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War Reverberating through time: scenes from
The Truth about Lou ( 2008, available Penguin/Random House, Kindle, Independent Bookstores, Amazon) [The core plot revolves around the love affair between married Lou and poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the birth of a daughter Cosima who is adopted by a friend of Lou's and who eventually escapes from Poland in Dec.1939. The story is told in the imagined voice of Lou, written by her great granddaughter, Anna, researching her grandmother & her origins...] |
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2000s. Anna from a cabin in upstate NY reflects on war and nationalism taking hold in the U.S.
I bang the door shut , throw the latch, stoke up the fire and collapse onto the couch, devouring the paper, hungry for any news of the outside world. The quilting competition--missed that, too bad. The snowmobiles back out on the lake--thrills, a few accidents, ice solid. The wolves are back the experts say, but nobody has seen one. Bad for the experts in these parts.
Stats--more snow and more snow! Alert level--orange. Up here, whatever for? Two thousand young soldiers fallen and still counting. No asylum up over the border for a 25 yr. old conscientious objector. Canada's declared the war illegal. The soldier still has to prove a prior aversion to war. I think of my son. No exit this time. Well, couldn't do the draft again, could they, not in this country? Austria did back then. Complained, but they still did as did all the others, when push came to shove. When it comes to Empire...
Another piece on textbooks being stickered with 'evolution' as a mere theory and not fact of science. Evolution won't be safe 'til it's a cereal brand we eat for breakfast. And what's this, did someone actually pronounce it with a devilish 'i' on the second syllable before congressmen seeking funding for the NSF, no less? It's a joke, right? A kind of 'nucular' moment. contagious. What is this chip, chip, chipping away?
No we don't see the body bags anymore but we see some real hits and always collateral damage... WMDs. That 's the scary thing. The ones we know and the ones we don't. But bottom line, they're there. Terrified by what we don't know. Eclipsing freedom right and left. Pre-empting ourselves... 'It's a hard rain gonna fall..."
Let it rest for now... Get back to her story....Do something later when you come off the mountain. The WMDs will wait. What did they do back then before them? Another world maybe. No-- they didn't think so, their individual lives... so torn and trivialized as the whole world that first time erupted around them as they'd never seen before...
1913. Rilke and a turning point for the World.
1913. It was a turning point/ A turning point for us all. And like all turning points we moved toward it with the simple trust of the ground we stood on, that our footing would not falter, that we would be held by our experience and time-worn beliefs. But the ground was moving and we could not see the cliff.
"Face-work is over/ now do the heart-work" Rilke had written that year, forcing himself to plumb his own desire. He was turning away from what he saw outside--the surfaces--to the images that incubated within. But his words to himself were nonetheless a clarion call to us all, as another poem of that time warned...
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look how tiny down there--
look: that last village of words but higher
and still so terribly small, one last
farmhouse of feeling...
Rainer had imagined something threatening in his own 'turning point' at the time and indeed in our greater cultural alienation from feeling--the image of a sheltered bird flying around a peak of pure denial, sure-footed animals milling around below and then leaving us (as Rainer was won't to do) in suspension he cried "But without shelter, here/ on the cliffs of the heart..." inconclusive, ever questioning a much larger collective fate.
1913. Vienna train station. Lou is seen off by fellow analyst & socialilst Victor Tausk who treated the shell-shocked and shot himself at the end of WWI & a week before his second marriage.
Suddenly, a tap on my shoulder from behind. I nearly jumped out of my skin and turned to find an excited breathless Victor. "Oh, Lou, I thought I wouldn't make it. Traffic was terrible. I wanted to at least see you off, my dear friend.' He looked disheveled and distracted with a sad smile.
"What have we here?' he said motioning to the table and the cards in my hand"
Oh, just a couple of cards for the trip back." He looked at them smiling. "Not bad, but a little ordinary I'd say, but I guess they'll do. And they'll put a few morsels on the table of some struggling artist. So hard to make a living these days.'
"Oh Victor, you're making me feel guilty. Perhaps I should buy more then," I pressed a few coins into the vendors's hands. "Thank you ma'am," he said tipping his worker's cap to me, " and the aritist Herr Hietler thanks you too."
I smiled, wondering 'must be a country name,' and stuffed them into my cloth carrying bag thinking nothing more of it then.
... Vienna was roiling. There were comings and goings whose truth would only surface much later.
The painter in his early twenties fled from that May Day parade in 1913 and boarded a train to find his fortune in Munich where a few days later he was picked up by the military police and charged with having evaded the draft of a neighboring state for nearly four years. He pleaded poverty, hunger, his meager wage from street sales of postcards and sketches to support his training and threw himself on the mercy of the court as a starving artist.
