The Knife Thrower (13 page)

The debate over the ten-year silence of Heinrich Graum will in all probability never cease. It has been compared in some quarters to Schiller’s twelve-year silence between
Don Carlos
and
Wallenstein
, but perhaps I may be permitted to point out that Schiller began to compose poetry (if not drama) eight years after the completion of
Don Carlos
, that he worked steadily on
Wallenstein
from 1797 to 1799, and that in any case he was far from silent, since he published two full-length histories as well as numerous philosophical and esthetic essays during the very years of his dramatic silence. Graum’s silence was complete. Moreover he released his apprentices. We have therefore no witnesses of his activity during this decisive period. He had married quietly during the triumphant years, and there is no cause whatever for connecting his silence in any way with his domestic life. During his silent years he is known to have made several trips in the company of his wife to various bathing resorts on the Nordsee; he was twice seen in a chair on the beach at Scheveningen, a stooped giant of a man in brown bathing trunks, staring out gloomily at the water. But most of the time he appears to have remained shut up in his workshop on the Lindenallee. It is commonly assumed that there he tirelessly took apart and recomposed clockwork creatures in the manner of his obsessive youth. Nothing can be proved to the contrary, for he has remained silent about this as about all other matters, but against the general assumption two objections may briefly be raised. First, no trace of any automaton from this period has ever been found. Second, the nature of the new automaton theater renders the theory of ceaseless experiment unlikely. It may be argued that he destroyed all his experiments; yet it should be remembered that he carefully preserved the sixty-three hands and more than six
hundred heads of his apprenticeship. My own suggestion, which I offer after long and serious reflection, is that for ten years Heinrich Graum did nothing. Or to be more precise: he did nothing, while thinking ceaselessly about the nature of his art. Had he been a man of letters, a Schiller, he might have offered to the world the fruits of his meditations; his genius being of the wordless kind, his thoughts were reflected only in the strange creatures that suddenly burst from him toward the end of this period, changing the nature of our automaton theater forever.

When the Zaubertheater first closed, we were disappointed and expectant. As the silence continued, our expectation diminished, while our disappointment grew. In time even our disappointment faded, returning only in stray eruptions of sadness or, on lavender summer evenings when the yellow streetlamps came on, a vague uneasiness, a restlessness, as if we were searching for something that had departed forever.

Meanwhile we threw ourselves into the automaton theater. It was a time of ripeness in the art; and it was said that never before had the skill of so many masters reached such a pitch of expressive brilliance, haunted as they all were by the memory of the old Zaubertheater.

The rumor of the great master’s return was at first greeted with a certain reserve. He had vanished so completely that his possible reappearance among us was somehow disturbing. It was as if a beloved son, ten years dead, should suddenly return, long after one had made one’s thousand little accommodations. An entire generation of apprentices had entered the workshops without having seen a single work of the legendary master; some were openly skeptical. Even we who had mourned his silence were secretly uncertain, for
we had grown accustomed to things as they were, we had lost the habit of genius. In our timid hearts, did we not pray that he would stay away? Yet as the day drew near we became tense with expectancy; and in our pulses we could feel, like an eruption of fever at the onset of an unknown disease, a slow, secret excitement.

And Heinrich Graum returned; again the old Zaubertheater opened its doors. That long-awaited performance was like a knife flashed in the face of our art. Of those who remained during the full thirty-six minutes, some were openly enraged, others sickened and ashamed; a few were seized by the roots of the soul, though in a manner they could not understand and later refused to discuss. One critic stated that the master had lost his mind; others, more kindly though no more accurately, spoke of parody and the grotesque. Even now one still hears such charges and descriptions; the Neues Zaubertheater remains at the center of a passionate controversy. Those who do not share our love of the automaton theater may find our passions difficult to understand; but for us it was as if everything had suddenly been thrown into question. Even we who have been won over are disturbed by these performances, which trouble us like forbidden pleasures, like secret crimes.

I have spoken of the long and noble history of our art, and of its tendency toward an ever-increasing mimetic brilliance. Young Heinrich had inherited this tradition, and in the opinion of many had become its outstanding master. In one stroke his Neues Zaubertheater stood history on its head. The new automatons can only be described as clumsy. By this I mean that the smoothness of motion so characteristic of our classic figures has been replaced by the jerky abrupt motions of amateur automatons. As a result the new automatons cannot imitate the motions of human beings,
except in the most elementary way. They lack grace; by every rule of classic automaton art they are inept and ugly. They do not strike us as human. Indeed it must be said that the new automatons strike us first of all
as automatons.
This is the essence of what has come to be called The New Automaton Theater.

I have called the new automatons clumsy, and this is true enough if we judge them from the standpoint of the masterpieces of the older school. But it is not entirely true, judged even from that standpoint. In the first place, the clumsiness itself is extremely artful, as imitators have learned to their cost. It is not a matter of simply reducing the number of motions, but of reducing them in a particular way, so that a particular rhythm of motions is produced. In the second place, the acknowledged master of expressivity cannot be said to have turned against the expressive itself. The new automatons are profoundly expressive in their own disturbing way. Indeed it has been noticed that the new automatons are capable of motions never seen before in the automatist’s art, although it is a matter of dispute whether these motions may properly be called human.

