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Tenderly, Schiller’s fingertips caressed the cloth-binding of the book one last time. The New York morning enfolded him in cold clouds, just as war enclosed the continent and the globe in blood-drenched barbarism. He had already threw away his honorary Russian citizenship certificate, which reached him in Denmark in late spring of ’38, as the anonymous scribe wrote циллер for some reason, and postmen futilely searched for a Ziller across the nervous borders on the Continent, until finally the document reached him, signed by Bukharin, almost simultaneously when he heard the news of the man’s execution. Now the mentor must follow the student to the netherworld beneath the filthy waves. Adieu, he whispered, to the barely-held-together book in his hand, to its pages covered in ink, sweat, and unknown substances accumulated throughout the years, to the ‘Proletariats of the world unite’ printed on the heavy first page and the portrait of Lenin on last. Adieu, he whispered, and watched the book fall into the filthy water that flowed from the Hudson, adieu, we shall soon be as dead as you.
He thought back to the days, those heady, desperate and all too hopeful days almost twenty year back, when Herzfeld published his Robbers and Piscator staged it. How Charlotte adored the austere lines of the illustrations. He remembered when Erwin first came up with the idea of giving Moor the mask of Trotsky. Those were the days where they seized any piece of news from Moscow with such fervour, those were the days they studied, debated, argued in cafes over books, pamphlets, manifestos, when he first bought the Lenin selections and, with astonishment, observed the rapid deterioration of the condition of the book simply because of the unfriendly elements the pages encountered. They read, talked, wrote, published, polemicised, and friendships were started, ended, restarted. And all the while Trotsky was falling, falling, falling in front of their eyes, and none of their hands could reach him, yet still held their passions and imaginations like vice. Give him the mask, said Körner, of course, it’s a bit over the top, but give him the mask. Yes, do it, said Seghers, a distant look in her eyes, as if the going-ons in the present had already been transposed to the epic register, a timeless time that all is determined, and no hand can ever stay the falling course of the stars. He remembered himself arguing against them, firstly, the contemporary element breaches the aesthetic self-containment and autonomy of a work of art—too tendentious, too obvious, too didactic to be artistic, he said; secondly, it’s plainly stupid to have the main character wear a mask of Trotsky anyway. What even is the drama about? A roman a clef about 1917? And in any case, the point of Trotsky—or Lenin—is the systematicity of revolutionary action. Karl Moor has been, and will always be, an enemy of systems, of positivity. Too Nietzschean. If you must give the mask to someone, he added, not at all enthused about the idea, give it to Spiegelberg. That posits a counter principle, he said, and is even more provocative.—Spiegelberg! Piscator exclaimed, now, that’s something…it’s ambiguous, it’s awful, it’s disconcerting—let’s do it. And so they did, and they staged the Robbers in those Berlin nights when the line between insanity and inspiration was unintelligible, and they became the scandal of the year—or at least the month—or, as his theological sentiments would like to say, the stumbling block of the establishment. Those were the days. The young, traumatised, desperate, hopeful days. Those days that stood under the embossed head of Lenin and were certain of their omnipotence. They thought the dead was not dead, only immortal. And they thought they too were immortal. But Lenin was dead, and what could the poor, immobilised, stuffed and preserved Ilyich do? He couldn’t move his little finger in Moscow, let alone the world. Immortal, dead Comrade Ilyich couldn’t do a thing for his dear Comrade Trotsky when he was hounded from Denmark, and Fritz Schiller could do no more than twaddle his thumbs when he heard the news on radio that night. No, Lenin was dead alright, and he couldn’t do a thing. He had been dead for almost two decades. Now poor Fritz must part with him as well. He threw his Lenin into the Atlantic. For Schiller, Lenin was buried. For Schiller, Schiller might as well be buried. But he breathed, he breathed and he breathed, as he disembarked in an ominous, foggy, drizzling morning in New York.
He must go into the desert, as the gate to Eden is forever barred by an angel with a flaming sword, and endure naught but labor and resignation.
He had learned his lesson.
But probably not as much as he should, as months later he found himself storming out of yet another Hollywood producer’s office, face as read as his thrice-damned hair. He moved to Brentwood after suffering through an awful pneumonia in New York, as it became obvious that he could never survive the east coast weather. Californian weather, it was theorised, would do much good for his health, and he would surely have some prospect in Hollywood as a playwright. Theory, of course, clashed with praxis, and the former crashed and burned spectacularly. The whole affair disgusted him: at first he thought he could easily sell one of his plays for a film adaptation, but that soon turned out to be vanity on his part, when first the reception, then security, then finally the producer asked him to spell his name, and when his heavy accent aroused nothing but incomprehension and annoyance on the face of his interlocutors. Kabale und Liebe? What even is that? The what now? Oh, you mean Miss Miller, that fabulous musical comedy! Why, of course we would have something like that—the music is brilliant, that was you? So you are the composer? What, no? —Streicher, of course, is in the states as well, but he’s on the other side of the continent—in New York, actually, enjoying a successful career in Broadway and all that. —briefly put, all negotiations ended at that, and Schiller (with a C—it’s S-C-H-I-L-L-E-R, thank you, yes, it’s a weird name, German, yes) found himself detesting the perfect Californian weather which, of course, miraculously kept him in rather good health the whole time, so that he had none but himself to blame for his lack of success. The palm trees and the pacific breezes felt like Tahiti or mythical Attica. It was unnerving and disgusting to him. He thought back on the times with Streicher, when tunes from Kabale were on everyone’s lips, and they felt so close to something, something greater than themselves. They felt themselves on cusp of a popular revolution. That was 1928. How those days disappeared, and now they couldn’t even stage a revolution in a studio, as they were under the watchful eyes of American authorities. After a month, he decided he could no longer live on Charlotte’s meagre salary from translations, and thought he might as well just be another anonymous script writer for the Hollywood Moloch. It would be shameful, but the anonymity would absolve him, and he was in any case no guiltier than this age. But that went nowhere as well. This led to him lowering expectations all the more, still to no avail. If the whole Hollywood debacle was gruesome and mind-numbing, where the brutal exposure to the industry led to his cognition of the fundamental commodification and debasement of culture in this cursed century—the shinier the beacon of hope for democracy, the shiner their glistening greed and well-oiled soullessness—to his ever greater despair, it was the emigré gatherings that crushed his last hope for humanity. And, horror of horrors, exiting the pristine architecture of yet another studio, he saw on his schedule yet another emigré dinner, which, for whatever reason that possessed him when he wrote down the time, was written in a dreadful pink ink. The address was in the university for a change, yet he feared in his very being that this cultivated and cultured environ would simply translate into surplus suffering on his part.
