On a Case of Confusion

 On a Case of Confusion 

One evening, I watched a film showing Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations.  These sorts of things expose my inadequacies, particular with respect to music.  Although I listen to a lot of music, I don’t really understand it and my “monkey mind” (as the Zen Buddhists would say) often distracts me from paying the attention that these works merit and, I think, may require.  It’s important to listen in good faith I think and, perhaps, I’m not really capable of this.  As Charles Ives’ used to say, “you have to use your ears like a man” and not shirk the responsibilities that music of importance imposes on us.  

When I was in northern Germany, I took the train to Buxtehude.  I was under the impression that the town had something to do with Bach.  Later in the month, I was in Leipzig and saw Bach’s church there (I’ve visited it before) and I thought I would supplement my visit to Leipzig with a trip to Buxtehude where I expected to see some relics of Bach’s life.  Of course, I had things entirely confused.

My original plan was to visit some neolithic grave-mounds at Fischbek, an archaeological park near Harburg.  (Harburg is a suburb of Hamburg, although in the metro area’s outer ring.)  I took the S-Bahn (#21) over the Elbe bridges and, then, to the Victorian-era train-station at Harburg, a big heap of rust-colored bricks (Klinkerziegel) in the hulking neo-Gothic style favored by north German architects.  In this part of Germany, there are no stone resources that can be reliably quarried for building purposes and, so, clinker-bricks are used for all significant buildings, mighty ziggurats of them, dark-colored and made by the millions in peat-fired ovens.  The train station in Harburg stood next to a grassy mall.  It was raining hard and the quadrangle of lawns with sculptures on small, wet pedestals was soggy. I found the Archaeological Museum and thought that I would tour that place while waiting for the rain to stop.  (A vain enterprise: in Hamburg in November, it rains every day and, almost, all day long.)  The Archaeological Museum was hyper-modern with facsimiles of prehistoric stuff embedded in plexi-glass crystals or, even, underfoot, below transparent walkways (yellow bones and beakers down there) – of course, after the German manner, the exhibits were besieged by platoons of explanatory text that I scarcely understood.  The “path of discovery”, as it were wound around a dimly lit space where small figurines and tools were floating in pools of yellow light.  The trail, then, went upstairs to a cantilevered balcony where there were more bones and canoes cut from ancient logs and carefully drilled and polished amber trinkets.  A movie crew was shooting some sort of documentary for TV about the museum, a place with a distinguished history.  The camera crew approached me and asked if they could interview me for the show they were making.  I told them that I don’t speak German well enough to be a useful interviewee.  “No problem,” they said.  “We will interview you in English.”  The crew set up a camera across from me and asked some questions as to why a tourist from America would have come out to the Museum of Prehistory, fifteen miles away from the Hamburg city center.  I told the interlocutor about how wonderful the museum was, noted its unique collections and “enthralling” presentation of the artifacts and, generally, acted as if the place should be a destination for every international tourist.  I suppose I sounded a bit insincere, but the camera crew and the sound recording man seemed happy with my remarks.  

At the information kiosk, I asked a volunteer about the archaeological preserve at Fischbek.  I would have to take a local bus out into the country, three or four miles to see the mounds at that place, some dolmens, and neolithic graves, exposed as pillars of rock supporting big, flat slabs of stone, transported here by barge from somewhere far to the south.  The woman was surprised that anyone would want to see such things.  In her view, the park was chiefly valuable as a nature center, on the flyway for migratory fowl, particularly storks that spend their summers along the sea shore in Germany and, then, fly back to the northern Sahara where they live in the winter.  Apparently, some foxes roamed around the nature reserve and there were other small mammals, martens, I think, and weasels.  I asked her whether the neolithic artifacts were worth seeing.  “Oh no,” she said.  “That part of the park is being renovated.  It is not completely perfect.”  This is an odd locution.  In northern Germany if something is not “completely perfect” this means that it is derelict, ruinous, even dangerous to inspect.  It wasn’t clear to me how you renovate neolithic tombs and mounds but this is what she told me.  Of course, I was secretly pleased that I didn’t have to make my way out into the bogs and marshes (where the African storks were now mostly gone back to the Sahara) in the falling rain.  The drizzle was cold and the lawns around the museum, although green were very wet.

It was at this point, with the purpose of my trip to Harburg now thwarted, that I decided to see the traces of J. S. Bach at Buxtehude.  The S-bahn continued from the train station out into the country another ten miles or so to the small city and, so, I decided that it would be reasonable to make that excursion.  The train tracks ran straight across the open country.  At a couple of elevated sidings, the S-Bahn briefly stopped at shelters to accommodate commuters – at this time of day, the exposed stations were deserted, just a few forlorn bikes padlocked to the fence.  The land was flat, pocked with small marshes and lakes, lines of trees marking the edges of shallow, murky canals.  At Buxtehude, another station shaped like a clinker-brick barn stood alongside a metal train-shed.  The station was ten blocks from the old town where more brick buildings encircled a medieval church.  The street from the train station to the city center crossed a bridge spanning one of the little canals cut into the moor.  The canal was a narrow box of dark, peat-colored water lined by rowboats and small colorfully painted skiffs.  Next to the dour church, a narrow building with a glass facade, a modern edifice, held the city’s Rathaus and museum.  An old man greeted me at the door and seemed very happy to have a visitor.  He began to explain the lay-out of the exhibition in German but, observing my perplexity, switched effortlessly into English.  The museum displayed a good collection of prehistoric artifacts, mostly stone tools, some celts, and small pieces of carved bone.  There were grave goods from pre-Christian burials, mostly necklaces and small circular bosses of the sort that are ubiquitous in northern Europe, knob-shaped adornments of chased metal, either tin or brass that people apparently wore for adornment.  In one case displaying some baroque surgical tools, there was a flea-catcher – apparently, the curious funnel-shaped device was used to pluck and confine fleas crawling in the wigs of 17th century gentlemen.   In a side-room, there were some big black and white photographs showing the destruction of the city in World War Two.  Apparently, the town had been destroyed before, in fact, several times, burnt to the ground, first in the 30 Years War and, then, burnt again in the early part of the 19th century.  One small room contained pastels and water-colors showing Buxtehude as it looked around the middle of the 19th century.  Many of the pictures featured a romantic-looking castle that seemed to have fallen down and not been rebuilt.  I found no reference to J. S. Bach.  I vaguely recalled that he had been in this place, perhaps, even composed music in Buxtehude.  But there was nothing on that subject.  This venture had also been a failure, although the museum was interesting in its own right.

Later, I discovered that Johann Bach had, in fact, walked to Buxtehude.  But the Buxtehude that he visited wasn’t this town, but, rather, a Danish composer named Dietrich Buxtehude (1637 - 1707).  I had taken the word “Buxtehude” to refer to a place, but, in fact, it was a man’s name.  In 1705, J. S. Bach hiked 250 kilometers north from Erfurt to visit Dietrich Buxtehude, then, regarded as the leading composer and organist of the day.  In fact, Buxtehude was serving as music director at the famous Marienkirche in Luebeck, the harbor town on the Baltic Sea.  (Thomas Mann was born in this old Hanseatic city).  Bach’s pilgrimage was to pay homage to Buxtehude and hear him play the organ at the evening concerts (Abendmusik) that the music director presented once a week.  Buxtehude replaced the previous music director, Franz Tunder, who had died unexpectedly.  According to custom, the new music director was required to marry the deceased director’s wife.  First, Handel was offered the position.  Luebeck was a prosperous town and the job paid well and the church could afford first-rate talent.  But Tunder’s widow was not to Handel’s liking and he turned down the job offer.  Buxtehude was more accommodating and agreed to marry the widow. 

Bach stayed at Luebeck for three months, studying with Buxtehude.  In the nave, there was once a frieze of lifesize figures – priest, a city official, a merchant and a beautiful young woman – each of them accosted by Death, a scrawny figure wearing a decaying loin cloth and a flat hat over his mummified face.  This was the so-called Luebeck Todtentanz.  Near the startling mural (painted around 1425), there was a majestic organ, called the Todtentanzorgel (The danse macabre organ).  This organ with the frieze was bombed into ashes and a tangle of melted bronze in 1942 by the RAF.  Bach supposedly had played on the Todtentanzorgel under Buxtehude’s direction.  But this was in another town on the opposite side of Hamburg, forty miles from the big city, where the Elbe flows into the Baltic Sea.  

This was my misadventure with Bach and Buxtehude.   

On a Mission to Dubuque

 On a Mission to Dubuque

1.

My mother is 88.  At that age, one of her problems is stuff.  Like most people who have lived a long time, she is drowning in stuff: books, old snapshots, souvenirs of various adventures and journeys, sentimental gifts and knickknacks.  Her cupboards are full of pens, flashlight batteries, old check registers, paperclips and rubber bands and calendar books, some of them decades old. Whatever value or meaning these things once possessed, it has leached out of them.  Stuff is inert and has lost its energy; these sorts of things never had much intrinsic value but, now, it is all just junk.

You spend most of your life accumulating things.  But, in the end, it has to be given away or taken to the landfill.

Every time, I stopped in Eden Prairie, a west suburb of Minneapolis, to see my mother, she pressed upon me bags of old photographs, legal documents, jocular mementos of ancient political hatreds.  Of course, I didn’t have any space for these things myself, although I sorted through them, organized the fading, murky photographs, and stashed some of the stuff in corners of my house, next to cardboard boxes full of gift foods (exotic mustards and oils and vinegars), piles of clothing, and towering stacks of books.  What else could I do?

Then, my mother told me that she wanted to dispose of the German books, a collection of about 20 antique volumes.  This posed a problem.  The valuable stuff, like the useless detritus, is not challenging – you keep the things with value and, even, protect them and the garbage gets sent to the landfill.  Clutter, however, consists of things that are midway between valuable and worthless – what do you do with impressive stuff that might have some value or meaning to somebody?

2.

All my life, we referred to the crates containing the old volumes as the “German books.”  They were a relic of an ancestor who had been a preacher and learned man, a collection of treatises all written in German and published between 1650 and 1786.  Because the books were about the Bible and religion, of course, no one had touched them for hundreds of years.  Used bookstore owners will tell you that theology books survive for hundreds of years for several reasons – first, the books have an aura of the sacred about them that makes people think twice before destroying them, and, second, no one can summon the energy and fortitude to read them – undoubtedly, they are unbearably tedious and obscure and, therefore, not likely to be marred by oily and injurious human hands.  

The “German books” as we called them embodied a rebarbative, fierce inviolability.  They were heavy, bricks of print, lettered in the old Gothic style used in German publishing.  The covers of these volumes were worn and expressed an aspect of geological time – the bindings were rent, blemished, splotched, as if with lichen, more boulders than books.  All of the books were the color of some sort of organic secretion – turd-colored in other words or a yellow vellum like urine, or slippery leather (said to be unborn calf-skin) that was the texture and tint of an Egyptian mummy or a body fished out of the dark tarn of a bog.  The books looked vaguely humid, decomposed, and smelled of death or, at least, moldering fabric.  Some of them were sealed with latches, or equipped with brackets to which chains could be attached.  Each of the books began with an elaborate frontispiece, a woodcut block-print or, perhaps, a copper-plate engraving, depicting allegorical scenes, tabernacles in a stylized desert, the instruments of the passion, or baroque worthies with pointed Taliban-style beards wearing frilled collars and clutching quills and small devotional books.  Heavy marbled front- and end-papers decorated the volumes.  The books were heavy, things of darkness – it was as if they had absorbed the residue of the centuries, seized time itself and locked it into their densely printed pages.  The volumes bore names like Herzens-Postille (“The Homily of the Heart”), Zullichau, 1742, Seelen-Schatz (“The Souls’ Treasure”), Leipzig 1682, Israels Trost und Freud (auserlesen Psalmen) (“Israel’s Joy and Consolation – selected Psalms”), Nuremberg 1660 – there was a three-volume dictionary of place names and Biblical terms (Chemnitz 1721 to 1722), a small catechism with sermons explicating the creed (Frankfurt-am-Main 1711), and a travel itinerary describing places in the Holy Land (Erfurt 1754).  The grandfather of these volumes was a mighty Luther Bible (Luneberg 1711), with both of its heavy board covers, exquisitely marbled, detached from the yard-tall, 18 inch thick block of print.  This monstrous thing was equipped with triple columns of annotations and a giant frontispiece showing the entirety of scripture, synoptically displayed in schematic vignettes arrayed around a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, an exotic-looking plant, more serpentine than the rather companionable, puppy-like viper coiled around its scaly trunk.  This huge volume was the commander-in-chief, the general among the smaller books – the thing made you dizzy just looking at it.

