Probably she asks the question every morning, aloud or to herself, to some man who’s waiting for the train, travelling far away, and hence likeable. I should like to be old now, to cover my cowardice. If I had a white beard, or was at least bald, then I could say to her: Stay here in the junction, miss! It’s sometimes better to watch men leave, than be whisked away by them. Because if you’re old, you’re allowed to comfort girls — and yourself as well — with sage lies.
I don’t take her with me, but I do take her hand. She wipes it on her apron — the movement is expressive of her resignation. She has wiped out her desires, with a sponge. Bon voyage! she says. I’m looking at the rails, I don’t look her in the eye, otherwise we would have had to kiss — which we’re afraid to do, because we’re stupid, scared and practical-minded.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 June 1927
VIII. Ending
58. The Old Poet Dies
A few days ago in the Frankfurter Zeitung I wrote a piece about the eighty-year-old Linz poet Eduard Samhaber. I concluded with the wish that the eighty-year-old might live to be a hundred. Now I read in the Kölnische Volkszeitung that three days before the appearance of my piece, and as I can now relate, on the very day I was writing it, Eduard Samhaber passed away. I wrote it at night. Samhaber, the dead man, was dear to me, and I didn’t know while I was wishing him a long life that I was actually writing his funeral oration. On the day of his death, moreover, he was given an honour: the silver medal that the Austrian republic gives its distinguished poets. Now both the state medal and my wishes are redundant. Genuine violets will sprout from his bones — and he will have eternal life in the section of paradise that is reserved for poets. He has put aside his wonderful earthly face and left it to us to remember him by. Honour to his beautiful inheritance!
Frankfurter Zeitung, 2 April 1927
59. The Third Reich, a Dependency of Hell on Earth
After seventeen months, we are now used to the fact that in Germany more blood is spilled than the newspapers use printers’ ink to report on it. Probably Goebbels, the overlord of German printers’ ink, has more dead bodies on the conscience he doesn’t have, than he has journalists to do his bidding, which is to silence the great number of these deaths. For we know now that the task of the German press is not to publicize events but to silence them; not only to spread lies but also to suggest them; not just to mislead world opinion — the pathetic remnant of the world that still has an opinion — but also to impose false news on it with a baffling naïveté. Not since this earth first had blood spilled on it has there been a murderer who has washed his bloodstained hands in as much printers’ ink. Not since lies were first told in this world has a liar had so many powerful loudspeakers at his disposal. Not since betrayal was first perpetrated in this world was a traitor betrayed by another, greater traitor: has there been such a contest between traitors. And, alas, never has the part of the world that has not yet sunk into the night of dictatorships been so dazzled by the hellish glow of lies, or so deafened and dulled by the screaming of so many lies. For hundreds of years, we have been accustomed to lies going around on tiptoe. The epoch-making discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the loud lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a shout when they doubt speech. Since the onset of the Third Reich the lie, in spite of the saying, has walked on long legs.* It no longer follows on the heels of the truth, it races on ahead of it. If Goebbels is to be credited with a stroke of genius, then surely it is this: he has caused official truth to walk with the limp he has himself. The officially sanctioned German truth has been given its own club foot. It is no fluke but a knowing joke on the part of history that the first German minister of propaganda has a limp.
But this sophisticated attention to detail on the part of world history has had little effect on foreign reporters. It would be wrong to suppose that journalists from England, America, France, etc. didn’t fall for the lying loudspeakers and loud speakers of Germany. Journalists too are children of their time. It is a mistake to think that the world has an accurate sense of Germany. The reporter who has sworn to be true to the facts bows to the fait accompli as before an idol, the fait accompli that is recognized by powerful politicians, rulers and wise men, philosophers, professors and artists. Even ten years ago a murder, never mind where and of whom, would have been a thing of horror to the world. Since the time of Cain innocent blood that cried out to heaven has found hearing on earth. Even the murder of Matteotti — not so long ago! — stirred the living to dread. But ever since Germany has started using its loudspeakers to drown out the cries of blood, these have only been heard in heaven, on earth they have been degraded to a common news item. Schleicher and his young wife were murdered. Ernst Röhm and many others have been murdered. Many of them were murderers themselves. But it wasn’t a just, but an unjust punishment that befell them. Cleverer, nimbler murderers have murdered others, less clever, less nimble than themselves. In the Third Reich, it isn’t just Cain killing Abel; it’s also a super Cain killing plain Cain. It is the only country in the world where there aren’t just murderers but murderers raised to the power of n.
And as I say, the spilt blood cries out to that heaven where the terrestrial reporters do not sit. They sit instead at Goebbels’s press conferences. They are only human. Stunned by loudspeakers, baffled by the speed with which suddenly, in spite of every natural law, limping truths start to sprint, and the short legs of lies stretch out to overtake the truth, these reporters tell the world only what they are told in Germany, and hardly anything of what is happening in Germany.
No reporter is equal to a country where, for the first time since the creation of the world, not just physical but metaphysical anomalies are propagated: monstrous hell births; cripples that run; arsonists who incinerate themselves; fratricidal brothers; devils biting themselves in the tail. It is the seventh circle of hell whose dependency on earth is known as “The Third Reich”.
Pariser Tageblatt, 6 July 1934
* Long legs: German says Lügen haben kurze Beine—Lies have short legs.
60. Far from the Native Turf
I
Heinrich Heine is a poet for the ages and a perennially current writer. His lasting, so to speak, continually reawakening journalistic relevance vies with his poetic immortality. He was always a darling of the Graces and of women, and therefore always detested by Germany. This country that is forever trying to prove itself was minutely understood, loved, pitied and despised by him. He is its prophet. He foresaw the course Germany would take. Read him, and save yourself the daily reports of events in Germany. Every new German calamity bears him out. Every new pubescent phase of this people that is unable to attain maturity and as a result sees itself (and unfortunately other countries as well) as “dynamic”, confirms Heinrich Heine’s words about his fatherland. No wonder the number of Heine biographies almost matches the number of German catastrophes. The newest one, to our knowledge, is by Antonina Vallentin, published in French by Gallimard.
Probably it is the discreetest of all the Heine biographies, cautious, tender, forgiving, and more than half in love. The personal wretchedness of the poet, the happiness and grief of his love affairs are discerned with greater reliability than literary science and research can establish for a fact. Which is not to say that this book lacks knowledge. On the contrary: it is full of diligence. But it takes the gentle hand and sensitive heart of a woman to order so much knowledge that it appears only in the background. It sometimes seems as though the author had known Heine personally, and only then, as if to cross-check her impressions, consulted the more substantial and objective sources. And all the time, the epoch that Heine crowned and represented is not lost from sight, nor his continuing relevance, which we noted above. A very alert publicistic sense compels the tender eye of the authoress, watching the suffering darling of the Muses with pity, to keep returning to the actual scene, and to draw the analogy between those days and ours.