James J. Conway

"I, the Emperor of Thebes"

A cache of correspondence from Else Lasker-Schüler is up for auction in Berlin next week. Held in Croatia for many years, the collection includes postcards and letters that Lasker-Schüler sent between 1917 and 1920 to the art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer and his wife, actress Tilla Durieux.

Paul Cassirer by Max Beckmann (1915)

Cassirer was a major catalyst of avant-garde art in Germany, promoting the work of Post-Impressionists, Secessionists and Expressionists from his Berlin gallery on a site where the Musical Instrument Museum now stands. Durieux was an acclaimed stage and early screen actress, and a subject of studies by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Franz von Stuck. She had clearly warmed to her pen pal since her dismissive comment on seeing Lasker-Schüler with her son Paul and husband Herwarth Walden in Berlin’s Café des Westens in the early years of the 20th century (‘the little family lived, I suspect, on nothing but coffee’).

 

Tilla Durieux as Circe by Franz von Stuck, c. 1913

 

This hoard follows a similar find from 2020, the recipient in that case being a Dutch school teacher and part-time reviewer who corresponded with Lasker-Schüler between 1905 and 1930. Here we have a narrower time frame (1917-1920) but this, intriguingly, is the period in which Cassirer published a 10-volume edition of Lasker-Schüler’s works (including the trio that make up our edition, Three Prose Works). Else Lasker-Schüler invested a great deal of creative energy in her correspondence. Never a mere listing of events or airing of opinions, her letters – often embellished with drawings – served to expand the world she created in her verse, fiction, drama and graphic works, a construct into which she would implicitly or explicitly draw the recipient. Here she lavishes compliments on the couple, often in the guise of one of her alternative personae (‘I, the Emperor of Thebes …’), alongside images of another alter ego ‘Prince Jussuf’ with a crescent moon and six-pointed star on his cheek.

Lasker-Schüler later turned on Cassirer, referring to him as a ‘shark’ in her 1925 pamphlet, Ich räume auf! (Putting Things Straight) – a rogues’ gallery of publishers she felt had exploited and mistreated her. Shortly after publication, Cassirer and Durieux entered divorce proceedings; unable to face life without his wife, Cassirer committed suicide. Lasker-Schüler appears to have regretted her harsh words, and pencilled a note on a copy of Ich räume auf! that describes Cassirer as a ‘gentleman’ (using the English word).

The estimate is EUR 25,000; hopefully the lucky buyer will share the work with the public at some point.

Images of Jussuf

One of the many fascinating things about Else Lasker-Schüler’s career is that through her dynamic, luminous illustrations, we have an insight into how she herself saw the characters who appear in her writings. In particular, the biblical figure of ‘Jussuf’ (Joseph/Jusuf, the favoured son of Jacob with the coat of many colours) looms large over both her graphic and written work. As the afterword to Three Prose Works reveals, Joseph was a persona of life-long identification for Else Lasker-Schüler, one that connected her to her brother Paul and her mother Jeanette, the two family members to whom she was closest. Paul taught the young Else the story of Joseph and his brothers, which she would in turn act out for her mother. Joseph was also associated with her early socialisation; when she told the story at school, a classmate mockingly declared that Else was Joseph.

That more or less came true shortly before the First World War; in a distressing phase of transition he became an alter ego to the writer and artist, although she fused the biblical figure with a fictional ‘Prince of Thebes’. This hybrid character not only turned up in Lasker-Schüler’s writing (most notably of course in The Prince of Thebes, issued in 1914 – the third of our Three Prose Works) but also her correspondence and numerous artworks. These images constitute a rich iconography spanning over 20 years, reappearing throughout the Weimar Republic and later accompanying Lasker-Schüler into exile.