All my life, I was aware of these books and, on infrequent occasions, looked at them, never for more than a few minutes at a time, The books defeated your attention.  They were too strange and alien, dense impenetrable masses of letters barbed like hooks.  

I read German and, for that reason, I suppose, I was charged by my mother to get rid of these volumes.  

3.

The books were acquired, on the evidence of marks in some of them, from an Antiquariat (that is, “Antiquarian bookseller”) in either Cleveland or Cincinnati.  Their owner, the formidable George J. Zeilinger, wrote his name on the front-papers of some of the volumes.  

George Zeilinger was my grandmother Helen Beckmann’s father.  He was born a little after the Civil War and lived until 1934.  For more than 20 years, he taught English (I think) at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.  (This part of central east Iowa, bordered by the Mississippi River was the place from which my people on my father’s side came.).  George Zeilinger was a dapper man who wore his clerical garments like a costume, as if he were playing the part of an ecclesiastic in a stage play.  He had a pointed beard and was near-sighted.  He wore glasses and, in some pictures, seems to be slightly cross-eyed – strabismus, it seems.  He was vain and appears in hundreds of photographs, sometimes clutching a Bible to his breast. No photographer ever caught him in a smile.  English, the subject that he taught at the seminary, was not in those days a trivial curriculum.  George Zeilinger spoke German in the home, preached entirely in German until World War One, and his children, of course, were fluent, native-speakers of the sort of Deutsch used in Iowa small towns and farming communities 125 years ago.  After retiring from the seminary on the bluffs above Dubuque, Pastor Zeilinger was called to a parish in Oelwein, Iowa where he served until a few years before his death.  I have photographs of him in the pulpit, his pointed face and pointed beard, aimed like a lance toward heaven, one arm outstretched to receive the afflatus of the Holy Spirt, a white chapel and altar behind him that looks ornate and formal, a bit like an old-fashioned wedding cake.  Helen Zeilinger, his daughter, married one of her father’s students John Herman Beckmann, my paternal grandfather.

I thought that, perhaps, I should return the books to Dubuque and Wartburg Seminary.  So I sent several emails to the librarian and archivist at the seminary, Sue D—.  She expressed some mild, polite interest in the books and asked me to compile an inventory of them.  Our email exchanges began in late Summer 2024 and continued intermittently for several months.  Around Thanksgiving, we agreed that I would retrieve the books from my mother’s house in Eden Prairie and drive them down to Dubuque where the seminary agreed to accept them as a donation.  There were 20 books, including one 1902 volume about the history of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, copiously illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings and engravings.  (This volume, printed in Dresden, was apparently a book presented to pastors when they were ordained at the seminary.)  I told my son, Jack, that I would retain one of these volumes for him.  Accordingly, there were nineteen books that I proposed to donate (on my mother Geraldine Beckmann’s behalf) to the library at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque.  Sue D–, the librarian and archivist, sent me a printed form for my mother to sign, confirming that she had donated the books free and clear to the seminary with no strings attached – the seminary could do what it wished with the volumes once it had them in its possession.  

4.

The German books traveled wherever my parents lived – they went from Ames, Iowa to New Jersey to New Brighton, a suburb of St. Paul to Richardson, Texas (north of Dallas) and, then, at last, to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, their location when I negotiated the donation with Wartburg.  There were other artifacts more appealing to me as a boy then these musty old books.  Several of my Lutheran forbears had been missionaries to Africa, serving in what is now called Tanzania.  We had pictures of pale men and women in long black garments, dark from ankle to buttoned collar, standing among half-naked tribesmen on an arid plain under the white dome of Mount Kilimanjaro.  In some photographs, bare-breasted girls posed in grass skirts in front of small stucco-walled chapels also adorned with grass-thatched roofs.  There was a book about a leper hospital in Tanganyika as it was earlier called (before World War One, the land was German East Africa) – that book exercised a sinister fascination, disfigured patients standing among gardens or against white-washed plaster walls.  In the European branch of the family, some cousins and uncles were missionaries to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, also German colonies before the Great War.  We had several masks retrieved as artifacts from the islanders, dark and grotesque objects that my parents (they were very young at the time) displayed on the walls of their little house in Asbury Park (actually Wanamingo), New Jersey.  I recall creeping by those glowering masks, keeping as close to the wall opposite them as possible and averting my eyes when I came from my bedroom to go to the toilet.  The masks were cruel and malign and they haunted my dreams.  Later, I discovered that we also had a lance made from iron-like wood and several bull-roarers. When you whirled those things on a string over your head, they cut through the air and shaped it into a sort of pulsing howl.  I don’t know what happened to those things.  

5. 

Seven degrees below zero when I take the dog out for her walk.  The streets are dark at six in the morning.  In the distance, an array of brightly colored Christmas decorations are bunched together in someone’s front yard.  It’s as if the festive season is all concentrated on one lawn.  Inflatable plastic snowmen guard a fence-line, hissing a little with the air blown into them.

The roads are dry and the traffic to Minneapolis surges northward across the empty, brown farmland. The marshes along the freeway are frozen into an elegant calligraphy of reeds trapped in grey-green ice.

My sister’s husband is hospitalized with COVID.  My sister is sick as well.  My mother reports by telephone that she is feeling ill also.  She tells me that she has tested negative for COVID but that she will stay in the other room when I come to her house to pick up the German books.

The drive is uneventful.  The traffic, all moving eight to ten miles faster than the posted speed-limit, is efficient and mannerly.  I’m at my mother’s house about when I expect to be.  

The books are located on a bench near the kitchen table, three stout boxes or totes full of the old volumes.  The Luther Bible, an obstacle and stumbling block in its own right, sits apart from the heavy boxes.  My mother directs me from the dining room, leaning on her walker.  She wants me to come into the house and inspect some construction work that is underway on the lower level of the house.  I can hear a power tool abrading a wall somewhere below.  (My sister, Melissa, has agreed to move with her husband from Reding, California to the family home in Eden Prairie so that she can care for my mother.  Of course, my mother doesn’t want to move into Assisted Living or some other kind of care facilty and, so, housing my sister and her husband in my mother’s home will allow her to stay there until the end.  At present, my mother is alert and fairly vigorous – she walks daily and spends several hours on Bible study – but, sooner or later, she will be too frail to care for herself.  For this reason, the “basement,” as we called it, of the split-level is being remodeled into an apartment with its own kitchen and bathroom.)

My mother can no longer safely navigate the stairs leading to the lower level of her home and, so, she dispatches me downstairs to assess the progress of the project.  It is December 12 and the job was estimated to be complete on the 13th, but it’s obvious that this schedule isn’t even remotely plausible.  A handsome young man who appears to be of Somali background is painting the ceiling in the basement.  There are buckets of white paint on a saw-horse table.  In the old utility room, some dry-wall partitions have been raised and an iceberg of cabinets covered in a white tarp sit in the middle of the room.  I ask the young man when the job will be complete and he tells me in two or three days. 

“So almost on schedule?”  I ask.

“Well, that’s just my part, painting the ceilings and drywall. The cabinets still have to be installed and the electrical completed and the plumbing also,” he says, adding: “It’s, at least, three weeks.”

I go upstairs and tell my mother that the job will not be finished until the end of January.  She isn’t much concerned.  Melissa and her husband, Steve, haven’t even put their home in Reding up for sale yet.  

The books are heavy but not backbreaking.  I carry the totes to my car, set them in the back, and, then, bring the Luther Bible, with both of its endboards separated from the slab of printed pages, to my vehicle.  Everything fits snugly in the rear of the SUV.  The Bible and the other books sit crouched in the vehicle, vaguely sentient, like dogs or rabbits about to be transported cross-country.  When these books were printed, of course, no one had any idea about motorized vehicles and interstate highways.  I suppose it will be a new experience for the old volumes.  

The sun is shining brightly over the suburbs.  Where cars are lined up at traffic lights, little puffs of white exhaust billow skyward.  It’s about zero degrees now.  My SUV slips into the groove in the highways and is borne south.  After about thirty miles on the interstate, I can see a vast cloud looming over the south, a huge tilted awning of rumpled grey.  It’s only two p.m. but already the winter afternoon is preparing for night, dimming with the sun no longer casting shadows at all, in fact, no light coming from the sky or the earth and grey covering the frozen landscape.

6.

I leave for Dubuque at eight in the morning on Friday the 13th of December.  An ice-storm is predicted for evening all across central Iowa and the overpasses flash warnings, digital displays on overhanging signs.  But, for the time being, the morning is well-lit and cold, the skies blue and featureless.  Grain elevators are drying corn and beans and puffy clouds of steam rise above the edges of the small towns scattered across the prairie.  

Someone told me that you can buy wonderful caramel rolls in Osage, Iowa, about 45 minutes from Austin.  In fact, I’ve got directions to the bakery.  But the place isn’t where I expect it to be, and, after driving up and down the deserted main street in the small town, I give up the search and continue southward.  The old seminary building, the school attended by Hamlin Garland, the novelist, stands at the edge of the red brick downtown in Osage.  The Italianate eaves of the white brick building are garnished with Christmas lights – the place is large and looks like an austere villa by Palladio. 

Beyond Osage, the highway – the so-called Avenue of the Saints (St. Paul to St. Louis) – skirts the little towns, bypassing them on the way to Waterloo. The route leads through Waterloo, pausing at several stoplights and, then, on the outskirts merging with a four-lane highway (20) aimed straight east across the flat terrain toward Dubuque.  This last leg of the trip is 80 miles.  All told, it takes three-and-a-half hours to travel from Austin to the heights overlooking Dubuque where Wartburg Seminary stands.   

7.

A few miles to the west of Dubuque, broad valleys open downward to watersheds draining to the Mississippi.  The plain is dissected by creeks and rivers tributary to the Father of Waters and the highway rides up and down on great waves of parallel ridges.  From the crests, you can see for miles, an intricate landscape of criss-crossing ravines and deeply incised river bottoms where pale hillside suburbs are flanked by old forests growing on the steep slopes.  

Tucked into an alcove cut into the hillside, I see an Olive Garden restaurant with an apron of parking lot on its tight level shelf of property.  I recall that I ate in that restaurant twenty years ago, the last time I visited Dubuque with my kids on a long weekend in the Summer.  It was hot, then, and humid and the deep, green valleys were steamy.  Some confusion ensued, I recall, driving to Dubuque where we intended to stay for the night.  I took the divided highway with the utmost confidence and landed, at last, on the river-front in Davenport, Iowa; among the casino riverboats and grassy levees, I realized that I had taken the wrong exit in Waterloo and traveled to the wrong city.  It was seventy miles back to the north, through Maquoetka, to reach Dubuque, an older, more genteel city on the Mississippi beneath sheer bluffs climbed by narrow residential lanes, old mansions like mountain goats perched on the heights.  We rode a funicular from the brick downtown to the hilltop where there were a couple of old restaurants, some street vendors at a little overlook, and more ornate Victorian homes crowning the hilltop.  Somewhere on those heights, we stopped to admire the statue of Martin Luther at the seminary that my great-grandfather and grandfather had attended.  I recalled the place as high, open to the blazing sun, and hot.  Later, we checked into a motel and the kids splashed around in the swimming pool and, then, we ate at the Olive Garden restaurant, the place I now was passing on this cold mid-day, starting and stopping in the hilltop traffic at the traffic lights on the broad boulevard.

I found the seminary, exiting from the four-lane thoroughfare on a residential street lined with big old houses, much of hilltop bare because of diseases that had slaughtered the old trees here. The place stood at the high-point on a narrow ridge between two great valleys, a pile of limestone blocks with turrets suggestive of a castle on the Rhine River.  But, at first, I didn’t stop but reversed my course and drove back to the highway four or five blocks away.

