The Weimar Triangle (14 page)

There were twenty-five boys in the Tertia and one girl, Daniela, a superb football player, is described as exemplary in every respect. The boys were in awe of her. She had stood aside the collective action, for her own reasons. But in the end she joined the rest and eventually became the triumphant heroine. Her participation demonstrated that any individual was powerless to achieve anything positive; only the group was effective. The class was organized along military lines under the superb leadership of the Great Elector, the ironic title borrowed from the founding father of the House of Hohenzollern.

T
HE
T
ILLER
G
IRL

Hanni had been complaining of a persistent cough and finally decided to see Doctor Alfred Goldstein, who frequently played the viola in her string quartet. After the consultation was finished, he asked whether she would mind staying for a few more minutes. His next patient was a young lady from the United States who, so his nurse told him, could not speak a word of German. Could she please serve as interpreter? Hanni’s English, after all, was better than his. Of course, she replied, she would be delighted. She had seen the patient in the waiting room
—
a strikingly beautiful tall girl who was browsing through a magazine.

Hanni’s job was easy. The young lady was suffering from an earache
—
body language made the situation clear. But words were required for Doctor Goldstein to convey to Linda Hughes, after he had written a prescription, that he had played his recording of Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
at least twenty times, that he adored every note of it, from the languid upward scale at the opening to the final E-major chord, and that he considered George Gershwin the greatest inventor of melodies since Franz Schubert. She laughed and said she accepted the compliment in the name of the United States. She added that she had seen Gershwin a few times at parties in New York when she was a chorus girl in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies but that they had never spoken. Doctor Goldstein said that it was about time jazz was
stubenrein
[housebroken] and introduced into the concert hall. He had heard that celebrities like Maurice Ravel, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Fritz Kreisler were among Gershwin’s many admirers. So was she, she said. When he asked her why she was in Frankfurt, she said she was appearing every evening in the Schumann Theatre as one of
The Tiller Girls.

Hanni knew that I was interested in every offering of the Schumann Theatre, a special favourite of mine. I had told her that I intended to write something about
The Tiller Girls
. On the way out to the tram, she invited Linda to tea on Sunday afternoon, to my apartment on the Feldbergstrasse. (She called Hermann and the boys every day to make sure they were all right. They always told her they hoped she was enjoying her vacation
—
the only explanation for her absence from home that would make sense to her sons.). Linda said she would love to come. Could she bring her gentleman-friend?

This turned out to be an unusually rewarding event. I found Linda hugely exciting physically
—
I hoped Hanni did not notice, as it happens to me very rarely
—
and much brighter than any dancer I had ever met. How she could tolerate the many hours of mind-numbing drilling all dancers have to endure was beyond me. She had her hair in the universal
Bubikopf
, had expressive brown eyes, a stunning figure, long legs and a perfect complexion
—
the first American I met in the flesh, of either sex, whom I actually liked. She amused us with lively descriptions of her childhood in a small town in Kansas, where she spent her days dreaming of a career as a dancer in a big city. She managed to join the Denishawn modern dance company in 1922, and danced with the likes of Martha Graham, Ruth St. Dennis and Ted Shawn. But after a row with Dennis, she was fired, and that was the end of her childhood dream. That ended her chances as a serious dancer. She auditioned a few times for bit parts in Hollywood movies but nothing clicked. However, she was not unhappy in the Ziegfeld Follies and was now enjoying her life as a Tiller Girl.

Her German gentleman-friend, Ferdinand Haffner, was a highly original character. He was twenty years older than she, well groomed, athletic and handsome. He had met Linda last year in Hamburg, at a reception after a performance. Haffner was an importer of American textiles, toys and kitchen gadgets of all kinds and managed to combine his sales trips with her itinerary so that they could spend as much time together as possible. He had fallen in love with America when he spent three years living with an uncle in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Eventually he and Linda hoped to get married. Making money was easy, he said, there and here. He was highly encouraged that Germany was Americanizing at a galloping speed because, to put it in a nutshell, America was the modern world. He did not mind where he was as long as he was with Linda. She preferred to live in America. That was fine with him.

For me it was refreshing to listen to someone who was not an academic or a newspaperman talk seriously about the state of the world. Of course, for Linda’s sake we spoke English.

The U.S.A. was the only country, Ferdinand said, that had emerged from the war as a clear winner. In spite of their heavy losses, Americans were stronger at the end of the war than they had been before. Their entry in 1917 had decided the war. In March 1918 we Germans had good reason to feel the victory was at last within sight. We had signed the peace treaty with Russia at Brest-Litovsk, so we had won the war in the east. Then we launched the spring offensive in the west to finish the job. It would have worked perfectly if only the Americans had stayed out of the war. They stole our victory.

Why were the Americans the only real victors? Because in 1914 the U.S.A. owed money to England and France. By 1918 England and France were exhausted and owed them money.

“By defeating Germany,” Linda said with a disarming smile, “we Americans defeated the whole of Europe.”

It was evident that she and her gentleman-friend often talked about these things.

“I never thought of it that way, Linda,” Hanni said. “I don’t blame you for feeling a little proud.”

“I confess I do,” Linda nodded. “But may I cheer you up by telling you that you are recovering faster than your former European enemies?”

“Really? That is news to me,” Hanni exclaimed. “We prefer to feel sorry for ourselves.”