Pre-World War One

It was in 1912, triggered by her painful split from second husband Herwarth Walden, that Else Lasker-Schüler reached back and reconnected with Joseph (Jussuf)/Prince of Thebes. The ‘self-portrait’ that adorned an edition of the journal Saturn the following year is a kind of ‘coming out’ of the writer’s new persona. He is shown in profile, as he would be in the majority of later images as well. He is frequently accompanied by a crescent moon or a Star of David, or more often both – shorthand for the Semitic realm in which Lasker-Schüler places her prince (see for example the cover of The Prince of Thebes, 1914). The images themselves are sometimes rendered in a few strokes which emphasise a strong brow and down-turned mouth which he shares with his creator. Once fixed, these features remained remarkably consistent.

In a postcard to Georg Trakl, sent a few months before the war which would claim the doomed poet in its early stages, we see how Jussuf/Prince of Thebes appears in Lasker-Schüler’s correspondence. For the rest of her life she often signed her letters with some variant on these names.

 

1913 | An edition of the journal Saturn entirely dedicated to Lasker-Schüler’s work

 

1913 | ‘The Prince of Thebes heads into holy battle’

 

1913 | ‘Jussuf Prince Tiba’

 

1913 | Self-portrait as Prince Jussuf

 

1913/14 | ‘Jussuf with spear’

 

1914 | Postcard addressed to Georg Trakl


Weimar Republic

During the First World War, Else Lasker-Schüler exhibited her art for the first time, and her work in the 1920s signals her confidence as a visual artist. Jussuf recurs throughout the Weimar period, although in contrast to the martial figure of the pre-war era the depictions tend to emphasise his sensitivity. He is often paired with animals (recalling his original role as a shepherd) and in one depiction the prince admires a blue rose, blue being an emotionally charged colour in Lasker-Schüler’s world. In the 1920s he appears more often in full length, a lithe physical presence, and the treatments advance from the pen sketches that dominate early depictions to more elaborate, appropriately many-coloured images in paint and even gold leaf.

Jussuf appears in different forms in the 1923 volume Theben, arguably the consummate union of Else Lasker-Schüler’s words and images. It featured hand-written verse in facsimile accompanied by illustrations, with 50 copies additionally hand-coloured by the writer/artist herself (even the uncoloured editions can sell for around EUR 10,000 these days). Theben was issued by the publisher Querschnitt, which was owned by the prominent gallerist Alfred Flechtheim – a key figure in the dissemination of Modernism in Germany.

 

1920 | ‘Asser Memed Schalomein Jussuf’

 

1920 | ‘Jussuf sculpts his mother’

 

1921 | ‘This is Jussuf in the evening full of longing’

 

1922 | ‘Thebes with Jussuf’ (from the book Theben, 1923)

 

1923 | ‘Jussuf goes to God’ (from the book Theben, 1923)

 

1927 | ‘Jussuf’

 

1927 | ‘Jussuf tending the goats in pasture’

 

1927/28 | ‘Elephant with Jussuf’


Exile

Else Lasker-Schüler left Germany in April 1933, shortly after the Nazi takeover. Despite the penurious conditions under which she endured exile in Zurich, and later Jerusalem, she continued to write and produce art. An unusual image from 1935 returns us to the word, with Jussuf – in something like Western costume – reading his verse. The final sketch, which shows Jussuf praying for peace, is undated but may have been created around the beginning of Else Lasker-Schüler’s residency in Jerusalem, at the outbreak of the Second World War.

 

1934 | ‘Prince Jussuf of Thebes’

 

1935 | ‘Prince Jussuf reads his verses aloud’

 

1939(?) | ‘Prince Jussuf prays for peace in the world’

Back to black

Our forthcoming title, Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler (20 June 2022), is the last in the current format of Rixdorf Editions, so we wanted to take a final look at the series design. First up: if you haven’t already, check out this blog post which covers the original design concept for our books as conceived by Cara Schwartz (and here you can also read up on the extraordinarily prophetic caricature that adorns our translation of Hermann Bahr’s Antisemitism).