In truth, he'd been turned down twice by Vienna's Institute of Art and his pan-German sentiments absolutely prohibited any association with the multi-ethnic Austrian army. He had turned his passions to writing "If social democrary is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer." He was let off, judged 'unfit... too weak to bear arms.' His failure , his cowardice, the belief in his lie had served him well. He would peddle it elsewhere.
1914 - 1918. World War I. Rilke, Lou, and Freud decry the war.
Rainer wrote, "God can't take the war back because people won't let him ...Avaricious human beings hang on to it with all the weight of their guilty consciences... One has no right to give up one's
future for a communal one."
I wrote to Freud, "The Big Brothers [aka Tsar Nicky, King Georgy, and Kaiser Willy] have all gone stark raving mad. Analysis will not save them"
And my dear Professor responded to us all, "I don't believe that after all this that we shall ever really be able to be happy again. The world is too hideous...
My secret conclusion has always been: since our present-day advanced civilization is so laced with hypocrisy and fundamentally flawed, it follows that we may be organically unsuited to make it right. We have to abdicate, and let the Great Unknown, He or It, lurking behind Fate someday repeat this experiment with another race.
I know that science is only apparently dead, but humanity seems to be really dead."
We all hunkered down during those first years of war....Travel was now perilous. Freud sent me money, large sums, and one lump sum I promptly spent to replace the moth-eaten fur coat I had been wearing for decades.
Vanity is the last stand... of individuals as well as empires.
... War does funny things to people weak and strong. Amidst lightening night sky, crack of gunshot just beyond the horizon and troop maneuvers closing in on the town periphery, it signaled that shock of recognition that this was neither celebration of past military feats survived nor rehearsal but a test of the real. And its threat sent us all scrambling for some last vestige, some sanctuary of home....
One does not see so much of war as hear its warnings. What we saw were the preparations, the scarcity of flour, sugar, coffee, men to work the farms and the aftermath, the rubble in the schoolyard, young men returning without limbs, young uniformed faces peering out from cameo portraits on headphones, Iron Crosses,, women and children digging graves. What we heard was the sound of our own fear--what we could not see-- a constant arrhythmic throbbing within, beating its own time. There was no predicting anybody's fate. You could go around the corner and your heart could stop. ...
1920s. Lou, a fledgling analyst, on war, our warring psyche and motherhood.
I think of war and the sometimes easy conclusion that the world would be better if it were simply run by women. And I think not. We imagine some sanctified notion of 'maternal endurance' but that is not the all of it...
You see, motherhood entails in its very essence extreme partisanship in love and hate--a stubborn intolerance and even destructive rage whenever what we bring into being is involved--a part of ourselves we have released which is nonetheless inalienable. The maternal instinct bequeaths its devotion and it brutality alike to every child, the inexorable limitations of who we are. Our nature.
Think of it, we, not unlike the primitive, wage war with lethal weapons and then are quick to assuage treating the wounds we inflict on the enemy. We wage war because we are at war with ourselves...Mankind engages in such a double-life, emotional and rational, that we can hardly imagine it's one and the same person involved in this necessary struggle. Except that we have the resources within ourselves to strive for a third possibility: to reconcile things so that the two get along....
Psychoanalysis was nothing more than warlike in identifying those impulses which rage within us, rooted in the very foundations of the soul. Nothing took us so far beyond the state of war-- two human beings a foot apart upon the borderline of peace--exploring the basic nature of the human soul.
...
1933. Nationalism spreads like wildfire through Germany
It begins with a For and Against that tolerted no nuances.
For moral discipline in family and state. Against decadence and moral decay. WE name...
For devotion to people and state. Against cynicism and political treachery. WE name..
For awe of our past. Against the denigration of our history and its great figures. WE name...
For veneration of the national spirit. Against arrogance and presumption. WE name...
For the nobility of the human soul. Against the filthy exaggeration of man's animal nature. WE name...
My dear Professor. No, not you.
And before you know it, there are elections and officious unknowns ushered in to wild applause, venerated as saviors, liberties falling like so much messy indecision on the wayside, laws enacted to exalt state and family values, entire government departments created to purify information within, to censor the evil assault from without. To cleanse society of its pollutants. Creation is invoked as mystical; evolution is condemned as mundane. Science cedes to the spiritual. And after each incantation of a by now unquestionable ideal, it feels so good to be one of the folk again, it feels so right to be pure and protected; to be a patriot and let that blade fall. To salute the commando in charge. Names are named.
Individual writers, artists, political theorists and the entire 'Freudian School in one fell swoop and the presses of their Jewish conspiracy, the journal 'Imago' too. All their questions. Burn them.
The Irish poet was right who wrote in those years: "Things fall apart. The center can not hold... the falcon can not hear the falconer.' It is percisely that moment when tyrants are born. And so it was with us in post-war Germany during those years. The mark was worth nothing. We were hungry and humiliated. A natural order that was flailing and falling aprt was seized by a most unnatural command of thugs predicated on fear and destruction....