See, the problem with emigration is manifold: beyond the apparent homelessness due to one’s country being engulfed and devoured by an archaic barbarism and inhumanity, the emigrants—priding themselves on being bastions of light, islands of civilisation in the ocean of blood—simply cannot stop being so repulsively happy with themselves, that not one of their lamentations, not one document of their suffering, is not at the same time a glorification of themselves, a document of narcissistic excess. He, quite frankly, detested Alma Mahler-Werfel’s salon, but Charlotte was close friends with her, and it would simply be socially suicidal to ostracise himself thence, as everyone and their cousin thrice-removed were there. Don’t even get him start on the new critical this-and-that people. Their obsession with aphorism and linguistic arabesques and implacable belief for their own correctness: more than once he’d like to ask how Wiesengrund could be so certain of his own being a person when his whole spiel was about the systematic disintegration of the category of personality under modernity. All the more awkward is the material situation: here on the West Coast he was forced into coexistence with his intellectual enemies, who, for a thousand times he had put to death in his writings, whereas his intellectual allies, scattered to the winds, were not in physical proximity. Lotte, bless her soul, stayed with him, but she did not come unscathed from this ordeal, and everyday lines invaded where her smile used to dwell, and he saw drudger, exhaustion, even bitterness overtook what used to be life and exuberance. Some—Streicher, for example, and Körner as well—were in New York or Boston, and then some are in Moscow, their fates unknown. A few are in Palestine, suspended beyond land and sea, yet still some others simply disappeared, and, in his darker thoughts, he came upon the eventuality of their demise, yet another senseless death in a senseless century. For all the uncertainty, the self-possession of other emigrants seemed diabolic to him, and—now he suddenly remembered the agenda of tonight’s gathering—especially Goethe, who recently delivered a speech in one of the prestigious universities where he claimed wherever he stands, German culture lives on still, was blatantly disgusting, arrogant, with their ears and eyes sealed to the world, living from their thrones on Parnassus, while the Elysium fields are being turned into desserts. The coffee they served tasted better than all the ersatz he had in the past decade, but this is a improvement in defeat; Madame Werfel insisted on providing her salon with apfelstrudel, but the apples always tasted rotten. She was not unaware of this: she sensed something was amiss, and complained the American fruits never tasted right. But Schiller knew better: the rot was not in the fruit, but in the very heart of the people. In general, Schiller would happily confess himself a misanthrope, only to point out the anthropos had become truly disgusting and he cannot love good without hating this evil. And, God help him, he was condemned to spending the night in Goethe’s company, which, from his perspective, to restrain himself from tearing the man—and his arrogant, pruned and polished face—apart seemed an impossible task.
Thus Schiller found himself sitting in a reasonably crowded auditorium, and the man of the hour—of the century, probably in his own estimation, thought Schiller, not without resentment—mounted the dais. Impeccably dressed, hair combed back in a manner resembling an advertisement for Bürgerliche Bildung, the sight of Goethe ignited in his chest an irrational yet all-consuming fire, whose path of devastation leaves behind ashes of annoyance, indignation, hatred, jealousy, and a paradoxical longing whose object’s impossibility led to its inhabiting the boundary between sublimity and repulsion.