Like all of our books, the cover of Three Prose Works uses a black background and recontextualises imagery from around the time of publication, the early 20th century. And like all of the titles since 2019, it is designed by Svenja Prigge (you can see more of her work here). But perhaps before we look at our interpretation, we should see how Lasker-Schüler’s books appeared in her own time. The three works which make up our edition – The Peter Hille Book, The Nights of Tino of Baghdad and The Prince of Thebes – were all published prior to the First World War.

Das Peter Hille-Buch (The Peter Hille Book) was originally issued in German in 1906. Its cover bore a portrait of Hille himself as the one-eyed Norse god Odin by artist Franz Stassen, an image which had once adorned the wall of the cabaret in Berlin where Hille (and Lasker-Schüler) performed.

The cover of Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads (The Nights of Tino of Baghdad), which followed in 1907, simply bore the title in gold against a pink background. The frontispiece by Max Fröhlich, however, seems to illustrate the opening passage of the book (‘You must visit me three days after the rainy season, for the Nile has receded then, and great flowers shine in my gardens, and I too rise from the earth and breathe. A mummy am I, as old as stars, and I dance in the time of the leas. Solemn is my eye and prophetic rises my arm …’).

Else Lasker-Schüler was not just a writer, she was an artist as well, but what might seem a natural step – getting her to supply the cover images herself – didn’t occur until her epistolary novel Mein Herz (My Heart) in 1912. In 1914 the third of our three prose works, The Prince of Thebes, carried Lasker-Schüler’s own illustration, a Semitic vision of a warrior with a Star of David nestled in a crescent moon on his cheek and his helmet, flanked by a Black comrade. This edition featured a number of other line drawings by Else Lasker-Schüler along with three colour illustrations by her friend, the Expressionist painter Franz Marc.

After the First World War, these three titles along with seven others were issued in a complete edition of Lasker-Schüler’s work to that point by art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer with cover images by the author; she re-used the illustration from The Prince of Thebes, but for the other two we can finally see how Lasker-Schüler herself visualised her works.

When we issued our translation of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad as a PDF-only release to our mailing list in 2019, Svenja Prigge’s design picked up on the motif of dance from the Cassirer edition, using an image from one of the thousands of collector cards produced in the early 20th century. A little larger than a standard business card, they were often richly coloured and issued in thematic sets as promotional extras with products like cigarettes and the ubiquitous ‘Leibig meat extract’. The marketing advantage presumably consisted in children collecting the cards and then asking their parents to keep buying the same brand so they could complete their sets. These collectibles are sold to this day; I found the well-preserved examples here at flea markets in Berlin.

 
 

Here the image comes from a card issued with ‘Zuntz’ brand coffee and tea, part of a set of scenes from One Thousand and One Nights, the great Arab narrative cycle which shares numerous motifs with Lasker-Schüler’s prose writing. The image was supplied by the Dresdner Kunstanstalt who were responsible for numerous collector cards, postcards and other ephemera from the era. This scene finds the character of Morgiana dancing for the chieftain of the notorious 40 thieves. The sensuality of this vignette is deceptive; Morgiana is about to stab the thief to death, echoing the violence which seems to inexorably follow each erotic encounter in The Nights of Tino of Baghdad.

This Orientalist aesthetic was typical of the time. As the Afterword to Three Prose Works describes, visual signifiers of an imagined Middle East were incredibly popular throughout high and low culture in early 20th-century Germany. Lasker-Schüler reported her delight at a Berlin circus which made use of these ‘Eastern’ motifs, so it was imagery with which she was certainly familiar. But she was also familiar with antisemitism, including the term ‘Oriental’ – a slur that bigots used to describe Jews. Lasker-Schüler’s response appears to have been to defiantly embrace this insult and transform it into a positive, constructing an ‘Oriental’ world in her writing and even in her day-to-day life.

