The Prince of West End Avenue (21 page)

The PROBLEM as I came to see it in the camps was not the terror or the physical deprivation or the pain or even the utter lack of hope, the gray misery of squatting in filth for weeks and months and years while the mad dance of death went on all around. The problem was how in such circumstances to retain the merest shred of human dignity. The signposts of civilization, the countless unrecognized details of ordinary life through which we find our bearings, gain our sense of time and place and personhood—these were gone, vanished forever. Beyond the barbed wire was a scarcely imaginable Paradise, peopled with golden gods and goddesses. Yes, the world at war was Paradise! Within the compound was Hell. We were creatures of nightmare, ugly, stinking, subhuman. You see, it was getting harder and harder not to believe the propaganda. I was beginning to assume that they were right, that / was where I belonged. That was the danger.

My solution was simple: I reentered the past. Time, of course, does not exist in Hell, but before the camps there had been time. I dived into the ocean of time, and when I surfaced, lungs bursting, gasping for air, I held in my hands nuggets of memory. I dived again and again, returning always with treasure. Eventually I underwent a metamorphosis, reversing the process of evolution. Gills appeared, a tail, fins. I became a fish and stayed in the ocean.

Well, I grow fanciful, and I blush to think of you smiling at me. "Speak plainly, Otto," my father would say. "Spare us the poetry." Meta would have understood, though. She could trade me metaphor for metaphor.

To put it plainly, then, I chose a day from the past and relived it. At first it wasn't easy. The memories were fragmentary, brittle, evanescent, and the brutal facts of the camp were insistent. But little by little I gained in skill, recalled details I had thought gone forever, joined shard to shard. I relived whole days, then weeks. It was important not to cheat: it was tempting to reshape the past. But all I wanted was to become a human being again, and life for human beings, after all, is not unalloyed bliss. I relived sorrow as well as joy, and more often than either I relived perfectly ordinary, utterly humdrum days.

It was like learning to ride a bicycle. The child falls off, rubs his bruises, perhaps cries a little, and tries again; at length he can wobble along, he has the hang of it; at last he flies like the wind. It was just a matter of balance, after all. Yes, but that was the tricky part: one could not sit idly by, mouth agape, immersed in fantasy. The routine of the camp had to be fulfilled, the formations, the work details, the attempts to avoid the notice of our capricious dance masters in their polished boots. One had to maintain a pious subservience to the transient hierarchy of doomed souls within the compound, pay careful attention to the shifts in faction and power. One had to give such care as was possible to the minimal imperatives of the

body, to the bestial scramble for a rotted turnip-top or scrap of rancid fat, to evacuation, ablutions, rags stolen for warmth, to sleep.

What was required to balance the bicycle was a radical shift in temporal perception. The stuff of memory became my everyday reality; everyday reality became a figment of my mind. I negotiated the routines of the camp with the same degree of involved disengagement that you yourself grant yesterday's incidents remembered today. Think about yesterday: you see yourself, don't you? You know what you did, what you said, what you felt. You might even "relive" some of yesterday's emotions, embarrassment, exultation, anger. But of course where you are today is in fact. . . where you are. That is perfectly normal. For me, however, the normal relationship between yesterday and today was reversed. Where I was was the past; what I seemed only to "remember" was the present. It was a deliberate effort of the will, and it saved my life.

Here is how I did it. I would select a date—for example, July 17, 1914. I was with the Infelds, on holiday in Baden-Baden. My aunt and uncle had kindly invited me to keep Joachim company. Neither the "old people" nor his little sister were much fun for him. It was a particularly happy time. My book had just been published. The juices of youth were flowing. Baden-Baden was in bloom with pretty young ladies—all chaperoned, of course, but that only added an exquisite spice to our enjoyment. The fun was in the stolen moment, the covert glance, the blushes, the sighs. We were young, very young, with straw hats on our heads, boutonnieres in our lapels.