...May 10, 1933 on Franz Joself Platz in Berlin, ten, no twenty, now fifty, a hundred, a veritable herd of brown-shirted students out for a rebellious good time, sacked the bookstores and the libraries and the private collections of surrounding homes carrying books on manure carts into the square, accompanied by fire chants, they set those words aflame to the roar of throngs, some forty thousand, around them. "Why read when we need only believe. ..."Reflection be damned, their Fuhrer had said.
...The German poet Heine in writing of the purges of the dark ages had said ony a century earlier: "there where one burns books, one eventually burns men.
We did not heed him then and certainly not now.
Freud, her aging mentor, now terminally ill, and Lou meet one last time in Berlin
In letters Freud had complained of growing old as 'growing inorganic'. He complained bluntly of'a lack of eruptions' (impotence, no less) All the while not wanting to be assuaged. He called things for what they were and said he simply lacked a kind of resonance, likening it to no longer using the pedal of the piano, as if the two instincts he had postulated (of life and death) had somehow become confused.
... I had to see my dear Professor and I did that last time in Berlin, 1928. He was at Tegel sanatorium for more painful work on his cancerous jaw. The outdoor cafe on the palace veranda at Tegelhof outside Berlin--our meeting place...
Freud arrived with a bouquet of pansies he had picked from the palace garden, producing them suddenly from his back like a young boy. His eyes heavy, his mouth locked in a slant. He sat down awkwardly as if in pain, laying his cane on the adjacent chair and resting his one arm gingerly on the table as if favoring it, coaxing it into cooperation. I was struck by his visible infirmity now, his jaw with a prosthesis, his hearing failing and his speech somewhat halting. He was slower, more deliberate in his response as if the words had a longer distance to travel. The burned hole on the sleeve of his tweed jacket, I realized, his poor eyes had not seen.
He caught me looking aghast at him and said, "So my dear Lou, now do you stilll think this ossified carcass of mine has a few eruptions in him?" We laughed and held hands. I remember feeling how different he was, we were, from that time fifteen years ago in the Cafe landtmann in Vienna when I was a new acolyte and he was still plotting out the conquests of his theory, his empire. Now his pain was a present reminder of imminent loss and he was looking back wanly surveying the landscape of his accomplishments...
I turned to how I experienced my only recently departed Rainer as the saving grace of my old age...I told him how I saw Rainer standing right thee under my trees, weathering all life's seasons--summer, winter, autumn, spring. He's become 'mature' like those trees are for me, evoking the deepest emotions--in the way that only nature can connect us to what we value most in life and death..."
Freud looked at me and patted my hand "You know, dear friend, you can't help yourself, can you? You have an insatiable urge to imagine, to embellish, to complete. Sometimes I must confess in the past it actually annoyed me when you took some bit of our scientific theory and gave it back again in rather fuller distorted form. But in the case of your Rainer, he is so lucky to have found you and to find himself today reflected in your eyes. Old man that I am, I confess. I'm a bit jealous. We should all be so blessed."
I would not see Freud again. But a year after our last meeting in Berlin, he wrote to me chiding me for neglecting to tell min of my seventieth birthday. He said: "I would have wanted to tell you how much I value you and love you."
No pretences, no exaggeration, no embellishments. Conquistador by his own calling, empire builder to be sure, conqueror of this heart. When I thought of a world without him, I thought nature must resonate all the more profoundly in the hollow of his absence. He would then surely be playing the pedal.
Early 1930s. Germans deny the genocide unfolding before them and embrace nationalism
...It was all around us. We could not read the signs, the full meaning of their symbols, their rhetoric, their language. Though we'd seen it clear as day, in the ashes of the book burnings that spring of 1933. We could not believe how dire our situation was. We couldn't believe that we cultivated Germans, the world's cultural heart, that we, could kill babies. No no, it was posturing. intimidation, politics, power-play. It need not concern us. We let it happen.
Even the best of us--my dear Professor too, himself, a marked man, could not believe it, could not bring himself to imagine where it was going. He quipped wryly when he heard of those book burnings: "Just books?... In early times, they'd have burned us with them.' It would take another five years and the love for his daughter Anna--her future-- for him to see through the masks of our culture to look into that conflagration and to know that they would not stop at setting minds afire, that bodies would soon follow....
No, no one knew. We all knew. We just wouldn't believe ... not us. Before they left to take refuge with his famiy that winter, Jakob [Jewish husband of Mariechen-daughter of Lou's husband Fred with their maid Maria] took me aside and said that they--the brown shirts-- would surely come again, that some people were taking the books they valued most, burying them or burning them before they fell into mischievous hands. I looked up at the shelves to my library, to my RILKE with those two last letters nestled between Darwin's Origins and Freud's Civilization and its Discontents and I said: "No, no, not yet Jakob. I speak to them daily. They are my comfort, my sole surviving companions in the world."