When we returned to Lasker-Schüler for Three Prose Works, we returned to the Zuntz One Thousand and One Nights set, with Morgiana now joined by the flagellant sorceress who is keeping the King of the Black Isles captive, and Maruf the cobbler at the spring. In place of the whip we gave the sorceress a pansy (taken from a botanical print); the character of Tino – who recurs in different guises throughout the Three Prose Works – is a fierce adversary but also susceptible to beauty.

The swirling figures pick up on the motif of dance which recurs throughout the three works, their weightlessness evokes the intoxicating disorientation of Lasker-Schüler’s prose, while their different forms represent the Orlando-like transformation that Tino undergoes. The cyclical momentum parallels the circular if fractured narrative that emerges throughout the three books. The pansy is the kind of flower to be found in the Nietzschean, Germanic forest settings of The Peter Hille Book, but the leaf on its stem resembles a palm tree, and points to the Orientalist journey ahead. By the time we end up in Jerusalem at the end of The Prince of Thebes, there are elements which seem to take us back to the source – quotes from Nietzsche and European flowers … and so it goes, round and round.

However it took a while to arrive at this arrangement; to prove that we really don’t rush into our designs, here are just some of the original alternatives.

As I mentioned in our original design round-up, the guiding concept for the Rixdorf Editions books was to have imagery from the time reconfigured on a black background, to suggest elements emerging from obscurity just as the works themselves were being rediscovered. And this is all true, but as this is the last cover in this format, it’s time I let you in on the original original inspiration:

Fuzzy-Felt.

 
 

If you’ve never encountered this low-tech children’s toy of yesteryear, Fuzzy-Felt came as a box full of coloured pieces of felt in different shapes which you could arrange into pictures in a lurid pop-folk style on a black felt background. I have a dim (yet clearly persistent) memory of playing with a care-worn Fuzzy-Felt set, which presumably belonged to one of my cousins, when I visited my aunt and uncle’s farm in rural South Australia. There was something about the suspension of carnivalesque elements against an unfathomable void which captured my young imagination. So there you go – it was Fuzzy-Felt all along.

Duly unburdened of that burning secret, it remains only for me to thank Cara Schwartz and Svenja Prigge for their expertise, taste and patience in producing these cover images over the last five years.


Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated by James J. Conway) will be published on 20 June 2022

Postcard from Sophienstrasse

Sophienstraße 21

A while back we visited Niederschönhausen, the town (then) outside of Berlin where authors Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf formed a bohemian community of two and fomented a literary revolution in the form of Papa Hamlet. Although set in Norway, that book was very much informed by their familiarity with Berlin’s less desirable residential areas. An even more acute study of this world comes to us in another of the duo’s texts included in our edition of Papa Hamlet, the 1890 short story ‘Die papierne Passion’ (‘The Paper Passion’). It offers not just a compelling social study, but a unique record of a building that, remarkably, is still around.

The original publication of ‘Die papierne Passion’ by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf

The story was inspired by Johannes Schlaf’s time as a student when he lodged in the Scheunenviertel (‘Barn Quarter’), immediately north of Berlin’s historic heart, before departing to share Holz’s sylvan seclusion in Niederschönhausen. At the time (the late 1880s) the Scheunenviertel was already beset by overcrowding, with constant new arrivals, particularly Jews fleeing persecution in eastern Europe (more from Slow Travel Berlin). Like so much of Berlin, this neighbourhood was dominated by buildings arranged around courtyards, with a typical configuration offering a front block facing the street, a rear block behind it separated by a courtyard, which was often also framed by side blocks. Depending on the depth of the plot there might be up to four successive courtyards leading away from the street – often gloomy spaces which retained more noise than light.