We had lunch that day at a restaurant in the Black Forest, the Blue Trout. The room was cool and timbered. The fish swam lazily in the tank. The diner would tell the waiter which one he wanted, and within twenty minutes it would appear on a plate before him, cooked to perfection. What was astonishing was the resignation with which the fish met their fate: they

seemed to know when their number was up. Down would go the net into the tank. All the fish but the chosen one would scatter in alarm. But the chosen fish, your fish, would make only the most desultory effort to escape, a minimal motion of the tail, a shudder, and hoopla! it was caught. I can still ride the bicycle.

It IS NOT TRUE that I retain nothing of the past but my letter from Rilke, and of course my memories. I have some photographs that once belonged to Lola, which Kenneth Him-melfarb thrust on me, along with a few family odds and ends, when Lola died. Some of the furniture, the paintings, the books that made their way from Nuremberg to Central Park West to West Eighty-second Street are still to be found here in my room in the Emma Lazarus. The photographs, generations of them, some brought by Lola to New York, many sent to her from Germany in the few years after she left us, are collected in an old shirt box that sits on a shelf in the closet, here as on Eighty-second Street. When Lola died, I got off the bicycle, packed up my memories, and put them out of reach, in a closet of the mind. Until today I have never wanted to look at the photographs, frozen warrants of life, of happiness, of belief in continuity that could show me only the dead. But today, impelled by I know not what, I took them out, sifted through them, grouped them. How they skew the past! Well, no one reaches for his camera, after all, to take a snapshot of family misery. There they were, all my dead, not knowing they are dead. Why describe them? All families have such photographs. I was able to look at them without emotion. Then I put them back on the shelf.

You know now that I had a son, Hugo. He was named after Metas maternal grandfather. He was a splendid little boy, you must take my word for it, born with a sense of humor. Of

course, his smile tended to fade in my presence. But I've told you about that. He got his looks from Meta. Today he would have been in his early fifties; that's hard to grasp, impossible to understand. But of course he is long since dead.

I AM ON THE BICYCLE AGAIN, but I have lost my sense of balance. I am dizzy, both literally and figuratively. What is happening to me?

For the last thirty years I have existed in the present, disposing of my life a day at a time. Only, unlike most people, I had no past. My first fifty years, at any rate, were high on the shelf, behind the closet door. I began these memoirs "to set the historical record straight," to leave a written record of the origin of the word Dada. Prompted by the seemingly purposeful arrival of Mandy Dattner in our midst, that became important to me.

Accordingly, I went to the closet of the mind and removed a few items for display, a carefully controlled "retrospective," so to speak, of the Zurich years of Otto Korner. But once the box was opened, the contents tumbled out, uncontrolled, uncontrollable, revealing folly upon folly. The last pitiful truths demand to be told.

The BICYCLE races downhill, and I cannot control it.

THIS TIME I do not choose the day. This time the day chooses me. It is April 3,1933. The Nazis have been in power for a little over two months. The Jews are in shock. Waves of violence have swept over Germany, and not against the Jews alone: the Brownshirts are settling old grudges. The New Order has begun in high gear. There is nothing to restrain the hooligans

now; the mobs are in the streets. Today is the third day of a state-sponsored boycott of Jewish businesses. Coincidentally, Korner's has been closed for "inventory and reorganization."

We are in my parents' living room, where we are having tea and those delicious pastries that my mother knows Hugo is so fond of. The spring sunshine pierces the curtains; the ormolu clock ticks away on the mantel shelf. There is a fire in the hearth, for despite the sunshine, the day is chill. I see it all so clearly.

Meta sits straight-backed, as always, holding little Hugo to her as if to protect him from immediate attack. She is clearly agitated. She bites her finger, breathes with effort. I imagine that my first duty is to calm her. Hysterics, I feel, cannot help. She is alarming Hugo: seven years old and he is wetting his bed again. This is how I react to the beginning of the end: it is a matter of family decorum.

My father sits in his stuffed chair by the fire. His hand trembles, his cup and saucer clink against his watch chain. He is sixty-eight now, but you would suppose him much older. In the new era he has lost his robustness, his air of decisiveness. He, too, is adrift, bewildered by the events that have overtaken his beloved Fatherland. Meanwhile, my mother is at the table selecting a cream puff for Hugo: "Let me see. . . . Which one will make him grow the fastest?" She deals with the looming disaster by ignoring it. Politics, phooey!

