A thinker at Waldemarsudde

I was here, at Prince Eugen's residence on the exquisite Stockholm island of Djurgården, in the course of a gusty but bracing and mostly blue-skied afternoon in early October before the formal business of the Birgit Nilsson Prize. Imagine my feeling of strong serendipity when, a couple of days later, I picked up my copy of Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt - second in my reverse-reading of his great semi-autobiographical novels about the horrors of the Second World War, and it's he who is my subject rather than the Rodin edition in Waldemarsudde's grounds - to find that his first chapter begins here, too. Malaparte described 'a clear September day of almost springlike softness. Autumn was already reddening the old trees of Oakhill'. Don't know what that is in Swedish; I'll make do with a slope in front of the villa, on the left one of several sculptures by the inescapable Carl Milles, whose legendary house and garden elsewhere in Stockholm I meant to blog about but never found the time.

Malaparte gives the names of sundry creatures to the six sections of novelistic reportage around his journalistic time at the Eastern Front and near the Arctic Circle, fraternising uneasily with the supposed enemy: 'The Horses', 'The Mice', 'The Dogs', 'The Birds', 'The Reindeer', 'The Flies'. I'm reminded of the sequences of animals going wild when the protagonist is cast out in Kozintsev's masterly film of King Lear. The connections aren't always instantly apparent, but Part One instantly places its subjects in Chapter One, 'Du côté de Guermantes': Prince Eugen identifies the 'sad, yearning wail' heard across Stockholm's harbour as coming from ' the horses of the Tivoli, the amusement park opposite the Skansen', being led down to a small beach by a girl in a yellow dress.

The sun was setting. For many months I had not seen a sunset. After the long northern summer, after the endless unbroken day without dawn or sunset, the sky at last began to fade above the woods, above the sea and the roofs of the city, and something like a shadow (it was perhaps only the shadow of a shadow) was gathering in the east. Little by little, night was being born, a night loving and delicate, and in the west, the sky was blazing above the woods and the lake, curling itself up within the glow of sunset like an oak leaf in the fragile light of autumn.

Amid the trees of the park, the two statues, Rodin's 'Penseur' and the 'Nike of Samothrace' wrought in excessively white marble [artistic licence, see above] made one think, in an unexpected and peremptory way, of the decadent and Parnassian fin-de-siècle Parisian taste that at Valdermarsudden seemed artificial and uneal against the background of that pale and delicate northern landscape [further licence here, this time on my part, with another Milles bronze in the formal garden and the linseed mill of 1785 in situ].

In the Chinese-box construction of Kaputt, Malaparte uses his conversations with Prince Eugen at Waldemarsudde as a frame for flashbacks to various scenes on Capri with Axel Munthe, in the Ukraine, on the Finnish side of Lake Ladoga. And this last offers the most astonishing literary image in the book. Malaparte would have us believe that the horses of the Soviet artillery, in desperate flight from a forest fire, ran into the lake, which froze on them.

On the following day, when the first ranger patrols, their hair singed, their faces blackened by smoke, cautiously stepped over the warm ashes in the charred forest and reached the lakeshore, a horrible and amazing sight met their eyes. The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses' heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an axe. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice...During the dull days of the endless winter, towards noon, when a little faded light rains from the sky, Colonel Merikallio's soldiers used to go down to the lake and sit on the heads of the horses. They were like wooden horses on a merry-go-round. Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois - turn, turn, good wooden horses. The scene might have been painted by Bosch. The wind through the black skeletons of the trees played a sweet, childish, sad music; the sheet of ice seemed to turn, as the horses of that macabre merry-go-round tossing their manes would curve to the sad tune of the sweet childish music.

Natually I went online in search of photographs of this extraordinary event. I should have known from my reading of Malaparte's The Skin: none exists of the catastrophe described. What I did find was a still from a Canadian film clearly indebted to the novelistic treatment of this phenomenon, which makes me want to see the work of  Guy Maddin in what he calls a 'docu-fantasia', My Winnipeg. His horses have escaped from a burning racetrack to the Red River.

The line between truth and fiction is more than usually blurred in Malaparte's work, as I found out reading The Skin, or more specifically the surrounding essays giving background. And here, in an afterword by Dan Hofstadter, I learned things I'd rather not know. Such as, for example, that Malaparte's distaste at hobnobbing with the banality of evil in the shape of Reichsminister Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland, meetings which govern the shape of his novel's second part just as Prince Eugene is the connecting thread of the first, may have been real, but his attitude to Frank originally had a very different slant. The original draft, according to Lino Pellegrini, praised Frank to the skies when it seemed that Germany would win the war; 'later, seeing how the wind was blowing, Malaparte rewrote the manuscript'. He was not present at the Iasi pogrom, which he describes so vividly and horrifyingly; he did not see for himself the ghettos of Poland.