A view of the Scheunenviertel

Each complex was a social microcosm; the apartments on the lower floors of the front block were generally reserved for the better off, with conditions deteriorating the higher and further back you went. Once you arrived at the top of one of the rear blocks you might well find apartments housing multiple families or a revolving cast of lodgers. In the most extreme cases the same bed would be occupied by different people working different shifts throughout the day. Well into the 20th century, these overcrowded spaces were notorious for appalling health and social conditions. And often the buildings weren’t solely reserved for residents. The Berliner Mischung (Berlin mix), sometimes known as the Kreuzberger Mischung, named for another working-class district on the other side of the River Spree, was a mode of urban development at the time which crammed residential, commercial, artisanal and even industrial usage into the same space with predictably poor outcomes for the people who called them home.

An image by Heinrich Zille depicting living conditions in Berlin around the end of the 19th century

Sophienstraße 21 is a prime example of this. Right behind the Sophienkirche, Berlin’s only remaining Baroque church, it presents a genteel front to the street which once concealed a teeming world of apartments, workshops and a tavern, as well as a sewing machine factory. Here Johannes Schlaf lived as a lodger in a household watched over by the loud, vulgar Mother Abendroth who ceaselessly bellowed her grievances in broad Berlin dialect. She appears unencrypted in ‘The Paper Passion’, while the student Haase, sensitive and ill-at-ease, is likely a stand-in for Schlaf himself.

An 1882 map showing Sophienstrasse 21 and the Sophienkirche

An 1882 map showing Sophienstrasse 21 and the Sophienkirche

Considering Berlin’s history it is truly fortunate that we have such a rich, closely observed literary account of a location that we can still visit today. Now known as the Sophie-Gips-Höfe, this is the very exemplar of post-reunification gentrification, with some avant-garde landscaping, walls adorned with text (but no graffiti), expensive apartments, media companies, an architectural practice, a high-end gallery, a French bookshop and a bakery (many Berliners will remember this as the former home of Barcomi’s Deli). With a bit of guesswork, here are some extracts from the text in the settings that inspired them (these photos were taken in late summer so as well as the grime, crowds and industrial activity you’ll have to imagine the snow for yourself).


‘A small Berlin kitchen, up four flights of stairs, around Christmas time …’

‘Meanwhile there is an occasional low rattling of window panes amid the muffled clatter of the factory in a rear block beyond the courtyard …’

‘From four storeys below in the cellar tavern comes the thin sound of an accordion …’

‘Another heavy, iron-laden wagon has just rattled through the gateway to the courtyard …’

‘The thin, monotonous peal from the Sophienkirche steeple can now be heard from the street …’

‘It’s the evening service. In between, from the bel étage below, a piano …‘

‘Beyond the low, snow-covered side block across the way the factory sends dark smoke into the winter sky, aswarm with fine powdery snow. Its numerous windows gaze yellowy-red through the flurry. The large black steel rails, belts and wheels in the bright squares move back and forth continuously. There is a snuffing and groaning in regular bursts …’

‘Heavy, dull blows from the courtyard. Between each, a shrill woman’s voice …’

‘Outside windows warped with frost are being thrown open, a few women are calling down into the courtyard, there is already a confused frenzy of buzzing and shouting down below …’

‘The women scream, a thick knot of people has gathered in front of a ground floor apartment. The whole courtyard is in uproar …’

‘A black knot of people comes through the front door. In their midst is a man, staggering; they are dragging him out …’

‘The factory chimney looming tall and black into the dirty grey snowy sky casts a red flame fluttering high into the whirling white-grey flakes …’


 
 

‘The Paper Passion’ by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf was originally published in German as ‘Die papierne Passion’ in the anthology Neue Gleise. Gemeinsames von Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf by F. Fontane in Berlin, 1892. This translation © 2021 James J. Conway, included in Papa Hamlet.

A Farewell

Today is publication day for our seventh print title, and an English-language debut for its two authors: Papa Hamlet, by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. As well as the title novella, the book contains other works by the pair who formed a writing partnership between 1888 and 1892. They include a short story about a young man dying after a duel (that’s not a spoiler by the way – the title is ‘A Death’). As he succumbs to his wounds in shabby student lodgings, his fragmentary, confused babbling is meticulously rendered, and it reads like post-war experimental poetry.

