He puts the scarf in the top hat
and brings it out again
with a tame hare in it.)
The hare so miraculously produced from the top hat is undoubtedly the totem animal in which the writer sees himself. The harelip with which he was born, and which was operated on several times, probably played a crucial part as a premorbid disability in the genesis and particular development of Herbeck’s schizophrenia and the specific form it took. It is an identifying mark; in his mind, Herbeck takes this blemish much further back in time than his childhood. When he is asked to write a poem on “the embryo,” he forgets that strange new word, and instead writes the following lines on an unborn fabulous animal more closely related to him, which he calls the empyrum.
Heil unserer Mutter! Ein werdendes
Kind im Leibe der Mutter. Als ich
ein Empyrum war, hat sie mich
operiert. Ich kann meine Nase
nicht vergessen. Armes Empyrum.
(Hail to the mother! A future
child in the mother’s womb. When I
was an empyrum, she operated
on me. I can’t forget
my nose. Poor empyrum.)
Gisela Steinlechner, in her studies of the work of Ernst Herbeck, was the first to try to describe the preexistential trauma that, to the damaged subject, later became his own myth. Among other sources, she drew on the three-page autobiographical account written by Herbeck in 1970, in which he describes how at the age of eleven he was in a Pathfinder group under a leader called Meier; their group was called the Pigeons, unlike the others, who were Eagles or Stags.
The Pathfinders organization is one of the last in which human beings give themselves the names of totem animals, but this odd little fact is less important in itself than Herbeck’s Pathfinder reminiscence of only a few lines which, in an entirely agrammatical context, uses the very odd word Thierenschaft (“beastship”). The old German spelling Thier, instead of modern Tier for “animal” (the “h” long ago became silent), suggests a time before human beings were even capable of speech.
Since in the history of our species ancient strategies of thinking and mental organization regularly occur in those described as mentally ill, it is not at all far-fetched to look back to the basic rules governing the totemic imagination in order to find out what Herbeck meant. Gisela Steinlechner has interpreted the harelip as the symbol upon which Herbeck himself fixed for his divided personality. In this connection she looks at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that in American Indian myths the harelip was the remaining trace of a twin who was never actually born. This duality in one person makes the hare, with its split face, one of the highest deities, mediating between heaven and earth. But part of the messianic vocation is to be elect in the context of salvation, and at the same time ostracized and persecuted in the secular world. Not for nothing did Ernst Herbeck, who probably felt the grief of the despised more than any sense of mission as the Son of Man, place four exclamation marks after the title that he was given for a poem one day, “The Hare.” The poem runs as follows:
Der Hase is ein kühnes Tier!
Er läuft bis ihm die Strappen
fassen. Die Ohren spitzgestellt; er
lauscht. Für ihn — ist keine Zeit
zum Rasten. Lauf läuft läuft.
Armer Hase!
(The hare is a bold animal!
He runs until the snare
catches him. Ears pricked; he
listens. For him — there is no time
to rest. Run runs runs. Poor hare!)
The ambivalent nature of the hare in myth, closely combining power and impotence, boldness and fear, determines Herbeck’s concept of the nature of his emblematic animal.
In his autobiographical essay, he also tells us (as Gisela Steinlechner, too, has pointed out) that his mother “had a hare” at what the author calls a time of revolt and the “need for silver.” By saying that she had a hare (einen Hasen bekam) he means, of course, that she “was brought or given” a hare, a useful addition to the meager diet of the times. The brief phrase used by Herbeck, however, suggests that his mother “had a hare” as a woman might have a baby.
This hare is then killed by his mother in his father’s presence, and after that skinned. Herbeck does not mention the dish of roast hare itself, but adds at the close of his account of the incident only the confession “It tasted too good to me,” which in a few words sums up the moral of the whole story. The true extent of his involvement in the dark machinations of social life is that he was involved in the joint family crime not just as victim but as perpetrator, having helped to consume his likeness and namesake. To those who can understand it, the legend of the poor hare used by Herbeck to explain his sad fate is an exemplary tale of suffering. “The greater the suffering,” he once wrote, “the greater the poet. The harder the work. The deeper the meaning.”
To the Brothel by Way of Switzerland: On Kafka’s Travel Diaries
A Dutch acquaintance recently told me how she traveled last winter from Prague to Nuremberg. During the journey she was reading Kafka’s travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time looking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka describes one of his fellow travelers cleaning his teeth with the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that not because the description was particularly remarkable, but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any inhibitions at all. This story made me return, after I had not looked at them for a long time, to the notes that Kafka made when he and Max Brod traveled from Prague to Paris by way of Switzerland and northern Italy in August and September 1911. Much of that account is as real to me as if I myself had been there, and not just because “Max” is so frequently mentioned, for instance when a lady’s hat falls on him in the train compartment, or when Franz leaves him alone “sitting over a grenadine by himself in the darkness on the outskirts of a half-empty open-air café”; no, in a curious way the stages of that summer trip of the past taken by the two bachelors are more familiar to me than any other place at a later date. Even the car drive in the rain through Munich by night—“The tires make a rushing noise on the asphalt, like the whirr of a cinema projector”—bring back great tracts of the memory of my first real journey, taken in 1948, when I and my father, who had just returned from a POW camp, went from W. to visit my grandparents in Plattling. My mother had made me a green jacket, and a little rucksack of check fabric. I think we traveled in a third-class compartment. At Munich station, where you could see huge mounds of rubble and ruins as you stood in the forecourt, I felt unwell and had to throw up in one of those “cabins” of which Kafka writes that he and Max washed their hands and faces in them before boarding the night train which passed through the dark foothills of the Alps by way of Kaufering, Buchloe, Kaufbeuren, Kempten, and Immenstadt to Lindau, where there was a great deal of singing on the platform long after midnight, a situation I know very well, since there are always a number of drunks at Lindau station who have been out on excursions. Similarly, the “impression of separate buildings standing very upright in St. Gall, without being part of a street,” but running along the slopes of the valley like one of Schiele’s Krumau pictures, accurately corresponds to the scenery of a place where I lived for a year. In general, Kafka’s comments on the Swiss landscape, the “dark, hilly, wooded banks of Lake Zug” (and how often he writes of such things) remind me of my own childhood expeditions to Switzerland, for instance a day trip we made by bus in 1952 from S. to Bregenz, St. Gall, and Zürich, along the Walensee, through the Rhine valley and home again. At the time there were comparatively few cars around in Switzerland, and because many of those were American limousines — Chevrolets, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles — I really thought we were in some entirely foreign, quasi-utopian country, rather as Kafka found himself thinking of Captain Nemo and A Journey Through Planetary Space when he saw a revenue cutter on Lago Maggiore.