A large bell-flower
wafted off the springtime tree
to the glory of the bright spring day
and danced into a gentle dream
[2] From the same edition of Die Fackel:
Let us in the silver glow
that cloaks the birches green
fill the vessels of our hearts
with the deep silence!
Let us with our dying breath
and the last wave of blood
flow into the shrub
as into the roots of the source.
All that is earthly must fall from us
without substance, without sadness;
a child once more, in the forest’s womb,
with only nightingales around us.
[3] From the same edition of Die Fackel:
… nightingales around us
that gently rock us past time and space
beyond ourselves, to God’s fields
and eternity,
where the angels with their gentle
motherly hands beatify our bond of love
and rejoice to choruses of harps
from mouth to mouth
jubilant that we again belong to God
[4] Longfellow translated this as “Knowst thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom?”
[5] “On a far-off, foreign meadow” [Johann Gabriel Seidl]
[6] A 1902 translation by Forster and Pinkerton renders this as: “More dignified than in our northern lands.”
[7] The lines come from the poem “Tivoli” by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, The literal translation would be:
The cypress and the olive tree,
piney woods and hill and meadow
sink into the heavenly deep
spotless fragrant blue
Around the waters and the lands,
high and low and far and wide,
Heaven wraps the outspread
arms of eternity
[8] From Die Fackel, Heft 781, 1928.
All that is heavy sinks
away from the things that expand
and the earth drinks
wonders of release
15. Journalistic Activities of Herr Alexianu and Professor Feuer; Death of Old Paşcanu
A POPULAR ditty started spreading among the so-called patchkas, or groups of young flaneurs who swarmed up and down during their daily morning and evening promenades. It was in Romanian, and people attributed the authorship to Herr Năstase on account of its wit, as well as because of the undisguised allusions to the goings-on in the house of Tildy, and to the Germans in general. The catchy refrain went like this:
Poftiţi cu toţi acuma la balamuc,
unde boeri de rasă azi se mai duc:
comfort — guic-guic
fără bucluc …
poftiţi la balamuc …
Balamuc is an idiomatic expression for asylum. In translation the song might sound like this:
Just follow me to the nuthouse, please,
where aristocrats come and go with ease;
it’s swank beyond dispute
and no one gets the boot,
so off to the nuthouse, please …
In reality this creation was taken from an article in the newspaper Vocea that focused on the discovery of the insane “poet” Karl Piehowicz.
As I have mentioned, the junior house physician of the municipal asylum, Dr. Kipper, had forwarded a selection of the transcribed poems to a certain Herr Sperber, who published them in the Tschernopoler Tageszeitung, with some remarks:
… we are literally confronted with the mysterious revelations of a vibrant lyrical spirit that comes from another sphere and speaks through the medium of this broken mouth. What a font of words, what breath of the earth! Not since the days of Johann Christian Günther and the other noble Baroque poets has such a voice been heard. Am I exaggerating? Here is the proof
This page found its way to the great critic Karl Kraus, who called it “by far the most respectable thing I have found in a journal in a long time, and certainly the most important I have ever discovered in a daily.” He published the poems ostensibly authored by Piehowicz, along with what he knew of their origin, in his highly influential polemical journal Die Fackel, juxtaposing them against some poetic creations recently published in German newspapers, in an essay entitled “From the Editorial Desk and the Asylum.” This was the focus of the article in the Vocea, which carried the headline “Voice from the Beyond”:
An apt old proverb states: For the jackal to admit his soul is black, think how black his soul must be … We are always happy to discover professions of ethnicity that serve to unmask a pose of national arrogance. Recently a particularly delightful example came to our attention. This particular voice comes from a nation that suffers more than any other from the flatulence of exaggerated self-opinion, and which misses no opportunity to rub the excesses of its discharges (which somehow never seem to bring relief) in the noses of other nations — to put it plainly, from the German nation, whose sons, down to the last stinky-foot, claim to be the descendents of Goethe and Beethoven — even in circumstances where intelligence (not to mention tact, which they don’t possess) would counsel against claiming a binding legacy, namely when living in scattered groups as guests of other nations, where the validity of such assertions is easily checked by comparison. However, the voice that now surprises us with its revelatory insights, with all the gravitas of a voice from the beyond, does not hail from our local ethnic Germans — the Volkdetusche, whom alas we must count among our minorities — but from their own homeland, although it is connected with an occurrence in our city. The great German journalist feels compelled to proclaim: “My inquiries led me to discover that the greatest German poet is an insane locksmith by the name of Karl Piehowicz, a resident of the Czernopol municipal asylum. He deserves every literary prize that Germany has to give
The author went on in the same malicious tone, lifting another sentence from Kraus’s article with poisonous glee:
I would particularly award him (Piehowicz) the Schiller-Prize, albeit without the bonus offered by the Odol Mouthwash Company, which has led the German people from literary Idol to literary Odol, a symbolic move that suggests their language is good for rinsing out the mouth
Nor were the attacks confined to general targets. The writer went on:
… We have since made our own inquiries and learned that it is an officer of our own army who has particularly distinguished himself in helping the Germans acquire a new genius, insane though this brilliant poet may be, as has been clinically proven beyond a doubt. It happens that this particular Herr Major is in the asylum himself, where his own mental state is under observation following a series of lunatic acts that several weeks earlier sparked both laughter and terror in this city. The entire chain of events begs the question of whether we ought not pay more heed to leaders of the nationalist program who advocate a thorough purge of our army, and give them a freer hand to implement their commendable plans than hitherto …
This was an allusion to General Petrescu and openly dragged the case into the political arena. The article ended with a satirical verse:
— as proof that we are not ourselves lacking in lyrical gifts
— even outside the municipal asylum—
And was signed Ali.
The “stinky-foot” reference was all we needed to recognize that the pseudonymous author was none other than our former tutor, Herr Alexianu.
A few days later a response appeared in Herr Adamowski’s Tescovina German Messenger: