The Weimar Triangle (5 page)

Still, when I saw him shake hands with Édouard Herriot after the speech, exchanging words of the warmest cordiality and friendship, I could not help feeling that the tactful, elegant and good-natured Frenchman would not have made a similar
faux pas
. Herriot delivered his speech in correct but somewhat hesitant German
—
an achievement in itself
—
and was witty and well meaning throughout. His speech, unlike Stresemann’s, was entirely positive. Musicians, he said, speak a language that can be understood by everybody because music transcends the barriers put up by national languages. It must become an essential element in the ethical basis of the new era we are now entering. Only if there is the kind of spiritual understanding that music provides do politicians have a chance to bring about a reconciliation between nations.

At his conclusion Herriot unleashed a storm of applause when he switched from the lofty political potential of music to the not entirely unrelated universality of his favourite subject
—
Goethe
—
and cited his famous verse:

Vom Vater hab ich die Statur,

Des Lebens ernstes Führen.

Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur

Und Lust zu fabulieren

[From father I inherited the posture

And a manner of serious gravity;

From mother a happy sense of fun

And the joy of making up stories]

Whatever one may think of Stresemann, he is more like Goethe’s father than Goethe’s mother. As for Herriot, he resembles both. I stood behind him at the reception in the Frankfurter Hof and overheard him whisper to Ernst Otto Sutter conspiratorially
—
as they clinked glasses of champagne
— Vive l’Europe
!

E
NTRY 4:
S
ATURDAY
, J
UNE 11, 1927

Lore Krämer came today. So naturally the big subject was Stresemann’s Nobel Peace Prize. She is now high up in the Foreign Office and has seen a draft of the lecture he will give in Oslo next week. She was in Stresemann’s entourage both in Locarno two years ago and last September in Geneva, when we were admitted to the League of Nations. Lore had come down from Berlin to inspect the exhibits on Italian Renaissance composers, on whom she wrote her dissertation before she switched from history to economics. She is as lively as ever.

The other two guests were the strangely conservative American composer Henry F. Gilbert, one of the two Americans whose works will be performed here (the other is the apparently more “modern” Aaron Copland), and the dynamic Belgian pianist Édouard Knocke. Most musicians are self-involved and single-minded about their music but both these two have wide interests that made it possible for us to have a lively discussion about the present state of things in Germany.

It all started when Gilbert said
—
very sympathetically
—
that it will probably take another generation or two for Germany to recover from all its troubles. (He did not say all the troubles that Germans had inflicted on themselves, but no doubt that is what he meant.) Oh no, Hermann said, the recovery has already taken place. At the end of the war, he said, the national income amounted to half of what it was at the beginning of the war. Now it has reached the pre-war level again, in spite of the territories we have lost and the reparations we must pay, not to mention the losses in real values we incurred during the inflation. Once again we have the most modern merchant marine and the fastest trains in Europe.

I was quite surprised at Hermann
—
he sounded like one of those nationalist boosters, the people he detests more than anybody else. We have one governmental crisis after another, he declared, but our administration is sound, our inventors and engineers are among the best in the world and our industrial planning is first rate. Much of this was due to the loans we received from American banks, he said with a bow to Gilbert. But the banks had nothing to worry about
—
they would get their money back. I don’t think Gilbert cared very much about the banks, but that seemed to be of no concern to Hermann. As to our cultural achievements, he said, the exhibition was only one of many things we could be proud of.

Knocke had mixed feelings about all this. This, Lore Krämer said, was most understandable. No one understood this better than Stresemann himself. But Knocke was not satisfied. He said he did not want to hurt Lore’s feelings, but he had heard that Stresemann had worked with Ludendorff during the war and Knocke was not sure he could trust Stresemann.

Lore took this very well. She replied that Stresemann had made a complete break with the past. It had been a huge effort for him, a great wrench. In 1918 he was fifty. He had been a solid monarchist all his life, devoting himself to various industrial enterprises. At fifty most people were no longer capable of making a fundamental switch. It was very painful. But he did it. He understood that there was no reasonable alternative to the Republic. So he became a politician, to help make it work. After a year or two he rose to the top of the German People’s Party. He became chancellor and later foreign minister in a number of successive cabinets. At every juncture, throughout the years of turmoil and afterward, he was bitterly opposed by those who did not make the switch and who firmly believed we had not lost the war but were stabbed in the back by traitors
—
that is, by the Left, by believers in democracy who were therefore naturally acting in the interest of the enemy. They never forgave him.

But Stresemann was not going to talk about any of this directly in his Nobel lecture, Lore said. He wanted to stay away from his personal story. All he would say was that all Germans who now occupied responsible positions, including himself, spent their formative years in the Kaiser’s Germany, which
—
and this should be recognized today
—
was not all bad. True, it was overwhelmingly militaristic but it also put a high premium on honesty and efficiency. And this was a time of enormous progress in many fields. His main point will be that Germans were not prepared in any way for the disaster that came, for the agonizing humiliation, for the succession of calamities that ruined the lives not only of those who were comfortably off but also of the entire middle class, and that turned millions of people into demoralized paupers who now had to start again from scratch, after all the sacrifices they had already made during the war and after. Until nearly the end of the war they firmly believed victory was around the corner. No wonder so many people became Bolsheviks
—
Bolsheviks of the Right and Bolsheviks of the Left, determined to suffocate the Republic. Especially those on the Right.

Henry Gilbert said he would take off his hat to any man who attempted reconciliation under such circumstances.

Lore said it was good to hear that. She hopes for reconciliation abroad with our former enemies and cooperation at home with workers, with social democrats
—
with people who in earlier days had not been part of Stresemann’s world at all. She went on talking about Stresemann’s skill as a parliamentarian, about the patient, grinding work of joining one coalition after another, at great cost to his health. Surely the fact that he had been largely successful demonstrates that it was now overwhelmingly likely that the Weimar Republic is here to stay.

That was enough political talk for one meal.

Knocke was excited about the concerts. He talked fast and had a strong accent. Gilbert’s German was better.

The highlights of the summer will be Alban Berg’s
Kammerkonzer
and Bela Bartok’s piano concerto, under Wilhelm Furtwängler, with Bartok himself performing. Knocke is also looking forward to the new opera
—
Ferruccio Busoni’s
Doktor Faustus
, of which Busoni wrote both the words and the music
—
and an awesome oratorio,
The Life and Works of Saint Cyril
and Methodius
by the Yugoslav composer Bozidar Sirola. All the performers will come up from Zagreb.

Will I be able to absorb all that?

E
NTRY 5:
S
ATURDAY
, J
UNE 18, 1927

Frankfurt the Mecca of Music? Music the artistic Locarno? Music the Instrument of Love and Reconciliation? Music the Esperanto of Sensibilities?

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, by far the most radical music critic I know
—
and the youngest
—
Teddy is only twenty-four
—
was our guest today. I like his mother, Maria Barbara Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, a gifted singer and the daughter of a French officer of Corsican origin. His father is a wine merchant. In matters of musical taste Teddy is a kindred spirit, a student of Alban Berg and a great admirer of Arnold Schönberg. And I am full of admiration for his penetrating and original mind, even though he talks too fast and is occasionally too complicated for me. But today he was reasonably intelligible. He is a composer himself, a student of philosophy at the Institute for Social Research. He likes to use big words and is a fountain of obscure knowledge.

Teddy poured icy water on the high-minded idealism of those who believe there is a connection between music and brotherly love. He called it nothing but wishful thinking, a silly bourgeois illusion. He said in August 1914 French and German lovers of Beethoven did not hesitate to begin slaughtering each other. Besides, what does Chinese and African music have in common with ours? The indisputable value of the exhibition, he said, is to reveal the hypocrisy of the bosses who call the tune. They want to sedate us by showing us beautiful things to see, to conceal the truth. Our ears tell us the truth: music divides rather than unifies.