And I kissed their little boy's forehead and I looked into Mariechen's black eyes and said farewell to Fred. I smiled at the irony, thinking of this Persian-German girl now being sheltered by Jews...
Dec. 1939. Lou's daughter Cosima, now a young woman, escapes from Poland
[is accompanied by her nanny Katya to the train station, her adopted mother Johanna having died in the flu pandemic years earlier],
A young woman in her mid-thirties in stylish plumed hat with ruby and pearl pin is running down the platform in her loden cape with brocade trim, new leather lace-up boots, clip-clip clop, clip-clip clop, racing against the clock. Dragging a brown leather strapped suitcase and a large quilted cloth carrying bag. We must hurry. They have held her too long reviewing her papers, checking identity cards in customs. A scrutiny of her picture, eyes lifting up and down and up again, seizing her alarm, catching her escape and then a slow sly smile, enjoying the hold, her squirming discomfort:
"Okay, all is clear. Danzig to Berlin, Berlin to Bremen, Bremen to Stockholm. Auf Wiedersehen. Gute Reise, Fraulein. Warm greetings from Poland."
And the stamp like some loud indelible footprint of yes, of no, of origins that will follow. Passport slipped closed. A plaintive nod. Taken.
It is the beginning of a deep winter freeze, late afternoon in December and the darkness has already begun to set in. There is commotion in the station, children crying, a stray vagrant hand held out here and there, a screeching of wheels against track and giant puffs of steam breathing a mist and the smell of burnt tar. Turning to the old hunched woman in headscarf struggling to keep up with her "Why all these people? So many-- where are they going?"
"Inland, south to Warsaw, Krakow, to family? But you are going out to an adventure you must write us about. We have a map, Cosima."
The old woman presses a small book wrapped in brown paper into her gloved hands saying her mother had wanted her to have it but fallen ill before she could give it to her. She said these words, a book of hours, would comfort the lone traveler. She tucks it securely into her carrying bag. Her suitcase is hoisted up. The girl now reaching down from the railway car steps to grasp her Katya's hand one more time, the conductor now pulling her in, ""Fraulein, it is verboten. You must take your seat now. We are departing." She falters a moment. Her bag opens and her old doll spills out caught. The doors compressed shut. She pulls, it gives and the doll is lost on the track. She winces stroking the cloth arm with porcelain hand. its tiny bloodless fingers, folding it into her bag. One of those children. They will find her. She takes her compartment, peers out the window. One last clipped view of Katya, a smile and a fistful of kisses thrown out like invisible birds into the cold wind. And the train chugs slowly deliberately into the dark, gradually picking up pace. She needn't worry now. She looks out into the rain of crystal snowflakes extinquished on the pavement, rests her head on the window and thinks, "like so many stars falling into night."
Early 2000s. North Country. Lou's story complete. Anna rummages through a hatbox of her Grandmother's (Cosima) belongings
To the kitchen, firing the leftover coffee already on the stovetop, I poured myself a large mug and made my way back to the bedroom study and plopping into the armchair, I pulled out from under my desk that old hatbox, the one that had jumpstarted this all, thinking now that the story was done, I'd rummage one more time through its contents. A kind of inventory. A leave-taking.
"Oma," I said out loud, because you talk to yourself in the North Country. It's healthy, the only company there is and no one there to commit you.
"Grandma, Oma, I found your Lou... I brought her back to you. But now she's silent again like you. She in that machine, you in these things." And tracing with index finger the flourished script 'Fields' on that fifties hatbox, I pulled the frayed ribbon loose releasing its top, to what remained of the bits and pieces of her life.
What would she say now, how much had she really known or only suspected? The arm of the doll with its delicate hand (carried so far from Russia and Poland, what had she looked like? when had she lost her? )the exquisite hatpin (I have to make a brooch of it, wear it off the mountain), the postcard of Vienna's Franziskanerplatz by one A.H. (don't want to imagine what that would bring on today's ungodly market) The "Book of Hours' with its intimate inscription from the great poet to Lou (priceless as a heartbeat).
But I remembered back then when she gave me that book, there'd been something more. She said that. Something still missing. I rummaged through it all, marriage license, snapshop of her looking like a flapper smiling up to her Carl, the grandfather I did not know, corsage of dried write roses, baby pictures of my mother, teaching certificate, mom's 4H ribbons, and at the bottom of the box a German-English dictionary with random words underlined and circled in pencil. I read them all thinking when she'd needed to use them, needed to know, and coming to the very end, I read circled in pen "Zuruckwerfen-reverberation, echo" and neatly folded into that page what I thought was maybe the bookshop's receipt. No, this was something else. A small folded note. It read:
"Dearest Johanna--
Rainer's book. For C.
May she know through these words
from whence she came.
