He is strict with himself in order to be violent with others. He runs that he may whip others. He fries that others may broil. He wants war so that others may die. He gives up half his hard-earned fortune that others may work.
Oh, he’s not a victim of society, he’s its beneficiary. Socially and morally he is effective. He does the work of a hundred idle people. He’s the go-getting character out of the civics textbook. He puts nothing off till the morrow. His life is a hive of activity, chimney soot, drain smells, sander’s hum.
No motor rattle, no belt drive, no clatter of horses’ hooves. He is the trench digger, the wire cutter, the whetstone, the insect powder, the coffee machine, the guaranteed-infallible lighter, the dry fuse. Only:
He’s my friend from way back. He’s the aunt who scoured me every Saturday with a stiff brush. He’s the Kratzbürste.*
My neighbor was a glazier. His wife was a scold. He’s my glazier’s whining wife.
Our living room had a clock in it that used to clear its throat before striking the hours. He is that harrumphing.
My schoolmate was at the head of the class, and he had an impeccably neat notebook: The man in the barbershop is the neat notebook of my school friend; my school master’s class log; simultaneous equations; a book of logarithms!
He is my headmaster’s address at assembly; the kiss of my old-maid aunt; dinner with my guardian; an afternoon in an orphanage; a game of dominoes with my deaf grandfather.
He is duty and decency, sour-smelling and clean.
He isn’t a knave: He’s a navvy.
One does run into people like that, in our part of the world, even in midsummer. It feels like encountering a schoolbook in the middle of a suitcase packed for the beach.
And one lives with the idea of summery lassitude and inactivity in the world — green, quiet, almost extinct, the fly buzz, the silent moth flutter, sunshine (broken into bars), the gentle rasping sounds of a razor being stropped, the sleepy blades of the scissors, the soft plashing of soapy water, the tired sleepy chatter of the customers: morning at the barber’s, a fit subject for a Storm or a Mörike.
But if he weren’t alive, the man, this world would end — this world of whetstones, aunts, logarithm books, pecks on the cheek, knitting needles, school trips.
And of course the world mustn’t end!. .
Berliner Börsen-Courier, July 31, 1921
21. Richard Without a Kingdom (1923)
Richard the Red looks like a king in exile. All he needs is a Shakespeare to build a tragedy around him. He mooches and mopes around: the stuff of drama lacking a dramatist. He sits in other cafés and — oh woe! — is reduced to asking for a newspaper. Richard, formerly the absolute ruler over all printed words, domestic and foreign, turning to other newspaper waiters* for a paper. He, who so to speak enjoyed droit de seigneur, the right to deflower the newest editions, now receiving newspapers secondhand!. .
What?! Do you claim the world no longer knows who Richard is? Richard, the newspaper waiter in the Café des Westens? Richard, who wore his hunchback as a physical sign of intellectual distinction; the crookback as emblem of wisdom and romanticism. His physical defect had the effect of leveling class distinctions, and raised the waiter at least into the ranks of the straight-backed newspaper writers. In the Romanisches Café,* the adopted home of Berlin’s bohemians, there is a well-grown gazette waiter. He has all the papers, the Wiener Journal, the Prager Tagblatt, even the La Plata newspaper. But he doesn’t have a hunchback! My gaze slithers down his boring vertiginous back and finds nothing to catch on to. His collection is somehow incomplete. His existence as a literature bearer is not justified in every regard.
Red Richard. (sketch by Walter Trier)
Now, Red Richard was different! He had red hair. He was a special creation of the Almighty’s literary advisers, and selected as newspaper waiter by the PR boss in heaven. He has seen generations of writers come and go. Seen them wind up in prison or on ministerial chairs. Become revolutionaries and private secretaries. And all of them left owing him money. He knew what the future held for them, he knew the style of their writing, knew where their pieces had been reprinted, and kept them posted. Even as he told them, he handed them the paper — it was like getting the news still in its shell. And, if they were obscure or struggling — he helped them. In the glass-fronted cabinet at the Café des Westens hung, like syntheses in an experimental laboratory, the products of obscure living persons: a portrait, a poster for some reading or signing, copies of a new magazine that Richard hawked around among the clientele. Richard, in fact, was a patron of the arts.
In the afternoon, if things were quiet, Richard worked on his memoirs. Those memoirs were never completed. It would appear that Richard, who always had good taste, finally disdained to write his memoirs, after so many others had fatuously written theirs: It was not for him to be mentioned in the same breath as Ludendorff or Wilhelm.
Admittedly Richard did have one thing in common with all the memoirists of the postwar period: He too was never in the war, in the trenches. First they sieved out the tubercular ones — the hunchbacks’ turn was still to come. But if one happened to ask Richard with a show of surprise why his number hadn’t yet come up, he bent down over the table and breathed his secret: “You know — just between you and me — I’ve got—flat feet.. .”
I still remember the painful night when the old Café des Westens closed its doors forever and Richard went around collecting our signatures. That sampling of immortality for his autograph book was the last service he was able to perform for literature. Then Richard vanished, and it took a while before he surfaced in the Romanisches Café. Imagine the pain he felt, returning home as a visitor and an outsider, calling for newspapers instead of distributing them?!. .
For a while a rumor did the rounds that Richard was going to open a new Café des Westens. Nothing would have been more natural. His physical condition, his training, his outlook — all qualified him as an ideal host for modern literature. But nothing happened; Richard did not open another establishment. Half a year later he was forgotten. Not only because people still owed him money; he was forgotten for historical reasons, like a writer who has outlived himself. Richard once had a part in a movie that dealt with the literary milieu of the West End of Berlin. Who knows where that film is playing now? Not once but twice Richard’s portrait was hung, painted by renowned artists — one of them was König — in the Sezession. Art treated him as a patron merits. Today the portraits are hanging in some chilly drawing room somewhere, where no one has any idea of Richard’s character. . And a new generation of writers is growing up, without Richard to stand over their cradles. To think that they will never know Red Richard!
One day he showed me a box of butterflies. They were wonderful butterflies and moths, velvety, particolored, red ones and red-and-black and black-and-yellow ones. Someone had invented a process that kept the delicate covering of dead butterflies intact. Richard bought the — as it were — embalmed butterflies to make brooches out of. There are women who will wear insects on their bosoms, I thought. Richard is saved.
A couple of months later, I saw that Richard had a postcard from Leopold Wölfling, the well-known Habsburg archduke. “Dear Richard,” the card began. It was the parallel between their historical circumstances that had brought them together. Richard the Red, ex-king, and Leopold Wölfling, ex-prince, were friends. Leopold Wolfling wanted to open a butterfly exhibition in Vienna. But the ladies didn’t want butterflies. Brooches are worn on exposed and strategic places — and the lacquered butterfly wings were not robust enough to be certain of withstanding an energetic male attack! Now, if Richard had come up with something revealing, say an original form of décolletage, that would have been another matter! But he had offered a barrier instead. The times are not that interested in barriers.