Once again, the last word will have to wait. It would be inappropriate to continue the search without first setting down the above-mentioned stories.
Hans Menscher
IN HAMBURG, not far from the Binnenalster Lake, there is a house whose neglected state stands in contrast with every other house in that part of the city and which would appear to be utterly dead were it not for the roses that still bloom in the garden even today, doing their best to overflow the railings that separate them from Vertriebstrasse, the street linking the lake and Eichendorf Square.
Any passerby chancing to pause outside the house will notice the peeling plaster of its walls, the faded paint on both front door and window frames, and recognize the air of desolation that clings to all abandoned houses, a desolation that speaks to his own heart, perhaps itself an abandoned place. But he sees no statue there, no plaque, no sign to excite his curiosity, so the passerby lingers a little longer, thinking how lovely the rose gardens must have been and then continues along the road. He reaches the shore of the lake, sits down on the jetty, and looks out at the fragile sailboats, watching them slip along, bobbing up and down each time a motorboat passes, making rings in the water; and barely has he begun his contemplation than he has forgotten all about the abandoned house he stopped to look at in Vertriebstrasse. He has thus missed the opportunity of knowing that the painter Hans Menscher lived there, and was found dead in that very garden on 27 July 1923.
Had the passerby shown more curiosity and, prompted by the need to know why the house had been abandoned, asked for more details, perhaps — as happened with me — someone would have delved into their memory to recall that July morning and then, with the expression of one trying but failing to remember something, directed him instead to the city’s central library.
“If you want to know what happened to Menscher, look in the newspapers of the time. They’re bound to have something about him.”
The passerby will then endeavor to follow his informant’s advice for, like all passersby, he too has gone out into the street in search of something to relieve the monotony of his life, without knowing quite what that something might be, and following the trail of the painter Menscher seems as good a way as any of spending the afternoon. Continuing with our hypothesis, it would not be long before the passerby was sitting down in front of one of the many newspapers that, the day after Menscher’s death, described what happened in the house on Vertriebstrasse.
Were he to choose the same newspaper I chose, the Bild Zeitung, the passerby would read: “Hans Menscher, the painter and close friend of Munch, never really fulfilled the promise of his early work. It would not, we believe, be an exaggeration to say that Menscher was lost to painting the day he went mad, rapidly becoming the laughing stock of all who observed him painting in the garden of his house.”
The first reaction of the passerby, who is now the reader, would be one of surprise. He would probably remember the names of painters whose genius verged on madness without having any ill effects on their work — quite the contrary — and he would want to know the details of the madness from which, according to the journalist, Menscher suffered; a madness that brought about not only his failure as a painter, but also made him a public laughingstock, a figure of fun.
Needless to say, there will be no shortage of such details in the article. Indeed, the passerby, who is well aware of the vileness of life but does not care to dwell too much upon it, will find himself obliged to skip most of the anecdotes that the journalist — with the malice ordinary people reserve for those different from them — poured into his work. And when, at last, the passerby comes across the concrete fact on which the idea of Menscher’s madness was based, the fact will strike him as banal, because it will turn out that Menscher’s madness consisted in a view of pictorial art that is taken absolutely for granted today: the idea of painting according to the dictates of the imagination.
“As many Hamburg citizens who walked down his street will know,” the journalist writes, “the painter seemed incapable of seeing what was right in front of his eyes. After looking hard at his rosebushes, he would take up his brush and with just a few strokes produce, for example, a Mediterranean landscape, a field of almond trees. And if he turned his gaze on Vertriebstrasse, a Greek square or some other exotic landscape would appear. But that was not the worst of it…”
Indeed, it wasn’t, the worst thing was that people — the bored citizens of Hamburg — would stand on the pavement and keep plying him with questions and the unfortunate Hans—“unfortunate” being the correct epithet for someone blind to the evil intentions of others — would reply as if “he really was, body and soul, in the midst of a Mediterranean landscape or in a Greek city, even speaking in some sort of Italian or Greek.…” The italics are, of course, the journalist’s.
That was the worst thing, the fact that Menscher slowly became what the English call a “village idiot” and because of that — again I yield the floor to the journalist—“no one considered what the consequences of that alienation from reality might be.” The consequences were his tragic death one July morning.
The Bild Zeitung journalist relates the circumstances surrounding the incident with a certain glee:
“As many of us who stopped in Vertriebstrasse had the opportunity to observe, for the whole of this past year Menscher painted only one subject. A Moorish city, always the same Moorish city… White streets, mosques, medersas, men wearing long robes, women with their faces veiled.… That was what appeared in the paintings. And along with that mania, there arose in him a rare joy, a joy many considered pathological. When questioned about it, the painter explained the reason for his state of mind as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He said that he was having a love affair with Nabilah, a woman he had met in the city of Jaddig that appeared in his paintings. For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Jaddig is a city situated on the coast of Arabia.”
I imagine Menscher speaking from behind the railings around his garden and I imagine the faces of those who listened to him. I cannot bear that image, it wounds me. On reflection, though, perhaps Menscher really was mad, because only madmen can bear the mocking smiles of the people who address them.
“It seems,” writes the journalist, and it is not hard to imagine a mocking smile on his lips too, “that the relationship between Menscher and Nabilah was a most passionate one. An old friend of the painter, whose name must remain secret, explained to me that Menscher had spoken to him of that passion in lurid and intimate detail, the kind of detail that, for obvious reasons, we cannot go into here.”
The journalist then emphasizes what he said before: “According to what his childhood friend tells me, the painter spoke of Nabilah as if he had really and truly lain with her in some lowly bed in the city of Jaddig. It is possible that Menscher died believing this to be so.… That he died or was killed, because it is still unclear as to what exactly happened.”
The journalist is, at last, back on familiar ground. He knows that readers of the article will appreciate the sincerity required in recounting such tragic events and he does his best to achieve this.
“Some months ago,” he writes, “the painter began to paint a very different image to the one described earlier. There was no longer joy in his heart. On the contrary, he seemed distressed, frightened. When anyone asked him the reason for that change, Menscher replied saying that he had seriously violated the ancient customs of Arabia, which not only forbid carnal relations before marriage but also any relationship between an Arab woman and a foreigner; he and Nabilah had been found out, and now her family was looking for him with the intention of killing him.