Perversely, I'm still not convinced by Hofstadter's detonation. I want to know more. The books burst with a sense of savage indignation that can't be faked. Malaparte may have been an opportunist, but he was also a profound artist. Unfortunately, given the nature of the hybrid form, it's not entirely enough to say that art is one thing, life another.

What he leaves us in no doubt of is the scarring-for-life nature of the horrors he witnessed, and nobody sets them before us with a greater strangeness of literary style. How Kurt Vonnegut dealt with his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden - or not, since he was walled up in the depths of Slaughterhouse Five while the firestorm swept through the streets above him - is cause for amazement of quite a different sort. Here the language is not florid and evasive but short and sharp in its irony and matter of factness. I've just read Charles J Shields' very readable biography of the great man, and I sense that it doesn't take into sufficient account the shaping effect of this trauma - Vonnegut was set to shovelling charred corpses in the aftermath - on an ambivalent personality.

His famous motto, or - let's not get the two confused - that of a key character, 'Dammit, you've got to be kind', was not always carried out in practice, least of all on those who ought to have been his nearest and dearest. But that's the human condition for you: which of us has always lived up to our ideals? Milton's seminal line on Satan in Paradise Lost, 'comprehending the good, but powerless to be it', surely applies to most of us. It's an upsetting mystery how the hell Vonnegut ended up in a second marriage with a careerist piranha whom nobody quoted in the book seems to have liked (and the first Mrs Vonnegut, Jane Cox, who strikes me as both brilliant and profoundly supportive, would have been relatively fine about it if he'd taken up with an earlier long-term mistress whose humanity she didn't doubt).

The book left me feeling very heavy, above all because Vonnegut seemed so miserable in his personal circumstances during the years leading up to his death. But the artist's life's his work, and there he made so many others happy and decisive. I was going to add a few lines about his son Mark's second book, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, but I ended up disliking this in many ways admirable man as I never quite could Vonnegut himself, so all the wisdom I thought I'd imbibed went up in smoke - unfair, perhaps, but there it is.

Another book both bitter and sweet, on a less cosmic scale than Malaparte's epics, perhaps, but no less resonant, and relevant here because of the past's effect on the present, is Maxim Leo's Red Love: The Story of an East German Family. Translated (superbly, I'd guess) from the German by Shaun Whiteside, Leo's history is essentially that of five people. There's the author himself, growing up in the crumbling East German system only to feel oddly bereft of a country when the Wall comes down, at least for a while. His parents, a rather beautiful couple if not without their troubles, are the wistful Anne who wants to believe in the system and how it can be changed from within and handsome artist Wolf, the eternal rebel who ends up being a man without a cause. And then, central to the book in every way, there are the two grandfathers: Anne's father Gerhard and Wolf's father Werner.

Gerhard's life seems like a screenplay, a story of unbelievable courage and integrity ultimately betrayed by a system. Max takes his days in the French resistance from Gerhard's own writings, which read like an adventure story too astonishing to be true, one you could film almost unfilletted; and yet since he seems to have been a man of total truthfulness, one could hardly impugn his veracity. The son of a courageous Jewish father, he escaped to Paris, then had extraordinary adventures and narrow escapes as a fearless youth plunging headlong into his work with the French resistance. Werner, on the other hand, seems like a feather for each wind that blows - a kind of Everyman, I suppose, with unbelievable luck. He adapts to Nazi ideology and the world of the GDR equally well, if not without repression and retribution. Having given us the two stories, Leo links them eloquently:

I think that for both my grandfathers the GDR was a kind of dreamland, in which they could forget all the depressing things that had gone before. It was a new start, a chance to begin all over again. The persecution, the war, the imprisonment, all the terrible things that Gerhard and Werner had been through, could be buried under that huge pile of the past. From now on all that mattered was the future. And trauma turned to dream. The idea of building an anti-fascist state had a beneficial effect on both of them. Gerhard could devote himself to the illusion that GDR citizens were very different Germans from the ones that had once driven his family out of the country. And Werner could act as if he had always believed in Socialism. All wounds, all mistakes were forgotten and forgiven if you were willing to become part of this new society.