Our edition also contains the short story ‘The Paper Passion’, which recounts the fractious social mix of characters in lodgings in a poor part of Berlin, based on Johannes Schlaf’s own experience of living in the Scheunenviertel. Here Arno Holz’s belief in the importance of dialogue is expressed in the very typesetting, where the spoken passages are rendered in a larger font.

Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf

Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf

Like Papa Hamlet itself, both of these shorter works show Holz and Schlaf’s fearlessly experimental side. But there was another side; just as socially critical but more subtle, even sentimental, as seen in their ‘Emmi’ cycle, the last part of which is translated below; consider it a DVD extra. These tales illustrate not just the authors’ skill in communicating a sense of place and the sentiments of those who dwell within, but also their particular alertness to the experience of women. First published in 1892 in the anthology Neue Gleise (New Tracks), the three stories are bound by the character of Emmi, a young woman. In the first of the three, ‘Krumme Windgasse 20’, we find Emmi working as a maid in student lodgings, where she meets Heinz. Despite the acutely observed differences in their social profiles, her flirtation with the student blossoms into a relationship. The next part, ‘Die kleine Emmi’ (Little Emmi), finds Emmi fighting off an attempted sexual assault from her uncle. This was actually the first piece that Holz and Schlaf wrote together; it was originally to be published with Papa Hamlet, but the publisher judged it too contentious a choice.

In the last piece, ‘Ein Abschied’ (A Farewell), Emmi and Heinz are reunited, only to part. Summoned by his father, Heinz will pursue the opportunities of a young man of his class while Emmi is fated to stay behind. A consistent feature of Holz and Schlaf’s work is an awareness of sound – the idiosyncrasies of human speech patterns but also the incidental sonic backdrop that accompanies their characters’ lives. In ‘A Farewell’ they include snatches of folk and popular songs throughout the narrative, functioning almost like a Greek chorus, dramatically highlighting the diverging destinies of the two characters. The song that Emmi requests from Heinz – ‘Wo ein klein’s Hüttle steht’ (Where a Little Cottage Stands) suggests domesticity and settled family life. The other songs, by contrast, are associated with young men going out in the world, including ‘Frei ist der Bursch’ (Free is the Lad) and ‘Am Brunnen vor dem Tore’ (At the Well before the Gate), also known as ‘Der Lindenbaum’ (The Linden Tree), which Schubert incorporated into Die Winterreise. And one song in particular may be familiar – the folk song ‘Muss i denn’ (‘So must I …’), in which a young man takes leave of his beloved. It was recorded by Marlene Dietrich but also became the basis for Elvis Presley’s ‘Wooden Heart’ which incorporated some of the original lyrics in Swabian dialect. Links to recordings are included if you want to multi-mediatise your reading experience.


Farewell.jpg

Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf

A Farewell

translated by James J. Conway

‘Well aren’t you dull today!’
Little Emmi bent her fine, round head low over her coarse, grey wool stockings once more. The slender steel needles in her hands jingled softly, the moonlight reflected in them gleamed.
Her small, red lower lip was protruding slightly. She was pouting!
Heinz had not even answered. He was still standing at the other window, looking down at the laneway.
He had bent the flower pots slightly to one side.
Their black, grotesque shadows stood out behind him on the scrubbed floorboards. Next to them, to the right and left, the two curtains wove their lacy garlands.
How fine the little nest was! How fine!
His forehead was now pressed firmly against the panes.
In the distance, on a small, octagonal oriel, he could clearly distinguish a large, coal-black weathercock. It looked as though it had just this moment crowed. A small hole had been punched into its round, iron head as an eye, and its strangely ornate tail feathers jagged sharply into the moonlight.
Behind it a cat was climbing up a drainpipe. Now it disappeared behind a chimney. Below it was a withered tuft of grass waving like a tongue from a tin dragon head …
Heinz now let the myrtle stem snap back again without thinking.
A small black bat had just touched the pane with its wing.
The old, shrivelled nest had never seemed so strange to him.
Downstairs, outside, there were still plenty of people. Women gossiping about their dear neighbours, philistines smoking their long pipes, children who had already fallen asleep on their mothers’ laps.
The small, round master baker Klüsener had made himself comfortable on a garden chair. His broad, red apple face was clearly visible diagonally across the laneway. His coat was white, snow white. Just like his apron.
Before him stood fat Ramschüssel, chatting with him. The silver-plated tip of his helmet gleamed every time he turned.

