Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (41 page)

1922

Klabund
*

Though I’ve long been deceased, I recently received a draft notice ordering me to report for active duty. This surprised me no end, and despite the stir my appearance aroused on the street I dutifully presented myself at the district command post.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ I rattled my teeth and shook the bone dust from my feet, ‘there must be some mistake here. I expired back in 1797 in the Great Revolution – of natural causes, as strange as that may seem: I choked on a chicken bone. And now I’m supposed to serve my country? Isn’t this a contradiction in terms?’

The Sergeant-Major eyed me suspiciously. ‘Great Revolution? Are you some kind of Red or something?’

‘If you please, sir, the point precisely is that I
am
not. Understand? I
was
…’

‘Don’t you mince words with me, fella! You’re an anarchist! Some gall, to negate God and country, which it is your duty to protect!’

‘Sergeant-Major, sir, he who is himself negated can hardly have the energy or the wish to negate anything or anyone else.’

The Sergeant-Major wrinkled his brow. ‘That’s enough of that! Spare me the philosophy! You have no respect for history and rank! Take it up with my subordinates. When were you born?’

‘1747.’

‘1747? But for God’s sake, man, that means you belong to the national reserves. We don’t quibble over dates here. You do
have a damned narrow chest. Any other notable physical defects?’

‘Bone rot!’ I screamed and let yellow dust fall from my ribs.

‘You do look a little under-nourished after all! You can go now. Wait for new orders.’

I stumbled down the stairs and almost fell over a fledgling lieutenant, whom I saluted in proper military fashion, for such are the rules at a district command post. I was struck by his fresh young cheeks, his sparkling eyes, his sprightly gait, and before I could stop myself, I fell against his breast and wept without tears. ‘Brother,’ I cried, ‘you too will one day be reduced to dust. Have pity and give me back a little blood. Your Sergeant-Major over there rattled off regulations. Put some meat on my ribs and I will gladly be your cannon fodder a thousand times over. Oh to breathe again but for an instant! Look, I have no lungs left and cannot rightly be called alive!’

Brusquely, the lieutenant shoved me away from him and pinched his monocle in his right eye socket. ‘Are you drunk, man, to make so familiar with a Prussian officer? Three days in the guardhouse!’

He signalled to an adjutant. Before they could catch me I bounded down the steps and made tracks back to the cemetery, where, weary of the day’s events and reluctant to lose my earthly freedom, I stretched myself out in my coffin and pulled the lid shut. Let them look for me. They won’t have an easy time of it. The mailman, who knows my plot number, won’t betray me, he knows for dead certain that he’ll get a handsome tip for every registered letter he delivers.

1914

Ignaz Wrobel
*

On 27 February 1926, this is how things stood.

The gentlemen in white coats filled the big hall, moving about uneasily, laughing, gesticulating and exchanging heated words all at the same time. For they had just spent the last two hours positively riveted, alternately pointing at the unwieldy apparatus on display in the middle of the lecture hall and at the deathly pallid little man seated on a stool, listening intently to his explanations delivered in a quiet voice … The German Professor Gottlieb Waltzemüller had invented the Time Saver.

The apparatus stored time. It was not at all as complicated as you might think, and if you go to the patent office you can see for yourself that I’m right; for there you’ll find the blueprint of that thing that – back then, at least, of course it’s different today – looked like a covered steel-frame bed. You inserted yourself, and the time saved – since no clocks, neither electric, wind-up nor hourglass, worked within – you could re-fasten and -affix to your life wherever needed …

It caused quite a stir! Dilly-dallying was suddenly a pastime of the past the world over. No one had any time to lose. The expression ‘I have no time’ became a fixed term for oaths of disclosure of temporal bankruptcy, and it was altogether astounding how people rushed to be done with their obligations. They saved! Not a soul still had time for anything else but hastily to wolf down the necessary nourishment and then to load themselves, contented, into the apparatus. In it you saved time, literally laid it away. Who still had time for a leisurely stroll?
Who still had eyes for the happenings of this world? People no longer read, people no longer loved, people no longer took pleasure – they saved.

