A potential mistress, yes, but one in the sentimental guise of a turn-of-the-century painting. The essential of my mother’s femininity I perceive in her clothing. She was very attractive in those years, with her still girlish though gently rounded slimness. I never imagine her body but always as she appeared, formally clad, in society. To my mind she is the prototype of the lady. I love her movements, her posture, as well as certain graceful details: her smooth arms, the nape of her neck with the line of her chestnut-colored hair artfully teased into an airy, fluffy fullness — not like Cassandra’s tightly wound pillow for baskets and pitchers. But I find even more appealing the elegant line of her clothes: the long narrow skirt, slightly gathered at the hips, the tightly laced waistline and the accented high bust of the period. Her favorite color is a light pearl-gray that invests the fabric with a discreet, self-assured neutrality which brings out the bloom of her delicate skin. For jewels, she prefers pearls. Her thin pointed shoes and soft kidskin gloves that cover her arms to her elbows are endowed for me with an erotic fascination. I develop a sharp eye for the quality of hats, handbags, umbrellas and other accessories. In winter, her furs flatter her with a voluptuous sheen that speaks eloquently to me. And all this is suffused with the scent of a fastidiously cared-for womanliness.
As if she meant to transpose this ethereal physicality to a spiritual and psychological sphere, she has an unworldliness, a remoteness from life that removes her as a possible object of my sensuality and places her in a category of sublimated eroticism. What is feminine in her awakens merely a mediated desire so that it remains platonic, as one used to put it. One might say the desire was directed at the brassiere rather than at the breasts. What I perceived as “womanly” in my mother were her female accoutrements: a totality of culturally distinguishing characteristics. The inevitable attraction of the totally different, forever unattainable and eternally incomprehensible female being, though belonging to the same zoological human species, was summed up for me in the onion skins of feminine clothing.
Whether that remoteness from the world and from reality also sublimated the desire of the men in my mother’s life remains a moot question. As far as my father was concerned, this would seem paradoxical, but it can’t be ruled out. He loved her very much, even though he never took her entirely seriously and cheated on her left and right. She accused him of unbridled sensuality, thereby probably expressing her inhibitions regarding any overt assertiveness. She feared reality; her life seemed to her a spell that had cast her into irreality. She always felt guilty about not fitting, as she saw it, into a world where everyone else was at home. Nothing around her or in herself corresponded to the conceptions she had formed about her life, and this nourished a culpability that she then angrily rejected. She felt constantly reminded of her subservience to the call of duty, as if she were forever failing at some task. This unfulfilled, unfulfillable sense of duty magnified ultimately into a nervously obsessive need for self-imposed duties. She assigned herself duties like self-inflicted punishments.
My remembrance of that early time is murky. The sunny days of childhood came later for me. I was still frightened by the stormy skies and the blood-red sunsets over the deeply melancholy spaciousness of the landscape, of which we had an unobstructed view on three sides of our house and garden. Clear-lit images, such as that of my mother at the tea table on a summer afternoon before her elfin dreaminess iced over, are rare. If there hadn’t been the brood-warm love of Cassandra and her comical buffooneries, I would now be visited in an even worse way by the anxieties that in those days permeated our problematic family life. None of them are forgotten. My allergies to all kinds of tensions, exaltations and neurotic resistances have their throat-tightening origin in those days, when, presumably, the hardness I displayed to my mother at the end of her life also originated. Her endearments were of a tempestuousness that frightened more than delighted me, and in addition prompted venomous remarks from my sister. Even though I surmised, with the uncanny ability of children to plumb the reality behind the surface, that the bluntness with which my mother interfered in our harmony stemmed from her need to find some firm ground in a life that was slipping away from her, I never forgave her for it. Nor did I forgive her her absentmindedness, which she tried to correct with unyielding opinions and rigid prejudices. The hostility to anyone not sharing her opinions and intentions resulted directly from existential panic. When she was alone or thought herself so, her glance would drift away and she would lose herself in a remote nowhere, initially filled by dreams, perhaps, but later peopled by phantoms from her misspent life — in any case the true scenery of her mind.
I see her at table, our meals a silent ceremonial. She holds herself stiffly erect and eats automatically, without visible enjoyment, the eyes either downcast to the plate or directed unseeingly straight ahead, apparently indifferent to what happens around her. She herself — or her soul, her fantasy or whatever; in any case, her true life — is miles away, beyond the dining room walls. All the more persistently she insists on the ceremony of the meals, on our table manners, on a letter-perfect service; she devises sophisticated menus, watches over our nutrition by serving us foods that promote our health, appetite and digestion, and punishes us excessively if, overfed and sated, we reject it. She requires sound corporeality to convince her of our physical reality. We have to prove that we actually exist, by means of thriving health, growth, appetite, regular bowel movements, red cheeks and bubbling exuberance as much as by unconditional submission to her unending instructions, prescriptions and proscriptions. What she understands to be maternal love clutches at the visible and the tangible. Intellectual development is by tradition left to professionals, hired employees: governesses, tutors, teachers. But the supervision of our weal and woe devolves upon her alone and it turns into a rankling obsession. She holds on to it desperately, as if it were her only support in the whirlwind of the times.
And it is true that that whirlwind was exceptionally violent. One no longer realizes today the extent of the changes that the 1914–1918 war wrought in the world in general and Europe in particular, though it did not bring so much destruction as its continuation in the even fiercer 1939–1945 war. Only the regions of the embattled fronts lay in ruins; the hinterland was largely spared. There was not the terror of aerial bombardments night after night, nor the horror of flattened cities across the continent, nor the misery of their ruins and the wretchedness of swarms and mobs of bombed-out populations and refugees. On the surface, the world seemed unchanged, but it was all the more spooky for that. In the first installment of the worldwide war which had come only to a temporary halt in 1918 and broke out all the more fiercely two decades later, an order had been destroyed in which, up to then, everybody had put faith. Critical voices had not been lacking: the world before 1914 no longer considered itself the best of all possible ones. But it was a world in which culture still rated high. The meat grinders of Ypres and Tannenberg, the hellish barrages of Verdun and the Isonzo shattered all illusions. A species of men arose from that ghostly landscape of bomb craters and trenches whose bestiality was unconstrained. A free field was given to the Hitlers and Stalins to come.