The compartment is full of potatoes, the air smells raw and autumnal and everywhere the train stops there are crowds wanting to get on. Someone squeezes in and tells us that now people are sitting on the buffers. Soon we hear the stamping of cold feet above us, so now people are travelling on the roof. It becomes insufferably hot in the compartment. I share my dry sandwiches with Gerhard. Someone pulls the window down and a small hand appears from somewhere outside and grasps the edge of the window, as in a surrealistic film. A boy in front of me questions the reality of that hand, but another boy bets him an Allied cigarette that it is a proper hand. The doubter reaches out his own hand and strokes the unreal one, squeezes it, and it is indeed a real hand. A woman is crouching on the footboard, clinging to the top of the window-pane.
As we cross Lüneburg Heath the first snow of autumn falls and those who clamber down from the roof and in from the buffers and beg to be allowed in are white as cotton. The light fades and some black-marketeers in the compartment exchange cigars and confidences with refined gestures. As we approach Hamburg Gerhard becomes uneasy. His belief in America has now evaporated. America was something he could believe in when Hamburg was twenty-four hours away. He knows there are no boats but he has not yet told himself. Can’t he come with me to Sweden? There is nothing I can say to that. All I can do is stare up at the muddy potato-sacks, keep silent and suffer a bad conscience.
We come into Hamburg almost four hours late or, as it is called in the language of inflation, two hundred and thirty minutes. It is cold and windy and it is snowing. The snow is falling on the ruins and on the dirty piles of bricks and on the girls from the Reeperbahn who are hungry for food but not for love. The snow is falling on the sluggish canals where sunk barges lie at rest under a roof of greasy oil. We walk for a while in the cold, Gerhard and I. Then we have to part outside the hotel with the sign NO GERMAN CIVILIANS. I shall go through the swing-door and enter a dining-room with glasses and white tablecloths and a gallery where in the evening musicians play from the Tales of Hoffmann. I shall sleep in a soft bed in a warm room with hot and cold running water. But Gerhard Blume walks on, out in Hamburg’s night. He does not even go to the harbour. And nothing can be done about that. Absolutely nothing.
Literature and Suffering
What is the distance between literature and suffering? Does it depend on the nature of the suffering, on its closeness or on its strength? Is the distance less between poetry and the suffering caused by the reflection of the fire than the distance between poetry and the suffering arising from the fire itself? There are examples to hand that show there is a more or less immediate connection between poetry and remote or closed suffering. Perhaps we can say that simply to suffer with others is a form of poetry, which feels a powerful longing for words. Immediate open suffering distinguishes itself from the indirect kind by, among other things, not longing for words, at least not at the moment it occurs. Open suffering is shy, restrained, taciturn.
As the plane rises towards the winter evening in a cloud of German rain and German snow, as the surviving German eagle on the airport vanishes in the gloom beneath us, while the lights of Frankfurt are extinguished in the smothering dark and the Swedish plane climbs above German suffering at a speed of 300 kilometres an hour, there is perhaps one question more than any other weighing on the traveller: What would it be like to have to stay behind, to have to be hungry every day, to have to sleep in a cellar, to fight at every moment against the temptation to steal, to have to tremble with cold every minute, to have to survive, constantly, the most intractable conditions? I remember people I met who had to tolerate almost all of that. And I remember above all certain poets and artists — they were not hungrier or suffering more than others, but I remember them because they were aware of the possibilities of suffering, they had tried to measure the distance between art and suffering.
One day in the Ruhr when it has been raining endlessly and when the bakers have not had bread for two days I meet a young German author, one of those who came out during the war but on account of certain spiritual reserves cannot be said personally to have ‘lost a war’. He has been allowed to borrow a fine Swiss-style villa in the middle of a forest and several kilometres of flaming red trees separate him from the most brutal privations of the brutally deprived Ruhr. It is strange to come from the lower depths of a Ruhr mine where a despairing miner with bloodshot eyes in a black face pulled off his battered shoes to let me see he had no socks — to come from there right into this autumnal idyll where hunger and cold were themselves cultivated to the point where they acquired almost ritualistic dimensions. It is a strange experience even to walk in an unspoiled garden, and in this bookless Germany, where a book is such a rarity that one approaches it with reverence simply because it is a book, to step into a room overflowing with books, from Dante’s Inferno to Strindberg’s.
On this island in a terrible sea sits a young author with the tired smile and the aristocratic name, smoking cigarettes for which he has traded away books, drinking tea whose taste is as bitter as the autumn outside. His way of life is certainly peculiar. The outer world, which consists of starving miners, grey tenements with ruined façades and grey cellar-people whose rickety air-raid-shelter beds stand in ankle-deep water when it rains as it is raining now — this world is not unknown here but it is not accepted — it is held at the distance which objectionable things deserve. Personally he is quite uninterested in what is happening a few kilometres away: his wife, who goes to the village for provisions, and the children, who travel to school by train, constitute his only, tranquil contact with life and death out there. Just now and then, and as seldom as possible, does he leave the lonely house in the rainy garden and venture out into the repugnant reality, with the same reluctance with which the hermits of the desert would make their way towards the oasis.
But even a hermit must live. Germany’s authors, who cannot have books published except through lucky accident, live mainly by travelling around giving readings or lectures: these are long, chilly and depressing expeditions from which one returns full of the cold, exhausted and quite unable to write. No one becomes rich doing this — it does not even produce enough to make ends meet. If one has books they must be sold off for tea or sugar or cigarettes. If one has more typewriters than necessary they can be bartered for paper, and if the author wants pens to write with he can get them by trading away his dearly acquired paper.
My hermit friend gives lectures on Möricke and Burckhardt, his two timeless favourites. He gave the same lectures to French-German gatherings in occupied France from Paris to Bordeaux. He says thoughtfully that that was his best time and he claims that people listened better there, that the climate was more favourable for German lectures in occupied France beteen 1940 and 1944 than in the devastated Ruhr of 1946. Of course, he says, I was aware of the situation, but why should a military necessity prevent me from contributing towards mutual understanding between German and French culture? It sounds cynical until one gets used to it, and the reality was in fact even more cynical. On his shelves I come across two dainty army editions, one of the poems of Hölderlin and one of the poems of Möricke, printed in 1941. We can imagine that German soldiers with Möricke’s poems in their inside pockets subjugated Greece, or that after yet another Russian village had been levelled to the ground the German soldier returned to his interrupted reading of Hölderlin, the German poet who said of love that it conquers both time and bodily death.