Carnegie had time for everything. He even squandered it, as if he had plenty to spare. But provision had been made: he bought up time. And thousands of poor devils had to pinch and scrape so that that little white-haired gentleman could take his time peeling a pear or even take a leisurely stroll.

There was a time stock exchange. Time was traded there – and since it was worth a pretty penny, entire villages thrust themselves, lock, stock and barrel, into that steel contraption, saved and sold to the highest bidder. The price dropped after that – but a time trust succeeded in re-establishing a bull market.

One time somebody cornered the market: Mr Woolf from New York, who, having suffered a terrible death after reading a popular novel that ended badly, came back to life, after sensing a fabulous business opportunity, and bought up – at the time, I think, he had amassed a total of 7,000 years – but was subsequently encircled by competitors and had to dump his stock. A day dropped to five cents, and people slacked off, what a damn shame. The theatres opened for business, well-heeled gentlemen started playing soccer and you could once again see members of the middle class idling, free and easy, on their doorstep in the glimmer of the setting sun, dreamily picking their noses …

But the time of plenty passed; a month rose to a good eighty dollars, and everything returned to the way things were before.

That’s how things stood when a curious bit of news was disseminated around the world. Near Munich, it was said, there lived a man who didn’t even save a second! Can you imagine? He was a medical doctor by the name of Bruck. Dr Bruck …

Some wealthy individuals – for the others had no time – resolved to see this strange specimen of humanity for themselves. Indeed, as they approached his modest residence, they spied a man with a goatee smoking a pipe, a long pipe, on the porcelain bowl of which – you could see it clearly – a flowery wreath was painted with angels holding up the garland edges … The
man puffed contentedly and blew little clouds of smoke in the warm summer air, in which, like light blue gauze veils, they slowly drifted upwards … And then this odd individual cheerfully followed their rise, and when one cloud vanished he sent another one after it, and may well have amused himself with this cloud game a good long time. And what’s more: he relit the pipe every time it went out and refused to burn, three times in a row. Then it burned. Wasn’t he a sight? … So it seemed.

For when, so as not to waste much time, the wealthy Munich wholesale butcher Mauermeier hastily thrust himself into the man’s field of vision, the latter responded thusly: ‘How do you do!’ he said and chewed right contentedly on the mouthpiece of his glowing pipe. And before Mauermeier had rightly recovered from the shock, the doctor continued: ‘What would you say to a little digestive stroll? Look what a lovely green is the waving grass, over which the wind wafts, and the heights over there, up which I propose to climb, are already a diaphanous blue, which bodes well for tomorrow’s weather.’

Whereupon Mauermeier took the time – since that’s what it was there for, and he could afford it, thank God! – he took the time to blurt out: ‘They ought’a lock you up, fella, for squandering precious time!’

Whereupon Mauermeier headed off, at a trot, in the direction of the station, so as not to miss the train to Munich, so that he could go right back to saving …

But the doctor just stood up with a chuckle, reached for his walking stick, his faithful companion on all peregrinations, and crossed the clean, quiet quarter in which he lived, gazed good-naturedly at the wide streets and squat houses and at the little octagonal tower atop the pub. Up there in an octagonal little room with a splendid view of the village and the mountains lived a mad countess, rumour had it, and when the cloud clusters passed through the rain-soaked firmament they brushed by the eight little windows, the oven smoked, and a white-haired lady crept up the winding staircase, muttering to herself, to end a lost life here … the doctor pondered this a moment, and then looked to see if the hospital was still in the same place, then turned to the post office, in front of which an old rattle-trap
of a coach minus horses was parked, and then turned to the
Rathaus
– and, puffing all the while, could not finally withstand the temptation to complete a little poem that touched upon it all: how lovely was that little allotment of life, and how you only get one go of it, and how he, for his part, didn’t give a hoot about all the Mauermeiers and time-savers of this world …

1941

Egon Erwin Kisch

Evenings when the coast was clear, that is, when I no longer had to fear a visit from the night guard, I could slip out of my solitary cell, though I had to remain in the guardhouse. I made my way to the watch-tower, where the prisoners gathered after a day spent behind walls, wood and iron, to see other souls, exchange chit-chat and play cards.

