The Weimar Triangle (8 page)

When I introduced the handsome young Teddy I noticed right away that she found him attractive. When I said that he was a great admirer of Arnold Schoenberg she exclaimed, “Good. I adore him!” But, for the moment, to my great surprise, she was more interested in what she called
la situation allemande
, specifically the inflation. She said she was so glad to be able to hear first-hand accounts of that time. How did we all survive with money becoming worthless and millions of people losing all their savings? She shook her head in disbelief.

Klaus Kolmar replied, a little ponderously, that in fact many people were irredeemably damaged, both materially and psychically.

I agreed. The stories people tell usually belittled things. A calamity could so easily become a mere anecdote, a year or two later. Of course Marie-Laure had read some of those stories in the Paris papers. We would have to wait a few more years, I said, before we could really tell the extent of the psychological damage, coming, as it did, on top of our defeat and the so-called “revolution,” and the turmoil that followed. We had to think of it all as one single experience, as one total, collective collapse. But there was one exception. There was a period around 1920 when the devaluation of the mark was as yet proceeding at a snail’s pace and nobody could possibly know what was going to happen
—
there was an economic upswing when suddenly we could buy all kinds of lovely things that had not been available since 1914. But in its later stages, the sky-rocketing, catastrophic inflation pulled the rug from under everyone’s feet and destroyed the last vestiges of stability. Its symbolism was devastating. At the same time, the experience was in some strange way exhilarating.

Marie-Laure remembered that someone told her there had been delirious dancing at funerals.

There was delirious dancing on every occasion, I said. We went through a universal dance craze. Everyone felt dizzy in the head, as dizzy as the currency
—
one dollar worth a trillion marks. It is convenient that we Germans use the same word
— Schwindel —
for dizziness as for, well, cheating. Since the state was swindling everyone, everyone went
schwindlig
with dancing. Not only with dancing
—
there was also an outright erotic explosion.

How charming, the
vicomtesse
observed, narrowing her eyes. I could imagine her seeing scenes of copulation in her mind’s eye, like a painting by Bruegel.

In due course, I went on, the currency was stabilized and, on the surface at least, so have our love lives. We have more or less recovered. But this may be deceptive.

She asked me whether I had always preserved my decorum. Yes, I told her, I did. Most of the time, anyway. In situations like that, it is always other people who go crazy.

I told her how, during the summer holidays in 1922, when we were staying with our two boys at a hotel in the Black Forest, Hermann had to pay the bill twice a day because the value of the mark changed so fast, from a hundred billion to two hundred billion a day, or something like that. But it did not really mean anything. I don’t quite remember how we got those billions. We still have some of the bank notes as souvenirs.

For the next few minutes we all regaled the
vicomtesse
with similar stories, many of them about the barter economy that evolved, and about the help some of us got from people we knew on farms out in the country. Suddenly she said she had been told the German government deliberately inflated the currency in order to cheat the French out of the reparations they owed them. Was that true?

This question changed the tone of the conversation dramatically.

First Hermann gave her his opinion, admittedly from the socialist point of view. The German government got into the habit of printing money long before they owed the French any reparations. It was done during the war, on the assumption that a quick victory would enable the Germans to collect the reparations. That is how we would pay for the war, he said. That turned out to have been a somewhat unrealistic assumption. Then, Hermann continued, we tried to have a socialist revolution, which threatened the institution of private property. But we socialists were cheated. Our opponents won. The private property of the big industrialists and landowners was never touched. The common people, especially those with fixed incomes, were disowned, through the simple device of printing money, a habit to which the government had become addicted in the war. If you French, and your allies, were cheated, so were the German people. No wonder the Republic has so few friends. Nobody trusts those who rob them.

Professor Kolmar begged to differ. What Hermann called cheating the French out of reparations he called performing the elementary duty of any patriotic government. There was no conflict between the high ideals of the current exhibition, which quite properly celebrates the universal language of music, he said, and the pride that every honest citizen should have in his or her country.

