The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (36 page)

Siegmund looked down into the orchestra. The sunken space stood out bright against the darkness of the listening house; hands fingered, arms drew the bows, cheeks puffed out – all these simple folk laboured zealously to bring to utterance the work of a master who suffered and created; created the noble and simple visions enacted above on the stage. Creation? How did one create? Siegmund felt a pain in his breast, a burning or gnawing, something like an exquisite urgency. To do what? For what? It was all so dark, so shamefully unclear! Two thoughts, two words he sensed: creation, passion. His temples glowed and throbbed, and it came to him as in a yearning vision that creation was born of passion and was reshaped anew as passion. He saw the pale, spent woman hanging on the breast of the fugitive to whom she had given herself, he saw her love and her destiny, and felt that life, in order to be creative, must be like that. He saw his own life, and knew its contradictions, its clear understanding and spoilt voluptuousness, its splendid security and idle spite, its weakness and wittiness, its languid contempt; his life, so full of words, so void of acts, so full of cleverness, so empty of emotion and he felt again the burning, the searing anguish which yet was sweet – whither, and to what end? Creation? Experience? Passion?

The finale of the act came, the curtain fell. Light, applause, general exit. Sieglinde and Siegmund spent the interval as before. They scarcely spoke, as they walked hand-in-hand through the corridors and up and down the steps. She offered him the liqueur chocolates, but he did not take any. She looked at him, but withdrew her gaze as his rested upon her, walking rather constrained at his side and enduring his eye. Her childish shoulders under the silver web of her scarf looked like those of an Egyptian statue, a little too high and too square. Upon her cheeks burned the same fire he felt in his own.

Again they waited until the crowd had gone in and took their seats at the last possible moment. Storms and wind and driving cloud; wild, heathenish cries of exultation. Eight females, not exactly beauties, eight untrammelled, laughing maidens of the wild, were disporting themselves amid a rocky scene. Brünnhilde broke in upon their merriment with her fears. They fled in terror before the approaching wrath of Wotan, leaving her alone to face him. The angry god nearly annihilated his daughter – but his wrath roared itself out, by degrees grew gentle and dispersed into a mild melancholy, on which note it ended. A noble prospect opened out, the scene was pervaded with epic and religious splendour. Brünnhilde slept. The god mounted the rocks. Great, full-bodied flames, rising, falling, and flickering glowed all over the boards. The Valkyrie lay with her coat of mail and her shield on her mossy couch ringed round with fire and smoke, with leaping, dancing tongues, with the magic sleep-compelling fire-music. But she had saved Sieglinde, in whose womb there grew and waxed the seed of that hated unprized race, chosen of the gods, from which the twins had sprung, who had mingled their misfortunes and their afflictions in free and mutual bliss.

Siegmund and Sieglinde left their box; Wendelin was outside, towering in his yellow ulster and holding their cloaks for them to put on. Like a gigantic slave he followed the two dark, slender, fur-mantled, exotic creatures down the stairs to where the carriage waited and the pair of large finely matched glossy thoroughbreds tossed their proud heads in the winter night. Wendelin ushered the twins into their warm little silk-lined retreat, closed the door, and the coupé stood poised for yet a second, quivering slightly from the swing with which Wendelin agilely mounted the box. Then it glided swiftly away and left the theatre behind. Again they rolled noiselessly, easily over the uneven ground to the brisk rhythm of the horses' hooves, sheltered from the shrill harshness of the bustling life through which they passed. They sat as silent and remote as they had sat in their opera-box facing the stage – almost, one might say, in the same atmosphere. Nothing was there which could alienate them from that extravagant and stormily passionate world which worked upon them with its magic power to draw them to itself.

The carriage stopped; they did not at once realize where they were, or that they had arrived before the door of their parents' house. Then Wendelin appeared at the window, and the porter came out of his lodge to open the door.

‘Are my father and mother at home?' Siegmund asked, looking over the porter's head and blinking as though he were staring into the sun.

No, they had not returned from dinner at the Erlangers'. Nor was Kunz at home; Märit too was out, no one knew where, for she went entirely her own way.