--Yours ever, Lou
It was such a flood of emotions, incredulous joy at having found it, anger at it being too late, a pleading ache to tell her, to tell someone. 'Oma, Oma, you were hers and I too." A fear of being alone. A sobbing stream of tears and weeping through smiles for I don't know how long and then a rocking release...letting go, letting go. It was over. Put it all back now. Time to go forward, time to join the living....
***
I bang the door shut , throw the latch, stoke up the fire and collapse onto the couch, devouring the paper, hungry for any news of the outside world. The quilting competition--missed that, too bad. The snowmobiles back out on the lake--thrills, a few accidents, ice solid. The wolves are back the experts say, but nobody has seen one. Bad for the experts in these parts.
Stats--more snow and more snow! Alert level--orange. Up here, whatever for? Two thousand young soldiers fallen and still counting. No asylum up over the border for a 25 yr. old conscientious objector. Canada's declared the war illegal. The soldier still has to prove a prior aversion to war. I think of my son. No exit this time. Well, couldn't do the draft again, could they, not in this country? Austria did back then. Complained, but they still did as did all the others, when push came to shove. When it comes to Empire...
Another piece on textbooks being stickered with 'evolution' as a mere theory and not fact of science. Evolution won't be safe 'til it's a cereal brand we eat for breakfast. And what's this, did someone actually pronounce it with a devilish 'i' on the second syllable before congressmen seeking funding for the NSF, no less? It's a joke, right? A kind of 'nucular' moment. contagious. What is this chip, chip, chipping away?
No we don't see the body bags anymore but we see some real hits and always collateral damage... WMDs. That 's the scary thing. The ones we know and the ones we don't. But bottom line, they're there. Terrified by what we don't know. Eclipsing freedom right and left. Pre-empting ourselves... 'It's a hard rain gonna fall..."
Let it rest for now... Get back to her story....Do something later when you come off the mountain. The WMDs will wait. What did they do back then before them? Another world maybe. No-- they didn't think so, their individual lives... so torn and trivialized as the whole world that first time erupted around them as they'd never seen before...
1913. Rilke and a turning point for the World.
1913. It was a turning point/ A turning point for us all. And like all turning points we moved toward it with the simple trust of the ground we stood on, that our footing would not falter, that we would be held by our experience and time-worn beliefs. But the ground was moving and we could not see the cliff.
"Face-work is over/ now do the heart-work" Rilke had written that year, forcing himself to plumb his own desire. He was turning away from what he saw outside--the surfaces--to the images that incubated within. But his words to himself were nonetheless a clarion call to us all, as another poem of that time warned...
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look how tiny down there--
look: that last village of words but higher
and still so terribly small, one last
farmhouse of feeling...
Rainer had imagined something threatening in his own 'turning point' at the time and indeed in our greater cultural alienation from feeling--the image of a sheltered bird flying around a peak of pure denial, sure-footed animals milling around below and then leaving us (as Rainer was won't to do) in suspension he cried "But without shelter, here/ on the cliffs of the heart..." inconclusive, ever questioning a much larger collective fate.
1913. Vienna train station. Lou is seen off by fellow analyst & socialilst Victor Tausk who treated the shell-shocked and shot himself at the end of WWI & a week before his second marriage.
Suddenly, a tap on my shoulder from behind. I nearly jumped out of my skin and turned to find an excited breathless Victor. "Oh, Lou, I thought I wouldn't make it. Traffic was terrible. I wanted to at least see you off, my dear friend.' He looked disheveled and distracted with a sad smile.
"What have we here?' he said motioning to the table and the cards in my hand"
Oh, just a couple of cards for the trip back." He looked at them smiling. "Not bad, but a little ordinary I'd say, but I guess they'll do. And they'll put a few morsels on the table of some struggling artist. So hard to make a living these days.'
"Oh Victor, you're making me feel guilty. Perhaps I should buy more then," I pressed a few coins into the vendors's hands. "Thank you ma'am," he said tipping his worker's cap to me, " and the aritist Herr Hietler thanks you too."
I smiled, wondering 'must be a country name,' and stuffed them into my cloth carrying bag thinking nothing more of it then.
... Vienna was roiling. There were comings and goings whose truth would only surface much later.
The painter in his early twenties fled from that May Day parade in 1913 and boarded a train to find his fortune in Munich where a few days later he was picked up by the military police and charged with having evaded the draft of a neighboring state for nearly four years. He pleaded poverty, hunger, his meager wage from street sales of postcards and sketches to support his training and threw himself on the mercy of the court as a starving artist.
In truth, he'd been turned down twice by Vienna's Institute of Art and his pan-German sentiments absolutely prohibited any association with the multi-ethnic Austrian army. He had turned his passions to writing "If social democrary is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer." He was let off, judged 'unfit... too weak to bear arms.' His failure , his cowardice, the belief in his lie had served him well. He would peddle it elsewhere.
1914 - 1918. World War I. Rilke, Lou, and Freud decry the war.