And where in this domestic scene is Otto Korner? He leans against the bookcase, a study in nonchalance, one hand in his pocket, the other resting lightly on a leather-bound volume of Goethe's collected works.

Meta can restrain herself no longer. She appeals to my father. "Tell him we must all leave—you and Mutti, too. Lola and Kurt, Joachim, my parents, we must all get out!"

"Really, Meta, leave Father alone, he has enough to worry about." In my voice I express a hint of indulgent exasperation.

"We can't simply drop everything and run for the border because a few idiotic louts get out of hand, now can we?"

My father rallies. "Before there were Germans in Germany, there were Jews."

"As soon as there were Germans, there were anti-Semites."

"But there, you have said it yourself." I speak as if she has handed me a trump card. "Anti-Semitism is nothing new in Germany. Fortunately, today we have laws against that sort of thing."

"Laws? What laws? Hitler is the law. Streicher is the law. Jewish judges are being publicly humiliated. They're stringing us up in the streets." We have heard this morning of a Jewish lawyer lynched by a mob in Kiel. She turns back to my father. "Did Otto tell you? Three days ago Hugo had to sit on the Jews' bench in school. They measured his head with calipers, a demonstration of Jew-filthy inferiority."

She must have been holding Hugo too tightly, for he squirms, and she releases him, kissing him on the temple. His grandmother lures him to the table. She is holding up a plate with a cream puff. "Why are they making such a fuss, Grandma?" She ties a napkin around his neck. "Pay no attention, grown-ups like to exercise their jaws before they eat."

"It won't go on like this," says my father. "It cannot. Hindenburg—"

"Hindenburg can do nothing!"

"Personally ..." I take a sip of tea and smack my lips together. "Ah, excellent! Darjeeling?" I put the cup and saucer down and pick up the volume of Goethe. "Personally, I expect any day to hear a public announcement over the radio: General von Such-and-such or von So-and-so has taken over the reins of government. It's only a matter of time." I leaf through the book as though looking for a pertinent passage.

From Meta, a look of open scorn. But she says nothing more.

How could I have been so blind, so insanely smug? Well, of course, I knew my Germans. One had to adjust his perspective to the larger view. Sporadic acts of anti-Semitism were no more than the initial exuberance of the Nazi triumph, a passing phase of the new Reich. Things were bound to get better, settle down. What were we if not Germans? We sprang from the German soil; we were Germans in our innermost souls. One could not, in any case, give in to female vapors. One had responsibilities. No doubt I believed all that.

But I had other, more pressing, imperatives. A week before Metas unseemly outburst in my parents' living room, I had received an urgent call from an old school chum, at that time an editor on the Israelitische Rundschau. As the wave of panic swept over the Jewish community, an effort was already under way to draw together the various Jewish organizations and form a common front against the terror. I was associated with no faction; indeed, I was an unknown. My friend wanted from me a series of articles on the current crisis. On the third day of the boycott I dropped the first of my articles into the postbox. More were to follow. Before the end I was also to appear in the Judische Volkszeitung, the CV-Wochenende, the Monatschafi der deutschen Zionisten, the Hebraische Welt, and others whose names I forget, the whole spectrum of Jewish publications. Again and again I was to urge the Jews of Germany to stand fast. It was cowardly to flee the homeland only because a few months or even years of hardship lay ahead. "The history of German Jewry teaches that we must wait, and we are capable of waiting," I wrote. We had reason for pride in our dual heritage. No one and nothing could strip us of our essential German identity. We were bound by history and fate to our beloved Fatherland. "As a matter of right—legal, moral, and religious—we belong on German soil": this was the poisonous nonsense I spewed forth. And why? Because once more I had a readership. Because thousands all over Germany were drinking

down the honeyed palliative of my words. I received hundreds of letters from my fans expressing gratitude for my forthright stand.

Leaning casually against the bookcase that day, a series of articles already bubbling away in my head, I could scarcely pander to my wife's panic. "It will all blow over," I said. And I delivered myself of those fatuous paragraphs already en route to the Israelitische Rundschau.