The title of the speech was as grandiose as the speaker’s ego: what is Germanness? With the self-certainty that was enough to drive Schiller insane, the man began his exposition, language gushed forth defying the gravitational pull of history. It was as inspiring as it was despairing: spirit took flight with mighty wingstrokes, creating powerful winds that devastated the plains of the everyday. In the Olympian gaze the world went to ground, disintegrated into non-being and inessentiality. Only spirit, only culture, only the Germanness of mind remained, thus declaimed Goethe from the dais, and none—be they monarchs or tyrants, gods or beasts—can take that away from us. The world of politics bows down in shame and recognises its emptiness in front of the world of culture. What, asked the spokesperson of German literature, is a decade of secular business compared to the eternity immortalised in words? Nothing.—Appealed yet repelled, Schiller shivered in his seat. Why must the Olympian grace us with his presence, and diminish our very finite world with his worldless infinity? And—how beautiful the man is, how beautiful his words, his spirit, Schiller thought, mesmerised. From his vantage point, he could observe the thinning hair, the delicate traces of grey on the man’s scalp. Still, the man bore the ages of the world with such refined dignity. How beautiful, and how contemptible. How sublime. How depraved. In his mind, he argued with every sentence Goethe had spoken; his lips shivered, swallowing, hissing, sighing. His face must be pale, his eyes feverish, his breathing heavy—Lotte looked at him worriedly, and he could barely manage a comforting smile. Judging from her expression, it failed miserably. Disagreement burned, the feeling held a complexity and weight that was difficult to articulate: how dare he be so confident, so comfortable in his place in the world, untouched by the unspeakable terrors and bloodshed; how dare he speak, with such certitude, when the very continuation of the world as they knew it hang in balance; how dare he exist, to be, to express himself, to act in this world so beautifully, so sublimely, so serenely, when terror haunts all to the last corner of the earth, when anguish and fear hammered themselves into the very core of their beings and threatened to overwhelm and devastate all in the blink of an eye. Was Goethe even earnest, or simply ironic, so sublimely ironic that he does not even require irony, that his very being itself expressed the mockery and contempt to those assembled in the room, rendered perceptible the infinite distance from which he judged them all, them measly, miserable mortals? To be swayed by the words, to be seized by the torrents of thought, and to remain where he was, on this puny, pathetic earth. How he longed to take flight with him, poised, wings stretched, only to learn the impossibility of this flight. And suddenly the flight itself became ugly, became a cowardly exit, fleeing from the world, from this unbearable yet nevertheless persisting torture chamber on a global scale. When the speech ended, he barely had the presence of mind to clap, and only thanks to Lotte’s prompting. Then the crowd dispersed and re-congregated in the adjacent room. Goethe, of course, was already encircled by friends and minions alike. Suddenly standing on level ground—physically speaking—Schiller was shocked to see how small the other was. Among the circle of mortals the immortal himself appeared just as unremarkable. Perhaps a head shorter than himself, limbs and torso rounded by years of comfort and sustenance, the man was, in a bizarre way, delicate, almost feminine. His eyes were sparkled in an almost coquettish manner, and his smile was soft, delicate, pleasant—pleasing, even, too pleasing to be genuine. Unconsciously, Schiller’s legs carried him closer to the other, and now his voice became perceptible. Without the garish distortions of the microphone, it was less than Olympian: perhaps closer to the tempting sweetness of sirens, the voice was melodic and tender, flowing all too easily and lightly like a delicate stream rather than a roaring storm. Indeed the man was pleasant: there truly was something coquettish in his mannerisms, in the way he carried himself, a femininity that threatens to break the boundaries of decorum, and leap faithlessly into the liveliness of the flesh. It was astonishing that such a spiritual speech came from such a sensuous mouth, that such a monolithic monument of words would originate in this puny, pleasing and pleased, flesh. Goethe was, in a word, Schiller decided, too alive to be real. There was an excess of life, of sensuality, of pleasure that he found threatening, a life rich and enriching, porous and amorphous, resembling some primordial abyss—a womb, even—that would swallow him up. Whereas previously with his words it was the transcendence of thinking that irritated him, now, standing in his presence, it was the almost hedonistic immanence that oozed from his pores that frightened him. How this dualism, this excess of spirituality and excess of sensuality, could coexist in one person, was inexplicable. Yet either way Goethe was uncanny, indeed, demonic.
Unbeknownst to him, Goethe, too, was observing him. For, it would indeed be difficult to not realise one’s being stared at by such intense, burning eyes. Schiller seemed like an apparition from hell to him: the hair burned with the intensity of hell-fire, and the paleness of his face was reminiscent of a whisper of the mortifying winds of the underworld. The assemblage of lanky and unwieldy limbs made the man seem like a reanimated corpse, a visitor from beyond the grave: and the lightness, the mindlessness with which he moved produced a ghostly grace, like the ballet from Robert le Diable. And those terrifying eyes, those terrifyingly mesmerising and mesmerisingly terrifying eyes, how they stared, burned, pierced, interrogated, dominated him. He knew he was called, and he must go forth. In the end, he surrendered. Politely but absently, he excused himself from his current conversation, and went to the diabolic apparition: “I don’t believe I had the honour of your acquaintance, yes?”
“No, no, I am one of the few who hold the honour of never having been praised by the great Goethe,” said Schiller, perhaps with too much sarcasm. Well, there was a consensus among his circle of friends that whoever was praised by the great Goethe has no future. During that time, almost every other week or so, the great Goethe would say a good word or two for every young writer that was a complete non-entity for their god-awful books. Almost all of the recipients of Goethe’s recommendation, needless to say, are today either already forgotten or a sycophant to the regime, vegetating in one aryan academy or another, if not worse, that is, howling with the beasts. There was a time, of course, young Friedrich also desired that recommendation. In fact, perhaps just like everyone else at the time, the recognition from the great Goethe would mean the world to him. The doors it would open, and materially, the income, the possibilities: the name of Goethe contained, in itself, a promise of something better. But that never happened. For one reason or another, Goethe kept his respectful silence, and so did Schiller. At a later point in life, he learned to appreciate this non-interference. At an even later point, he prided himself on it. But the absence of that recognition—albeit new reconstrued as true recognition, a point of honour—left its mark. Thus the sentence tumbled out of his mouth so suddenly, almost instinctively. It was pathetic, thought Schiller, it was defensive, hypocritical, stupid, arrogant, a posturing with no substance. Too quick, too sharp, too hurt. Now Goethe would just walk away, he thought, and be glad he never knew him.
