Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (29 page)

‘Impudent, gullible, fearful, but not altogether antipathetic human! Chance, oh harmless mortal, has honoured you! Till now, wandering across the pitiful surface of the sick secret of my desert, having already been touched by my breath, you are no longer insignificant enough to misunderstand my intentions. Know that the desert is the same (only more so) as the rest of the earth,
leonum arida nutrix
; has been almost barren ever since the egg, the principle of fertility, was wrenched out of the centre of its sphere, lying dried out and unshelled at the surface, and I, the soul of souls, have been electrified into a mummy by you, oh sublime idiot! You’ve outdone yourself by your own deed! Complete it now! Just press that button again once I’m back in the
egg and the tip will fly shut. By the same degree as slowly, slowly, but unfailingly this egg will sink to the centre of the earth, it will become smaller and smaller; its fertile potency, however – all the more concentrated once having arrived at the centre and having been expunged and pummelled into pure centre – will deliver up that fertile potential luminously outwards and upwards all the way up to heaven. You too, my good man, though now still nothing but an insignificant dog, will feel it: to live is to realize your genius, to feel and act like a god! Now then!’

Do you know perchance that precious old baron who under similar circumstances had the habit of repeating ‘Amazing, amazing!’ a hundred times in succession? So I let the mummy hop quietly back over the edge of the eggshell. And just as quietly, I gladly admit, I heaved the fragile lid shut again. But the button? Never did I go near it again! I pulled up the tail of my coat that had become all yellow and dusty from being dragged around the egg’s interior, took it under my arm and got out of there as quickly as I could. What the hell’s this supposed to mean anyway: ‘principle of fertility’? Shall I be the cause of the world’s overpopulation? Shall I allow a putrid mummy to involve me – me of all people! – in some unsavoury business? God knows, the world is no egg-beaten omelette, no crêpe aux confitures! Can the world’s salvation be dependent on an incidental gesture? The press of a button? The fact is, I wouldn’t be able to find the egg again. But if the reader feels like it, this egg would be a commendable object for your next Easter hunt! So what if I ran off like a coward! Who knows! Maybe it takes greater courage to have a close call with a new incarnation of the inconceivable than to brave great dangers for an inkling of some abstract good. Test yourself! Just think, would you now this very moment want to bring about the good of humanity, the salvation of the whole wide world by the mere press of a button? Would you not be seized by a terrible bout of fear, as before, in the case of one of those easily arrangeable martyr’s deaths? And even so I let a tear or two fall in my mind’s eye over that desert egg; I should have – yes! I should have pressed the button!

1913

Mynona
*

‘But leave me now to
this
nursery, my own private lair, where every childish whim is welcome.’

Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Let our beloved little ones get to know the
real
thing, life as it is
really
lived! Don’t tell me they’re too young to grasp the indelicate details. Or are you perchance afraid to rouse their slumbering consciousness of it all – lock, stock and barrel? How pathetic! Do you want to raise a pack of cowards?

It’s absolutely ill advised and disastrously dangerous to take the little darlings for incomplete. They’re just as complete as we grown-ups, only in every respect more compact, smaller, more sensitive, weaker; but nothing human is strange to them, nor could it possibly be so!

Consider this! The pedagogical principle whereby we are supposed to keep children for as long as possible sheltered from the real, full, round life with all its rough edges, is absurd. It’s not by cloistering their consciousness that we best raise them to live deliberately, but rather by letting our children playfully paddle about and fly around in the thick of that fearful element from early on and thereby learn to overcome and master the terrifying or repulsive or evil or base or malevolent.

It is precisely in this precious period of innocence and guileless gumption that all those things that will later be deemed
dangerous, liable to lead astray, the source of endless guilt, as it were, can, rather, be so finely filtered through the purest puerility that, finally, if generations of our precious progeny were truly prepared for everything – I mean, really
everything
that lies ahead – then their whole life would be lived in childlike innocence. Permit me, in the spirit of such ruminations, to make a few recommendations regarding children’s playthings.