‘Well you could at least play me something on the piano!’
Heinz winced a little, instinctively.
She looked over at him in astonishment.
What was wrong with him today? She couldn’t make sense of him at all!
He was now seated on the small, round swivel armchair which was covered in black patent leather. The moonlight reflected in the black sheen of the instrument. It dripped like gold from the fantastical arabesques of the two rotating brass candle holders. It lay like plated silver in the small disc in between. From its centre hunched Beethoven’s angular medallion, black as a black man’s head. Little Emmi instinctively dropped down deep into her aunt’s large, rattan armchair. Her round, white hands lay casually on her lap. She looked over at him with her eyes wide open, as though she were dreaming.
Heinz now bent down. The lid was folded back. The slight vibration that ran through the metal strings reverberated throughout the whole room.
For a moment all was still. The regulator ticked. The quaking grasses nodded in the two vases above.
Then his fingers slid over the keys. The melody was soft, muted.
‘At the Well before the Gate!’ Little Emmi sat there, motionless. How pale he was today!
He looked out the window as he played, the moonlight was now falling full on his face.
Little Emmi instinctively bent forward again.
His hands now slid off the keys.
The last note faded away.
The regulator ticked again and the quaking grasses nodded.

‘“At the Well before the Gate!” But that is so sad! You really are horrid today!’
Little Emmi said this in a very low voice.
‘Why don’t you play …’
She put the knitting needle thoughtfully to her little red mouth.
‘Wait! … Why don’t you play … something really jolly! … Well? For instance … “Where a Little Cottage Stands” or something like that!’
Heinz played. Once more he had not replied.
The moonlight now filled the whole room …
Suddenly little Emmi shuddered. A shrill, ragged sound rang out through the room, and the back of the small, leather swivel armchair hit the floorboards. Heinz leapt up.
‘Damned music!’
He was now standing again, his hands in his pockets, by the window.
Little Emmi was trembling all over.
The poor, poor boy!
She felt herself turning pale.
Now she lay her hand lightly on his shoulder.
‘Tell me!’
She could not continue.
‘There!’
Heinz had torn the damned letter from his pocket.
‘There!’
He held it out to her, facing away.
Then he pressed his head against the window frame again and looked down at the quiet, moonlit laneway …