But the other man, inexplicably, smiled that all too feminine, all too pleasant smile: “Please, I swear you shall be no enemy of mine. Now, the language of politeness and the language of art are separate, although the former thought they speak the same tongue.”
“Then which are we speaking now?” Asked Schiller, perhaps out of sheer contrariness.
“That, I’m willing to find out,” came the reply.
“I’m Friedrich Schiller, by the way,” so he said, for lack of better things.
“Aha,” thus the other, then a sigh, at which Schiller was reasonably but also irraioinntally offended. “Truly, this explains,” contemplated Goethe, “well, I cannot say I regret anything.”
“And what a rare privilege is that.”
And to Schiller’s everlasting astonishment, Goethe smiled at him, gently, tenderly, even imperceptibly sadly, as if in that single statement Schiller has unveiled the mystery of Isis to him, as if he revealed to him the very mystery of his life.
The conversation went on, after that, relatively smoothly. They, out of an unspoken agreement, avoided anything overly serious—neither politics, nor philosophy, nor idealist aesthetic theory. Even so, they barely avoided decidedly heated arguments—over things that didn’t even matter that much. In fact, in each other they discovered the simple joy of conversation, the pleasure of discoursing itself. The very act of exchanging words became satisfying, and even if—or rather, especially when—no worldview-shattering matter was at stake, in the fact of speaking they discovered each other in such a manner that it was two lives laid bare, in their simple aliveness, that their beings came into contact in one another and found pleasure in this metabolism of words. For, where originally each approached the other for their uncanniness, in this process, they encountered each other in their own determinacy, and became at home with the other in the world. In fact, such a world emerged between the two that the others in the room soon observed them in astonishment, for Schiller’s misanthropic animosity was no secret among the emigrants, nor was Goethe’s haute-bourgeois narcissism. Indeed, the realignment that unfolded in front of everyone’s eyes appeared consequential immediately, and, while at the time none could be certain its repercussions would be felt for centuries, they did perceive something significant had changed. Lotte, chatting with Alma, looked on with a mythical smile, whereas her lady friend almost stared, and in hushed voice, discussed the strategic impact of this novel phenomena with Franz, her current husband. Alma did not get along with Goethe, but she was close to Lotte. The storm after Werther was by no means welcome to her and her late husband, and the breach between parties became irremediable after the Gustav’s death. They remained polite, but nothing more, until they were forcefully gathered and transplanted to the pacific palisades. In the Californian cloister, they endured each other, not out of love, but rather like Juno and Jupiter, who, even if they were divorced, would still be bound by the fraternal relation between them, the common, accursed, Titanian blood. The proud queen now looked on, almost perplexed, as her co-regent miraculously fell again under the power of a mortal, and in a week this new development was known to all. It would so transpire that in several months Chaplin himself would mime the two with Isherwood, and Schiller had to endure the scene, but even then he could not say he regretted any of it, with Goethe’s arm warm and solid on his shoulder. Thus, when the gathering eventually ended, Schiller was surprised to say he did indeed enjoy the evening, and when he went home with Goethe’s number, for once the Californian palm trees did not strike him as monstrosities of a industrialised slaughterhouse, but homely guardians of a virgin land of hope. The tilted canopy of stars across the Atlantic was no longer an alien and indecipherable map of homelessness, but a welcoming embrace of the excitement of natality.
When Schiller was getting ready to meet Goethe yet again, Charlotte looked up from her typewriter and said: “you’re in love, Fritz.”
She said the words in such an assertive way, with the Sibylline grace of allowed for no error, that Schiller could not comprehend for a solid minute what had transpired. When he did, he fought down the instinctual denial, for he knew when Lotte uses indicatives in that manner, it was futile for mortals such as him to argue. Still, weakly, he returned: “I have a mutually beneficial and respectful relationship with a colleague, Lotte. That’s all there is to it.”
“Yes, the same colleague you before hated with a passion, who, I quote, you would pay to have him not published, and before that obsessed over. For respect to have this effect, it must be something significant.”
“Well, so what if it turns out he’s not as despicable as I thought?”
“Fritz, Fritzchen, not despicable does not give you that stupid smile on your face when you’re trying to tame your manes.—stop it anyway you’re making it worse, let me do it—” and just like that Lotte took over his comb, and truly, he was smiling rather idiotically, his reflection confirmed. And Lotte imperiously dominated his curls, just as she imperiously dictated: “all I’m saying is, something happened and it’s happening, and you know it.”
His last shred of self-respect prevented him from answering, but he was self-aware enough to tell himself to stop smiling when he left his house.
Goethe, it turned out, was working on his Faust project, and wisely decided to take a break when he arrived. He made them both coffee and put on a record. It was a selection from operas, and when suddenly ethereal strings sounded, then voices joined in, Goethe put up a hand—although Schiller wasn’t speaking at the moment—as if to stop time.
“Listen, listen to this. This beauty.” Goethe whispered, his eyes closed. “This grace. It’s sublime. It’s beautiful. It’s both. It’s everything.”
Equally silently, Schiller whispered back: “how can you bear it?”
For a while Goethe said nothing, then he began: “you see, this is the trio of absolute awful deception. From Mozart’s cosi fan tutte. The men made a plan to deceive their lovers, to tempt them to infidelity. This is the height of their lies, their deception. It’s an absolutely despicable scene. Yet how did Mozart compose for it? With such beauty, such grace, such innocence. As if this is the most beautiful moment of love, of confession, of devotion, of fidelity. In a word: everything that this music should not be. How did he do it? Why did he do it? Why must he, with this beauty, force us to forgiveness? Force us to forgive the lies, the ugliness, the baseness? How could he justify this crime with such beauty, what shall justify him?”