Freeways in Iowa, for the most part, aren’t interstates, nor are they even limited access roads.  (For most of their lengths, there’s nothing requiring access, just farmland with tiny villages far off on the horizon.)  These roads don’t have rest stops and they generally pass two to three miles from the towns on the old two-lane highways.  As a result, there’s a dearth of toilets roadside and, needless to say, after hours in the car, there was some urgency about seeking a restroom. (I didn’t want to use the toilet at the seminary since my business in that place was complicated and vaguely sanctified.)  In Iowa, Kwiktrips are called “Kwikstars” and I had passed one near the Olive Garden on the way into town.  Retracing my route, I pulled into this Kwikstar, also occupying a small terrace chopped into the hillside.  The place was circumscribed by steep slopes and fantastically busy: all the pumps were occupied and big trucks were blocking lanes near the convenience store and cars were coming and going with the peculiar heedlessness that characterizes these sorts of places, everyone hurrying to and fro, tradesmen coming into the store to buy their lunches, old people in walkers or leaning on canes on the sidewalk, people backing without looking to their rear and semi-trucks bullying their way through the small parking lot toward the white pavilion of the building.  I had to park along a curb on the lane near the gas station.  The store was crowded, but transactions were efficient – people are familiar with these places, know their layout, and enter with a precise plan as to what they intend to purchase.  You don’t browse in a place of this sort.  I found the toilet and, fortunately, a stall was unoccupied.  With a full tank of gas, I departed, driving back onto the congested boulevard to the seminary exit.  

8. 

My instructions were to park on the street a little beyond the area reserved for the handicapped.  An icy wind was blowing over the hilltop and I could see down into the both deep hollows, to the front and back of the seminary grounds, steep slopes lined with what seemed to be orchards or vineyards and, far below, residential streets.  The influence of the Mississippi is evident – the river exerts a hydraulic pull that cuts up the landscape, but the main bore of the Mississippi is not visible from this place, indeed, as I recalled, invisible until you reach the bottom of the valley occupied by the old brick buildings of Dubuque.  (There’s a riverside park on a hogback marked with some Indian mounds and some squat observation towers and, across the iron bridge, pits and ravine, remnants of  an old lead mine with a shot-tower atop a stony height.)  I had a phone number written on a 3 x 5 card and I called the seminary.  A woman answered, a bit brusquely, but said that she knew who I was and why I had come.  My contact, Sue D– , had the day off.  In fact, the Seminary was between the Fall and Winter seminars, on break for the Christmas Holiday.

I was told it would take a few minutes for someone to come to my car with a cart to move the books into the buildings.  I paced up and down the sidewalk, walking into the small quadrangle between the seminary’s administrative offices and chapel and the limestone-block wings extending out from core of the building.  Luther stood on his plinth, larger than life, a blunt bronze instrument like a wedge for splitting wood or a sledge-hammer.  The Reformer looked truculent and indignant, his metal jaw clamped shut like a vice, and one of his feet was stepping forward, as it to take the plunge from the rough-hewn block on which he was displayed.  On a nearby wall, a concrete plaque inset in masonry displayed these words: Gottes Wort und Luthers Lehr / Vergehet nun und nimmermehr – a vaguely defensive slogan that means “God’s Word and Luther’s teachings do not fade away now or ever.”  Over the chapel, a square, castellated tower rises surmounted by a lethal-looking spike of steeple.  The grounds were empty and the windows in the building dark despite the bright Winter sunlight.

A door opened and I heard a metal trolley clattering a little as it was pushed over the sidewalk.

9.

The woman pushing the cart was heavily bundled.  Her face was robust and square and she spoke with an accent.  On a windy hilltop in Iowa in December, you tend to interpret foreign accents as Slavic, Finnish, Estonian or Latvian.  But, for all I know, perhaps, the young woman was from sunny Italy or Spain.  She was a formless shadow with round glasses, wearing gloves like oven mitts on her hands.   

A minute later, another woman appeared, ambling down the sidewalk, also in a heavy coat with a scarf tucked under her chin.  She was smaller than the girl with the metal cart and had a band-aid covering the tip of her pointed nose.  Her glasses were also round, imparting a bit of breadth to her otherwise narrow and vulpine features.

I picked out a couple books from my cardboard boxes and opened them to show the women my treasures.  On the yellow page, naked allegorical figures representing Truth and Revelation shivered a little in the breeze breathing up from the hollows encircling the seminary on its height above the valleys. The girl with the accent showed some interest in the Baroque engravings.  The other woman, clearly her boss, was noncommittal, emitting a sound midway between a sigh and groan.  The cold upset her and she wanted to go inside.  Certainly, this street in front of the seminary was no place to inspect these books.

I followed the two women as they pushed and tugged the cart bearing the three boxes of books and the Luther Bible to the door at the center of the quadrangle.  Luther’s shadow cast as if by a gnomon, extended across the winter-burnt grass.  Inside the building, the cart’s wheels rattled over the tiles that seemed vaguely Spanish.  Down a hallway, some stained glass flared like a small bonfire in a window.  The place was orderly, silent, very clean and uncluttered – in this lobby, the moldering books with their shaggy pages seemed an embarrassment.  

We took an elevator down to a subterranean hallway, brightly lit by florescent fixtures embedded in the ceiling.  One room was marked “Archives” with a brass or tin plate on the door showing the name of Sue D–, the woman with whom I had negotiated the donation.  The door opening into the suite of rooms comprising the archive was heavy, a massive metal slab like the door to a bank vault.  Some metal utility shelves were burdened with boxes and stacks of paper; a metal desk stood between filing cabinets.  On a stark metal desk like an antiseptic dissecting table, several empty cardboard boxes were stacked-up, labeled “ZEILINGER” with a post-it sticker.  We lifted my boxes of books from the cart and set them on the floor.  The girl with the accent, still encased in her coat, raised the Luther Bible and its detached endboards and put it on the desk top next to the empty boxes.  She passed through the heavy vault door and vanished.  

The lady with the band-aid on her nose led me into an adjacent room.  More metal shelves were lined with cardboard boxes stuffed with papers.  The woman told me that when a parish is dissolved or a church congregation becomes extinct, baptism, wedding, and funeral records have to be preserved.  These nondescript boxes, each named and numbered, represented churches that had vanished and their official documents, retained in perpetuity in this large, silent room.  These records were preserved in this underground room with concrete floors and walls, a vault sealed against fire by the heavy metal door opening into the basement hallway.  

We passed through that door and across the hall to another vault, also sealed by a fire-door.  “This is our rare books collection,” the woman told me.

More bland, grey metal shelves stood in rows in another chamber with poured concrete floors and an infrastructure of fire-sprinklers among the overhead lights.  Packed onto the shelves were several thousand books, more or less identical to the volumes that I had transported from Eden Prairie to the seminary.  The books were dark, pressed together, and emitting, it seemed, a kind of muddy gloom.  On their spines, most of the books were ribbed like human bodies, but eyeless and larval-colored, like grubs unearthed from the black topsoil in Spring.  The profusion of these volumes explained the relative unenthusiasm with which Wartburg had accepted my family’s donation of the old books.  The place already had these sorts of things in abundance.  There were too many books for me to examine them and volumes of this age are blind – they don’t bear any writing on their withered, leathery skins.  But I saw several enormous Bibles similar to the big ornate book that I had brought to Wartburg.  No doubt there were duplicates in this collection of the books that my mother had donated.  On the floor, I saw several boxes of books, stacks of old volumes, presumably, awaiting cataloguing and placement on the shelves.  But the shelves seemed to be full, all spaces occupied by the antique books.  To put something on those shelves would require that some other volume be discarded or moved into another collection. The press of the books and their profusion was like a natural phenomenon, an ecology of some sort and I felt vaguely reassured that the books now resting in the archives across the hall would soon be among their own kind; they were with others of their obdurate and eternal species, whispering in German and subsisting on dusty air under the colorless, abstract light cast from above.

I felt like I should apologize for burdening the collection with more books.  But I said nothing.

10.

The woman with the band-aid on the tip of her nose led me on tour of seminary.  We went into the modern library, two floors of books arranged on efficient-looking metal shelving similar to the stacks in the rare book vault below.  A fat girl sat behind the circulation desk.  My guide showed me two or three books about law and religion – the volumes were weirdly exotic, strange: something about Congo tribal law and procedure in light of local religious practices.  The place was bright and airy and the girl at the circulation desk had a jar of red and white striped candy-canes next to her computer monitor.  The lady with the band-aid told me that she wanted to introduce me to the donations and resources development director.  She vanished for a few moments while I lingered in the library.  I asked the girl at the desk if I could take a couple of her candy-canes.  She nodded yes and seemed amused at the thought.

When, the woman returned, she apologized for not being able to find the person that she was seeking.  She took me into the chapel where I admired a big, burnished pipe organ and some bright stained glass windows.  The doors to the chapel were decorated by bas relief bronze figures under a runic inscription: “Whatever you do to the least of them, you do to me.” The angular letters were hard to read against the heavy dark metal patina on the arched door.  Figures imitating German expressionist woodcuts or sculptures were providing succor to one another – clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting those in prison.  I mentioned to my guide that the bas relief panels on the door seem to be derived from Ernst Barlach’s art.  

“Oh, no,” the woman said, “it was done by a local artist.”

It would be too difficult for me to explain the notion of influence and imitation and, of course, I regretted the showy allusion.  Barlach means a lot to me.  I visited the elegant Barlach museum in a Hamburg suburb and one of his massive monumental sculptures stands next to the entrance to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a huge winged angel, aerodynamically conceived like a rocket ship, bearing a lance and perched on a massive shaggy lion.  I’ve known and admired this huge bronze figure since I was a small child – the 1928 sculpture, cast for the Lutheran church at Kiel, is called “Fighter of the Spirit”.  The angel’s furry plinth, the fierce, predatory lion (looking a bit like the she-wolf who reared Romulus and Remus) is supposed to represent the forces of materialism over which the armed and winged figure rears up into the sky like a praying mantis.  These are things that I know, but, I suppose, the reference was opaque to my tour guide and, so, rather than deepen the confusion I decided to keep my mouth shut.

In a small alcove, there’s a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Some religious art from around the world is framed in the hallways that form the outer perimeter to the chapel.  Between the paintings, there are photographs of each year’s graduating class.  In the pictures taken before 1920, Dr. George Zeilinger with his spade-shaped goatee and vaguely crossed eyes under his pince nez sits next to his colleague, the formidable Dr. Reu. I search for my grandfather’s picture among the graduating class photographs but without success.  I’ve taken up too much time here and the road back to Austin is long and cold and so, I suppose, it’s time to leave.

Wartburg Seminary ordained 12 to 15 pastors annually until the late forties when class size increased.  Graduating classes today are about 45; and almost all of the students are women.  (Until the era of Vietnam War, Wartburg’s students were entirely male.)  The development director is standing in the refectory.  The place smells of a buffet lunch but no food is visible.  The director is young with a Beatles’ haircut.  I suppose he thinks that I am positioned to make an financial donation to the seminary.  He tells me that students pay $30,000 per year for tuition.  After a short conversation, he withdraws into his office behind the refectory.  

I thank my tour-guide, shake her hand, and go outside into the bright shadowless winter afternoon to begin my trip back to Austin.   

11.

Truck traffic is moving with a certain palpable urgency.  The ice storm is approaching although, for the time being, the skies are cold and clear.  Dyersville is about 25 miles from the seminary in Dubuque, a straight shot on State Highway 20.  I’m hungry and I take the exit for fuel and food.  A Quizno’s sub-sandwich place is near the 20 overpass and, so, I pull into that place.  Dyersville is famous for a baseball diamond in a cornfield east of town – this was where the Kevin Costner movie The Field of Dreams was shot.  A lot of local people, cops and realtors and farmers with community theater experience got their International Movie Data Base (IMDB) credits as extras in that film.  (The Arts Administrator in Austin appears in the background in some shots in the film and, in fact, assisted the production by casting his Dubuque friends and neighbors in the picture – he earned a credit both as an actor and assisting casting director for the film.)  Dyersville also boasts a so-called “Minor Basilica”, the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, one of the few churches of this status in the United States outside of a major urban area.  From the exit by Quiznos, I can look across the flat expanse of houses and commercial buildings to the twin spires of the basilica, inconspicuous against the vast empty sky and the featureless, flat horizon . 