With the arrival of the lithographer from the regimental orderly room, a lance-corporal under arrest, a new mood took hold in our midst. He heaped curses on ‘Old Pig’s Snout’ who, ‘on account of a mere trifle’, issued the order of his arrest.

By ‘mere trifle’ the new arrestee was referring to the fact that, thanks to a lithographed regimental command order prepared and issued by his own hand, he had personally promoted a corporal to sergeant. ‘My friend, the man I promoted,’ he said, ‘would have made a ten times better sergeant than anybody picked by that colonel, that “Old Pig’s Snout”.’

Not only did the lithographer make a stink about the injustice of it, but also about the ingratitude of the colonel: ‘And to think that I did that Pig’s Snout so many favours.’

‘
You
did favours for the colonel?’

‘I painted his apartment, drew place cards for his dinner table and enlarged the photograph of the colonel’s wife. Which now hangs framed in their bedroom; and me, I sit here under arrest – there’s fine thanks for you! But when I’m back in my civvies, I’ll salt his snout for him, the ungrateful swine.’

My fellow prisoners delighted in these outbursts, since it
was a superior officer being insulted or threatened. I had once seen him in passing at our swearing-in ceremony. Another time, when I stood guard at the entrance to the barracks, he stormed by disdainfully without acknowledging me and my rifle raised in salute. I was, after all, a lowly private,
*
and as such, for a professional officer, the lowest form of life. As we learnt at our very first military training lesson, our colonel had risen from the ranks. Serving under Field Marshal Radetsky, the then eighteen-year-old Corporal Ferdinand Knopp had with his battalion shot himself up an entire Italian cavalry patrol in the West Ukrainian stronghold of Unterhausen. For which feat he was awarded the Emperor Ferdinand Medal – not the highest honour, but by far the most sizeable. On account of its size – more or less that of the lid of a kettle – it was later done away with. When Ferdinand Knopp was knighted and the name of that battleground added as honorary title, his heroism lay a good forty years behind him and he had already risen to the rank of
Oberst
, colonel. An Oberst Knopp von Unterhausen can’t very well be called anything by a lowly enlisted man but ‘Oberste Knopf von Unterhosen’,
^†
a fair approximation of which might be Lord Colonel Long Johns.

He was perfectly grotesque. Decked out with the sole remaining, kettle-lid-sized medal long since removed from circulation, his entire uniform was likewise anachronistic. He wore his low-brimmed billycock hat in the manner prescribed back in the days of Radetzky, such that, on the one hand, it covered his eyebrows, and on the other hand, the stiff sweat band left off right at the base of the skull. Under this headgear his head looked as if it had been scalped – on top of which, the colonel was profoundly fat and altogether neck-less. His chin descended in steps down to his breast, and his breast continued on without interruption all the way to his belly, the girth of which the stoutest uppermost long-john button could not rein in by so much as a millimetre. But his most noteworthy feature was his nose – not so much the nose itself, for the poor proboscis
was essentially blotted out by a fist-sized flabby appendage that blocked its view. The latter growth was bedecked with red-berry-like splodges, so that the sobriquet ‘Pig’s Snout’ which our new fellow prisoner kept hissing through his teeth was by no means precise.

This fellow, our new prison-mate, never grew tired of mean-mouthing Old Pig’s Snout while playing cards or engaged in the practice of tattooing. He was truly remarkable at this art. With a dash of the pencil he first flung his sketches on paper – an eagle, a pair of crossed dumb bells, a virgin with realistic features, a writhing, hissing snake, various inscriptions, emblems and arrows pointing to one or another body part. With a cobbler’s awl he pricked each client’s selected sample into the skin, and to colour it in he pressed a barely still liquid trickle of ink out of a tube. The blood that spurted out of these prick wounds, the ink that failed to seep in and the sweat that oozed out of the pores – he wiped it all away in short intervals with an indescribably filthy rag.

We prisoners surrounded the master and his living canvases, remarking on every dot and line. He was a highly accomplished graphic artist. Though I was disgusted, I must admit, by that rag begrimed with filth, blood and ink. I can’t say for sure if I shuddered, but one of the other onlookers cried out: ‘Look at the rookie, he’s trembling!’ I don’t know if I went white in the face, but another onlooker added: ‘He’s pale as a ghost, poor thing.’