Schiller had no answer to that, so he said so: “nothing. Nothing would justify him. Nothing would justify beauty.” As if shocked by his own words, he murmured again: “nothing would justify beauty.” He was silent, as Mozart’s graceful music encompassed his world, then he added, “but beauty needs no justification.”
Then Goethe looked at him, softly, tenderly, also with the inexplicable sadness: “Doesn’t it?”
And suddenly Schiller remembered, the generation who went to war with Wether in their bags, who believed it was all justified for it would be beautiful. The blood, the steel, those glass, protruding, bleeding sightless eyes under the broken helmet. It was beautiful, they thought. And how many times the medical students tried in vain to mend those unmendable wounds, to resurrect the already decaying bones? How many times did he close their eyes that would no longer be beautiful to anyone, eyes forever closed to their loved ones? What has been justified, how many times has the unjustifiable been justified by beauty, because beauty requires no justification? And how much still more, as a shiver stroke him, would beauty justify, as yet another generation goes to war, with Werther in their bags? To commit unspeakable crimes, to murder, to wound, to injure? But it was done so beautifully, they would say. They worship death—and blood and soil—under the veil of beauty. And he saw all of this in Goethe’s steady gaze, stoic, serene, and unspeakably sad. And to all of this he has no answer, and all the while the music soared to ethereal heights. And he thought, hollowed and numbly, that of course he knew it all—and yet still in the moment he was tempted. How beauty tempted—just like how Goethe tempted, like the devil himself he tempted—Schiller knew he was tempted to say yes to anything, or, just the same, to kiss Goethe just in that moment, for no reason, completely gratuitously, unjustifiably.
The moment passed, and the Mozart came to an end.
“I try to do that,” said Goethe, “that breakdown, that disintegration, that undoing of the temptation. I need to—I ought to be able to—take it back. Take it away. Destroy it. Burn it. Take it back. Revoke it. The beauty. That’s the Faust. I have to be able to—” and the combination of modal verbs betrayed his desperation, the Kantian phrasing sounded like despair, like impossibility, “it is a fist that destroys, annihilates, accuses, revokes. I challenge the Creator to take back the deed.”
“So you, Goethe the creator challenge The Creator to undo his deeds, so you can in this work also undo your deeds.” Schiller felt the truth of this sentence, and Goethe seemed almost monstrous to him: in his intention, he fashioned himself as the ultimate destroyer of worlds. “But how can you do it? The revocation cannot be done other than in another deed,” Schiller mused aloud, he had developed this terrible habit of thinking in their two-person public sphere, “you cannot undo beauty by any way other than beauty. And that’s the end of it, isn’t it? So the world has been irrevocably cursed with the temptation. So beauty appeared. So beauty has justified the unjustifiable. But still only beauty can justify beauty. There is no redemption other than through sin. There is no way back other than forward.” And he saw the desolate path of suffering before them, he saw how an angel with flaming sword guarded the gate of Eden. They can never go back. “You cannot take back Werther, you cannot take back anything. Beauty appeared only because it followed its own laws of disappearance. The transience is the eternal—” so he continued, “so in beauty what has been given in a moment is given in eternity. We can never return to Arcadia—we can only go forth to Elysium.”
For a moment silence hang between them, heavy like revelation. Then suddenly whispered Goethe: “I detest you.” He said it in the familiar du, and it felt more intimate than a thousand kisses.
Goethe’s Faust proceeded steadily after that. It was torturous work, but he persevered. It felt like atonement. With every word, he felt like he was mortifying a part of himself, but this mortification was the only path toward resurrection. Every word an end, yet, as he saw Schiller’s flaming hair and glowing eyes beside him, he convinced himself that every word was also a new beginning.
A month later Lotte moved to DC. She had a job with OSS, collaborating with her friend Doctor Herbert. Schiller hated the idea—he was too unruly, too anarchist for that—but he still gave her his blessings, although Lotte had no need for it. All the while the Hollywood situation did not improve, but Schiller nevertheless started working on his own drama. Not in hope of selling it, but simply it has become imperative for him to write, to keep writing. It so happened that his encounter with Goethe awakened in him a fateful urgency, that suddenly the futility of art that haunted him throughout his exile fell away from his shoulder, and art reclaimed its imperative that overthrew all exigencies.
Californian summer soon overtook them, and before long Schiller found himself on a beach with Goethe. Meanwhile they moved from the indeterminate waters of a combination of Sie and du to a gradually stabilised du situation, all the while sticking to last names for some reason. Schiller had come to terms with some of the Goetheanisms—he would never forget the birthday party where Goethe’s mother stood after dinner and delivered a thirty-minute-speech, after which Goethe responded with another thirty-minute speech, and all the while Schiller only went there for the cake (although, to be very honest, for Goethe the man as well)—and Goethe some Schillerisms as well. Thus it happened that Schiller is buried under an umbrella, his very pale face reddened by the sun, and Goethe was sitting next to him, picking through a bizarre collection of coloured lenses. So it happened that today he was in the mood of lecturing outdated colour theories, and it would never cease to amaze Schiller that Goethe’s fascination with Schopenhauer would go as far as his harebrained philosophy of nature. The first time he heard it, he politely inquired about the validity of Newtonian optics, and found himself in a long lecture validating idealist philosophies of nature, with Einstein’s theory of relativity as proof of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. Schiller, to say the least, learned enough from the experience to not ask relevant questions anymore. The other’s interests’ breadth resembled the infinitude of the world itself: the mind of Goethe was porous receptivity and plasticity, an endlessly malleable substance that nevertheless retained its oneness through the protean changes.