Twenty years ago, there was a Quiznos place in Austin, a storefront in a mall that was always perpetually failing.  The restaurant didn’t survive, presumably due to its location.  In a small town, people are spoiled.  If you have to drive three blocks out of your way for food or services, you will regard this as an inconvenience and not patronize those businesses.  I recall that the subs at that restaurant were good, but more expensive than the sandwiches at Subway.  The Quiznos in Dyersville is convenient to the highway, next to a pet hospital and boarding place, and across from a medical clinic and, so, it seems prosperous.  I order a sandwich called “the Ultimate Italian” and eat it while driving.  Perhaps, I am very hungry or, maybe, the sandwich is particularly well-crafted, on slightly toasted and chewy bread, but the sub seems fabulous to me.  The sandwich justifies the drive, justifies the ways of God to man, justifies life itself.  Ahead of me, the sun is sinking from its meager height in the sky, the winter solstice approaching in this season of cold and dark – although it’s still light and bright with visibility measured in miles, the darkness is advancing, and the shadows are stretching away from their sources as black meridians inscribed on the plain.  I reach Waterloo in the odor of sanctity, that is, the smell of fresh-chopped onions and vinegar that suffuses the warm cockpit of my car.  

In Waterloo, there are a half-dozen cross-roads running over the four-lane thoroughfare and each of the overpasses is displaying a warning storm advisory.  It still seems improbable that an ice-storm is imminent – the sky remains vacant, washed over with a pale blue tint like glaze on fine china.

I’m talking to my mother on my cell-phone, reporting on the mission, at the place where the freeway between Waterloo and Cedar Rapids divides, several lanes suspended on round concrete stilts exiting north and south.  I end up on the wrong exit flung off the freeway in a direction that will take me not to, but away, from home.  It’s distraction that has caused me to err.  Finding my way back to the route, I drive north by northwest and the road gradually becomes more familiar to me as I approach the border with Minnesota.  The sun is low now and its heat and light have drained away into the grey and brown earth.  At the border-line, a huge corn-fuel (ethanol) plant shows a constellation of lights under an immense baldacchino of steam scaling the heavens. 

The sun has set and its dark when I reach home. 

12.

The book that I retained for my son, Jack, is small, a modestly sized volume that fits snugly into your hands.  The title of the book is Ein und Funffzig Geistliche Andachten oder Heilige Betrachtungen Zur Ubung wahrer Gottseeligkeit that is Fifty-one Spiritual Reflections or Sacred Meditations for the Exercise of True Holiness.  The book was written by Johann Gerhard with a preface by L. Joachim Fellers, the librarian of the University of Leipzig.  Johann Gerhard is identified as a Doctor of Holy Scripture and P.P. (Pastoral Professor) at Jena.  The publisher of the book is said to be Johann Christoph Mieten in Leipzig and Dresden.  Beneath a stylized cherub shown as a child’s face borne up on a scroll of wings, eagle feathers it seems, the book is dated Im Jahr 1692 (“the year 1692").

On the frontispiece, an oval cartouche depicts Gerhard, a middle-aged man wearing an elaborate white ruff under his bearded chin.  The author holds a Bible against his belly.  His chest and forearms are covered with a robe that seems to be made of fur.  A ring around the portrait is engraved with a Latinized version of the man’s name and more abbreviations signifying his rank as a doctor of theology and pastoral professor. Vegetal scrolls flourish around the edges of the portrait in its oval compartment.  Baroque loops and ribbons of scroll wrap around two smaller vignettes in the upper corners of the engraved frontispiece.  In the left vignette, an emblem shows a wayfarer walking away from a round globe on which a map and a small square hut with a single window are printed.  The wayfarer carries a sort of cane over his shoulder.  The band around this emblem reads spes et for / tuna valeta.  These words are a translation of a phrase in a Greek epigram into Latin: “I have reached the port; hope and fortune farewell; you have made sport enough of me, make sport of others now.”  The emblem in the right upper corner above Gerhard’s portrait depicts a cross against which someone has leaned a ladder, a skull and crossbones sits at the base of the cross.  Above the instrument of execution, a small hand seems to extend from a cloud holding a crown.  The emblem is labeled In hoc Signo – that is, Constantine’s motto “Under this sign (I have triumphed)”.   Two vignettes under the author’s portrait show a flower irradiated by smiling sun and a flaming heart afloat on a troubled sea.  These images illustrate verses from the Canticle, that is, The Song of Songs in the Bible.  8:7 is the verse associated with the flaming heart floating on the turbulent sea: “Unleash God’s Word! Many waters can not quench love! Rivers can’t sweep it away!”  Some Latin words to this effect surround the emblem.  The friendly sun casting its beams on the flower refers to Canticle 10 although mislabeled 7:  “I to my beloved and his turning is toward me” – the flower, apparently, is imagined as turning to the rays of sunshine beaming down upon it.  

Johann Gerhard was a Lutheran theologian who lived between 1582 and 1637.  He wrote many books translated into a number of languages and was reputed to be the greatest Protestant scholar of his generation.  As far as I can determine his 51 Spiritual Reflections are composed in verse.  The diction is ardent and the meditations read like love poetry. The volume is posthumous.  Gerhard had been dead for 55 years when the publisher printed this book.  His fame outlived him and he is not wholly forgotten even today – Gerhard has a brief Wikipedia entry on the Internet.  Spes et fortuna valeta...   

13.

Although it was bitterly cold on December 13, 2024, the weather warmed enough by midnight for sleet to fall all across the State of Iowa – that is, from the river to the river (defined as the Mississippi to the Missouri).  It was the end of Autumn and the ground was brown and frozen and the trees were bare, a stubble of trunks and branches embedded in decaying leaf-litter.  Green spots of torch-shaped arbor vitae marked country cemeteries, little encampments of the dead scattered across the land.  The steeples of churches standing along two-lane highways pricked the sky at the horizon.  The congregations of those churches were perishing and, soon enough, I supposed their registries of baptisms and weddings and funerals would be locked away at the seminary behind the kind of fire-door that protects currency in banks.  

The season was ending and winter, astronomically defined, was a little more than a week away.  The transfer of the books marked the end of something.  For a hundred years, the Beckmann family had harbored those old volumes, a symbol, I suppose, of certain pretensions toward theology, the divine, and writing.  But those day have ended.  The secret cache of meaning is now dispersed and the emblems are set aside.  Soon enough, it will be a new year.

On literature in extremis -- the case of Hans Henny Jahn

 1.

A voice tells Matthieu to go forth and explore the dark city.  “I am leaving you now,” the voice says.  Matthieu looks to his right and left and sees nothing but a desolate prospect of an empty street, lights at intervals vanishing in the distance, streetcar rails – both directions are identical, like mirrors lined-up to reflect one another.  Matthieu walks along the street unable to recall exactly why he is alone, wandering in this strange place.  When he tries to imagine people warm in their homes along the roadway, his thoughts keep foundering on obscure voids in his memory – his thinking goes awry, also drenched in the pervasive darkness.  He knows that he is 23 years old, but nothing more.

A dark figure accosts him and hands him a business card, guiding him to a place where a street lamp casts a ray on the writing: Elvira entertains in a cozy salon.  Sandwiches, wine, Cute breasts.  Singular transformations.  One-time support payment: 50 francs.  No one will regret helping Elvira out.  

Of course, Matthieu can’t resist the invitation.  A porter with epaulets on his outfit “like an admiral” leads him through impenetrable darkness into a curiously designed, and furnished, building.  There’s an octagonal entry-way, baroque passages and stairways, and, at last, lushly appointed rooms with hidden doors concealed in the tapestry-covered walls.  Matthieu is ushered into these chambers by a groom who calls himself Eselchen (“little donkey”).  Eselchen flirts with Matthieu indicating that the rule of the house is that there are now rules and that Matthieu is free to kiss his hand, kiss his lips, or unbutton his military tunic, presumably as a prelude to a sexual encounter.  Matthieu, who is either bisexual or homosexual, strokes Eselchen’s hair, prompting the groom to suggest that he should be a bit “rougher” in his caresses – he wants to be treated like a tierische Eselchen (a “bestial little donkey”).

Matthieu is intrigued and sits on a bench with Eselchen holding his hand.  He likes the look of the Groom’s red, swollen lips and his fuzzy boyish whiskers.  Eselchen wants Matthieu to unbutton his blouse (Litewka or “soldier’s tunic”) but warns that his lips are cold as “quicksilver”.  And the Groom’s breath seems icy.  Eselchen is supposed to collect the fifty franc fee, but he seems diverted by his attempts to seduce Matthieu. A woman’s voice sounds in another room and Eselchen, who somehow knows Matthieu’s name announces his presence.  

Matthieu sees Elvira, dressed in a decadent costume that only partly conceals her voluptuous figure.  She brings food with champagne.  The victuals and drink taste like spittle with a faint admixture of blood – Matthieu can’t really taste anything but himself. Elvira looks like Eselchen’s sister.  Elvira accuses Matthieu of wanting to undress the Groom.  She pulls off his tunic, revealing that the man’s torso is black as a lump of coal – his head is blonde and his complexion is fair, but his body is the color of soot.  Elvira repeats that Eselchen’s lips are cold as quicksilver.  Matthieu is alarmed by these developments.  Elvira acts seductively in a sort of macabre way – she’s some kind of vampire. Matthieu is confused, seemingly, more interested in the uncanny, corpse-like Eselchen than his mistress.  Miffed, Elvira vanishes again into the door in the wall.  Matthieu no longer feels desire, but, rather, the dull sense that nothing will work out to his satisfaction.  His perceptions are fragmentary and his memory seems shattered.  

Events don’t follow any clear sequence – people inexplicably come and go.  Elvira re-appears, this time naked.  Unfortunately, her torso is also jet-black.  Her lips are red and there’s a suggestion of flame around her loins, but her skin is charcoal-colored.  Elvira observes that she has chosen this color.  Matthieu looks into her eyes: “He couldn’t determine whether her eyes were dark as caverns or some other color.  He peered into the never-existing, never-imagined, never-emerging, something that endured motionlessly beyond form and substance, beyond joy and sorrow.”

This doesn’t promise much in the way of erotic satisfaction and, so, Matthieu, who has dropped to his knees cries out “No! Not yet!”  Elvira, spurned, summons Eselchen who shows Matthieu to the door.  Elvira tells the Groom to refund Matthieu’s fifty francs, which Eselchen neglected to collect.  Eselchen reproaches Matthieu for not kissing him on the lips and for not unbuttoning his tunic (a curious complaint since Elvira, in fact, disrobes her servant).  Then, Eselchen gives Matthieu fifty francs since the night is cold and dark and he should have some spending money, escorting him to the gate.  On the threshold, Matthieu embraces the Groom and weeps inconsolably.  

Thus, the first 35 pages of Hans Henny Jahnn’s bizarre novella Die Nacht aus Blei (“The Night of Lead”).  Jahnn was a German writer who lived in Hamburg and died in 1959 – he was 65 years old, born in 1894 in Stellingen, one of the seven boroughs comprising Hamburg.  Die Nacht aus Blei was first published in 1956 – in fact, it’s an episode in a novel that was never finished Jeden ereilt es (“It pursues Everyone”)  Jahnn began his writing career as a playwright, composing several notoriously lurid theater works in the twenties.  He wrote several novels, including his magnum opus Fluss ohne Ufer (“River without Banks”), an unfinished trilogy – the last of the three novels was posthumously published in incomplete form in 1961.  Jahnn was also a master organ-builder, organist, and composer.  He is a dour, cheerless writer, a self-loathing homosexual, and his books, as far as I can determine, are farcically grim and relentlessly morbid.  He illustrates in a risible manner the limits of prose with respect to depicting abnormal and perverse states of mind and occurrences.  Photographs of the man show a beefy fellow with a broad mouth, generally clamped into a scowl.  He looks like a more corpulent Francis Bacon, the Irish-born London artist whose work was similarly gruesome.  (On the last house where he lived in the Hamburg district of Blankenese, a crudely shaped bronze of the writer’s head hangs above a plaque that gives Jahnn’s dates next to the legend “Dichter - Orgelbauer - Forscher – that is, “Poet - Organ-builder - Researcher”.  The raw-looking bronze depicts what looks like the face of an angry gorilla with a flat nose laid on with a spatula.