Little Emmi stood there with the letter for a moment, perplexed. Then she returned to her window and held it right up to the pane. The moonlight now fell full on the solid black lines.
‘Dear boy!’ …
The paper in her hand trembled slightly.
… ‘Dear boy! When you come for your long holiday, pack all your things with you this time.’
She felt her heart pound!
‘I believe I am only doing you a favour, by … by taking you … out of that nest.’ …
Her arm had sunk down limply on the window sill. She had to support herself. She pressed the letter against her chest.
‘I believe I am only doing you a favour by taking you out of that nest!’
Now she looked over at Heinz. He was still leaning against the window frame. She thought she saw him shrugging his shoulders slightly.
‘For a few semesters I plan… to you send to Berlin’ …
To Berlin!
Mechanically she read on.
‘You will have the best experts for your disciplines there. And beyond that, it would not hurt you to stick your nose into the wider world a little.’ …
Oh yes! Into the wider world! The wider world!
Outside there was a slow rumbling over the bumpy old cobbles up the steep laneway.
So must I, so must I, leave the village with a sigh?
The postilion blew his horn into the quiet evening. Far, far above the pointed bay windows and roofs a few white stars were shining.
‘The purpose of your stay in the nest – to give you a few jolly semesters – has, I feel, been sufficiently accomplished.’ …
‘I cannot imagine, apart from your studies, what other major advantages for your further education might derive from your continuing to stay there. Your mother and your siblings send their greetings.
                               Your father.’
The page slid out of her hands and rustled on the floorboards. It lay there like a garish white spot in the middle of the image of the window that the moon had painted on the floor.
It was deathly quiet in the room. Only the dark brown regulator ticked; evermore, evermore! The round, shiny brass disc of the pendulum moved evenly back and forth. The lacquer sticks on the windowsill exuded a numbing fragrance. The frame and the glass of the wide, round mirror above the mirror and the green tiles of the large stove shimmered indistinctly in the half light. Gentle reflections of the moonlight shone from the curved backs and the yellow wickerwork of the chairs.
Little Emmi sank back into the big armchair. She stared at the gold-plated, woven sewing basket next to her on the window sill between the flower stems.
Her hands lay limp on her lap.
Suddenly she came to again. Heinz had thrown himself down before her. His black curly hair lay on her knees …
‘Emmi!’
She could not respond. She closed her eyes tightly.
After a while, once more, quietly, timidly:
‘Emmi!’
She was trembling all over.
Heinz now quickly raised his head. There were warm drops on his hand …
‘Dear, dear Emmi!’
He now embraced her and kissed her full on her round, small mouth.
‘No! …’  No!’
She turned red all over. He wasn’t listening to her.
He now hugged her very tightly and kissed her. On the cheeks, on the mouth, on the forehead. Over and over! …
Suddenly little Emmi looked at the window, startled. Something had knocked softly on the window.
A night butterfly! …
A shiver ran through her. Gently she pushed Heinz back.
In the alleyway below several doors closed. Someone shouted distinctly across the street: ‘Good night!’ Now someone was coming round the corner, singing: ‘Free is the lad!
They were both listening.
‘Emmi! I will stay! I will stay!’
He took both her hands and squeezed them.
‘But if your father wills it?’
‘Oh, it is so fine here! So fine!’
The singing continued. From a distance. From far, far away …
She did not respond. Heinz was still clutching her hands. Now she looked sideways at the floorboards. Her eyes had just fallen on the letter. It was still lying motionless like a garish white spot on the floor, on the image of the window. The solid black signature stood out clearly from the white paper: ‘Your father!’
‘Do you see? It’s no use! It’s no use!’
Heinz looked at her, most frightened.
‘I will not forget you! Never!’
‘Forget! Forget! How you talk! How stupid we are anyway! How stupid! As though we were saying goodbye forever! Forever!’
Without meaning to he now followed her gaze. Now he too saw the letter.
‘Oh! That damn letter!’
He leapt back to his feet now.
He picked up the paper.
‘There! Well? There! There!’
He tore it into a thousand pieces. The small, white flakes swirled all over the dark room. Little Emmi watched him, very frightened.
He was now standing upright before her.
‘Not forever!’
He embraced her again.
‘Not forever, dear Emmi! We will write to each other every week! Several times! No?’
She just nodded.
‘Emmi! … Tell me!’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘And for the last semesters I will come back here! And then … and then … you know! … Emmi! No? You see?’
‘Quiet! Quiet!’
She leaned over him now. She kissed his forehead.
Again she looked at him with her large eyes. So strange!
Outside the evening wind was now blowing through the quiet little moonlit laneway. The metal sign below creaked. At times it creaked against the window pane. Softly, softly. So softly …


‘A Farewell’ by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf was first published in German as ‘Ein Abschied’ in the anthology Neue Gleise. Gemeinsames von Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf by F. Fontane in Berlin, 1892.

This translation © 2021 James J. Conway