“Schopenhauer’s theory of colours,” thus began the lecture—and Schiller thought he might as well add a verily-I-say-unto-thee here—“belongs to one of those forever misunderstood but ultimately immortal contributions to humanity. To overcome the dead mechanism of a Newtonian universe, to see the world as unity, living and organic, rather than a lifeless machine—herein lies the only path to truth. Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light: in their activities, their deeds, their glory—their life. Science, in its scientism, refuses to see this. The living world of life decomposes into facts, as Wittgenstein so poetically said. The rationalism of calculus, of mechanical physics, of infinite divisions: all of these hold no living interest to us. To see the world as change, as becoming, as living: only thus does a human being become more than a cogitating machine. Only thus is life possible.” And so he went on, but the temperature was so comfortable, and they rhythmic murmuring of the Pacific so calming, that Schiller found himself soon losing the thread of the discourse, and logos started fleeing him, until he grasped nothing but the rhythmic rise and fall of tones, of Goethe’s calm and soft voice blending together with the wind and waves. And when he thought about colours, he thought about the colour of Goethe’s eyes, an inexhaustible brownness that is also everything else. He thought how in that infinite brownness there was also the infinitude of starry heavens above and human hearts within, how all of this and so much more would be contained in those eyes, and how he would live a thousand lives in those eyes. Those eyes, with their uncanny feminine charm, silently displays an invitation to the unknown, yet with the same femininity, also held the power of a thousand rebirth, where all of his sins would be forgiven a thousand times. They were the signature of an unintelligible promise, whose mystery would be revealed only after the final judgement. At least he retained enough consciousness so that when Goethe finally concluded his speech, he sighed, seemingly thoughtfully but more due to sleepiness: “yes, life. The living. Always the living. —Remember to live, yes.”
Goethe hummed in agreement: “remember to live, indeed, wiser words cannot be spoken.” He smiled softly, and those infinite brownness suddenly concentrated on Schiller, and Schiller felt frightfully vulnerable, exposed to the judgement of the infinitude of his gaze. “But I’m not living up to the maxim, it seems,” he continued, and suddenly he grasped Schiller’s hand and placed a featherlike kiss in his palm, and Schiller had the absolute self-certainty that he would spontaneously combust, for no mortal should bear this kiss and live. But he shivered, he shivered, and he kept breathing, and Goethe never let go of his hands, placing it by his cheeks, then his neck, and suddenly Goethe was kneeling in front of him holding Schiller’s hand so delicately, gingerly, tenderly, and Schiller felt, with his fingers, with his skin and bones and sinews and every drop of blood, how Goethe swallowed, how his Adam’s apple bobbed, how his bloody flowed, his heart beat, how he lived—being so alive, so very here, with Schiller’s hand around his neck. He could have killed him, vaguely, he thought, he could have killed him, and he invited him to. I would kill you, and love you, love you and kill you, he thought to himself, and felt the truth of his words. The hand placement—and how Goethe’s neck arched, how he looked up to him as if in supplication—he placed himself like a sacrifice in Schiller’s hands. All the while his eyes were steady, they watched Schiller with the attentiveness of a worshipper studying an augury.
For, truly, Schiller appeared to Goethe as a sign of some higher power. From the first moment of his appearance, he seemed to be the bearer of an inexplicable yet absolute command. He was his own ghost haunting him: Schiller appeared in his life like his own shadow, having escaped from himself, now stand over and against him, interrogating him and confronting him. Or just the same, he seemed like the very own question he posed to himself, still unanswered, had now became alien and frightful, like an enemy that cannot be put down, for that enemy is the very essence of his own being. How Schiller appeared—as unrest, as haunting, as what has been renounced—as the very invalidity of his resignation. The world—or some higher power—would not let go of him, and they sent Schiller to him, to remind him of his unbreakable covenant with the world. Schiller. The World. Everything, his existence is the signature of eventuality itself. And his words, how he talked, how he burned—his entire being became feverish, and through his fevered being, the world became heightened. How sensitive, how vulnerable the other made him feel—or, in other words, how alive he had become in the other’s presence! He felt both infinitely significant and infinitely insignificant in the presence of the other—and how the other’s presence permeated him, fulfilled him, and transfigured every moment into an eternity, and everything a constellation of a higher destiny. And how empty he was before, how dreadfully empty, barren, infertile, a yearning that did not even recognise itself as yearning, a lack that was translated as possession. All of this came undone by Schiller’s simple presence: how much he hated him, detested him, for forcing him to recognise this, for forcing him to live—and, all the same, how he loved him so for the very same reason. Thus he recited his prayers, those he composed under the cloudless skies of California, the America that once the world was, the closest approximation to Arcadia:
And we do more than just kiss; we prosecute reasoned discussion
(Should she succumb to sleep, that gives me time for my thoughts).
In her embrace—it's by no means unusual—I've composed poems
And the hexameter's beat gently tapped out on her back,
Fingertips counting in time with the sweet rhythmic breath of her slumber.
Air from deep in her breast penetrates mine and there burns.