Characters in Jahnn’s Die Nacht aus Blei don’t so much depart, but fall way like scabs or bloody bandages.  Leaving the Groom behind, Matthieu continues his nocturnal wandering in the nightmare city.  Outside the brothel’s gate, he sees the figures of young men and women, motionless like “mummies” – their role is to watch and stand outside.  After staggering through a grotesquely miserable slum, Matthieu sees a door marked with the sign that a midwife works from within that lodging: “What difference is there,” Matthieu muses, “between those who were never born and those who have been here only once?”

A classical homosexual trope follows: a shadowy figure on the street asks Matthieu for a cigarette.  A young man, cloaked in darkness, importunes Matthieu – he is said to slightly resemble the Groom (or Eselchen) from the brothel.  This young man is lame; he has difficulty walking.  Matthieu wonders whether he isn’t suffering from an “in-grown toe nail.”  The couple find a bar that is still open and escape the cold in that place.  Looking across the tavern to a beer advertisement, some letters written on a mirror, Matthieu sees that the hobbled figure from the street looks just like him, but, as he was, eight years ago – that is, when Matthieu was a teenager.  Their two identical heads glisten in the darkness of the mirror.  The youth says that his name is “Anders” – both a Nordic-sounding proper noun but also the German word for “the Other,” that is, someone who is “different.”  An interlude follows that is, perhaps, intended to be comical.  Matthieu tries to order something to eat, but there is nothing available, no bread, no soup.  He asks for Eierlikoer, that is, “egg nog”, a staple of German taverns in the Winter.  But there’s no egg nog and, as it turns out, the beer kegs are all empty.  What has happened here?  Why aren’t sufficient provisions on hand for the bar’s customers?  The barmaid says that the night has proven to be much longer than expected, immeasurably long and during this protracted night, the tavern’s customers have eaten up everything and drank all the potables in the place.  At the city center, turbines are failing.  The power goes out.  Energy is also depleted, used-up; exhaustion is general.

Outside the bar, it is snowing and bitterly cold.  Anders can’t walk any more; his wound is disabling.  Matthieu carries him on his shoulders through the falling snow.  Anders uses his boots as a spur and treats him like a pack animal.  The motif of one man carrying another like a beast of burden, seemingly a fetish image, recurs.  Stumbling around in the falling snow, Matthieu becomes disoriented; there is a sort of kenosis – he loses all sense of himself and his memories are poured out of him to be lost in the darkness.  

Anders has led them to the opening into a cellar.  It’s a very deep cellar.  There are fifty or more steps leading down to a subterranean passageway.  This is where Anders lives, apparently in an oubliette carved into the floor that contains some sort of wooden sarcophagus in which he sleeps.  The place stinks of decay and is “warmed” by sewage flowing through the main cloaca or central sewer canal. (The imagery is physiognomic – it’s a landscape interior to the city, it’s bowels.)  Anders disrobes and peels a bloody dressing off his belly.  He’s been wounded, stabbed so deeply that his viscera are exposed.  Matthieu recalls that he suffered a similar wound when he was Anders’ age – he was accosted by a gang in the street, cut open, and left to die.  But a tanned, muscular angel of some sort lifted him up and, miraculously, he survived this ordeal – all of these memories are vague, occluded, unclear.  On his own belly, he has a scar marking the place where his wound, identical to Anders’ injury, has healed.  Anders embraces Matthieu and our hero finds himself, literally, groping around among coils of his companion’s entrails bulging out of the open wound.  Like doubting Thomas in the Bible, Matthieu has put his hand in the ghastly wound by which Anders has been partly disemboweled.  This sexual encounter, seemingly anal sex displaced into some sort of gruesome exploration of the other’s intestines, is disturbing to Matthieu.  Despite the intense darkness, he gropes his way out of the subterranean chamber, and, perhaps, climbs the steps.  But he falls.  Matthieu’s fall is suddenly arrested by the dark angel that bore him up and away from the street thugs who had slit open his belly eight years earlier.  He calls the angel “Gara” and mutters the words Malach hamoves – these terms are from the Cabbala and name the angel of death, apparently now lifting Matthieu, who is swooning, up and away from where he fell.  He hears the thud of Anders’ casket lid crashing down on him in the darkness.  All of this is unclear – Matthieu describes his brain as “sweating”; but it appears that Matthieu is now interred with his Doppelgaenger, his young self who has appeared to him as “Anders”.  

The “darkness visible” in the novella, it’s awful gloom and ridiculously gruesome imagery, makes the narrative a bit comical.  It’s hard not to laugh at the hysteria embodied in this story.  Is homosexuality really so terrible, so akin to vampirism?  There is an old notion that homosexuality is epitomized as a kind of identity, male with male, while heterosexual sex involves gender differences – homosexual lust involves desire between Doppelgaengers.  This seems ludicrous to me, but Jahnn’s imagery is indisputable.  The notion that sodomy involves rooting around in someone’s entrails is also pretty clearly expressed – Anders’ wound is an orifice that offers itself to Matthieu, perhaps, for sexual exploration.  The whole thing is extreme, nasty, and repellant. 

2.

My copy of Jahnn’s Die Nacht aus Blei is a small white book with a black dust-cover, # 682 in the Bibliothek Suhrkamp, first edition by that published, 1980.  The novella, running to 105 pages, is followed by a 21 page afterword written by Josef Winkler.  I knew nothing about Winkler but was interested to read his reaction to Jahnn’s grotesque and nightmarish tale. 

Winkler’s essay, crammed with extremely macabre imagery, is an autobiographical prose-poem that vies with Jahnn’s text for the laurel of being the most lurid and disturbing – the writing is rather overtly competitive: Winkler seems intent on showing that he can write in a manner just as disgusting as Jahnn.  The effect is a sort of “twofer”, that is, “two for the price” of one. compilation.  The reader can luxuriate in Jahnn’s horrific effects and, then, enjoy Winkler’s exceptionally morbid rejoinder to the novella.  

Winkler, an Austrian novelist, focuses on his own reactions to a photograph of his father’s dead baby-sister, a yellowing post-mortem image showing the one or two year-old infant dressed like doll and resting in a sort of funereal perambulator.  This photograph was kept in cardboard box, apparently in the attic of house on the impoverished Austrian farm where Winkler was raised.  When assigned to task of writing on Jahnn’s novella, Winkler fell ill and, in a sort of feverish delirium,  called his younger brother, still living on the family farm.  Winkler recalled having seen the picture of the dead child in his own childhood – the image threatened him with the understanding that it is, not merely, the elderly who die; even infants and small children can also perish.  Winkler’s younger brother, who has broken his foot in a gymnastic accident at school, climbs the 11 or 12 steps into the attic, roots around among rodent droppings, finds the “15 centimeter” picture, and, then, dragging his injured foot in its plaster cast down the ladder-like stairs, retrieves the photograph.  Winkler’s mother doesn’t want to send the picture to her son, Josef, but, at last, authorizes its mailing.  Winkler is afraid to examine the picture; it triggers memories of morbid childhood fears.  At last, he turns over the image, scrutinizes it, and describes the photo in upsetting detail. Of course, Winkler’s father was a Nazi with an imitation Hitler-moustache.  His mother, still alive in 1980, had three brothers, all of them killed in the War.  One of them was studying to become a pastor – “just as you wished to be,” Winkler’s mother tells him.  This part of Winkler’s essay is focused on establishing that the writer shares Jahnn’s obsession with death and that the living are vastly outnumbered by those who have died.  We are surrounded by the presence of death.  Making this point, Winkler remarks on graves near the family farm inset with pictures of dead children.  Winkler expands his focus to the political world and, paraphrasing Celan’s poem “Todesfuge”, tells us that “Death is a master from Austria”.  The essayist father had little “rat eyes” above his Hitler moustache; the rats on the family farm had the eyes of humans.  

Winkler, apparently, is a well-known Austrian writer, specializing in books about rural depravity, death, violence, and homosexuality down on the farm.  He seems to be a bit like a gay William Faulkner. After demonstrating his chops with respect to lurid morbidity, Winkler proceeds to provide the reader with a couple of interesting anecdotes about his mentor (and spiritual brother) Hans Henny Jahnn.  First, we learn that, as a boy, Jahnn’s mother periodically led him to a cemetery: My mother had the habit of dragging me to a gravestone on which was written:’Hans Henny Jahnn’.  This was among the most terrifying and decisive experiences of my childhood.  – She loved me, but only as a substitute child (“Ersatzkind”). I was repulsively ugly, the other had been pretty as a picture.  Three years before his birth, Jahnn’s older brother, for whom he was named, had died.  Jahnn came to believe that the dead child somehow inhabited him, and that, in fact, he had somehow been born dead.  He wrote: My blood circulated through me, but I knew that it wasn’t my blood, that nothing belonged to me, rather that it was all owned by the one who was buried.  I didn’t understand why my mother didn’t understand that I was the child that she had buried there.  I was convinced that I possessed his soul, a stranger’s soul, that wished to return to its own true body and go back to the grave, exactly that grave that she showed me.  Jahnn remarks that he always knew that he was “an ugly child”, that this was apparent from the way in which people responded to him and that, as a consequence, he felt driven to become famous (“beruehmt”) – or, as the case might be, “infamous”.  The provocative quality of Jahnn’s writing, extravagant to the nth degree, seems to reflect this urge.

Jahnn’s desire for fame, coupled with his eerie sense of already being dead, was combined with his sado-masochism.  Jahnn reported that he tallied his episodes of masturbation by slashing marks into his thighs – he knew the exact number of instances of “onanism” from the count of scars on his thighs.  Jahnn felt that he should mortify his flesh since he was trapped in a corpse full of pus, semen, and shit.  Out of this experience of the “utter destruction of (his) body”, Jahnn composed his drama Pastor Ephraim Magnus.  He was 26 when the play was first performed.  The work caused a scandal to which the theater responded by presenting the play without public notice, seemingly relying on “word-of-mouth.”  But this was insufficient as far as the authorities were concerned – the police were called and the show was closed by order of the Berlin authorities.  In the wake of this scandal, Jahnn was awarded the Kleist prize. (Kleist would have approved – his 1808 tragedy Penthesilia, deemed “unplayable” by Goethe, is described as a spectacle of “sexual frenzy”, in which people are torn to bits by ravening dogs and the Amazon queen declares that she sees no difference between “kissing and biting.”) Pastor Ephraim Magnus was published by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin in 1919.  A prominent critic, Julius Bab wrote: “(It) was the most agonizing reading of my life! It lasted months – because after four or five pages I was always so crippled with horror that I couldn’t go any farther.  There is a wild, fearsome power in this book, but it seems to have nothing to do with art – rather, this is the power of madness.  Strindberg was also in hell – but he was, at the same time, outside and above his hell.  Jahnn is trapped in his inferno and screams to us out of it.  As a splendid, hideous document of the most extreme situation, this book should be locked away in mankind’s poison chest.”  Oscar Loerke, who had been Jahnn’s advocate with respect to the Kleist prize, responded: “They dissect the elephant but they don’t really see it...”  

Jahnn was invited to speak at the Curio Haus, a massive cultural venue located near the Hamburg University.  (The huge structure, complete with colossal reclining bronze gods atop its brick portico, was completed in 1911; most of it survived bombing so that it could host war crimes trials in 1946 through 1947). On the steps of the Curio Haus in 1923, another artist, a painter and poet, brained Jahnn with a champagne bottle.  Jahnn said that he had become anathema in Germany but that his play (and other works) were famous in other countries.  In 1932, Jahnn was back at the Curio Haus.  In his lecture, Jahnn announced that he was opposed to the National Socialists.  He said: “If you vote for Hitler, you are voting for war.”  Of course, his opposition was unavailing.  After Hitler assumed power, the Nazis sent some thugs to Jahnn’s home to intimidate him.  In the report that they filed, one of them noted that Jahnn had an “impressionist” portrait of himself hanging on the wall.  The Nazi agent asked Jahnn: “Who is that dead man?  His face is already green.”  After the War, Jahnn made proclamations against nuclear power, railing against even peaceful applications of the technology: he said: “I have survived two so-called world wars and sense that a third is imminent.  The dead that will fall in the Third World War are alive today.”  