The toy has heretofore been conceived by … cowards. Of course we do, for instance, have enough toy soldiers, castles, cannons, armour and weapons to fill the air with the bang bang and boom boom, the hiss and crackle of bloody battle. But there’s no blood in it, the whole business of play remains too dry. Just introduce a little blood (artificial, of course!!) and, boy, oh boy, what a time they’ll have. It’s perfectly simple: just manufacture hollow soldiers with perforated holes. Knock them over and they spill red-tinted water. To achieve grenade-like effects all you need are magnetized little soldiers whose limbs dislodge on impact; you can reassemble them easily enough. Injured aviators and infantry primed for pulverization can best be blown out of glass, like Bolognese bottles and vials. A revered commanding officer, say Hindenburg, in the form of a spinning top, would work wonderfully well: he’d just have to be outfitted with radial sickles. Wound up and dropped by a miniature Zeppelin, just let him loose on the enemy. And as he mows down the masses of cannon fodder, the Hindenburg spinning top intones the melody ‘Hail, the Conquering Hero!’ or ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. It’s the optimal way to prime our German tots with patriotism from the start. Mass graves are a must in every box of toy soldiers, as are a miniature military recruiting office and a field hospital in which the little doctors can perform operations, amputations and such. How in heaven’s name do we hope to make the
real
battlefield engagement of the future a matter of child’s play if it hasn’t first been tried out in the nursery? I had a finely crafted field hospital, complete with corpses, wounded, doctors, nurses, attendant widows, orphans and other personnel, including little figurines dressed in black, fashioned for my kids, and it proved to be a great success! In this way, early childhood
impressions help to transfigure and mitigate the future effect of
real
mourning. And how profound! How small, for instance, are our sufferings before God, for whom we grown-ups are but children after all.

Playing firing squad is a splendid game; which is why a sizeable civilian population ought also to be included in every military toy-box, along with little barricades, or you couldn’t play ‘revolution’. Every mother would then instantly stop tearing her hair out, relieved of the torment of worrying what to give little Helmut for Christmas.

No doubt about it! Children’s playthings can never be
realistic enough
in design. What is my son supposed to make of a cow that
can’t
be milked? Just insert a miniature rubber balloon udder and it works, and it’s a lot of fun too.

And Aunty Paula still wrings her hands, fretting: should I
enlighten
the little ones about the birds and the bees? Yes, of course, Aunty, you should! And to help, you need a woman-in-childbirth doll. Precisely because children so innocently process such impressions, they
should
be acclimatized early, and thereby protected against later lies: playthings
are
prophylactic. It’s a shame that a false decency makes me mince my words. Modesty is no doubt a lovely virtue, but its automatic connection with cowardice, instead of pluck, is repulsive, it’s prudery. In life there is a modest
and
an immodest denuding of the human body. True modesty is not at all applicable to the
thing itself
, but rather to the manner in which such things are revealed; the
thing itself
is so much a veil over all indecency that, viewed objectively, it can dispense with all veils, and, rather, stand naked, with complete modesty.

Our initial inclination is prematurely to disapprove of the notion of a doll’s house bordello. Why?
Because
it exists in real life? Cowardice! It
ought
not to exist?! Very well! If you will. Then, precisely, for that very reason, better immediately to
diminish
its insalubrious effect on the under-age. The enticement of sin depends on surprise. So why not make Buster
blasé about the forbidden
? Indeed, why not open the entire Pandora’s box of the
illicit
as a toy!

What an enchanting idea! A charming miniature morgue,
the whole works; a dissection table; a maternity ward for the unwed with midwives on hand, but no trace of the father. Wonderfully effective little assassinations, complete with explodable, easy-to-reassemble princes. Department stores with perfectly functioning arson attacks, burglaries, little pickpockets primed at will. All-purpose murder victims along with the accompanying murderer dolls outfitted with the appropriate tools of the trade.

Just imagine lovely little hearses and the cute coffins that come with toy cemeteries and crematoria, with tiny graves and urns, tombstones with replaceable inscriptions, little pastors and other dolls of mourning.

And why should the child not have his own little museum? It would help introduce presentiments of the value of paintings, sculptures etc. Our little progeny can hardly be fortified with enough presentiments!!! The child must not be kept in a state of ignorance, he must experience
everything
.