To my surprise, my old friend and fellow student of the violin, Luise Holzer, did not challenge Teddy. In fact, she seemed to agree with him. The last time I saw Luise was in Hamburg when we played the Bériot duets together. Now she lives in Berlin. Her husband is a physicist and a colleague of Albert Einstein’s at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She says she has hardly a moment to practise and spends all her time writing about architecture. She tried to talk one of the curators at the exhibition into letting her just hold
—
not even play
—
the Stradivarius the Italians are exhibiting here, the viola “Medicea” made for one of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. Of course she got nowhere.

We reminisced about playing the Bériot together. I don’t know why nobody ever plays them, I said. Few violin duets are as rewarding. They are such a joy to play
—
pure bel canto. Not surprising since Bériot’s wife, Maria Malibran, was famous for singing Norma and for the concert aria Mendelssohn wrote for her. And for dying in Manchester, of all places, after falling off a horse. The other day, Luise said, she mentioned the duets to Einstein. He promised to have a look at them. She occasionally plays the Bach double with him
—
without a piano
—
behind closed doors.

Of course, as soon as Einstein’s name was mentioned everybody wanted to hear more. And we were not disappointed. Luise said a couple of weeks ago she attended a dinner party with her husband, and Einstein was there. So was Alfred Kerr, whom we all know as the fearsome theatre critic of the
Berliner Tageblatt
. Since Einstein is not an actor and does not write plays, Luise said, he does not have to be afraid of Kerr. Einstein told us he was just reading a book by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl about primitive mythology. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if this scholar was right to state that our concept of causality had its origin in primitive thinking about demons. This was too much for Alfred Kerr. He accused Einstein of coming down on the side of crude superstition. The next thing would be some sort of religious credo. Luise somehow managed to whisper in Kerr’s ear and a moment later he asked Einstein outright if he was a
gläubig
, a believer. Einstein replied that if one tries to penetrate Nature with the limited means at one’s disposal, one cannot help but recognize something unintelligible, intangible and very elegant [
etwas ganz feines
] behind those connections that one does understand. That feeling of awe, he said, was his religion. Kerr was speechless.

Then we talked about architecture. What Luise had to say about our architectural scene was quite extraordinary. Of course she is well informed about the flat-roofed
Siedlungen —
the public housing units
—
being built here in Frankfurt. The animating spirit was Landmann, but the man who actually built them was City Counsellor Ernst May, with lots of
Licht, Luft und Sonne
[light, air, and sunshine], for thousands of people who have been living in sordid conditions up to now. But she had just heard that I.G. Farben was planning to put up a huge administrative building on land bought from the Rothschilds, in the Grüneburgpark, on the northern periphery of the west end. The architect who had designed the League of Nations building in Geneva, Hans Poelzig, had won the competition. She has not yet seen the blueprints but she has been told the building will be sensational. The
palais
of Versailles celebrated the Sun-King; this colossus would celebrate the Sun-King’s modern equivalent
—
monopoly-capitalism.

We all looked at Teddy, expecting him to make a sneering remark, but he just sat there, smiling.

It was significant, Lore went on, that at the western periphery of the city there was Teddy’s building, the Institute for Social Research, next door to the university, a perfect example of the New Functionalism: four floors, with square, simple straight lines. Its inhabitants were committed to studying the world critically, theoretically and empirically, from the point of view of what was now known as scientific Marxism. It was significant because the two buildings, at opposite ends, were deliberately unlike the architecture in between them. The west end was strictly late nineteenth century
—
post-1870 bourgeois. Teddy and his Institute were, so to speak, the Marxist David critically confronting the super-capitalist Goliath across the decaying body of the doomed bourgeoisie.