3.

Without much difficulty, I procured a copy of Pastor Ephraim Magnus.  The volume is a copy of the 1919 first edition, a facsimile reproduced complete with handwritten catalog and index notations on the title page.  The book’s colophon shows a naked man flexing his muscles as he hauls a net out of the water; the woodcut image is marked S. F. for S. Fischer Verlag – of course, the publisher’s colophon shows a fisherman.  The play is huge.  The printed text runs to 268 pages of dialogue to which there are appended three pages of very precise mechanical drawings of stage-designs.

The play is hysterical, demented, as well as extremely (and tediously) repetitious.  Characters scream at one another for dozens of pages.  The style is a bizarre melange derived from the most lurid passages of Georg Buechner (the author of Woyzeck, a theater work much beloved by the Expressionists and Danton’s Death) as well as Shakespeare, particularly the most extreme diction from Hamlet (disease, death, decomposition, festering sores) and King Lear (madness and cruelty).  A little of Richard III is thrown into the mix as well – the play’s villain, the monstrous Jakob, tends to speak a bit like Shakespeare’s crook-backed monster.  The text is difficult to read: you continuously wonder whether the stuff described in the play can really mean what you think it means.  A good example is a totally gratuitous scene near the very end of the work in which two lusty lads come on stage to either urinate in one another’s mouths or for mutual fellatio – the verb form for what they are doing “piet” is not in any of my dictionaries.  Therefore, my readers should approach my summary below with caution.  Pastor Ephraim Magnus has never been translated into English, although there was a symposium in April 2021 conducted by Dr. Jason Lieblang and Matthew Tomkinson on preparations for staging the work (possibly as a puppet play) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  The outcome of this project is unclear to me.     

Pastor Ephraim Magnus  begins with a protracted howl of despair.  The old pastor, Ephraim Magnus, is dying slowly and painfully, apparently from constipation.   He describes his body as heap of dung decorated with Eiterbeulen (“pus-oozing boils”).  Magnus harangues his children, two of them lawful (Ephraim and Johanna) and a third illegitimate, the product of a liaison after the death of the pastor’s wife – the latter son is named Jakob.  After twenty pages of lamentation, the old pastor, apparently, takes some kind of poison and removes himself from the scene.

The next sixty pages plays out like a deranged version of Frank Wedekind’s Fruehlings Erwachen, a proto-expressionist theater-piece about lust, rape, child abuse and abortion among teenagers. This play is a landmark in German theater, first produced in Berlin by Max Reinhart and, for about eighty pages, Jahnn seems to be amplifying the work’s themes to a hysterical pitch. (Fruehlings Erwachen, as Spring’s Awakening, was revived as an Off-Broadway musical in 2008, became an improbable hit, and won many Tony Awards.)  Jakob, the bastard son, plays provocateur and pimp to his brother, Ephraim, and a boyfriend who is 16 named Paul.  Jakob tries to persuade his brother to allow him to lick his feet.  Ephraim declines this pleasure.  This triggers some monomaniacal tirades by Jakob about purity being only for those who are “eunuchs and without desire.”  Everything, Jakob says, depends upon serving the “secret work” of our testicles and ovaries.  Enter Paul, a lad who is weeping because he has been rejected by a girl as “ugly and without culture.”  Jakob, seeing an opportunity to exercise his foot fetish, tries to get Paul to take a bath with him so that he can suck his toes.  This doesn’t happen.  Frustrated, Jakob recruits a girl named Mimi to inhale “the perfume of Paul’s unwashed feet” and kiss them.  This effort also seems to fail although this part of the play is very unclear – characters pop in and out of the scenes and their roles are not well-defined; the text has the dream-like quality of an exotic sexual fantasy enacted on stage without regard for logic or consistency of character.  

A girl named Mathilda is now seduced by Jakob who, as the first token of his desire for her, makes her lick Paul’s feet.  Poor Mathilda is desperate for Jakob to marry her, apparently not grasping that Jakob is not good candidate for either boyfriend or husband.  Jakob, who is polymorphous perverse, wants Mathilda to satisfy him by having sex with other men.  Jakob harangues her about socially sanctioned love being based on models in conventional theater and accuses her wanted to put her love “on the stage.”  Ephraim is courting a girl named Hedwig.  Jakob interferes with their relationship by demanding that Ephraim maul and beat her.  Although Hedwig seems chaste, Jakob urges Ephraim to rape her.  For a few pages, Paul and Ephraim discuss their career aspirations: Ephraim is studying theology and plans to become a preacher like his father; Paul says that he wants to be an architect, a Baumeister (“master builder”, perhaps, channeling Ibsen).  Sister Johanna appears and confesses that she harbors sexual desires for Jakob, her half-brother.  Both Jakob and Ephraim are aroused by Johanna and lament that she is their sister – although why this would matter in the lurid context of this play is unclear. The depraved Jakob argues that society is based on “masks” – that people portray themselves in the light that society requires from them.  (This observation, at once trivial and puerile, is announced with great sententiousness, as if a profound insight – and Jakob resolves that he will act to tear away these masks.) Jakob continues his campaign to debauch Mathilda despite Jakob’s demand that she have sex with Paul.  I can’t tell if Mathilda is pregnant with Paul’s child, or whether this is just another of Jakob’s fantasies.  In any event, Jakob says that it will be Mathilda’s highest pleasure and her greatest accomplishment to give birth to Paul’s child, strangle or drown the infant, and, then, enjoy playing with the little corpse before burying it in a tiny casket in the vault of the church.  On this edifying note, Act One of the “tragedy” ends.  Jahnn appends a note between the acts: “There follows the second part of this tragedy a tre.  Anyone who has taken offense even with respect to only one thing and feels himself to be without reproach, should not trouble himself with any more of this.  I have a lot more to say.”   This arrogant little interpolation is puzzling in itself – as far as I can see the “tragedy” has two acts and not three.  It’s as if Jahnn in his frenzy has forgotten that he didn’t divide the enormous second part of the spectacle into two acts.  

The siblings Ephraim and Johanna indulge in a long colloquy about death.  Ephraim says that the “world is a madhouse and heaven above a mere glass shell.”  He observes that this could be proven but that the effort would be too dispiriting, noting that the essence of existence is offal rotting in filthy water (“cow stomachs” and “animal bladders” swelling up as they decompose before bursting – this imagery continues Jahnn’s obsessive concern with entrails and the rectum.)  Jakob, in the meantime, is hustling around on the dark side, messing around with whores – Ephraim says he plays with their vaginas as if they were obscene pictures of the sort that one finds scribbled on the walls of public toilets: “he sticks wood, coins, and his fingers” into these orifices.  On a street at night, Jakob encounters a prostitute.  He tells her that he would like to rearrange her guts so that she shits through her vagina, all the better to have sex with an orifice full of excrement and filth. (It’s pretty obvious that this image invokes Jahnn’s apparent disgust at his own homosexuality.)  Jakob also urges her to use constipating measures so that her turds will be larger and, therefore, more sexually stimulating to excrete – “because child birth,” he maintains, “is just producing a big poop.”  The prostitute nonchalantly remarks: "Du hast schoene Reden” (that is, “that’s a nice thing to say.”) Her sarcasm is lost on Jakob who continues to berate her about being “merely a vessel for rotting semen.”  Since she is menstruating, Jakob says he “will screw her in the ass.”  Apparently, he later kills and disembowels her.  We learn this in the next scene, a trial that incorporates morbid expressionistic spectacle into the play’s mise-en-scene.  (In the production directions, Jahnn references a touchstone for expressionistic theater, Buechner’s Woyzeck which he spells “Wozzeck” after the manner of Alban Berg’s opera, a misreading of the playwright’s handwriting perpetuated by Max Reinhardt’s 1913 first production of Buechner’s text.)  Jakob defends himself against the sex crime by arguing that he’s no worse than, and morally superior to, soldiers who kill their enemies in name of duty and patriotism and without the sadism that he finds so vivifying.  A chorus of mutilated figures appears, apparently representing those whom society has maimed with its demands for conformity and rectitude.  These figures are someone who has been castrated, someone with his hands cut-off, a headless apparition (who nevertheless speaks at length) and “the crucified one.”  Symbolizing the disfiguring demands of society, Jakob denounces these emblematic characters and maintains that he had every right to experiment on the prostitute – it was an endeavor, he says, to rip away the mask that society imposes on its members.  The Judge is not impressed with this defense and Jakob is taken away and beheaded.  Johanna and Ephraim steal his corpse, try to reassemble it as best they can, and, then, deposit the carcass in a casket in the vault of the church.  Ephraim is obsessed with Jakob’s decomposition and regales Johanna with vivid and nauseating accounts of the suppurating corpse gradually drying to become something like a mummy.  Ephraim, then, harangues Johanna for many pages, trying to persuade her to crucify him.  She’s understandably a bit put-off by this demand but, after a while, warms to the task.  She tells Ephraim that she will nail him to a cross but only if she can accompany that act with her own mutilation – she plans to thrust a red-hot poker up her cunt.  Apparently, these acts are accomplished.  A bit the worse for wear, Ephraim and Johanna continue their tedious conversation about sexual perversity, God’s cruelty, and the injustice in society.  (Jahnn interpolates a few sex scenes between characters imported into the action for no purpose other than to enliven the lengthy, abstract, and hysterical dialogue.)  Johanna seems to now enjoy torturing Ephraim.  She makes him strip and binds him to a Folterbank (a “rack”).  Apparently, she passes out while mangling Ephraim so he has to spend the night weltering in his blood on the rack.  In the course of this orgy of cruelty, Ephraim gets his eyes plucked-out.  Johanna, then, expires, possibly due to her wounds incurred in her own self-harm.  It takes her a dozen pages to laboriously die, accompanied by the chorus of maimed figures from the trial who reprise their appearance in the empty cathedral.  Ephraim, somehow, manages to open the tomb where Jakob is rotting and puts Johanna’s corpse on top of her decaying half-brother.  Apparently, some time passes.  Ephraim, although being blind and mutilated, continues to serve the church, preaching regularly.  A representative of the congregation meets with Ephraim and tells him that the church will be remodeled – there are funds available to rebuild parts of the cathedral that are in poor repair.  (This part of the play is weirdly realistic and normal, devoted to aspects of church finance and architectural renovation.)  Ephraim is attended by two thugs, young men, who he keeps at this side so that any crimes they commit will be sanctioned by the pastor – better for them to commit crimes in Ephraim’s presence and under his supervision than to assault people on the street.  These youths interrupt the action briefly to have some kind of oral sex.  Ephraim is enthusiastic about the remodeling project.  Paul appears, now an established architect.  Ephraim tells Paul that he wants the cathedral to be a sort of shrine to homosexual desire – the place will have bronze figures of handsome young boys displayed all around the sanctuary.  In this weird monument to pederasty, Paul will install images of boys around the casket containing Johanna and Jakob.  And, from the pulpit, he will preach sermons denouncing the “Gewaltaetigkeit ihrer buergerlich Ordnung” (“the violence of the congregation’s bourgeois order.”) Paul says a little prayer to Heaven praising God for letting him build and erect a monument to his “impure drawings (blueprints)”.  He tells the Lord that there is nothing in human beings that was not created by God and that Ephraim understands that you can’t have a soul without it being embodied – and that only those without soul deny the carnal urges of the body.  At least, that’s how I interpret Paul’s somewhat gnomic final speech.  And, so, the play ends.  

