Another Green World (50 page)

But wait: lest the reader feel that he has heard this sermon before, we rush to assure him he has not. For when Isaac makes some feckless interjection or other—one does not often jot these things down, nearly all are unprintable—to the effect that German Youth in this case ought to find itself some baggier hiking shorts, because its balls are going to swell up, Hagen surprisingly takes no offense. Natural sexual yearning (geschlechtliche Sehnsucht) must have a healthy outlet: so he informs us, his manner straightforward, instructional. On which account, masturbation is encouraged and may be practiced quite frankly, as one attends to other bodily needs. Indeed one ought not to be furtive in such matters, as this might indicate, or be symptomatic of, some sexual incorrectness.

At which astonishing point, the female of the species appears, demurely sheathed. Hagen does not terminate his lecture but turns his attention to certain dietary practices recommended in such cases. What with one thing and another, the details have been lost.

10.
SEPT

Enough.

One has had enough. Walking, sweating, fornicating on terra ardua, communing with the genius loci.

One misses Leipzig. Better: Berlin. Waking at ten, an intelligent newspaper. Rudeness of pedestrians, ugliness of streets—waiting at the corner for the tram to pass—then out of nowhere, an apotheosis. A violin sighs from an upper window. You imagine the beauty up there, she is sixteen next month, waif-waisted, practicing her recital piece. You stare upward as an elderly linden fans yellow leaves against the coal-smeared sky.

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Enough of this landscape. Sum it in a sentence. If you should ever want to lose a thing, to let it drop, then stroll away and think of it nevermore— do it here.

Enough of cows!

Of the Brunette however. Toothsome, musky, mischievous, untiring. The eyes that blaze then slowly close—eclipse of passion. The arms, enveloping. The mouth, hot, hungry, generous with laughter, lair of the sharp tongue. The body, sweet and bountiful as a soft fruit plucked hot in the sun; you seek to taste it but it, instead, consumes you. Her voice, her hair, her elbows, small feet, trivial complaints, shallow breathing in the night, moments of zany, girlish abandon. By no means ever enough.

11. sept—arndtheim.

What, wondered the Expatriate, would Tucholsky make of this?

12.
SEPT

Finally catch one's breath. Nothing I've ever seen before. Whole new world here, but (the usual rub) likely of zero interest to New World readers.

They do not like ‘commune’— the term sounds too Parisian, I suppose. We are a voluntary community, they say, freiwillige Gemeindshaft, and we choose to share the labors and the rewards. And by the way, we don't like talking about this, actually (while never ceasing to blather), so why don't you put down that expensive writing instrument and come join us for a mug of applemint tea?

It is not much Marx. It is rather very Morris—though no one fesses to having read News from Nowhere, so there must be some intermediary, a vector. They place great value here upon handcraft, the thing well made, no more complicated than it needs to be. The perfect emblem of Arndtheim is the honey-dipper: a curious curvaceous elongated knob, carefully lathed and grooved, that emerges from the pot impregnated with oozing sweetness. Thus Arndtheim: a well-earned bounty, an earthly abundance, with just that twist of oddity, those funny grooves running right through the grain. An essential stickiness.

I don't know what it is about these people that annoys me so.

They dress as they imagine good German peasants might dress, or ought to dress, or dressed once upon a time, in some golden agrarian age: loose-fitting smocks, wide britches, leather moccasins, wide-brimmed hats, all made by themselves.

They labor together, that is true. Whether they labor equally or not? Not only the cynic suspects an unacknowledged hierarchy.

They plant their herbs and food crops in keeping with the cycles of moon and planets, using complicated charts marked up with astrologic formulae. Further, there are mysterious preparations to vitalize the soil, draw the appropriate cosmic energies, or deflect negative influences back to the Underworld—don't enquire too closely about this unless you have an afternoon to spare. It's all very Madame Blavatsky, I think, though they make it out to be scientific.