New faith for old suffering: that was the ideal behind the foundation of the GDR.

That is the explanation for the unbounded loyalty with which Gerhard and Werner were bound to that country until the bitter end. They could never unmask the great dream as a great lie because the lie they needed to live would have been exposed at the same time.

And their children? They were hurled into their fathers' dreamlands, and had to dream along whether they wanted to or not. They didn't know that founding ideal. And because they had nothing to overcome, nothing to hide, they found faith difficult too. They saw the poverty, he lies, the claustrophobia, the suspicion. And they heard their fathers' phrases as they raved about the future. Much of the power and the euphoria had gone. And the grandchildren? They were glad when it was all over. They didn't even have a guilty conscience at kicking the state. What did I get from the great dream? Small-minded prohibitions, petty principles and jeans that looked like elongated Youth Front shirts. The energy of the state had been used up in three generations. The GDR remained the country of old men, of the founding fathers, and their logic no longer made sense to anybody.

There you have it; I hope the passage was worth quoting in full. The troubles of the fathers invade the hopes of their children, and children's children, more than we like to think. Inherited disposition to depression, for instance, may be a myth: was it not because my grandfather was an invalid for the last 24 years of his life, after his mustard-gas poisoning in World War One, that my father succumbed to invalidism in his late 50s, during five crucial years of my development, leaving me to deal with my own improperly unleashed demons in mid-life, too? But this is another argument altogether, for which all I recommend is that you read Darian Leader's superb little study Strictly Bipolar. And so it goes...

Which is why I should take us out of the woods of melancholy Waldemarsudde, round the bay on the south (above and below), which was always my intention to complement the north-side routes we took to and from the fabulous Thielska Galleriet in the early spring.

and in to the fruitful heart of Djurgården. Large co-operatives grow fruit and vegetables in a huge clear space in the centre of the island where the sunflowers still grew

and autumn was in the leaves but not in the light

while vines and lavender were still themselves close to the pavilion.

Now we head into the depths of winter, but bright, cold days like today can still lift the spirit. Nature is merely conserving its energy, not dead. Of course you knew that, but I find it comforting to remind myself.

Moralists adrift: Kästner and Walser

I was going to put 'idealists' but strictly speaking while Swiss genius Robert Walser's alter ego, the sublimely detached Simon Tanner in his 1906 novel about the siblings of that name, fits the bill, Erich Kästner's advertising copywriter Jacob Fabian, more or less alone in 1930s Berlin, tends rather to an ironic pessimism. I read the novels in quick albeit unhistoric succession, finding as many correspondences as differences.

Their styles could not be more different. As as you'd expect from the author of Emil and the Detectives, the prose of Kästner's Going to the Dogs (published in the original German as Fabian: The Story of a Moralist) is laconic and ironic. Walser's unique, unbearable lightness is expressed in lyric flights of fancy and long speeches in which the bizarre characters think aloud, stream-of-consciousness wise. I bought The Tanners, incidentally, partly on what my blogging friend Susan Scheid has written about Walser's microscripts, partly because the introduction was written by the late, great W G Sebald, whose seemingly free-flowing style takes a cue from Walser and who characteristically includes plenty of intriguing photographs as in his bigger works.

Both provide equally fascinating portraits of their times. Tanner's novel is very difficult to date, for a while at least - and since my edition didn't give the publication year, I was guessing for some time. It's the poetic descriptions of summer evenings in the city with big-hatted, long-dressed women drifting along, that suggest fin-de-siecle pictures of Edwardian ladies. I'm especially thinking, though the background scenes are completely different, of the Skagen painters in northern Denmark, not least Peter Severin Krøyer in his Summer evening on the Skagen southern beach with Anna Anker and Marie Krøyer.

The lightness I mention is also, of course, an evasion. One senses that Simon Tanner can't go on for ever, moving on from job to job until he ends up in a charitable copywriting institution which doesn't even pay his rent (a dea ex machina hovers at the end). He seems to remain, like Mark Tapley in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, jolly in unpromising circumstances, but the sands of time are running out. As they did for Tanner, who spent decades in a mental asylum, soon restored, it seems, to health but refusing to leave. His death is as uncannily anticipated in The Tanners as was Pushkin's by the killing of callow young poet Vladimir Lensky by Eugene Onegin in a senseless duel.

