That came after the only time he attended one of her performances. After the premiere of Spring Awakening at the Kammerspiele, as she waved into the whistling crowd, Alma saw her father’s eyes staring at her from one of the first few rows. The play, in which Wedekind attacks adult moral prejudices and hypocrisy, was too much for traditional conservative minds. And, for Alma’s father, the role of Wendla, the naive, idealistic girl who dies after a botched abortion, was the last straw. When she got home, after wandering around all night trying to screw up the courage to confront him, Alma found her things at the foot of the stairs. They only saw each other on two more occasions.
A few months later, taking advantage of some contacts she got from a friend in the Prague circles — I think she mentioned Paul Kornfeld, but I’m not sure — Alma went to Berlin to study at the Deutsches Theater Institute and work with Max Reinhardt. “I owe him everything,” she told me more than once. With Reinhardt, she not only learned to “do real theater” but also to be daring enough to make the most of her versatility. Alma could move easily from the classics to young contemporary playwrights, or from denser, philosophical texts to parodies and cabaret songs. Her curiosity was boundless. And, when performing expressionist drama or acting in the evenings at Reinhardt’s cabaret, Schall und Rauch, she showed her nonconformity with and rejection of an increasingly degraded social and political situation. I imagine that the years living with her father made her particularly uncompromising with moral hypocrisy and the abuse of power.
Alma knew many cabaret songs. When I spoke to her about Hofer for the first time, she sang me one whose last verse mocked Göring’s medals and paunch, calling him “the artist of Prussia.”“Is it yours?” I asked her. “No, not by a long shot, someone added that verse to a song by Waldoff,” she answered, a tinge of admiration in her voice. I guess if I had known Claire Waldoff was one of her idols, I wouldn’t have been surprised that she mentioned her as if she were “Tebaldi” or “Callas.” Despite the lightness in tone, I could tell that chatting about Göring wasn’t her cup of tea.
If “Waldoff ” had met Hofer, she probably would have dedicated one of her diatribes to him. No, not probably. Definitely. Because Hofer — a cynical, arrogant social climber — was a perfect target. He became Göring’s adviser through various machinations and, once he got the position, held onto it with evil, intimidating cunning. And, like all social climbers, he had a great skill for self-protection. When the Allies recovered part of Göring’s collection, hidden in a tunnel in the town of Berchtesgaden, Hofer offered to collaborate with them and, without the slightest scruples, pretending to be someone else, he took advantage of the media presence to act as a guide for the recovered works. In one of the photographs, published in Life magazine, he is showing — with one hand on his hip and the other on the painting, a Leda and the Swan by Leonardo that’s not actually by Leonardo, but by one of his disciples. Judging by Hofer’s supercilious pose, it seems he didn’t know that or, if he did, he hid it with his characteristic cynicism. Although it pains me to admit it, I can’t help but feel somewhat envious at seeing him so confident, because there have been many points in my life where I should have been bolder. “There’s no need for you to always have that frightened look on your face,” my father would say. “People can see it, and then you’re done for.” I suppose Hofer noticed it too.“You decide.” My paintings or the Cranach, for “the artist of Prussia.”
My character didn’t help me much at school either. Luckily there were more tempting prey in my class, like “egg face,” “skunk,” “booger-eater,” and “wanker.” Once I got used to being ignored, which was considerably more tolerable than the humiliations the class martyrs were subjected to, I could do my own thing without many obstacles. Things changed with the arrival of Marcellus Goldschmidt, my closest childhood friend, because, when he noticed me, I became visible. Maybe even too visible. Marcellus was a dunderhead, he had no interest in school, but he was clever enough to get what he could out of things. And that’s where I came in. One fine day, sitting at the back of the classroom, he offered me a “proposition,” one of his favorite words. Marcellus had taken his father’s collection of erotic postcards and, when he saw my drawings, he realized he could palm them off on our classmates in exchange for their homework.“You copy and I’ll distribute. What do you think?” he asked me. I accepted without the slightest hesitation. Not so much to save myself having to do equations and Latin translations, which I don’t mind, but mostly not to disappoint him since, actually, the only one who came out ahead was Marcellus, because it took me more time to copy the postcards than to do my homework. The “proposition” went on for less than a trimester and ended up getting us both expelled.
Even though we weren’t in class together anymore, we still saw each other. In secret at first, because our parents didn’t want us to be friends. Until I started at the Fine Arts Academy, we were inseparable. We could spend hours talking about everything and nothing. Or out on the streets, spying on the girls we liked. Or waiting to slip into the variety shows at the Wintergarten or the El Dorado. What I remember best of all is one evening at the Circus Sarrasani. We were so dazzled by one of the amazons that we were talking about her for weeks. “Can you imagine her naked?” Marcellus would ask me when we locked ourselves in his room to masturbate. No, I couldn’t imagine her naked. Perhaps because, at that point, I had only seen Marcellus’s sister in the nude, on the sly and in very dim light, and I was incapable of establishing any link between that pale, bony body and the exuberant women on his father’s postcards. Later, as often happens, I lost track of him. We only ran into each other once and, when I told him my job was coloring postcards, he laughed like a madman as he patted me on the back.“You see? Everything happens for a reason. Thanks to me you have experience in the world of postcards.” The last thing I heard about Marcellus was that he died in Auschwitz.
I had never seen my father so upset. On the way home from the meeting with the school principal, all he said was “I didn’t expect this from you. I’m so ashamed!” And he didn’t speak to me for a week. I was used to his silent phases, when the sadness that darkened his gaze contaminated everything he did, but that time was different, because I knew I was the only one responsible. And over time I’ve learned that there’s nothing worse than letting down someone you love. Or maybe there is: when someone tries to make you believe that you would’ve disappointed someone who is no longer around. “Have you even thought about what your mother would think about all this?” my father asked me a few days later. No, I hadn’t even thought about it. And I doubt it was some low blow to her memory. I like to imagine that she occupied a separate place, some sort of secret territory where the boundaries between what I’d been told about her and what I’d had to invent to fill in the gaps blended together. It’s hard to live with the idea of someone that you’ve created based on other people’s memories, because often there’s no way to make them fit with all the things you don’t know. Besides, even though it was hard for me to accept, the fact that Mother had eyes like mine, was observant, and also liked potato fritters and Friedrich’s landscapes didn’t really mean anything at all, since I don’t know if those things were true or just my father’s strategy for giving me something to cling to. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would have been like to live with her, but I can’t. Everything’s been filtered through my father’s critical lens, through his ability to tell me stories — the honeymoon, a rainy day in Moritzburg, my birth — and to evoke small details — a word, a gesture, a color. Or a shared obsession.“Your mother couldn’t stand hands with their nails all bitten down either,” he would say to me every once in a while. Who knows. . I suppose that, once again, it’s a question of balance between the whole and the parts, which is impossible to strike when you haven’t lived with someone long enough.