Although Pastor Magnus Ephraim is dramatically more obscene and histrionic than predecessor and contemporary theater works, the play’s vehemence is not without some precedent in German literature.  Dramas composed during the so-called Sturm und Drang period (roughly 1770 to 1800) are similarly turbulent and excessive with respect to their rhetoric.  Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) is an acetylene torch of a play, crammed with extravagant action and, even, more extravagant diction.  Schiller’s theater-works, in general, are overwrought and savage, building upon plays by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz such as Die Soldaten (“The Soldiers, 1776) and Die Hofmeister composed in 1774.  Lenz was clinically insane, or, at least, ended up that way – he died in the gutter in St. Petersburg, Russia after an extended period of mental illness.  His grotesque plays strongly influenced Georg Buechner who wrote the epic Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) an intensely melodramatic and violent play set in revolutionary France during the Terror.  Buechner’s Woyzeck, unpublished during the writer’s short life time, was only discovered and performed during the Expressionist period in the early 20th century.  Theater originating in the Sturm und Drang period represents the overwhelming influence of William Shakespeare on the German theater; Shakespeare’s intricate verse and violent imagery provided an example for German writers – even Goethe’s Faust (Part One) bears the imprint of Shakespeare’s influence in the context of a sexually inflected plot (Faust impregnates Gretchen who murders her new-born infant and is executed for that crime) similar to some features of Pastor Magnus Ephraim.  Expressionistic drama, although tending toward the symbolic or allegorical, is also extreme in character, featuring spectacles of madness, horror and murder.  Exemplary is Oskar Kokoschka’s celebrated Moerder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murder, the Hope of Women), first performed in 1909, revived in 1917, and adapted as an opera by Paul Hindemith in 1919.  Berg’s opera Lulu (written 1929 to 1935) features a cameo appearance by Jack the Ripper and ends with a sex-murder.  As previously noted, Alban Berg adapted Woyzeck into opera form in 1925.  Woyzeck, of course, is a festival of madness and homicide with an anti-military subtext similar to Jakob’s bizarre defense against the sex-murder charges in Jahnn’s play: sadistic crimes of passion are morally preferable to industrialized murder in World War One’s trenches.      

 

Needless to say, there’s not much of a performance history with respect to Pastor Ephraim Magnus.  The work was awarded the Kleist Prize (inaugurated in 1912 on the 100th anniversary of the death of the Prussian writer Heinrich von Kleist) in 1920 when Jahnn was only 26 years old.  Bertolt Brecht and Arnolt Bronnen produced a condensed version of the work in 1923 –reportedly Brecht and Bronnen lopped off 80 % of the immense play.  Frank Castorf, a renowned avant-garde director who cut his teeth in East Germany, presented the play in February 2015 at the Deutsche SchauSpielhaus in Hamburg.  Castorf’s esthetic originates in the uncompromising theater practice typical in East Berlin before the collapse of the Communist regime.  Castorf was friends with Heiner Mueller whose provocation, Hamletmaschine, is characteristic of East German theater – the theater-piece deconstructs Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a series of nihilistic monologues performed by characters who shriek at one another, batter other actors, and mimic puking and defecating on stage.  Castorf was Mueller’s favorite director and, apparently, Castorf found the equally emetic Pastor Ephraim Magnus immensely congenial.  His version is more than five-hours long, staging the entirety of the work.  (How this could have been accomplished is unclear to me – half of the play consists of extremely monotonous harangues that are virtually indistinguishable from one another.  It boggles the imagination that someone could memorize this stuff.)  A “trailer” has been posted to YouTube inviting audiences to attend the show.  But I can’t view it because the teaser is age-restricted and my computer, for some reason, thinks I’m a mere youth.  Photographs from the production show elaborate and towering sets featuring enormous arrays of organ pipes aimed like cannon barrels into the theater’s upper darkness.  Grim-looking young men with bulging muscles and sooty faces wrestle with one another.  They look like Tom of Finland characters brought to life on-stage.  A woman in a black bra and bare midriff, make-up running off her sweaty face in black tracks, howls at the audience. Some folks in military uniforms prance around wearing swastika arm-bands.  (The American exploitation director, Roger Corman, said that nicely shaped bare breasts were the “cheapest special effect” available; in Germany, the same could be said for tricking out a character on stage with Nazi regalia – this is sure to attract attention.) A contemporary review of the Hamburg show, cited with approval on the theater’s web page, calls the play a “kaputt abgefuckte” production that features an “orgy of sado-masochism.”  (I think kaputt abgefuckte means something like “ruinously fucked-up”.)  In the same year (2015), Castorf somehow inveigled himself into directing a Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, a venue that often features leading-edge productions of Wagner plays performed for the most conservative audiences in Germany.  Castorf’s intentionally chaotic 16 hours of Wagner horrified the audience.  For more than ten minutes, the crowd booed Castorf who defied them by standing on the stage grinning and flashing a “thumb’s up” sign to the incensed opera fans.  The booing would have continued all night if someone hadn’t come up with the expedient of summoning the orchestra conductor on-stage to take a bow.  Apparently, the crowd appreciated the music and singing by the opera stars and stopped deriding Castorf to applaud  the orchestra.  

Outside of Germany, where Jahnn’s influence is spectral but, perhaps, faintly visible, the Hamburg writer’s work was, more or less, unknown.  However, a case can be made that Jahnn’s obsessive and megalomanical provocations are exemplary of an international literature of nihilistic extremism.  Celine’s novels feature long harangues in which deranged characters lecture one another on philosophical subjects. This is particularly apparent in Death on the Installment Plan.  Of course, two of the main characters in Ephraim Magnus are preachers and they present a series of harangues in the form of deranged sermons.  The grotesque imagery in Jahnn resonates with the parade of sexualized hangings (with ejaculation) in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and his other works that are overtly fetishistic.  Similarly, Last Exit to Brooklyn, a 1964 collection of hyper-violent and perverse short stories by Hubert Selby, Jr. explores similar themes to those presented in Pastor Ephraim Magnus including rape, homosexuality, pederasty, and sadistic violence.  Selby’s book, because of efforts at censorship in the U.K., achieved considerable success and was a best-seller briefly in 1968.  Selby wrote several other novels, similarly vehement and grotesque – one of them Requiem for a Dream was made into a movie by Darrin Aronofsky.  I would be remiss in not mentioning the Barcelona writer (although mostly expatriate) Juan Goytisolo and Genet who writes in French.  

What genre encompasses writings of this kind intended as extreme provocations to the sensibility of the common reader?  Perhaps, the notion of genre isn’t properly applicable – after all, the raison d’etre of works like Pastor Ephraim Magnus is to defy genre, rupture decorum, and explode conventional aesthetic categories. Accordingly, there’s really no rubric applicable to these sorts of works.  The notion of Sturm und Drang developed with respect to works like Schiller’s The Robbers and the First Part of Goethe’s Faust probably is the best and most descriptive way to index and collectively catalog specimens of this kind.  (A Grove Press collection of writings by Genet, Selby, and Burroughs was called Writers in Revolt –however, I don’t think “revolutionary” effectively characterizes these sorts of works.  Although many of these writers imply vague political or social themes, the heavily fetishized subject matter in Jahnn, Burroughs, and Genet is essentially personal and apolitical.  Similarly, James Joyce, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf might be called “revolutionary writers” due to their innovations in prose style; Beckett is a “revolutionary playwright” – but they don’t engage in narcissistic provocation for the purpose of provocation.)  Confronted with melodramatic Sturm und Drang writing, the reader has three possible responses – you can condemn the text as immoral and repellent, you can praise the text as important, brave and self-revelatory, or you can laugh at the excesses embodied in the writing.  Viewed in this latter light, Pastor Ephraim Magnus and Die Nacht aus Blei, toxic compounds of vomit, semen, and shit presented with a mucousy dollop of self-loathing and, of course, self-righteous indignation directed at a censorious public and critics are pretty funny.  The whole enterprise is ludicrous and monstrously self-indulgent.  Most often, however, those who reject the literature of Sturm und Drang seek refuge in the argument that the text isn’t all that shocking and, in fact, is pretty dull.  This seems to me to be an inept approach to dismissing challenging Sturm und Drang texts.  Pastor Ephraim Magnus is horribly repetitive, overlong, tedious, and formless – but it isn’t dull; you might as well say that a train wreck or a wild fire burning through a populated town is boring.  The same sort of tragedy is enacted over and over again, but it’s absurd to claim the experience is somehow dull.   

4.

Han Henny Jahnn wrote from the heart, albeit a heart that was pitch black and decomposing.  It’s easy to mock a writer who ventures this sort of radical wager, a leap of faith that self-revelation, no matter how sordid and humiliating, is, nonetheless worthy of an audience’s attention.  (Rousseau’s Confessions and works by Burroughs like Queer and Junkie make this same bet.)  Whatever my reservations about Jahnn’s project, good faith requires me to acknowledge the writer’s weird perseverance and deranged integrity.  In some ways, Jahnn’s biography is more interesting than his enormous, flawed and suppurating books.  Please regard this section, then, as a corrective to the derision implicit in much of what I have earlier written about this writer.

Hans Henny August Jahn was born in a Hamburg suburb in December 1894.  (He later added an “n” to his last name.)  Jahnn’s family was north German, Protestant, with roots in the trades, particularly ship-building, an enterprise that characterized Hamburg at the time.  The decisive event in Jahnn’s life was a boyhood friendship that he forged with Gottlieb Friedrich (“Friedel”) Harms at the Realschule that he attended in St. Pauli (a blue collar district with an entertainment hub that catered to sailors).  Jahnn’s emotional attachment to Friedel Harms, who was about a half-year older, was intense, inflected with homosexual elements, and mystical.  In fact, in 1913, Jahnn and Harms celebrated their “mystical marriage.”  When World War One ensued, Jahnn and Harms who both opposed the war, left Germany and moved to Aurland on the Aurlandsfjord in Norway.  (Aurland is one of three tiny villages located in a narrow and abysmal gorge in Norway’s western mountains – the gorge is a mile deep and flooded with 18 miles of water, an offshoot of the larger, and more famous, Sognefjorden.  Improbably beautiful with sheer rock walls laced with waterfalls above the fjord, the area is also remote and was then desperately poor.)  It’s not clear to me how Jahnn and Harms survived in this place.  The peasants in the area were primitive, even bestial and Jahnn later wrote: “In this time, I learned life, looked through the world and saw everything of which life consisted.  It was a hard school.”  Jahnn’s visionary novel Perrudja is a literary souvenir of these experiences.

After the War, at the end of 1918, Jahnn and Harms returned to Hamburg.  All German institutions had been discredited by the War and, it was generally believed, that persons of good will were obliged to establish an entirely new dispensation, a humane revolutionary regime that would redefine human nature and possibility.  This Weimar-era impulse toward radical reform powered a resurgence of the Communist party, experiments such as the Bauhaus, but, also, quasi-Gothic and visionary communes comprised of artists and writers.  (These enterprises were not without precedent – an artists’ community had flourished at Worpswede in lower Saxony during the last years of the 19th century and participants in the “Blue Rider” school in Munich, people like Franz Marc and Kandinsky, had lived in close collaboration before World War One.)  Jahnn and “husband” Friedel Harms together with the sculptor Franz Buse attempted something similar when they founded the Utopian community Ugrino.  

Ugrino was more of a concept than a place, although the community was planned for the soggy moors between Hamburg and Bremen.  Jahnn and the others lived briefly at Eckel, a small village (1500 inhabitants) that they hoped to re-vitalize with their utopian project.  Ugrino represented a comprehensive theory and ideology of life proposed in opposition to the bourgeois norms thought to have led to the Great War.  The community was promoted as vehemently anti-Christian since nationalism and militarism were thought to have tainted organized religion.  Already in Norway, Jahnn had been designing furniture and dwelling systems for the new, enlightened humanity.  Particular buildings would be constructed on the moor for religious and ritual use, following the system of Bauhuette, or medieval building guilds in which apprentices and journeymen labored under the supervision of wise Baumeister – traces of this concept animate the last pages of Pastor Ephraim Magnus.  Conventional sex roles would be dissolved and homosexual love was to be perceived as a gift from God (and emanation of God’s mercy).  Although Jahnn conceived complex sacraments for the residents of Ugrino, these rites to be celebrated in massive brick buildings, Ugrino’s fundamental religion would be the pursuit of sculpture, the composition of music, and other arts.  Jahnn drew up a “constitution” for the community, conspicuously authoritarian in nature.  Of course, the expense of acquiring land for the commune and the challenge of erecting monumental buildings on the soggy terrain was prohibitive.  Nothing much came of the project.  However, archives contain large numbers of sketches and architectural drawings.  The sculptor Buse, inspired by the late medieval Luebecker Totentanz, an enormous frieze (90 feet by six feet) at the Marienkirche in Luebeck, created six life-size bronze figures derived from that design.  I’m not sure how these macabre figures were supposed to be deployed in the notional Ugrino.  (The original mural was destroyed by the British Palm Sunday bombing of Luebeck in 1942; Buses’ sculptures, thought to be lost, were rediscovered about ten years ago – they had been taken to Bornholm, Denmark when Jahnn and Harms fled the Nazis – and were displayed in an exhibition about German utopian communities of the 1920's at the Bossehard Museum in Jesteberg in 2022.).