Honest citizens? Georg Swarzenski asked. We don’t have those any more. The inflation had turned us all into crooks. If the government could get away with printing counterfeit money, why couldn’t any formerly honest citizen steal a Rembrandt from the Städel?

Teddy was sitting diagonally opposite Marie-Laure. Having apparently tired of the conversation she asked the handsome young student whether he ever came to Paris.

Yes, he said, he had a friend who had a little place just off the Boulevard Saint Germain, near the Sorbonne. He always stayed there.

I would have expected Teddy to sense that she found him attractive, but he did not seem to notice.

She asked him whether he knew Schönberg personally.

Teddy met him once in Vienna. Alban Berg had introduced him during the intermission of a concert by the Kolisch Quartet. He had written Schönberg a fan letter when he was fifteen. But the composer only vaguely remembered it. Later Teddy sent him an analysis of some of his pieces. Schönberg’s answer was cool. “I write music, not theory,” he wrote.

Were you upset? Marie-Laure asked.

Of course he had hoped for a positive reply. But on reflection he decided it was a fair comment from a great composer.

Do you ever get upset?

Yes, when people say a piece of music is bad at first hearing. Especially music critics.

The
vicomtesse
held out her glass to Minna to be refilled
—
we were drinking a 1923 Rüdesheimer Auslese.

Did he like the songs of Reynaldo Hahn, she asked.

Very much.

Did he like Marcel Proust?

Of course.

Did he know that when they were young men, Hahn and Proust were lovers?

No, he did not know that.

Well, now he knew, said Marie-Laure, with a small smile. Had he ever noticed that men who like Proust have very small penises?

You had to be a cold fish like Teddy not to faint.

It was most regrettable, Marie-Laure said, that at the moment she was faithful to her husband. But she may feel differently in a little while. Then, when Teddy came to visit her in Paris, she would like to put this matter to the test.

F
ALLING IN
L
OVE
A
GAIN
OR
T
HE
C
ASE OF
B
EETHOVEN
’
S
H
AIR
by Hanni Geisel

A day after Beethoven’s death the fifteen-year-old Bernhard Schlosser snipped off a lock of the composer’s hair. He had visited the sick Beethoven twice during the last few weeks of his life. On one occasion Beethoven told the boy, “I rather think I shall soon start out on an upward journey.” Schlosser later became a pianist of note and a friend of both Schumann and Chopin.

The surprisingly dark
—
not grey
—
hair, sheltered since 1827 inside a glass locket, remained in the Schlosser family until early this century. It was eventually bought by the Italian economist and collector Ernesto Uzielli. It had not been opened for a hundred years.

It was this glass locket that was the instrument of the forty-five-year-old Yella Wallberg’s falling in love with Erwin Herzberg, the feuilleton editor of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
. He was three years younger.

This happened at the time of the International Music Exhibition, which was being held in the Festhalle in Frankfurt in the summer of 1927. Yella was the wife of the eminent lawyer Gustav Wallberg and the mother of two teenage boys. Yella and Gustav were prominent in Frankfurt society, were ardent amateur musicians and art collectors, and lived in a comfortable house on the Untermainkai. They did not considered themselves unhappily married.

The circumstances leading up to Yella’s falling in love were as follows.

One evening she arrived early at the concert hall for a recital of Beethoven sonatas by Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin. She had been particularly looking forward to the recital because she played all the sonatas herself, except the Kreutzer Sonata, which was too difficult for her. She often went to concerts by herself when Gustav was busy.

In the row ahead of her she recognized a face she knew from pictures. It was the famous author Vicky Baum, who had also come to the concert early. She lived in Berlin so, Yella thought, she must have come to Frankfurt for the exhibition. Yella knew that she had started her career as a harpist, so it was not surprising she was interested in music. Yella would have liked to converse with her but she did not talk to strange ladies unless she was introduced, especially not if they were famous. She left that to giggling
Backfische
in pigtails.