In short, Walser went out for one of his walks from the asylum, this time in the snow of Christmas Day 1956, and was found dead of a heart attack, lying there, captured thus by a photograph which has been much reproduced and turned into art. Just so, on one of his many mountain ascents, Simon discovers the poet Sebastian. 'Looking at him, one couldn't help feeling he hadn't been strong enough for life and its cold demands'. And in his self-communing eulogy, he declares:

What splendid peace: reposing and growing stiff beneath fir branches in the snow. You couldn't have chosen anything better. People tend to inflict harm upon eccentrics - and this is what you were - and then laugh at their pain. Give my greetings to the dear, silent, dead beneath the earth and don't get too badly scorched in the eternal fires of nonexistence...Farewell. If I had flowers, I'd strew them over you. For a poet one never has flowers enough...I cannot know what you have suffered. Your death beneath the open stars is beautiful. I shall not soon forget it. 

There's another surprising death of a friend in Going to the Dogs. Not to mention a shockingly abrupt ending. But the actions of hero Fabian, faced with even more desperate employment prospects in post-1929 Berlin, have such a daily beauty about them. It's a picaresque ramble round the clubs, brothels, offices and private rooms of the city, knitted together symphonically in the kind of dream-sequence also favoured in Emil and told from a perspective which, even if this weren't such fine literature, would be more valuable as insider documentation than, say, Isherwood's novellas (and Going to the Dogs doesn't even have the benefit of hindsight; it was published in 1931, not long after Emil). So, of course, are those in the novels of Hans Fallada, but I sense an even greater all-round candour here. Sex is portrayed realistically, sometimes comically, perversions accepted without censure; political idealism is dismissed by Fabian, apologising to a friend who wants to initiate a 'radical bourgeois pressure group' among the young for

not believing that you can ever make reason and power lie down together. Here you have, unfortunately, an antinomy. My conviction is that there are only two alternatives for mankind in its present state. Either mankind is dissatisfied with its lot, and then we bash each other over the head to improve things, or, and this is a purely hypothetical situation, we are content with ourselves and the universe, and then we commit suicide out of sheer boredom. The result is the same. What use is the most perfect system as long as people remain a lot of swine?

Nevertheless Kästner did have a blueprint for 'the triumph of decency' and human change, and he was still around for the post-1945 West German government to take some notice. He campaigned for peace and on anti-nuclear issues up to his death in 1974. A Mensch indeed, and nothing sums up him or his writing for adults - which essentially is the same as that for children - better than this passage. Fabian has just seen his mother off on the train back to the provincial town where he grew up, and returns to his flat.

There were flowers on the table, and a letter. He opened it. A twenty-mark note dropped out, and a scrap of paper. 'A little present. Love. Mother,' was written on it. There was something else at the bottom of the sheet: 'Eat the cutlet first. The sausage will keep for some days in grease-proof paper.'

He put the twenty-mark note in his pocket. There was his mother in the train; very soon she would find the twenty-mark note he had slipped into her handbag. Mathematically considered, the result equalled nothing. For both were now as poor as they had been before. But good deeds are beyond book-keeping. The moral and the arithmetical equations work out differently.

Three Emils

Erich Kästner's 1928 masterpiece for juniors Emil and the Detectives wastn't on the radar in my own childhood, though so many contemporaries remember reading it and wanting to be one of the 100 Berlin boys who pursue crook Grundeis through the city streets (in much the same way, I imagine, as I so wanted to be one of Fagin's boys after seeing the musical film Oliver! and dreaming about that sequence where they cross the rickety 'bridge' singing 'We'll be back soon'). I think I'd heard the title, but it was only reading John Bridcut's Britten's Children and especially the nine pages he devotes to the 19-year-old composer's obsession that made me curious to see the 1931 film directed by Gerhard Lamprecht, with a screenplay by Billy (then still Billie) Wilder and an uncredited contribution by Emeric Pressburger.

Even that had to wait until I ordered up the BFI special edition and we watched it yesterday night, two days after going to see the joyous National Theatre adaptation by Carl Miller and directed by Bijan Sheibani. I was lucky enough to be allocated that to review by The Arts Desk, and felt a good deal more generously disposed towards it than some of the carpers.