And why, come to think of it, withhold his own airy Reichstag? Why leave him without a feather-light embalmed body of a monarch to mourn? My children recently laughed themselves silly over the sweet little Socialist gathering that came complete with general strike and crying mothers, on which they let loose one of those deadly spinning tops. I was truly touched to see with what character-strengthening disdain they learnt to take in and look down on everything human. Do you think this bird’s-eye perspective might weaken their resolve? Nonsense! Does it hamstring the eagle, that lofty symbol of all winged important persons (WIPs, if you will)?

Even epidemics and famines can be enacted for instructional purposes. Hungering rubber dolls with bellies designed to swell and shrink would be a blast! Abscess- and blister-pocked dolls would be terribly funny. At least my children will no longer do without their own guillotine and gallows. And while we’re at it, a homeless shelter is a most tantalizing thought. Ought we likewise (with the aid of stink bombs) give our dear little ones an appreciation of little rotundas and subterranean establishments for the satisfaction of bodily needs? On this I dare not insist. On the other hand, I am definitely in favour of a play
paradise where children can re-enact man’s fall from grace; I’m for toy churches (snappy little synagogues for the Jewish juniors), miniature mosques, etc.

Toy trains without the capacity to enact a train crash are only
half
the fun. If we ever want our children to become complete persons, we must not keep anything human from them. Their innocence already
innately
sets limits; and later in life, when these limits are little by little extended, their pre-primed spirits will be prepared for new temptations. The fact that the little darlings can laugh at
everything
, even at the underbelly of life – that is precisely the splendid elaboration of their blessed capacity callously to shrug off the unseemly, that would otherwise, were they to dwell on it, burden them with unnecessary sadness. It is the kind of healthy humour of future generations reared in this fashion, from whom nothing more will be withheld!

Let me not refrain from touching upon a solemn matter: no nursery should henceforth be without a memorial plaque for its present resident already nailed on the wall!

1894

Rainer Maria Rilke

It was in April of 188—. I was obliged to change lodgings. My landlord had sold his house and the new owner was determined to rent out as a single unit the entire floor, including my modest little room. For a long time I searched unsuccessfully for another. Finally, tired of looking, I took, almost sight unseen, a room on the third floor of a building whose length occupied no small part of the narrow side street.

From the very first days, my little cubicle already seemed downright cosy to me. Through my two little windows (whose panes, made of myriad morsels of glass, attested to the considerable age of the house) I looked out far and wide over grey and red rooftops, over sooty chimneys, onto the blue mountains in the distance, and could see the sun rise, a luminous ball balanced on the hazy ridge. My own furniture, which I had had brought over from my former residence, made the cramped confines more liveable, as I had hoped it might, and the housekeeping provided by the wife of the concierge left nothing to be desired. The staircase was not overly steep and could be climbed without thinking; indeed when I alighted, lost in thought, my feet were enticed to clamber all the way up to the attic. In short, I was pleased with the place, all the more so since neither children nor organ-grinders played in the dark courtyard below.

Years have since elapsed. The time of which I speak is lost to me in the dusk of bygone days, the glaring colours of experience have faded and blurred. It is as if I were speaking of things that happened, not to me, but to someone else, perhaps to a very close friend. Consequently, I need have no fear that vanity
will induce me to lie; I will write it out openly, clearly and truthfully.

I didn’t spend much time at home in those days. Early, at 7.30, I went to the office, dined at noon in a cheap restaurant and, as often as possible, spent my afternoons at the home of my fiancée. Yes, I was engaged at the time. Hedwig – let’s call her that – was young, kind, educated and rich – a quality that my contemporaries valued above all else. She issued from an old, enterprising family that had finally succeeded, through industry and thrift, in establishing a household even the young gentlemen of note were glad to visit, for, all its elegant trappings notwithstanding, a free and easy
joie de vivre
held sway which kept any latent ennui from wafting up over the rim of the teacups. The youngest girl, Hedwig, was, moreover, everybody’s darling, as she combined with her cultivation a lovable frivolity that somehow made the most inconsequential chatter interesting and stimulating. She possessed more spirit and spunk than her two older sisters, was sincere, cheerful and – there is no doubt that I loved her.