Konrad Edler, whom she vaguely knew, came in and seemed to know Vicky Baum. They shook hands. He then went to his own seat at the back. Edler was a mystery man. No one knew where his money came from. But two things were known about him. He loved doing crossword puzzles and spent a lot of time at the Frankfurter Hof. Perhaps during the intermission he might introduce Yella to Vicky Baum.

Yella heard English spoken behind her. She turned around and recognized the Cambridge philosopher Julian McAndrew and his wife, Rosemary, whom she had met at a dinner party the previous week. He had a collection of musical autographs, many of them on exhibit here. Although he was still at Cambridge, Julian had made a fortune in the City, thanks, he had said at that party, to Locke, Hume, Kant and Hegel.

In the first part of the concert they played the sonatas no. 3 in E-flat major, and no. 5, the Spring Sonata.

Just as Rosemary had hoped, at intermission Konrad Edler introduced her to Vicky Baum.

Fortunately it was a long intermission, at least half an hour.

The McAndrews joined them.

Soon another man arrived, Erwin Herzberg. As it turned out, he had made friends with Julian McAndrew at Cambridge, where he had spent a few weeks in early 1924 working on a series of articles on the philosophy of cricket.

On previous occasions Yella had always found Erwin
très sympathique
, but nothing more. She regularly read his feuilleton pieces in the newspaper and admired his erudition and his original way of looking at the world. He took seriously things that were usually outside most readers’ range, such as popular culture, especially film. He was at this very moment working on an article on the metaphysics of the detective story. It was very unusual for a trained philosopher to be interested in such subjects. His work was often eye-opening. At the same time he was amusing and never cruel. And he wrote beautifully.
Le style c’est l’homme
. She liked the way he looked
—
handsome and healthy, unusual for a philosopher. He was an avid tennis player. His curly hair was always well groomed but his clothes agreeably sloppy.

This was not yet the moment, however, when Yella fell in love with Erwin.

Erwin asked Vicky what Ullstein had to say about the socalled “rescue” of Germany’s great film production house, UFA. The Ullstein people were aghast, she said. It was a dark day for the Republic when an outspoken enemy took over the most important film production house in Germany. Her own view was that Hugenberg had seized control primarily to prevent Ullstein from doing it first.

“The main beneficiary will be Frederick the Great,” Konrad Edler observed dryly.

Everyone knew exactly what he meant. UFA would now make dozens of films with Otto Gebühr playing that terrible man and would produce all the profitable right-wing kitsch the mob desired. Germany had a good chance to compete with Hollywood, now that sound was coming in.

“I heard rumours that some of our best directors will try their luck in Hollywood,” Konrad reported.

“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Vicky said.

“I understand,” Julian McAndrew ventured, “that Hugenberg made his fortune during the inflation by buying up bankrupt companies. Before we all condemn him for that, may I declare that I am in the same boat. I also profited.”

They pressed him to explain.

“A number of German dealers came to me offering musical autographs that German collectors had been forced to sell. At most reasonable prices. Do you think it was immoral of me to have acquired in this fashion
Die Winterreise
and the Diabelli Variations? They are on exhibit here.”

“May I add,” his wife interjected, “that Julian hesitated before he went ahead with it. He had scruples. He said one should not exploit people who have lost everything through no fault of their own. I told him not to be silly. So you can blame me.”

Of course none of them would.

“I must admit it gave me a huge thrill when I saw
Die Winterreise
, in Schubert’s own hand,” Vicky said. “I really had the feeling I was establishing a magical contact with him.” She turned to Erwin. “What do you think,
Herr Doktor
?”

“I don’t find it strange at all,” Erwin replied. “We’re all thrilled when the uncanny stares us in the face. Are you writing about the exhibition for Ullstein?”

“Oh no,” she replied. “No more journalism for me.”

“So it is true,” he remarked, “that you were paid a record fee for the rights to your novel.”