They left their overcoats in the vestibule on the ground floor and went up the stairs and through the first-floor hall into the dining-room. It stretched out before them, immense in its murky splendour. Only one chandelier was lit, over the table at the farther end which had been laid and where Florian was waiting to serve them. They moved noiselessly across the thick carpet, and Florian seated them in their softly upholstered chairs. Then a gesture from Siegmund dismissed him, they would dispense with his services.

The table was laid with a dish of fruit, a plate of sandwiches, a jug of red wine. An electric tea-kettle hummed upon a great silver tray, with all the accoutrements about it.

Siegmund ate a caviar sandwich and poured out wine into a slender glass where it glowed a dark ruby red. He drank in quick gulps, and grumblingly stated his opinion that red wine and caviar were a combination offensive to good taste. He drew out his case, jerkily selected a cigarette, and began to smoke, leaning back with his hands in his pockets, wrinkling up his face and twitching his cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other. His strong growth of beard was already beginning to show again under the high cheek-bones; the two black furrows stood out on the bridge of his nose.

Sieglinde had made herself some tea and added a drop of burgundy. She touched the fragile porcelain cup delicately with her full, soft lips and as she drank she looked across at Siegmund with her great humid black eyes.

She set down her cup and leaned her dark, sweet little head upon her slender hand. Her eyes rested full upon him, with such liquid, speechless eloquence that, in comparison, what she actually said seemed less than nothing.

‘Won't you have any more to eat, Gigi?'

‘One would not draw,' he said, ‘from the fact that I am smoking, the conclusion that I intend to eat more.'

‘But you have had nothing but bonbons since tea. Take a peach, at least.'

He shrugged his shoulders – or rather he wriggled them like a naughty child, in his tail coat.

‘This is boring. I am going upstairs. Good night.'

He finished his wine, tossed away his table-napkin, and slouched away, with his hands in his pockets, into the darkness at the other end of the room.

He went upstairs to his room, where he turned on the light – not much, only two or three bulbs, which made a wide white circle on the ceiling. Then he stood considering what to do next. The good-night had not been final; this was not how they were used to take leave of each other at the close of the day. She was sure to come to his room. He flung off his coat, put on his fur-trimmed smoking-jacket, and lighted another cigarette. He lay down on the chaise-longue; sat up again, tried another posture, with his cheek in the pillow; threw himself on his back again and so remained awhile, with his hands under his head.

The subtle, bitter scent of the tobacco mingled with that of the cosmetics, the soaps, and the toilet waters; their combined perfume hung in the tepid air of the room and Siegmund breathed it in with conscious pleasure, finding it sweeter than ever. Closing his eyes he surrendered to this atmosphere, as a man will console himself with some delicate pleasure of the senses for the extraordinary harshness of his lot.

Then suddenly he started up again, tossed away his cigarette and stood in front of the white wardrobe, which had long mirrors let into each of its three divisions. He moved very close to the middle one and, eye to eye, he studied himself. His curiosity subjected each feature to a meticulous examination; he opened the two side wings and studied both profiles as well. For a long time he stood there, scrutinising the signs of his race, the slightly drooping nose, the full lips that rested so softly on each other; the high cheek-bones, the thick black, curling hair that grew far down on the temples and parted so decidedly on one side; finally the eyes under the knit brows, those large black eyes that flowed like fire and had an expression of weary sufferance.

In the mirror he saw the bearskin lying behind him, spreading out its claws beside the bed. He turned round, and went over to it with tragic, stumbling steps; after a moment of hesitation he sank down and stretched out on the skin, his head pillowed on his arm.

For a while he lay motionless, then propped his head on his elbows, with his cheeks resting on his slim reddish hands, and fell again into contemplation of his image opposite him in the mirror. There was a knock on the door. He started, reddened, and moved as though to get up – but sank back again, his head against his outstretched arm, and stopped there, silent.

Sieglinde entered. Her eyes searched the room, without finding him at once. Then with a start she saw him lying on the rug.

‘Gigi, what ever are you doing there? Are you ill?' She ran to him, bent over him and, stroking his hair and forehead, repeated, ‘You're not ill, are you?'

He shook his head, looking up at her from below as she continued to caress him.