During the period that Jahnn was laboring to establish Ugrino, he and Friedel Harms wandered into the St. Jacobi Church in Hamburg during a stroll. There, quite by accident, they discovered the church’s  baroque-era Arp-Schnitger organ, clearly neglected and in a state of serious disrepair.  Jahnn undertook to restore the organ, recreating it consistent with his visionary theories about music.  (Jahnn was a follower of the “Harmonic System” of Hans Kayser, a theosophist who developed harmonies and compositional methods on the basis of his reading of Paracelsus and Kepler, among others – some aspects of Kayers’s music theory derived from his understanding of quantum physics.  Kayser thought that music should embody the natural harmonics operative in nature and the “music of the spheres.”) The Arp-Schnitger organ was ultimately rebuilt by Jahnn (or under his supervision) to equip it to play musical compositions devised in accord with Kayser’s understanding of harmony.  By this point, Jahnn was active in composing his own music and, also, publishing works of avant-garde composers in northern Europe.  

The work on the Arp-Schnitger instrument at St. Jacobi inaugurated Jahnn’s lifelong vocation as Orgelbauer (“organ builder”).  There is some controversy as to whether this term, customarily applied to the writer, is really accurate.  In fact, although Jahnn prepared hundreds of carefully scaled and detailed sketches for organs, he seems to have only worked on a handful of actual instruments.  As with Ugrino, most of his labors were theoretical, in the realm, perhaps, of fantasy.  I have seen the Arp-Schnitger organ at St. Jacobi in Hamburg – it’s an infernal machine, a dark forest of pipes and tubes and valves festooned with apocalyptic angels brandishing great brass trumpets.  There are weekly organ concerts in the church, one of which I attended.  The organ was completely rebuilt in 2008 and, so, Jahnn’s innovations are no longer in existence.  Indeed, only one of Jahnn’s organs still exists in playable form.  This is the instrument at the Heinrich-Hertz Schule, a school located in north Hamburg. The organ is featured in monthly concerts and said to have a very idiosyncratic timbre.  (Another organ at the St. Ansgar Church, also in northern Hamburg, was recently reconstituted following Jahnn’s plans – part of his Nachlass are thousands of extremely detailed mechanical drawings relating to instruments that he repaired, renovated, or designed.)

Although Ugrino as an utopian project existed for only two years before succumbing to expense and indebtedness, the publishing house associated with the community survived until the early forties when the Nazis put an end to it.  Ugrino Verlag published mostly treatises on music theory and scores by composers.  The publishing house’s music editor was a Dane named Hillmer Trede.  Trede suffered an untimely death and Jahnn undertook to raise his small son, Yngve Jan Trede.  Jahnn proclaimed Yngve to be musical genius and supported his work as a composer.  Yngve is alive today after a long career in music and represents a living connection to Jahnn and his legacy in music.

Despite his homosexuality, Jahnn married Signe (Ellinor) Philips in 1926.  The marriage was unconventional but, apparently, close – the couple were together for 33 years.  Based on Jahnn’s letters, we know that both partners had numerous affairs with others, all apparently not only condoned but encouraged.  Signe’s sister, Sybylle nicknamed Monna, married Gottlieb “Friedel” Harms in 1928 – these marriages were celebrated in accord with the Ugrino sacraments.  Ellinor seems to have been sexually involved with Friedel and, often, traveled with him.  Ugrino’s citizens kept things in the family.  Yngve Trede, Jahnn’s musically gifted god-son, married Jahnn’s daughter, Signe in 1963.  (Jahnn’s daughter died in March 2018.)   Jahnn also was involved in a protracted love affair during his exile to Bornholm with the Hungarian photographer, Judit Karasz.  It seems clear that Jahnn’s great love, however, was Friedel Harms.  Jahnn never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality – acts of sodomy were criminal in Germany under the notorious section 175 of the penal code during his entire life.  

Jahnn’s first play Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1919), written during the Ugrino period, made him famous.  The play won the Kleist Award in 1920 and was acclaimed by many eminent writers and critics including Thomas Mann.  Mann, who thought that art is the symptom of a pathology in the bourgeoisie, was a deeply closeted homosexual himself and may have felt some affinity with Jahnn. (Although the reflections on the 12-tone system in Mann’s late novel Dr. Faustus derive from his interest in Arnold Schoenberg, it is hard not to see reflections of Jahnn’s musicology in some of the more gothic sections in the novel.)  Of course, Pastor Ephraim Magnus divided critics and there were many who denounced the work in the most vehement terms.  Jahnn wrote several other plays, and, indeed, continued to labor in theater throughout his life.  His plays (there are 13 in total) include the lurid 1921 Coronation of Richard III, a revamping of Medea (1926) and a Gothic-influenced “Everyman” play based the Luebeck Totentanz (1931).  The famous Gustaf Gruendgens, an iconic actor and director in German theater, successfully staged Jahnn’s late play, Thomas Chatterton (about the English poet manque and suicide) in 1955.  By comparison with Jahnn’s early work, his later theater pieces are said to be relatively accessible and can be readily staged.  Indeed, Jahnn’s polemic against nuclear power, Die Truemmer des Gewissens (“The Ruins of Conscience”) written in 1950 was presented as Die staubige Regenbogen (“The Dusty Rainbow”) in Frankfurt-am-Main in March of 1961 under the direction of Erwin Piscator – adherents to a disarmament policy in German opposed as well to nuclear weapons and power facilities, predictably, found the play powerful and incisive; more conservative critics’ reviews were less laudatory.  It didn’t matter to Jahnn; he had died in November 1959. 

Jahnn’s novel Perrudja was complete in the late twenties.  However, immediately after Jahnn had finished the book, Joyce’s Ulysses became available in German translation.  Jahnn studied Ulysses with enthusiasm and, then, completely rewrote the novel in imitation of Joyce’s style – the first volume of the book was printed in 1929 and praised by Alfred Doeblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz) and Heinrich Mann.  Jahnn intermittently worked on the second part of the novel, but that work was not published (and, then, in fragmentary form) until the sixties.  Perrudja has been proclaimed by some as a masterpiece of expressionistic literature.  The novel concerns an idealistic Norwegian, the eponymous character, who lives in the fjord country of western Norway.  Perrudja, with the help of a mysterious British benefactor, is given money to found a commune.  Not surprisingly, the community is modeled on the precepts on which Ugrino was based.  A love triangle complicates the situation and Perrudja, who is a kind of anti-hero, kills his peasant rival for the love of the beautiful Signe.  The homicide is disclosed on the night of Perrudja’s honeymoon with Signe.  Needless to say, she rejects Perrudja’s embraces.  This causes Perrudja to console himself with his blood brother, Hein.  The commune’s British patron donates more money and the enterprise succeeds, but, then, apparently the world ends in fire and an universal flood.  It’s not clear to me how Jahnn intended to write a sequel to this spectacular work but he spent his life brooding on an epilog to the novel.  

Jahnn opposed the Nazis.  They returned the favor by characterizing him as a “Communist and pornographer.”  After several Gestapo inspections of his home in Hamburg, Jahnn decided that it was time to leave Germany again.  He dispatched his sister-in-law to Bornholm, an island controlled by Denmark in the East Sea – it’s between Copenhagen and the German island of Ruegen.  In that place, Jahnn wrote his magnum opus, a 2000 page trilogy of novels entitled Fluss ohne Ufer (“River without a Bank”).  Das Holzschiff (“The Wooden Ship”) was published in 1949, with a second volume Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn nachdem er 49 Jahre alt geworden war (“The Testament of Gustav Ania Horn written when he was 49 years of age”) following in fast sucession.  An unfinished third volume Epilog was first printed in fragments and posthumously in 1961.  

In the Holzschiff, a vessel sets to sea heavily laden with a mysterious and possibly lethal cargo.  Gustav Anias Horn, the novel’s main character, is a passenger on the vessel called the “Lais”.  Horn is traveling with his betrothed Ellena, the daughter of the ship’s captain.  The so-called Supercargo, the officer on board responsible for loading the freight on the vessel, accompanies Ellena into the Lais’ hold where she vanishes.  Horn searches the vessel and discovers that it contains a labyrinth of secret chambers and passageways.  But there’s no trace of his fiancee. A tempest beleaguers the ship.  Horn breaks into the cargo hold and tears open the crates there.  They turn out to be empty.  But, in the corner of the ship’s hold, he discovers a metal door that is locked.  Horn pries the door open only to be met with a flood of seawater.   The ship sinks and, as it goes down, Horn sees the Lais’ figurehead sucked into the vortex, focusing on the voluptuous thighs of the goddess carved on the prow of the vessel.  Critics detected influences of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad in the story.  Like Moby Dick or The Whale, the novel is reputed to be a somewhat laborious allegory. I can’t find an account of the subject matter of Horn’s testament or the content of the epilogue.

5.

One of Hans Henny Jahnn’s lifelong obsessions was the ancient Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh.  The poem, written on fragmentary tablets incised with cuneiform, exercised a great influence on Germans around the turn of the 20th century.  For instance, Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch lectured the Kaiser in 1902 about the epic and, later, claimed that Gilgamesh as a literary work was purer than the “contaminated” Old Testament, an opinion that mutated into anti-Semitism in the Nazi era.  It’s not surprising that Jahnn spent years imagining adaptations of the ancient work as opera or theater.  In the poem, the great warrior-king Gilgamesh falls in love with the wild man, Enkidu.  (Enkidu has been taught civilization by the erotic arts of a temple prostitute; her embrace causes him to forget the gazelles and other wild creatures with whom he was raised.)  When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh tends to his corpse and won’t allow the body to be buried until a “worm falls out of (the dead man’s) nostril”, a detail that no doubt thrilled Jahnn – a similar motif is dramatized in Pastor Magnus Ephraim when the title character attends to the corpse of the beheaded Jakob.  Gilgamesh, then, ventures into the Underworld to find some elixir to restore his friend and lover to life.  At the end of the epic, Gilgamesh finds a plant that, if eaten, confers immortality.  While traversing the shadowy realms of death, Gilgamesh drops the plant and it is eaten by a snake, thereby dooming Enkidu, and every one of us (yes, you and me as well) to death.

Despite his interest in the poem, then only recently discovered (the so-called “flood tablet” for instance, cognate to text in Genesis was first translated into English in 1880 – and only later into German), Jahnn doesn’t seem to have completed any writings on the subject.  

Jahnn died of complications of a heart-attack on November 29, 1959 in the hospital in Blankenese, a suburb of Hamburg on the Elbe in the northwestern district of the metropolitan area.  The constitution written by Jahnn for his utopia Ugrino prescribes burial rites that must be implemented when a citizen of that republic of arts and letters dies.  Furthermore, the constitution mandates that all those living in Ugrino should design their own caskets and, then, before death, build them.  In accord with these decrees, Jahnn constructed a massive casket with a bronze lid mounted on a box of dense and thick hard-wood. After his body was placed in the sarcophagus, the box was sealed with wax, also a specific decree set forth in the Ugrino by-laws.  

The casket built in conformity with Ugrino precepts turned-out to be immensely heavy.  The burden was so great that the pallbearers had to rest the casket on the earth every three steps.  (In the “talk” annotations to the German Wiki-page on Jahnn, some skeptics claim that the halting progress of the casket to the grave-site was actually in accord with the Ugrino rituals prescribed for burial of the dead – Jahnn’s interment was also accomplished in accord with the Ugrino sacraments for obsequies.) 

Jahnn’s enormous casket was buried in the Nienstedten cemetery.  His body was entombed between the graves of Friedel Harms and his wife, Ellinor Jahnn.