They do not like squares. For them, it must be the circle, the conic section, the hexagon (shape of a honeycomb—and yes, of course, they keep bees, great wood-framed enclaves of this earnest and Socialist-minded insect). The village is laid out in alignment with the poles and with the exact directions in which the sun rises and sets on the summer and winter solstices. This gives six bearings—hence, six lanes webbing out from a central green or common. The innermost structures are workshops, a mule-powered grain mill, a smithy, and a pleasant timbered edifice that should very much like to be a village inn or pub but is obliged to call itself the Community House, a library–cum–school–cum–dining hall. Second ring out, cottages of the permanent residents or, as they call themselves, ‘settlers,’ as though this were Jamestown 1609, or Erewhon 1890. Subsequent rings house the less permanently situated (hard to tell who lives here, actually, even the residents themselves don't seem to know). The living is rustic but comfy enough. Marty and I have got a little cabin in which one hears a stream lapping pleasantly through the night.

13.
SEPT

Chilly, these last mornings.

Book shelves, don't you find, are mercilessly revealing. In the Gemeindehaus (loitering, shirking our kitchen duty) we discover Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer: well enough. Freud of course. Spengler in successive editions. The usual moderns, Kästner, Hesse, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, the Manns. Wyneken, Blüher, Baden-Powell (in translation), canon of the Youth Movement. Waist-high stacks of magazines, pamphlets, journals, broadsheets, most badly written, execrably designed, amateurish in every way. Others less so.

Then, the odd things. Last, the worrisome things.

Among the former, highly colored romances by Guido List, a Walter
Scott of the Ring Cycle set. Wise chieftains, fearless warriors, ‘runic magi.’ And of course a stable of blond Frauen of fulsome breast, ready and happy to (as the saying goes) throw the babies.

Among the latter—who is Raoul Francé? He would seem to be a Monist. (Whatever that is.) His Discovery of the Homeland, 1914, entreats men of German blood to quit the cities, those dens of filth and ‘cosmopolitanism’— i.e., Jewry—and return to the fields, the forests, the good rich earth of their ancestors.

And who, pray, is Ernst Haeckel? A biologist of some kind, one gathers, though what kind one cannot guess. He is all over the shelf, some of his writings quite dusty indeed. From 1866, ‘Oekologie,’ a term I don't recognize, a monograph having to do with Nature and the intricate relationships therein. Relationships chiefly fratricidal. The fellow seems to take fiendish glee in the prospect that certain organisms shall surely exterminate their fellows, and that (if one reads him correctly) the same applies to certain races. One looks in vain for a clear definition of ‘race.’ Is he talking about the hated French? The Lapps, trespassers on Nordic ground? No, one suspects one knows whom he is talking about.

From Haeckel, a short hop to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Who at least comes right out with it. ‘We must save the sacred forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.’ This in 1853! Right-wing tree-worshippers espousing the ‘rights of wilderness.’ How could this possibly be understood in America?

Finally, the namesake, Ernst Moritz Arndt—hence ‘Arndtheim.’ Queerest of a queer lot. A treatise from 1815, Darwin barely out of diapers, sounds radical even today. On the Care and Conservation of Forests: ‘When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important—shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity.’

Sounds cozy and warm, for those who enjoy their panentheism. Yet a paragraph down, one chokes upon dire warnings against miscegenation and, a few pages later, scurrilous diatribes against the usual villains: Slavs, Mediterraneans, and… need it be said?

The message, ringing and clear: We belong to this world, our natural place is here, like the stag, the eagle, the oak. Our bodies are meant to thrive on this hard continent, our souls shaped by this climate, these mountains, a quality of sunlight, a sharp scent of tannin in the air. And so it is our sacred duty to defend this place, this German soil, this German
water, these German trees, against all that is alien, corrupting, industrial, ‘civilized’— not for our own sake, for we are merely part of the whole, but for the sake of that greater, unified thing, the living body of Germania.

A stirring vision, and so very dangerous. Over a century old yet very much alive here, evolving, ramifying, in this ‘model hamlet.’

Oh, and did you know, this Arndt man wrote also fairy tales. There is a book of them and they appear very common indeed.

14.
SEPT

Talk of leaving. Talk of staying. Talk of politics. Talk.

Last night late—too late to record, now half forgotten—a disputation over Hesse, whose recent novels are enjoyed in Leipzig arguably to excess. Minds here divided. These people approve the author's mystical aspect, likewise his iconoclasm. His focus, however, upon the singular man, the lone wolf, emphatically they do not. Hesse lacks völlig social consciousness, they say. At which point, roughly, the Demian was adduced. This slight auto-Bildungsroman is taken by these credulous folks (in such matters more conventional than they suppose) at face value: Max Demian, mini-Übermensch, meets sensitive but unenlightened narrator and shows him the Way.