Schiller’s eyes were closed. Those terrifying blue orbs that would burn so intensely to resemble death. It was in his eyes more than anywhere else that Goethe detected the imprint of death as only the spiritual can be thoroughgoingly imprinted by death, but how often he experienced, precisely in those eyes, inexplicable sensuous tenderness, gentle and soft, a promise of life beyond reproach. Now more than ever, his visage took on the otherworldliness that Goethe feared he would simply dissolve into ether. How he would like to press him closer, in a ritual of confirmation, to seal him for eternity in his being. To draw him in by his chthonic pull. To affirm, once, again, and forever, his credo, his faith, his love, his irrevocable dependence on the other. How he longed for it, yet could not. He felt like Hector in front of Achilles, his very existence emptied and laid bare in front of the other. He stood trial, accused and desolate, still unaware of the weight of his transgression.
But his god was merciful, and love miraculous. So the other bowed his head, and the hand that was still on his neck moved, caressingly, to his lips, and a kiss was bestowed.
And eternity stood still, amongst the waves, the winds, and the swaying palm trees.
Their collaboration, or as Schiller preferred to think, their complicity grew. For they were complicit, in a joined escape from the world that is to a world that came into possibility between them. That which bound them happened: it was, in itself, firstly an intuition, indistinct yet undeniably present. The element of the sheer facticity of the existence of their bond frightened Schiller endlessly: he felt, more often than not, that he was seized by an unintelligible, mute destiny that wordlessly pushed him forth. Sometimes, he would even beg to be released from this fate, for it was too brutal, too quick, too unstoppable, for human mind to make sense of this irreversible process that resembled a chemical reaction with its instant, inexorable laws. The existence of Goethe can be subsumed under no concept: the idea of a concept of Goethe was nonsensical. But the other stood, existed, and came forth to him as a fact of the universe. A materialised a priori, an absolute intuition, an indecipherable hieroglyph of something that cannot be put clearly and distinctly. Goethe, on the other hand, was fearless. He threw himself into this happening, the concept of self-doubt completely alien to him. His approach to the affair was young and almost wanton. Thus almost mindlessly he followed through his course of gravitational attraction to Schiller. To him, something that developed so naturally, that defied all human design, cannot be evil. It must stand beyond the rational justifications of good and evil.
And they were beautiful together: beauty lived on between them, in its own unjustifiable manner. For Goethe, this concluded the matter. If Schiller’s rational conscience disputed it, their simple coexistence nevertheless strode forth in an indisputable manner, an irrevocable intuition that may be justified and explained by reason, but never undone by it. Beauty simply is, they simply are. The two of them started a system of twin suns, with their own calendar and time. They moved according to their own laws, whereas worldly time lost all meaning to them. They, as Schiller liked to think, were on their own path, from the dessert of absolute sinfulness to Elysian heights, with their own stations of suffering to bear, and their own triumph. But of course, there was nothing exactly romantic about this relationship, and herein its beauty: it occurred so matter-of-factly, or, in more sentimental terms, simply and with sobriety. It became a simple fact of life, and everything followed accordingly. The separate spheres of lives rearranged themselves naturally: Goethe being Goethe, arranged for a Hollywood producer to buy Schiller’s plays. The money was good, and all the better that he retained rights to his works in German. On most days, they simply wrote together, in relative silence. And in the evening, Goethe would put on some music, and they even danced together, a difficult mixture of viennese waltz and jazz. California felt like seclusion: more accurately, with the two of them, it felt like a submarine hidden away while volcanoes erupted on earth, and they danced to the silent murmurs of gentle currents, rocking slowly, from nowhere to nowhere. Life was good. Life was beautiful. And sometimes Schiller thought, such life was unjustifiable. But Goethe would look at him in his unbearably tender manner, in those infinite brownness that devoured him and preserved him at the same time, he would forget about it all. He would softly tell him how beauty binds, albeit only as idols, as mirages, yet nevertheless it binds, and it guides them forward. It is the hope in a world without hope, whose very nonreality holds the key to a different reality. They cut their names onto the beech in Goethe’s backyard. The poor plant was struggling when Goethe moved into the house, but he nursed it back to health. From Goethe’s study it was visible, and sometimes they would pause in their conversation, and observe the tree in silence, as though their names were visible. In a sense it was, always, to their minds’ eyes. As they observe its gently swaying leaves, they thought they could hear the silent chorus of eternity that consecrates their pact, their immortality. And they would write some more, nourished by the silent testament of a future, from silence to silence, letters to a faceless yet nevertheless present posterity. They write: their transgression, their confession, their atonement, their absolution. Their promise, their futurity, their immortality. And on a good day Schiller would even forgive himself for hearing in the gentle rhythm of falling leaves not a lamentation, but a gentle idyll.
