombe cabaret company and started to play cat and mouse with Goebbels’s officers because, although it had to be done very carefully, they risked satirizing Hitler and the abuses of the regime. She would be rolling on the floor with laughter when she told the anecdote about the greeting. Once they had located the couple of spies sitting in the back of the room, the owner of the cabaret would come out on stage with his arm held high to greet the audience with a “Heil, Hitler! And good evening to the other ninety-eight percent.”“You should’ve seen their faces,” added Alma. Another evening, while they were performing a sketch against the anti-Semitic measures, someone in the crowd shouted out, “Fucking Jews!” Alma faced up to them and, without losing her cool, responded, “Actually we’re not, but I’m sure it’s our obvious intelligence that led to the confusion.” She said that for a few seconds the silence was so thick you could have cut it with a knife.
The authorities shut down the cabaret and arrested some members of the company. Alma was sent to the Columbia-Haus camp, but was released a few weeks later thanks to Göring. When she told me that, I made her repeat it a couple of times. And then, all of a sudden, I understood her strange reaction the day she sang me the mocking song about the paunch and medals of “the artist of Prussia”: Hofer worked for the man who had saved her skin.“See? The ironies of fate: my benefactor is your thief,” she added finally. It seems someone knew what buttons to push to get Göring, who he never missed the chance to badger Goebbels, to revoke her arrest order. Alma was aware that her “benefactor’s” motives weren’t selfless, but she didn’t much care. “Without him, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” she said.
Once she’d been freed, Alma didn’t think twice about leaving Germany. “There was no point in tempting fate again, was there?” she asked me. And, stubborn as ever, she continued her particular battle in the Viennese cabarets. First at Literatur am Naschmarkt and, when they shut it down as a result of the annexation, at Wiener Werkel. Besides performing, what she most enjoyed was writing lyrics for the songs and adapting them to melodies the audience was familiar with. Her biggest hits were a parody of Hitler’s speeches with the opening music to Tannhäuser and a spoof of the Nazi military parades set to the final tune from the first act of The Marriage of Figaro. More than once she told me that it wasn’t an easy period, but not having to bite her tongue made up for all the risks. “It’s better to face up to things than to turn your back,” she often repeated. It didn’t last very long though, because the trip to Prague to see her sick father put an end to it.
Despite the time she spent in Ravensbrück, Alma never regretted having ridiculed the vile people who locked her up there. In fact, she was proud of it. She said that, when there was nothing more she could do, at least she never lost her convictions. Come to think of it, that seems like a good center for her chromatic star. That is if her figure is a star, of course.
I don’t know if, in my case, I can say the same thing. Ida Bienert, the first collector to buy one of my paintings, once told me that she liked my work “because it was honest,” but I don’t know if that has any relationship to “facing up to things.” I’ve always tried to be honest, that’s true. And engaged as well, but with my work. I’m just a painter in love with my work, which, after all, is where I had to end up finding my recompense. In fact, the only one that counts. I think I’ve achieved that. In the words of Braque,“the rest is just fool’s gold.” Before him, Herbert Kegel, one of the few teachers from the Academy whom I remember fondly, said: “If you work hard, without rushing or shortcuts, if you have enough patience, everything will come in due time.” Taking his classes was a privilege, because he wasn’t as inflexible or overbearing as the others and, in addition, he made us understand that a good teacher is just a trampoline and that, sooner or later, we had to jump on our own. Without fear of crashing. Professor Kegel didn’t lecture us when we made mistakes or didn’t follow his instructions to the letter. And when he saw that we were discouraged because the direction we’d chosen had led us to a dead end, his response was always the same: “Don’t complain. You know more than when you started: where you shouldn’t go.” And he smiled with satisfaction. He was quite a character. Squat, with very thick eyeglasses, a fluty voice and his shirt cuffs stained with paint. Enough to turn him into the butt of our jokes, as happened to other teachers who were actually much less tempting, but instead he won our respect by treating us as equals. I don’t know what happened to him. The last I heard was that Professor Müller, who had been promoted to rector of the Academy, had fired him because he was a Jew.
Yet being useful is a horse of a different color. Alma said that, acting in the cabarets, she had felt useful. I can understand that. I suppose that painting can also be a way to be useful, but that wasn’t my intent. It’s much simpler than that. For me, it’s not about understanding the world or embellishing it. It’s not about capturing the meaning of my existence or beating death. I’ve only ever wanted to be happy doing what I love. If, in doing so, I’ve given someone else a moment of comfort or if, as Matisse longed for, a painting of mine has become an armchair to provide relaxation from fatigue, that’s fine with me. I feel the same way about life. I’ve never had grand pretensions. And I don’t regret this now that it’s nearing its end but, if I were looking for weak points, maybe I wish I’d been a bit more involved. I’ve too often been just a slack-jawed onlooker.
One morning while I was drawing, a European goldfinch approached a thistle that had somehow survived just past the trench’s parapet. After a week of rain, the intensity of its colors amid the mud was like an offering. The red of its face, the yellow patch on its wings, the white of its chest and legs, the black of its tail. . They were so vivid that it seemed someone had cut it out, as if it were a collage, to paste onto the brown of no-man’s-land. When I saw it, I remembered my father, in front of Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch, telling me that Grandma Johanna had one and that sometimes she would take it out of its cage and let it take food from her lips. “Yeah, I knew that already. And she would talk to it,” I added. My father’s jaw dropped. Then I confessed that, one day, spying on her, I’d caught her explaining to the bird how she’d just gotten mad at me because, as usual, I didn’t want to take a bath.“As I live and breathe,” she complained. “That boy is so stubborn.” When she stopped talking, the goldfinch warbled. I had followed my grandmother to find out if she was very cross, and I went over and asked her, naively, what the bird had answered.“That, if you don’t bathe more often, you will get all scabby and turn into a scarecrow.” But when she saw my horrified expression, she started to laugh and gave me a hug. “Aren’t you a gullible one!” she said while I pressed myself up hard against her chest and breathed in the scent of camphor that came through her clothes. While the goldfinch pecked at the thistle seeds, I thought that it wasn’t that hard to turn into a scarecrow. You just had to live in a trench with water up to your knees. The only difference was that the itchiness from the lice made it impossible to stay still. I drew a couple of sketches of the bird with my colored pencils and, for a few moments, it seemed that the smell of Grandma Johanna drowned out the disgusting stench coming off of me and the mud filled with dead bodies. But the calm didn’t last long. A shot broke the silence and turned the goldfinch into a clump of bloody feathers. I remember that the seconds it took the thistle stalk to stop moving seemed like an eternity.