“Let me tell you how this happened,” Ferdinand explained. “After the war, France and England collected reparations from us and were therefore able to pay their debts to Washington. We, on the other hand, had not been economically humiliated. Unlike England and France, we did not have to borrow from anybody
—
we had fought the war using our own resources. And today, speaking in terms of economic performance, we are in better shape than France and England, partly because of that and partly thanks to a number of American interventions.”

“Above all, thanks to Taylorism, which we picked up from America,” I said. “Germans have had a special affinity with American technocrats for fifty years.”

Linda beamed.

Hanni had no idea what we were talking about.

I explained to her that around the turn of the century Frederick W. Taylor devised a scientific theory of industrial rationalization that analyzed all aspects of the production flow and made it possible, by treating human beings like machines, to achieve a degree of efficiency and productivity unheard of until then. Taylor became the Darwin of work organization. He anticipated Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Hanni was puzzled. She turned to me.

“Why do you say that Germans have a special affinity with that?”Hanni asked me. An amusing thought struck her. “Because Frederick the Great also suppressed the human element?”

“Exactly!” I laughed. “Because if he had been around a hundred and fifty years later he would have been the first to militarize production. He would have treated everybody like machines.”

“And do you know something?” Ferdinand asked excitedly “We Germans militarized our economy, just the way Old Fritz would have liked. That’s what we did in 1916 as part of the Hindenburg Plan, when we subordinated the civilian sector to the war effort. And we applied our own version of Taylorism and imposed uniform standards on all industry. When we lost the war, we never demilitarized our economy. It never surrendered. That is why we are recovering so fast. There was an English economist
—
I have forgotten the name
—
Kohn or Keynes or something
—
who wrote a book soon after Versailles with the title
The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
He foresaw all this and pointed out that reparations made no sense at all in the modern world and might even trigger an economic boom in Germany. That’s exactly what happened. Gradually our economy is undoing the Treaty of Versailles, step by step. About that objective there is absolute unanimity. Right and Left are united and good old Gustav Stresemann is leading the way. Of course, nobody talks about it in those terms. There is no point in frightening the whole world.”

The Schumann Theatre got its name from the Schumann Zirkus, which in 1916 had moved its headquarters from Germany to Denmark because there was reason to fear that its seventy horses might become war victims. It stood diagonally opposite the Hauptbahnhof and was the home of both the high arts and the low arts. This represented a cultural innovation of great significance to someone like me who finds it difficult to draw a line between them. Did Picasso and Stravinsky become low artists because they were inspired by the circus?

I remember the excitement when the Schumann Theatre opened in 1905. I was seventeen. In those years variety theatres sprouted up in all the major cities of Europe but this one took pride in being particularly grand. The two sculpted horses on the roof were designed to make horse-loving Schumann Zirkus welcome when it visited Frankfurt. The purpose of
Die Fackel der Liebe
[The Torches of Love], the two sculpted nude couples embracing and kissing on each side of the entrance doors, was evidently designed to ignite passers-by to buy tickets.

A residual animal smell lingered even after the emphasis changed from circuses to movies. I remember an evening with one of the great stars of the cinema, Henny Porten. In the first part, one of her films was shown. I don’t remember which one but it probably co-starred Gustav Fröhlich or Emil Jannings. There was applause after the most gripping scenes, very unusual in the cinema. In the second half she appeared in person in a mimodrama, which pleased the audience immensely, although I found it trivial. The show was sold out for an entire week.

Then there were the wrestling matches, which I reviewed with relish in the
Frankfurter Zeitung.
One of the paper’s artists usually decorated my pieces with delightful drawings of sweating gladiators colliding with each other. These drawings were certainly high art. But were the events themselves? Was
Commedia dell’arte
the spiritual ancestor of these colossal mountains of gleaming flesh groping with each other?

I never had any doubt that the sophisticated artistry of the great clown Grock and of the Fratellini brothers, the darlings of Paris intellectuals, was high art. But what about the amazing juggler Rastelli who could balance three footballs, one on top of the other, on one foot? At what point did low art become high art?

The renowned Pavlova was definitely high art when she danced
The Dying Swan
in the Schumann Theatre with her ensemble of sixty other ballerinas from Russia. So was Ernst Toller’s revolutionary play
Hoppla Wir Leben
, with its mass scenes, imported from Erwin Piscator’s stage in Berlin.

Now
—
where did
The Tiller Girls
fit it?

From the
Frankfurter Zeitung
:

The show is an invention of the American entertainment industry and is therefore designed to be entertaining. I found the marriage of the Chicago factory to the Prussian parade grounds a nightmare. It introduced us to an entirely new element in our culture. The faceless mass clumps of indistinguishable de-sexed bodies move along carefully designed geometric circular and linear patterns performing meaningless acrobatics in time to tuneless mechanical music. There is no equivalent for this in ballet, which never celebrates sterility. No lover of any one of these sexless, long-legged, high-kicking automatons on the stage would ever be able to recognize his beloved. Did the producers of this “entertainment” know what they were doing when they squeezed forty beautiful girls in full bloom into neutered bathing-suits and smeared pasty make-up on their faces?

I know what they were doing. They were presenting to us a terrifying metaphor of the dehumanized management age that is beckoning us. It will be the age of the technocrat who puts efficiency and productivity above individuality and does not care how much suffering it causes. Quantity will triumph over quality. Conformity will rule. The profit motive will demand human sacrifice.

Very soon we will all be nostalgic for the happy days of the class struggle.