Rainer wrote, "God can't take the war back because people won't let him ...Avaricious human beings hang on to it with all the weight of their guilty consciences... One has no right to give up one's
future for a communal one."
I wrote to Freud, "The Big Brothers [aka Tsar Nicky, King Georgy, and Kaiser Willy] have all gone stark raving mad. Analysis will not save them"
And my dear Professor responded to us all, "I don't believe that after all this that we shall ever really be able to be happy again. The world is too hideous...
My secret conclusion has always been: since our present-day advanced civilization is so laced with hypocrisy and fundamentally flawed, it follows that we may be organically unsuited to make it right. We have to abdicate, and let the Great Unknown, He or It, lurking behind Fate someday repeat this experiment with another race.
I know that science is only apparently dead, but humanity seems to be really dead."
We all hunkered down during those first years of war....Travel was now perilous. Freud sent me money, large sums, and one lump sum I promptly spent to replace the moth-eaten fur coat I had been wearing for decades.
Vanity is the last stand... of individuals as well as empires.
... War does funny things to people weak and strong. Amidst lightening night sky, crack of gunshot just beyond the horizon and troop maneuvers closing in on the town periphery, it signaled that shock of recognition that this was neither celebration of past military feats survived nor rehearsal but a test of the real. And its threat sent us all scrambling for some last vestige, some sanctuary of home....
One does not see so much of war as hear its warnings. What we saw were the preparations, the scarcity of flour, sugar, coffee, men to work the farms and the aftermath, the rubble in the schoolyard, young men returning without limbs, young uniformed faces peering out from cameo portraits on headphones, Iron Crosses,, women and children digging graves. What we heard was the sound of our own fear--what we could not see-- a constant arrhythmic throbbing within, beating its own time. There was no predicting anybody's fate. You could go around the corner and your heart could stop. ...
1920s. Lou, a fledgling analyst, on war, our warring psyche and motherhood.
I think of war and the sometimes easy conclusion that the world would be better if it were simply run by women. And I think not. We imagine some sanctified notion of 'maternal endurance' but that is not the all of it...
You see, motherhood entails in its very essence extreme partisanship in love and hate--a stubborn intolerance and even destructive rage whenever what we bring into being is involved--a part of ourselves we have released which is nonetheless inalienable. The maternal instinct bequeaths its devotion and it brutality alike to every child, the inexorable limitations of who we are. Our nature.
Think of it, we, not unlike the primitive, wage war with lethal weapons and then are quick to assuage treating the wounds we inflict on the enemy. We wage war because we are at war with ourselves...Mankind engages in such a double-life, emotional and rational, that we can hardly imagine it's one and the same person involved in this necessary struggle. Except that we have the resources within ourselves to strive for a third possibility: to reconcile things so that the two get along....
Psychoanalysis was nothing more than warlike in identifying those impulses which rage within us, rooted in the very foundations of the soul. Nothing took us so far beyond the state of war-- two human beings a foot apart upon the borderline of peace--exploring the basic nature of the human soul.
...
1933. Nationalism spreads like wildfire through Germany
It begins with a For and Against that tolerted no nuances.
For moral discipline in family and state. Against decadence and moral decay. WE name...
For devotion to people and state. Against cynicism and political treachery. WE name..
For awe of our past. Against the denigration of our history and its great figures. WE name...
For veneration of the national spirit. Against arrogance and presumption. WE name...
For the nobility of the human soul. Against the filthy exaggeration of man's animal nature. WE name...
My dear Professor. No, not you.
And before you know it, there are elections and officious unknowns ushered in to wild applause, venerated as saviors, liberties falling like so much messy indecision on the wayside, laws enacted to exalt state and family values, entire government departments created to purify information within, to censor the evil assault from without. To cleanse society of its pollutants. Creation is invoked as mystical; evolution is condemned as mundane. Science cedes to the spiritual. And after each incantation of a by now unquestionable ideal, it feels so good to be one of the folk again, it feels so right to be pure and protected; to be a patriot and let that blade fall. To salute the commando in charge. Names are named.
Individual writers, artists, political theorists and the entire 'Freudian School in one fell swoop and the presses of their Jewish conspiracy, the journal 'Imago' too. All their questions. Burn them.
The Irish poet was right who wrote in those years: "Things fall apart. The center can not hold... the falcon can not hear the falconer.' It is percisely that moment when tyrants are born. And so it was with us in post-war Germany during those years. The mark was worth nothing. We were hungry and humiliated. A natural order that was flailing and falling aprt was seized by a most unnatural command of thugs predicated on fear and destruction....
...May 10, 1933 on Franz Joself Platz in Berlin, ten, no twenty, now fifty, a hundred, a veritable herd of brown-shirted students out for a rebellious good time, sacked the bookstores and the libraries and the private collections of surrounding homes carrying books on manure carts into the square, accompanied by fire chants, they set those words aflame to the roar of throngs, some forty thousand, around them. "Why read when we need only believe. ..."Reflection be damned, their Fuhrer had said.
