Listen up, gentlemen! I danced this afternoon on the lawn in the melancholic old Herzogspark naked as the day I was born; and I held no dress in my two hands, for I had none on and was naked!
Dream of it! You dreamless ones!
Oh you wretch, you wretch! You took me and used me—!
But dream of it! Dream of it, I beg you, at least this night and the next!
No, he did not dream of it, but slept soundly and deeply like a satiated beast—.
Cabaret Fledermaus
The Cabaret Fledermaus really goes all out to please. Following the appearance of the universally acclaimed and much heralded Wiesenthal Sisters, the Cabaret now brings us a young Moroccan dancer. And all this at a time of day, five in the afternoon, when “the idle world” is particularly prone to idling around. Well now you can wile away the time with the exceptional. The altogether new is preferable to the habitual, as pithy as the latter may be. It’s an energizing stimulant like tea, coffee, cigarettes. However skeptical and reserved you might be, something or other of the inertly traditional is rattled and disturbed. You start tallying up your carefully guarded capital of what was, sifting out the true worth; it spawns a change in you, a change for the better. For the stamp collector who suddenly sees that coins are also beautiful, it’s the beginning of a recognition that both may be beside the point, not an end to which to devote your life! But something must move forward in us, move forward, forward march! Morocco introduces a new rhythm in our limbs. Long live Morocco! We see before us an unaccustomed kind of light brown skin, muscles developed in an unaccustomed way. The sword dance is strangely astonishing, the belly dance is strangely stirring. How wondrous is woman’s body without the deception of drapery! It is so natural that one can no longer fathom that crime “tricot.” Goethe once admired for hours on end a young woman in her God-given perfection. He was happy not to touch even her fingertips. He considered himself sufficiently satisfied at the mere sight of her. He went away pleased as never before. Our sense of modesty focuses on imperfection. It gets caught up with that which is hidden, rightfully indignant that what we see does not bespeak the original concept of the Creator. But the orange-colored skin of Sulamit Rahu passes the test of perfection before the eye of the artist. The nobly grotesque dance of Gertrude Barrison in her green costume designed by Kolo Moser, in which she resembles a new unknown species of bird, carries us away to likewise exceptional worlds. In one of the dancer’s indescribably lovely and engaging spoken texts she declares before starting to dance that all women conform in a cowardly fashion to that to which they are spiritually or economically beholden. Beholden only to her own spirit, she, however, sought to ensnare no one, not even the public. What follows then is a grotesque dance infused with the friskiness and clowning of a child. On top of all that a hairdo that ought to catch on among others endowed with an equally lovable face! But only among them! The third exceptional act is Lina Loos. An uncommon personality, she delivers her extraordinary recitation accompanied by an oboe and in blue moonlight. The young lady expresses her pain and her despair that the man in question does not respond romantically. She dreams of Minnesänger* and an entanglement with Mr. So and So. A veritable Altenberg in a newfangled frame. We see before us a wonderfully attractive and frustrated woman, whose complaint we fathom directly, not merely through the byway of a sympathetic poet’s heart. And that oboe melody is so poetic! Band leader Scherber composed it. The whole thing is presented as an attack on the feeble reality of daily life. That’s why everyone is initially against it and almost offended by it. Even for carefree kids there’s only one Christmas a year, one birthday, one nameday. And with grownups, isn’t it all the more so? The holidays of the soul and the senses are all too scarce. Poets keep proclaiming them but they never come! So we resign ourselves and make do with the puff. What else can we do? In any case, we’d better not scorn the dreaming poets who point the way to that which we might actually need!
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*German troubadours
Newsky Roussotine Troop
How miserable you feel on summer evenings in the big city. As if you’ve been left behind. Bypassed. For instance, I go walking after dark on the Praterstrasse! It’s as if I and those I pass had flunked life’s final exam and—, while the good pupils were permitted to enjoy their vacation by way of recompense. But we are only allowed to dream.
“Oh waves crashing against old wooden docks; oh little lonesome lake; oh clearings sparsely grown with grass and brown bog, where every private tutor will tell you: “You see? This is where deer come in the evening to drink.” Oh elder brush with black musk beetles and little metallic-looking mountain beetles and louse-ridden rose beetles and light brown mountain flies beside babbling brooks slipping over big stones at a speedy clip! And the brush nourishes insect worlds! Oh 22-degree well bubbling forth in an open basin on which linden blossoms float; for the pathway to the swimming hole is bordered with linden trees, and everything is covered with linden blossoms!White sailboat serenity in lacquered yachts! The ladies lightly tanned. The whole world trimming down. Who’s going to win the regatta?! Risa, give me your hand on the pier. Noontimes loaded with 10,000 tons of solar heat, like the weight of war ships; afternoons with apricots, sour cherries, noble gooseberries; evenings with chilled Giesshübler;* at night — do you hear the swans opening and closing their beaks?! And again, the swans opening and closing their beaks?! And nothing more—.”
But we wander down the Praterstrasse in the big city. 8 P.M. Akin to all the failing shops on either side. Peaches in bins beside matjes herrings. Baskets full of this and that. Bathing caps. Black radishes. Bicycle lights blinking everywhere. As if the air, like in perfume factories bursting with the scent of violets, had here soaked itself full of the smells of potato salad, tar sandwiched between granite pavement slabs and millefleur de l’homme épuisé! Arc lights burning as feebly as glow worms on summer nights could hardly make matters any worse. Summer misery all lit up! Leave it in the dark, if you please, to lower in silent shadows! But arc lights scream: “Take a look!” They screech out life’s lapses, spilling the beans in their white light!
“Venice in Vienna,” 11:30 P.M.: Performance of the Newsky Roussotine Troop. Just a hop, skip and a jump away from the Praterstrasse and summer’s illuminated misery. As if you were to wake up on the Semmering after having fallen asleep in an air thick with red brick dust! Newsky Roussotine Troop. They dance like noble princesses!
Every movement sings out. “You heap of crippled, crawling, downtrodden slaves, see us swing free! We come from the Russian folk soul! We’re poems straight from the steppes!”
As if far removed from life’s insufficiencies, they peer at you, standing there with inordinately noble faces and red flowers in their hair; long, pale green strands of pearls hang down the front of their white silken gowns.
The songs, the dances are Russia incarnate. That’s how you learn to recognize Russia. It’s like a journey into the heart of the Czarist empire. No books can convey it. Or perhaps you’d rather read about the “noble melancholy” of the people who live there, about “the freedom ringing in their souls,” about the forests of birch trees and the embroidery in red and green?!?
Better, you mere mortal, keep your eyes on the Newsky Roussotine Troop!
Behold! They sing both chorales and wails! Just as in a warm bath an infant wails and in cold life a wise man mutters: “So be it!”
Behold, the youngest member of the troop, the most Russian of Russian Misses, shakes herself from her shoulders to her toes and lets spill a wail out of this life-filled organism, a long, childlike wail — the trill of nature! And then again somebody else declaims, as it were: “Respice finem” and “requiescat” and “Moskwá, Moskwá.”