Here in Germany expert understanding tends to go hand in hand with barely comprehensible jargonizing. Expertise lacks style, knowledge stammers just as if it were ignorance, and objectivity has no opinions. Werner Hegemann is one of the rare exceptions (no less German for all that) in whom expert knowledge makes for passion, and passion feeds hunger for knowledge. Style sharpens his judgment, the facts plead for his opinion — if it needed a plea — truths underpin his convictions, and a winning edge of malice sharpens, points, and rounds the writing. This edge of malice produces something close to a vendetta when the subject turns to Frederick the Great, whose sobriquet the author has evidently vowed never to use without encasing it in quotation marks. He is Werner Hegemann’s special enemy. Not since Voltaire, it seems to me, has Frederick the Great had to suffer a wittier antagonist. Here is the embodiment of the vengeance of German literature on the Frenchified Prussian. The present writer lacks the historical knowledge to refute or uphold the author’s views. He is a “layman,” but the “reader” in him would affirm that the passages of the book he most enjoyed were where Hegemann’s stylistic adroitness fed on the weakness of his historical enemy, and where the sharpness of the writing is surely sufficient to make even Frederick’s fans admire Hegemann’s authorship.
It is, so far as I know, the first successful attempt to follow the stone traces of history in such a way that makes it possible to hear the soft and vanishing tread of the past. Reading it is like looking at someone’s testament and hearing it read in the testator’s voice. Anecdotes, seemingly merely tossed in, acquire symbolic weight through the way in which they are used and the context in which they appear. The author’s near-omniscience in the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and architecture is fused together by his overall historical perspective and his style, so that his “expertise” becomes unobtrusive, and no more than a natural element of his language. The private in the historical is raised to the level of the human, thanks to his fine passion for justice. Passion for justice: That seems to me particularly to characterize this book and its author. With the zeal of the true writer he pursues injustice throughout history, like God following sin through generations still unborn. The striking relevance of the book to today is also rooted in this quality. It is fortunate enough to appear at a time when the scars of the absolutist lash are healing over rapidly, but confusion shows no signs of lessening. The stupidity that is our inheritance and the ignorant snobbery that we have learned from our recent rulers dim and becloud our freedom. Now we have this capital city. Its interests are the same as ours. From its past, for which we are only partly responsible, we ought to learn how to shape its future, for which the whole of Germany is now taking responsibility. Stone Berlin (designed and illustrated, by the way, with great beauty and attention to detail) appears just as further damaging scandals are shaking the city and the nation, which seems as yet unaware that Berlin is its chosen representative. From the fact that it has found a historian of this stamp, we ought to acquire confidence that it has a future more wholesome and less warped than its past has been. A city that has had so much knowledge and passion devoted to it surely has a historical mission. It may indeed be young and unhappy, but we may hope it is a city for the future.
Das Tagebuch, July 5, 1930
Part VI. Bourgeoisie and Bohemians
20. The Man in the Barbershop (1921)
On Sunday morning there was a stifled, almost canned heat in the barbershop: a desiccated temperature.
Sunlight, split into golden bars by the blinds, bullioned its way into the room. Scissors clacked avidly, and a large fly was buzzing about.
(To date no poet has hymned summer in a barbershop in his iambs. That would be a task worthy of a Theodor Storm, or an Eduard Mörike.* Think of the mild scrape of whetting blade on tautened strop; the soft plashing of soapy water; the flushed cheeks of the apprentices, who — because the master and journeyman are too tired today — don’t get their usual smacks: a holiday from discipline!)
But people like to talk at the barber’s, even on hot days. And on that particular Sunday morning they were certainly talking a lot.
The man, however, who suddenly crashed into the summery torpor of the barbershop — ginger blond, bull-necked, pugnacious — he talked the most.
No sooner had he slung his hat on the hook, as hard as if he wanted to tear it out of the wall, than he was tapping a half-lathered customer on the shoulder, bringing the barber’s assistant up short.
What the ginger-haired gentleman talked about was Hamburg.
Entirely without preamble he was off on Hamburg, as though his narrative was nothing but the continuation of a conversation begun on the street.
“The farther north you go, the more nationalist people are. In Hamburg they’re really excited about Flag Day. Well, you’ll see. It’s on its way. Can’t be stopped. On, on!”
His sentences grow ever shorter, he rattles subjects together, his words puff out their chests and march: one-two, one-two. It’s a nightmare.
And if you — I think — were to go south, or west, or east, it would be just the same. Whichever way you went you’d see people getting more nationalistic. Because what you see is blood.
The ginger-haired gentleman has killed off the summery singsong atmosphere in the barbershop with his crashing sentences. His voice rattles along like a yellow weathervane.
“Will you be joining us, Herr Trischke? Eh! When the time comes? Sure you will! Who wouldn’t? And it will come! Mark my words!”
His words rattle, clatter, and bang. Batteries, mortars, rifles, running fire, all come spewing out of his larynx. World wars slumber in his bosom.
Herr Trischke, the barber, would surely have lost a leg — at least! — if he hadn’t successfully lathered up the chops of the gentlemen on the General Staff. If war comes he won’t go.
But Herr Trischke is silent. Who isn’t? Even the fly, buzzing in so summery a fashion a moment ago, now adheres lifelessly to the ceiling, awestruck.
No one speaks, just him, the man. He touched rock bottom, but he didn’t rest; he worked and worked and worked till he had made his way back. He’s at the top of the tree now.
One morning not long ago his business partner came up to him and asked him for a loan. And in the afternoon? In the afternoon he was talking to his partner’s young wife, and she was wearing a diamond ring!
“You won’t catch my wife wearing any diamond ring!”
“My wife doesn’t own three summer hats! My sons don’t hang around in bars!” And if they did, by God — he would knock some sense into them! No matter how old they were! He would knock some sense into them!