In the classic automaton theater we are asked to share the emotions of human beings, whom in reality we know to be miniature automatons. In the new automaton theater we are asked to share the emotions of automatons themselves. The clockwork artifice, far from being disguised, is thrust upon our attention. If this were all, it would be startling, but it would not be much. Such a theater could not last. But Graum’s new automatons suffer and struggle; no less than the old automatons do they appear to have souls. But they do not have the souls of human beings; they have the souls of clockwork creatures, grown conscious of themselves. The classic
automatists present us with miniature people; Heinrich Graum has invented a new race. They are the race of automatons, the clan of clockwork; they are new beings, inserted into the universe by the mind of Graum the creator. They live lives that are parallel to ours but are not to be confused with ours. Their struggles are clockwork struggles, their suffering is the suffering of automatons.

It has become fashionable of late to claim that Graum abandoned the adult theater and returned to the Children’s Theater as to his spiritual home. To my mind this is a gross misunderstanding. The creatures of the Children’s Theater are imitations of imaginary beings; Graum’s creatures are not imitations of anything. They are only themselves. Dragons do not exist; automatons do.

In this sense Graum’s revolution may be seen to be a radical continuation of our history rather than a reversal or rejection of it. I have said that our art is realistic, and that all advances in the technical realm have been in the service of the real. Graum’s new automatons offer no less homage to Nature. For him, human beings are one thing and clockwork creatures another; to confuse the two is to propagate the unreal.

Art, a master once observed, is never theoretical. My laborious remarks obscure the delicate art they seek to elucidate. Nothing short of attendance at the Neues Zaubertheater can convey the startling, disturbing quality of the new automatons. We seem drawn into the souls of these creatures, who assert their unreal nature at every jerk of a limb; we suffer their clumsiness, we are pierced by inhuman longings. We are moved in ways we can scarcely comprehend. We yearn to mingle with these strange newcomers, to pass into their clockwork lives; at times we feel a dark understanding, a criminal complicity. Is it that in their presence we
are able to shed the merely human, which seems a limitation, and to release ourselves into a larger, darker, more dangerous realm? We know only that we are stirred in places untouched before. A dark, disturbing beauty, like a black sunrise, has come into our lives. Dying of a thirst we did not know we had, we drink from the necessary and tormenting waters of fictive fountains.

And the new automatons begin to obsess us. They penetrate our minds, they multiply within us, they inhabit our dreams. They waken in us new, forbidden passions we cannot name. Once again it is adolescent girls who have proved to be peculiarly susceptible to Graum’s dark wizardry. In any audience one can see three or four of them, with their parted lips, their hungry eyes, their tense, hysterical attention. The tears that flow are not the tears of love, but quite different tears, deep, scalding tears torn up from unspeakable depths, tears that give no relief, tears wrung from nerves tormented by the crystalline harmonies of unearthly violins. Even our stern young men emerge from these dangerous performances with haunted eyes. Incidents of a pathological kind have been reported; the demonic pact between Wolfgang Kohler and Eva Holst must be passed over in silence. More troubling because more common are the taut, drained faces one sees after certain performances, especially after the terrifying dissolution scene in
Die Neue Elise.
The new art is not a gentle art; its beauties are of an almost unbearable intensity.

These are perhaps superficial signs; more profound is the new restlessness one feels in our city, an impatience with older forms, a secret hunger.

They are no longer the same, the old automatons. Gratefully we seek out the old theaters, but once we have felt the troubling touch
of the new automatons we find ourselves growing impatient with the smooth and perfect motions of the old masters, whose brilliant imitations seem to us nothing but clockwork confections. So, rather guiltily, we return to the Neues Zaubertheater, where the new automatons draw us into their inhuman joys and sufferings, and fill us with uneasy rapture. The old art flourishes, and its presence comforts us, but something new and strange has come into the world. We may try to explain it, but what draws us is the mystery. For our dreams have changed. Whether our art has fallen into an unholy decadence, as many have charged, or whether it has achieved its deepest and darkest flowering, who among us can say? We know only that nothing can ever be the same.

T
HE SUMMER
I turned fifteen, I could no longer fall asleep. I would lie motionless on my back, in a perfect imitation of sleep, and imagine myself lying fast asleep with my head turned to one side and a tendon pushed up along the skin of my neck, but even as I watched myself lying there dead to the world I could hear the faint burr of my electric clock, a sharp creak in the attic—like a single footstep—a low rumbling hum that I knew was the sound of trucks rolling along the distant thruway. I could feel the collar of my pajama top touching my jaw. Through my trembling eyelids I sensed that the darkness of the night was not dark enough, and suddenly opening my eyes, as if to catch someone in my room, I’d see the moonlight streaming past the edges of the closed Venetian blinds.