...The German poet Heine in writing of the purges of the dark ages had said ony a century earlier: "there where one burns books, one eventually burns men.
We did not heed him then and certainly not now.
Freud, her aging mentor, now terminally ill, and Lou meet one last time in Berlin
In letters Freud had complained of growing old as 'growing inorganic'. He complained bluntly of'a lack of eruptions' (impotence, no less) All the while not wanting to be assuaged. He called things for what they were and said he simply lacked a kind of resonance, likening it to no longer using the pedal of the piano, as if the two instincts he had postulated (of life and death) had somehow become confused.
... I had to see my dear Professor and I did that last time in Berlin, 1928. He was at Tegel sanatorium for more painful work on his cancerous jaw. The outdoor cafe on the palace veranda at Tegelhof outside Berlin--our meeting place...
Freud arrived with a bouquet of pansies he had picked from the palace garden, producing them suddenly from his back like a young boy. His eyes heavy, his mouth locked in a slant. He sat down awkwardly as if in pain, laying his cane on the adjacent chair and resting his one arm gingerly on the table as if favoring it, coaxing it into cooperation. I was struck by his visible infirmity now, his jaw with a prosthesis, his hearing failing and his speech somewhat halting. He was slower, more deliberate in his response as if the words had a longer distance to travel. The burned hole on the sleeve of his tweed jacket, I realized, his poor eyes had not seen.
He caught me looking aghast at him and said, "So my dear Lou, now do you stilll think this ossified carcass of mine has a few eruptions in him?" We laughed and held hands. I remember feeling how different he was, we were, from that time fifteen years ago in the Cafe landtmann in Vienna when I was a new acolyte and he was still plotting out the conquests of his theory, his empire. Now his pain was a present reminder of imminent loss and he was looking back wanly surveying the landscape of his accomplishments...
I turned to how I experienced my only recently departed Rainer as the saving grace of my old age...I told him how I saw Rainer standing right thee under my trees, weathering all life's seasons--summer, winter, autumn, spring. He's become 'mature' like those trees are for me, evoking the deepest emotions--in the way that only nature can connect us to what we value most in life and death..."
Freud looked at me and patted my hand "You know, dear friend, you can't help yourself, can you? You have an insatiable urge to imagine, to embellish, to complete. Sometimes I must confess in the past it actually annoyed me when you took some bit of our scientific theory and gave it back again in rather fuller distorted form. But in the case of your Rainer, he is so lucky to have found you and to find himself today reflected in your eyes. Old man that I am, I confess. I'm a bit jealous. We should all be so blessed."
I would not see Freud again. But a year after our last meeting in Berlin, he wrote to me chiding me for neglecting to tell min of my seventieth birthday. He said: "I would have wanted to tell you how much I value you and love you."
No pretences, no exaggeration, no embellishments. Conquistador by his own calling, empire builder to be sure, conqueror of this heart. When I thought of a world without him, I thought nature must resonate all the more profoundly in the hollow of his absence. He would then surely be playing the pedal.
Early 1930s. Germans deny the genocide unfolding before them and embrace nationalism
...It was all around us. We could not read the signs, the full meaning of their symbols, their rhetoric, their language. Though we'd seen it clear as day, in the ashes of the book burnings that spring of 1933. We could not believe how dire our situation was. We couldn't believe that we cultivated Germans, the world's cultural heart, that we, could kill babies. No no, it was posturing. intimidation, politics, power-play. It need not concern us. We let it happen.
Even the best of us--my dear Professor too, himself, a marked man, could not believe it, could not bring himself to imagine where it was going. He quipped wryly when he heard of those book burnings: "Just books?... In early times, they'd have burned us with them.' It would take another five years and the love for his daughter Anna--her future-- for him to see through the masks of our culture to look into that conflagration and to know that they would not stop at setting minds afire, that bodies would soon follow....
No, no one knew. We all knew. We just wouldn't believe ... not us. Before they left to take refuge with his famiy that winter, Jakob [Jewish husband of Mariechen-daughter of Lou's husband Fred with their maid Maria] took me aside and said that they--the brown shirts-- would surely come again, that some people were taking the books they valued most, burying them or burning them before they fell into mischievous hands. I looked up at the shelves to my library, to my RILKE with those two last letters nestled between Darwin's Origins and Freud's Civilization and its Discontents and I said: "No, no, not yet Jakob. I speak to them daily. They are my comfort, my sole surviving companions in the world."
And I kissed their little boy's forehead and I looked into Mariechen's black eyes and said farewell to Fred. I smiled at the irony, thinking of this Persian-German girl now being sheltered by Jews...