Wars are those awful tears in the continuum of history, an exception that shatters the bindingness of the world, a suspension between nothingness and nothingness, an abyss, an anomaly, a void. Wars, on the other hand, end. Thus did the first, and so did this one. Exiles, in the final analysis, are defined by the concept of return, of homecoming, but the concept always remains empty and unfulfilled, for they always return to what can no longer be returned to, and the homecoming becomes a second exile, one without hope of return. All of this was born witness by the metamorphosis of apfelstrudel that was served in the Werfel salon. The apology for apfelstrudel with wreathed American apples—Goethe would say the fault was rather with the sugar—gradually became a justification fro the emergence of pie à la mode, until finally, and even Alma gave in, until finally, the dessert was simply called the apple pie. The transfiguration was complete, a process that no power in the world could undo. The apfelstrudel sailed forth in the gentle breezes of Hollywood, swayed, dissolved and rejoined by inexorable rules of chemistry and history, and returned an apple pie—just like the emigrants. In a similar fashion the war ended: in the meantime, Goethe competed his Faust manuscript, and Schiller three plays. The Faust was such a beautiful piece, where soul-wrenching anguished was sealed seamlessly in artistic autonomy, a sublime edifice that commemorates the blasphemous age they lived in. And the plays were eternal interrogations that resounded their accusation to heavens, they bore witness to their own impossible strivings, and they captured, in themselves, the very breakdown of their striving, and gave testament to an age that must eternally stand trial. Art, with its mighty wingstrokes, bore them beyond the torrents of time. They lived in the suspension, or, what amounted to the same thing, the global exception, until even the exception was breached by exception. Peace. Peace that felt like defeat, like irremediable loss. Some friends resurfaced: from Moscow, from Jerusalem, from Mexico, and some returned only in the certitude of death. In the end, only in the beginning was all of the world America: in the end, America was not the end. Even the always-sunny California would be touched by time and history, and so the clock ran, and so history resumed.
“Must you go back, and to the east no less? Do you think so lowly of yourself, that the dictates of the madman of Moscow shall value more than your art? At least when Wiesengrund was stupid enough to be hopeful and optimistic, he goes back to the American zone!” Involuntarily, Goethe switched back to the formal Sie, as if unconsciously he already perceived the finality of the situation, and braced himself for the inevitable loss.
Throughout the years, they never talked about politics.
“I’ll be fine,” said Schiller, almost tiredly, “Suhrkamp will be my publisher for the rest of the world, and I kept all of my money in a Norwegian bank. Stalin can’t kill me anyway, you made me too famous for that.”
“But to live under those—barbarians! I cannot stand the thought that one day I would see you on trial—and don’t you dare tell me you would call that world history’s judgement—and don’t you dare tell me you wouldn’t get in trouble with the powers that be. I know you, Schiller, you can’t live like that.”
“But that’s the only place I ought to live. There is value in that, dignity, worth. There will be a future—even if I don’t have that.”
“But you don’t even believe in all that—you don’t believe in politics, in revolution, in any of that! You wrote about the vanity, the one-sidedness of the political yourself—you read your proofs to me!”
At those words, Schiller shook imperceptibly—but of course Goethe saw it, he was just that familiar with the other that he would notice such things without thinking, instinctively, as all the times they spent in each other’s body developed in him this intimate sensibility of the other’s every reaction, the very trembling of nerve endings—but he soon recovered, the stoic forbearance of a martyr returned: “it is a crime to believe in politics, yes, but a graver crime to believe one can escape it. There is no freedom except through reconciling oneself to the determinations of the world.”
And Goethe knew this was about him: “There is freedom other than love then, after all.” He took a breath, suddenly a thought struck him: “is that all we are? A play? To you? An escapism?”
“Then you don’t understand me at all,” and Goethe was furious that he dared to appear wounded, the more furious at his own impotence with the situation, “if we were a play, then…” he fell silent for a while, then he spoke, clearly, softly, with a conviction whose depths transcended Goethe’s comprehension: “then you are the guarantee against everything, you constitute the hope for a future fulfilment firmly anchored in the present. Only in playing is man truly free, but this freedom is only a semblance, a foretaste of our ascension to Elysium.” Schiller took up his hand, and kissed his palm chastely, reverently, “We constitute a world together, yes, this will always be the way for me. But there is also a greater world outside—there is no innocence from without. I shall greet you, heartily, happily, when we find each other in that world again, one day, reinvigorated, renewed, transfigured.”
“I don’t need you transfigured, in another world—I need you here, in this world, damned, perhaps, but with me!—Can’t you just stay? Stay—with me? Is this not living? We don’t have to stay here—we can go to Switzerland.” He thought with all of his mind’s power on the beech tree that bore their names. What felt like a palace of life now revealed itself as the stone grave that became Antigone’s wedding bed. Thus Goethe saw the futility of the argument. Every moment, he saw, was stolen, for his Schiller must return to that never-ending slaughter bench of history. His greater world of letters was a lie, a pettiness, a crime against the world. Indeed, he stole him from the world—and how stupid he was, to think their immortality among words, this literary eternity between stars, would suffice for the transience of the real.
“Shame of our shadow-safety! Away! No more!” Quoted Schiller, “every Faust must, in the end, leave the study.”
“Farewell – and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends.” Weakly, Goethe repeated his own words. The familiar du sounded hollow and jarring, a dissonant sonority slicing open a foreclosed, non-longer-possible future. The fullness of the consonant vowel sounded like a fullness of life, a well-rounded, unshakable bond, a pact of eternity, the hissing Sie sliced through it all, lacerated the promise, paper-thin and unbendable, resolute, irrevocable. The du was a ballon that soared to the heights, now it was cut, air escaped from it. Now the du only a shadow of itself: it bled like an open wound, a lamentation that cannot resurrect the dead. Thus the words suddenly attained prophetic glory, and it was such a gruesome, cruel, awful glory. It rang truer. He knew he must release Schiller to his fate, but what a fate, and it was in that moment he saw how much more crueller life can be than death, for, what death could not destroy in an instant, life would, with hands steady and precise as a surgeon, extinguish by torture in a decade.
Therefore, ye living, rejoice that love keeps you warm for a while yet,
Until cold Lethe anoints, captures your foot in its flight.