Two write from lack of knowledge of the book (which I was sure to buy a copy of while I was there and read it later that evening). No, Michael Coveney, Kästner's original has no dark undertow (though the film certainly has in Fritz Rasp's rather alarming portrayal of the villainous Grundeis, The Man in the Bowler Hat). And it's no surprise to find the odiously opinionated Quentin Letts - whose one-star reviews always guarantee an adventurous show worth seeing, though he grudged this one three - vilifying the social commentary. 'The show's programme drones on about how Emil's single-parent mum is poor' (a reference to the excellent article by Miller on Kästner's relationship with his own troubled mother). 'Oh poverty, woe, alack. Yet all I remember from boyhood is that this was a ripping yarn'. NT production photo, like the third of the leads, by Marc Brenner - this one featuring Naomi Frederick as Ida and one of the three Emils, Daniel Patten.

Would it have hurt Letts to read again? One of the most charming things about the book is that some of Walter Trier's classic, indispensible illustrations have extra texts by Kästner underneath. The one below the drawing of Emil's mum Ida Tischbein washing a neighbour's hair runs:

Emil's father was a master plumber, but he died when Emil was five. So his mother became a hairdresser, trimming, washing and setting the hair of all the mothers and girls in her neighbourhood. She has to do all the housework as well, of course, and the washing and cooking. She is very fond of Emil and glad she can earn enough money for them both. Sometimes she sings lively songs. Sometimes she's ill. Then Emil does the cooking. He can fry eggs, and steak and onions too.

Kästner has a light touch with the social commentary, and usually lets actions speak louder than explanations, but here's one more observation he makes in the story proper:

You may possibly be thinking that this is a lot of fuss to make about seven pounds [140 marks in the original; the NT programme helpfully tells us that this would be about £360 today]. Well, perhaps it is, and people who earn a hundred or a thousand pounds a month certainly would not think twice about spending that amount. But, believe me, most people earn a great deal less than that, and to anyone who earns, say, thirty-five shillings a week, seven pounds seems a great deal of money to have saved. Plenty of people would think themselves millionaires if they had five pounds to spend, and in their wildest dreams could not imagine anyone actually possessing a million pounds.

It seems that for Mr Letts, the reverse is true: he simply thinks that poverty is the stuff of fiction (you ask what on earth I was doing reading the Daily Mail. The answer is that I was at my ma's for a night and a day on her emerging from hospital - praise be - and now that she's not dependent on me taking that loathsome rag to her - I flatly refuse to buy it - she's back to it again. And what a horror yesterday's edition was, with Jan Moir telling the woman who wants her dead husband's child that she shouldn't, an 'open letter' from the film critic to Daniel Radcliffe advising him to stop seeking out 'sordid' roles and a 'before and after' picture nonsense about the beauteous Nigella Lawson, making out that on day two of the admittedly rather compelling trial she's stressed and tired because she's caught with eyes and mouth downcast).

Anyway, enough of all that rubbish. I'd say that the play version is simply a third telling very different from the book and the film - which of course are already different from each other. The film creeps us out with Grundeis' leering, sinister behaviour on the train - no wonder Rolf Wenkhaus's Emil looks so stricken.

As he is right to be - good gracious, drugged sweets inducing a trippy dream (with brilliant special effects for 1931, which, remember, is very early on in the history of the Talkies). But the Berlin in which Emil wakes up is a lively rather than a scary place. Lamprecht was an experienced recorder of street life, and it shows. And of course all this has both charm and horror, when you think of how this everyday life was so shortly to be decimated. Other books by Kästner, a pacifist and freedom fighter, were burned in 1933, and though proscribed by the Nazis he stayed on in Berlin until the end of the war, moved to Munich and died in 1974. Clearly many more are in need of translation, above all his childhood autobiography and the ecologically-minded Animals' Conference outlined in this blog entry.

Young Wenkhaus was shot down on a German bomber expedition off the coast of Donegal in 1942. It's also heartbreaking to learn that Hans Albrecht Löhr, the nine-year-old playing 'little Tuesday', a character so many kids identified with during rehearsals for the play, died that same year on the Eastern Front at Saplatino. His mother Lotte went to see the first post-war performance of Emil at Berlin's Metropol - her son had been in the 1930 stage premiere, too - and wrote a rather moving letter to Kästner on his 64th birthday.

Lotte Löhr was, happily, incorrect in her assumption in the letter that all the other children had been killed in the war. Just a few weathered the storm.  Hans Richter, the funniest kid of the lot, 'The Flying Stag' (the freckly one on the right below) who delivers his message to Emil's granny with the utmost sense of self-mportance, appeared in more than 130 films before his retirement in 1984.

Inga Landgut, charming Pony Hütchen (also pictured above with Emil and Olga Engl's Granny) - who, alas, seems destined for the housewife's kitchen rather than the emancipated life promised in the National Theatre's much more girl-friendly version  - had as long a career as Richter if a less prolific one.

