The business did badly, and now Richard is doing badly. But his personal destiny, which in spite of everything seems to put news on his path, chose him of all people to discover Rathenau’s murder. Richard happened to be walking along Königsallee, ten minutes after the assassination. He knew just what to do. Richard called the newspapers. If it hadn’t been for him, the extra editions could have been delayed by — why, an hour or by even more!
That was the last time Richard made contact with history. Every evening he sits at a little café on the Kurfürstendamm and reads the papers — papers that have passed through others’ hands. He is said to own some shares on the stock market. Maybe he is able to live on them. His soul wanders the hunting grounds of the past. Whenever I see him I feel as melancholy as if I had just been looking at an old newspaper, or reading old articles of mine.
That’s how dear Richard is to me. .
Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, January 9, 1923
22. The Word at Schwannecke’s (1928)
“At Schwannecke’s”
Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite. And, just as it is difficult to see an object clearly by the light of a harsh but flickering flame, so it is difficult for the man straining his ears to evaluate what he has just heard, particularly — as is most often the case — when it is told him in confidence.
The watering hole for Berlin artists and literary figures — where one can be sure to find at midnight all those who only hours before had sworn that they would never go there again, yes, that they hadn’t set foot there for years — houses a class of established bohemian whose creditworthiness is beyond question. None of the clientele really needs to go to bed any later than his bourgeois instincts would tell him to. And each of them, at the end of every evening, promises himself not to go there tomorrow. But the fear that his friends, who are waiting to have a nice talk with him, would say nasty things about him behind his back, prompts him bravely to show his face when it might actually be more courageous to stay away. He comes so as not to disturb the harmony — formed of fear and distrust — of the nooks and corners, and to protect himself and his table mates from the calumnies that are waiting on the lips of those at the next table. If someone had the ability to sit at every table at once, he would hear nothing but good about himself, and yet even such contortions would pale in comparison to those of the others. Still, many approach the very cusp of the miraculous by table-hopping very quickly to keep tabs on what is being said. But even so they fail to match the speed with which those who remain seated change the subject — and, on occasion, their minds as well.
Admittedly there are also some seated customers of such seniority that their rank just about permits them to stand when required, but no longer to visit other tables. Even they are not proof against the fear that somebody somewhere might be saying bad things about them. But they bear the burden of being unpopular as proof of their importance — and these eminences turn the suspicion that less elevated customers are careful to disguise as courtesy into naked contempt and disdain. All the people one doesn’t need right now are — for the person who will need them in a year’s time — no more than air* which he breathes but doesn’t need to see. Softly, softly! Before long they will have roused themselves from their transparent anonymity into that pseudonymous corporality without which it would be impossible to occupy a seat behind an office desk. Those who even today ask for nothing better than to be shadows of bodies will one day cast shadows of their own, shadows of patronage over new, anonymous, transparent airy shades. It will fall to them to dole out the movie-reviewing assignments, which today fall into their laps once or twice a year like manna from heaven. They themselves will be participants at conferences they are today sent out to cover, and they will attend premieres sitting next to critics, critics themselves, but representatives of some “new direction,” with a new terminology, which will help save them from making judgments and ensure that they stick to prejudices. Therefore it is advisable for cautious spirits not to overlook anyone here, to take in even the least of those present with a certain respect, and to greet the shades in such a way as to suggest that they had the power of speech and were capable of replying. In the long years I have observed the German literary business, I have seen zeroes attach themselves to real numbers, and amount to totals that need to be reckoned with. Yes, a few of the company at Schwannecke’s who seemed merely to serve the negligible function of being ornamental vertical lines have become strokes that put paid to the innocent plans of others.* And some illiterates whom one might come upon in the anterooms of editors, trying to spell their way through newspaper headlines, are now all at once reviewing books themselves.
Enmities among the clientele at Schwannecke’s can also take surprising turns, and it would take a naive person indeed to put his trust in one, and hope to use it, say, for his own advantage. Even after an unmistakable declaration of a so-called ink feud — which, along with the ink vendetta, is about the most dangerous custom among the Schwannecke tribes — no one can predict how quickly a feuilleton writer is capable of ending a long-standing campaign against an author that has gone on for days if not weeks. Quite suddenly there is a long and admiring review, without anyone being able to give the how, why, and wherefore. Sources close to both parties have been known to claim that a shared interest in a new type of sports car has brought about a “speedy” reconciliation between the two foes. Because for some time now the mania for speed, with which the construction, destruction, and reconstruction on the Kurfürstendamm and elsewhere has been taking place, seems to have taken hold on the priests of the intellect and their acolytes, and every one of them seems to be capable of forgetting their principles over a fifty-mile-an-hour joyride. The experience of measured speed tearing down the road seems to eclipse for them the sensation of that unmeasured speed with which they forget a commitment. And since, in our contemporary literature, a monocle is a fair stand-in for an eye, it is no longer possible to distinguish sympathy or the lack of it, even in the way ostensible foes regard each other. For which reason I have long made a point of reading personal attacks and diatribes in our literary pages as if they were merely a particular, inverted form of overture.
I have reason too to be irked by the design of Schwannecke’s: the long, narrow interior, with square niches stitched along both sides, so that various groups of clients are kept separate from one another, as if they didn’t all belong together. I am annoyed by the narrowness of the room, and by the fact that it can’t hold everyone who ought to be there. It is one of my favorite fantasies, when I find myself sitting in one of the niches in the early morning, which, here, is an extension of the night. I imagine a colossal, panoptical Schwannecke’s with a domed roof, big enough to house all the writers and all the critics, the film producers and their reviewers, the stage and its scribblers, even encompassing the studios and ateliers of individuals who profess the snobbism of a solitude that is not theirs by nature, collapsed and broken-up studies, where only the hammering of a typewriter punctuates the empty thrumming of ideas. I see before me an infinite, as it were hyperreal Schwannecke’s, a pantheon of the living — if not live — artistic scene, with room in it too for the garages of the bold poets of speed, and a racetrack for the bards of now, and even a landing strip for the tabloid Homers of aviation.*