She was half ready for bed, having come over in slippers from her dressing-room, which was opposite his. Her loosened hair flowed down over her open white peignoir; beneath the lace of her chemise Siegmund saw her small breasts, the colour of smoked meerschaum.

‘You were so cross,' she said. ‘It was beastly of you to go away like that. I wasn't going to come at all. But then I did, because that was not a proper good-night at all  …'

‘I was waiting for you,' he said.

Still bending over him, she gave a grimace of pain, which made the facial characteristics of her kind stand out to an extraordinary degree.

‘Which does not prevent my present posture,' she said in their habitual tone, ‘from causing me a not unappreciable amount of discomfort in the back.'

He threw himself from side to side to stop her.

‘Don't, don't  …  Not like that, not like that  …  It doesn't have to be like that, Sieglind, you see  …' His voice was strange, he himself noticed it. He felt parched with fever, his hands and feet were cold and clammy. She knelt beside him on the skin, her hand in his hair. He lifted himself a little to fling one arm round her neck and so looked at her, looked as he had just been looking at himself- at eyes and temples, brow and cheeks.

‘You are just like me,' he said, haltingly, and swallowed to moisten his dry throat. ‘Everything is  …  as it is with me  …  and the way  …  nothing touches me is just like  …  Beckerath for you  …  it balances out  …  Sieglind  …  and on the whole it is  …  the same, especially as far as  …  taking revenge is concerned, Sieglind  …'

He was seeking to clothe in reason what he was trying to say – yet his words sounded as though he uttered them out of some strange, rash, bewildered dream.

But to her it had no quality of strangeness. She was not ashamed to hear him say such unpolished, such clouded, confused things; his words enveloped her senses like a mist, they drew her down whence they had come, to the borders of a kingdom she had never entered, though sometimes, since her betrothal, she had been carried thither in expectant dreams.

She kissed him on his closed eyelids; he kissed her on her throat, beneath the lace she wore. They kissed each other's hands. They loved each other with all the sweetness of the senses, each for the other's spoilt and costly well-being and delicious fragrance. They breathed it in, this fragrance, with languid and voluptuous abandon, like self-centred invalids, consoling themselves for the loss of hope. They forgot themselves in caresses, which took the upper hand and turned into an urgent thrashing and then just sobbing –

She sat there on the bearskin, with parted lips, supporting herself with one hand, and brushed the hair out of her eyes. He leaned back on his hands against the white chest of drawers, rocked to and fro on his hips, and gazed into the air.

‘But Beckerath,' she said, seeking to find some order in her thoughts, ‘Beckerath, Gigi  …  what do we do about him, now?'

‘Oh,' he said and for a second the characteristics of his kind stood out sharply in his face ‘he ought to be grateful to us. His existence will be a little less banal, from now on.'

From:
Stories of Three Decades.
Thomas Mann.
Seeker and Warburg,
London, 1946.

Bahr, Hermann
(Linz 1863 – Munich 1934)

Hermann Bahr’s fame rests primarily on his work as a critic and essayist: his essay on ‘Die decadence’ is probing and perceptive. He was at the centre of the latest literary developments or, indeed, one step ahead. He was often lampooned (by Karl Kraus particularly) for his awareness and championship of the latest trends. His novel
Die gute Schule
(
The School of Love
), appearing in 1890, is the first German novel to deserve the predicate ‘fin de siecle’: it portrays the sexual adventures and entanglements of a nameless painter from Lower Austria with Fifi in Paris. The school of love is, apparently, the only source of wisdom.

Ewers, Hanns Heinz
(Düsseldorf 1871 – Berlin 1943)

Ewers began writing poetry heavily indebted to neoromantic and decadent modes; he appeared in cabaret in Munich where his grotesquely satirical humour was exploited to the full. His second novel,
Die Alraune: The Story of a Living Creature
(1911) was immensely popular, reaching sales of over a quarter of a million in ten years. Ewers considered himself the herald of a fantastic, Satanist movement that looked back to Poe and de Sade; later he willingly served the Nazi cause but was soon rejected as degenerate, his work being incompatible with visions of rude Nordic health. His work is of interest in the link it provides between decadence and proto-Nazi attitudes.