Dec. 1939. Lou's daughter Cosima, now a young woman, escapes from Poland
[is accompanied by her nanny Katya to the train station, her adopted mother Johanna having died in the flu pandemic years earlier],
A young woman in her mid-thirties in stylish plumed hat with ruby and pearl pin is running down the platform in her loden cape with brocade trim, new leather lace-up boots, clip-clip clop, clip-clip clop, racing against the clock. Dragging a brown leather strapped suitcase and a large quilted cloth carrying bag. We must hurry. They have held her too long reviewing her papers, checking identity cards in customs. A scrutiny of her picture, eyes lifting up and down and up again, seizing her alarm, catching her escape and then a slow sly smile, enjoying the hold, her squirming discomfort:
"Okay, all is clear. Danzig to Berlin, Berlin to Bremen, Bremen to Stockholm. Auf Wiedersehen. Gute Reise, Fraulein. Warm greetings from Poland."
And the stamp like some loud indelible footprint of yes, of no, of origins that will follow. Passport slipped closed. A plaintive nod. Taken.
It is the beginning of a deep winter freeze, late afternoon in December and the darkness has already begun to set in. There is commotion in the station, children crying, a stray vagrant hand held out here and there, a screeching of wheels against track and giant puffs of steam breathing a mist and the smell of burnt tar. Turning to the old hunched woman in headscarf struggling to keep up with her "Why all these people? So many-- where are they going?"
"Inland, south to Warsaw, Krakow, to family? But you are going out to an adventure you must write us about. We have a map, Cosima."
The old woman presses a small book wrapped in brown paper into her gloved hands saying her mother had wanted her to have it but fallen ill before she could give it to her. She said these words, a book of hours, would comfort the lone traveler. She tucks it securely into her carrying bag. Her suitcase is hoisted up. The girl now reaching down from the railway car steps to grasp her Katya's hand one more time, the conductor now pulling her in, ""Fraulein, it is verboten. You must take your seat now. We are departing." She falters a moment. Her bag opens and her old doll spills out caught. The doors compressed shut. She pulls, it gives and the doll is lost on the track. She winces stroking the cloth arm with porcelain hand. its tiny bloodless fingers, folding it into her bag. One of those children. They will find her. She takes her compartment, peers out the window. One last clipped view of Katya, a smile and a fistful of kisses thrown out like invisible birds into the cold wind. And the train chugs slowly deliberately into the dark, gradually picking up pace. She needn't worry now. She looks out into the rain of crystal snowflakes extinquished on the pavement, rests her head on the window and thinks, "like so many stars falling into night."
Early 2000s. North Country. Lou's story complete. Anna rummages through a hatbox of her Grandmother's (Cosima) belongings
To the kitchen, firing the leftover coffee already on the stovetop, I poured myself a large mug and made my way back to the bedroom study and plopping into the armchair, I pulled out from under my desk that old hatbox, the one that had jumpstarted this all, thinking now that the story was done, I'd rummage one more time through its contents. A kind of inventory. A leave-taking.
"Oma," I said out loud, because you talk to yourself in the North Country. It's healthy, the only company there is and no one there to commit you.
"Grandma, Oma, I found your Lou... I brought her back to you. But now she's silent again like you. She in that machine, you in these things." And tracing with index finger the flourished script 'Fields' on that fifties hatbox, I pulled the frayed ribbon loose releasing its top, to what remained of the bits and pieces of her life.
What would she say now, how much had she really known or only suspected? The arm of the doll with its delicate hand (carried so far from Russia and Poland, what had she looked like? when had she lost her? )the exquisite hatpin (I have to make a brooch of it, wear it off the mountain), the postcard of Vienna's Franziskanerplatz by one A.H. (don't want to imagine what that would bring on today's ungodly market) The "Book of Hours' with its intimate inscription from the great poet to Lou (priceless as a heartbeat).
But I remembered back then when she gave me that book, there'd been something more. She said that. Something still missing. I rummaged through it all, marriage license, snapshop of her looking like a flapper smiling up to her Carl, the grandfather I did not know, corsage of dried write roses, baby pictures of my mother, teaching certificate, mom's 4H ribbons, and at the bottom of the box a German-English dictionary with random words underlined and circled in pencil. I read them all thinking when she'd needed to use them, needed to know, and coming to the very end, I read circled in pen "Zuruckwerfen-reverberation, echo" and neatly folded into that page what I thought was maybe the bookshop's receipt. No, this was something else. A small folded note. It read:
"Dearest Johanna--
Rainer's book. For C.
May she know through these words
from whence she came.
--Yours ever, Lou
It was such a flood of emotions, incredulous joy at having found it, anger at it being too late, a pleading ache to tell her, to tell someone. 'Oma, Oma, you were hers and I too." A fear of being alone. A sobbing stream of tears and weeping through smiles for I don't know how long and then a rocking release...letting go, letting go. It was over. Put it all back now. Time to go forward, time to join the living....
***