Here the Expat, mildly intoxicated, essayed an alternative exegesis: the Demian as daring (though botched) attempt at homosexual confessional. Admittedly, one hoped to shock. One hoped also, however, to make a gesture of goodwill toward Marty's old friend, whom we have here unkindly called the Invert, who does not, for all one's chumminess, show signs of warming toward ourselves. And so, with muddled intent, we began ticking off the points (which, need it be noted, have the striking feature of correctness).

In the throes of Pubertät, whilst his comrades speak coarsely of women, pseudonymous young Emil thinks only of his friend Max Demian. Consistently, through all his changing moods, he employs the term Sehnsucht (yearning, desire) to characterize his feelings—though the word never appears in the text when Max is more than two sentences away. The friend's striking looks are (redundantly) detailed—variously called ‘womanly,’ or weiblich, and androgynous. In a stuffy classroom, Emil stares fixedly at the back of Max's neck, rapturously inhaling the ‘soft smell’ there. Max gives as good as he gets, referring pointedly to the ancient Greeks, who held in honor certain (unspecified) things now felt to be abominable. He confesses himself to be ‘interested in’ the younger boy
for no obvious reason—or rather, one obvious reason that is nowhere openly acknowledged. He quivers once at the edge of a great declaration, only to retreat as, indeed, does Hesse himself, into silence and misdirection. The only female character of note (Max's mom!) enters late and serves merely as a double and stand-in for her son, whom she looks and talks exactly like. Once, yes, it is true (we were obliged to respond to a predictable objection), Emil glimpses in a public park a Real Girl, and thereupon fixates implausibly upon her slender, small-breasted, and suspiciously boylike image. But this flimsy narrative ploy serves two purposes. First, Emil's chaste daydreaming about this girl, whom he never tries to meet in the flesh, excuses him from the opposite-sex involvements of his schoolmates, which he finds crude, dissolute, and unappealing. Second, it impels him to create art, starting with a portrait of his comely Muse— which, when it is done, depicts not the nameless Mädchen but the mädchenhaft Max, right down to his full, sensuous mouth. And of course the story closes with a boy-to-boy, lip-to-lip kiss, concerning which the author, in his haste to explain it away, makes his feeblest and most craven showing to date.

—All of which, one had hoped and rather expected, might have earned at least a friendly nod from Ingo. To the contrary! Said Kerl avoided one's eye from ‘homo-’ onward and slunk from the common room during the ensuing spirited discussion. Thus was the Expat left to defend an unpopular (but honestly unassailable) position with no one to hand him ammunition. So much for gratitude. So much for wearing one's tolerance upon one's sleeve.

We shall carry on, though. We shall not be so easily blinked out of this fellow's eye. Where the Brunette goes, we mean to follow. And thus far, she seems devoutly disinclined to go anyplace without our Ingo tagging along.

16.
SEPT

The evening meal here is the high point of the day, communally speaking. People are done with their labors in the garden and the vineyard and the workshops and the mill (my own day's assignment: shepherding! which gives one time to think and write), and everyone has a pent-up impulse to socialize. Usually there is something on for the evening—a topic for discussion, lessons in folk dance, a musical recital—so dinner is, you might say, the last open slot of the day. ‘The boys,’ as Marty calls them, are not present, unaccounted for since midday, their movements lately
hard to keep track of. Quite the oddest trio imaginable, but there you have it.

The big hall where we eat is a curious mix, Arts & Crafts with a touch of barrier-free Gropius functionalism. Socialist interior design: no rugs on the pale wood floors, but a superfluity of wall posters, Blue Rider prints, portrait of Rosa Luxembourg, her coiffure in itself a form of torture.

At our table is one of the Big Men About Arndtheim (which pretends to be a pure democracy, but strikes one as more an ideocracy, led by those with the strongest opinions)— a fellow named Alwin. Tall, bright-eyed, articulate though given to talking in slogans, his distinguishing affectation is dark hair worn long and straight, past his shoulders, and a deerskin waistcoat. Rousseau's homme sauvage, or his German cousin. Who falls to discoursing, this night, on the calamity soon to befall Western civilization. The nature thereof, unspecified. The signs, the auguries, however, unmistakable. One hears this kind of thing everywhere, of course, but Alwin gives it a twist. He sees cracks in the cultural edifice where other observers—Yanks above all—might see breadth and novelty.