Ultimately, the film's tone and touch remain light (I'm not sure I'd read much other than suspense into the scene where Emil hides under the villain's hotel bed, though Bridcut does). Amazingly, it was copied action for action, with the same musical soundtrack but a Kent/London setting, in the 1935 English film, which I've yet to see on the BFI DVD - let's give it another week before making too much of a good thing. Meanwhile, long may the NT Emil run. It's a perfect seasonal treat for kids of all ages.

Strindberg in Friedrichshagen

Since I went to see and write about Dances of Death, Howard Brenton's Strindberg adaptation at the Gate Theatre Notting Hill, the peculiar Swedish master - self-photographed above circa 1892* - has been popping up in various contexts. The first was musical, which I'll relate as a listenable footnote. The second was to find that he'd once, very briefly, stayed in a house virtually at the bottom of the garden owned and so beautifully tended by our Berlin-based friend and soprano extraordinaire Debbie along with husband Derek whom we've yet to meet (he was off working on the Ring in Milan).

Friedrichshagen, founded as its name suggests by Frederick the Great in 1753 to encourage cotton spinners from Silesia and Bohemia by giving them five-window houses with plots of land and planting lots of mulberry trees, was merged into Berlin in 1920, but still feels like a place apart, surrounded by woods and water. That's especially the case when you reach the end of Bölschestrasse (named after natural history writer Wilhelm Bölsche, central figure of the 'Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis'), take a left turn by what was once Berlin's biggest private brewery and the Müggelsee, Berlin's biggest lake in and out of which flows the River Spree, lies before you.

As I can think of few things more delicious than lake bathing, I was determined to take a dip in the Müggelsee on the evening of the most delightful birthday I can remember. The mosquitos had to be braved, but there was no problem about freezing water; the temperature, once in, turned out to be just right. The below shot's just about distant enough to pass muster for public consumption. You will note that I am not in the buff, as was the wont of Rudolf Steiner, another distinguished Friedrichshagen resident who arrived there in 1897 and walked around the lake starkers. The Germans still think nothing of it.

Strindberg came here in the autumn of 1892, taking the S-Bahn just as we did from Friedrichstrasse (in our case after a disappointing Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle performance of Britten's War Requiem, which was after all only an optional extra in the little holiday shared between Berlin and Dresden). The old, 'zerissene Berlin' map which hangs above the sofa in Debbie and Derek's biggest room shows you how far out Friedrichshagen was, and is, from the centre. It's defined here by its nearest neighbour, the similarly left-wing, free-spirited Köpenick where residents put up such a brave and, of course, fatal resistance to Hitler.

Strindberg lodged with fellow-writers Ola Hansson and his German-Baltic wife Laura Marholm at 2 Lindenallée. 'My boldest hopes exceeded here!' he wrote home, noting 'a little more air under my wings now I have a bigger fatherland than frightful Sweden'. Berlin lionized him and his plays, but personal relationships were as fragile as ever: after six weeks, surprise, surprise, he fell out with the Hanssons and moved on, holding court at an ordinary pub he called 'Zum schwarzen Ferkel' ('At the Black Porker'). The home at Lindenallée, however, handsomely restored after the fall of the wall, is the only Strindberg residence in Berlin to have survived the bombings of the Second World War, so this plaque is to be treasured.

I'm indebted for much of the above information, incidentally, to a book full of the most beautifully reproduced images - was there ever a more  photographed turn-of-the-century artist than Strindberg? - given to us by Swedish friend Carl Otto, The Worlds of August Strindberg. The pictures of productions at the Intimate Theatre in the early 1900s are especially startling, and the text is full of salacious new details.

At our household on Fürstenwalder Damm, all was exceptionally natural and harmonious. How could it not be, spending most of the birthday as we did in the garden surrounded by peonies

irises

and Johnson's Blue geraniums in full bee-adored midsummer glory.

Here's a shot towards the house, a massive project bought for a song - and as much for the garden as anything - which can be a little spooky when you're living on floors between ghosts. Very forbidding from the main road, but not at all from the haven at the back. And so much light, too.

Table decorations newly gathered for the day, my only duty, were a necessity

and then our guests arrived: the famous Wanderer (strictly speaking lower-case 'w'), Australian blog-ally and now very real friend along with partner Kim, who had ferried us to Dresden and back, and in whose company we spent three very happy days, and Debbie's UNESCO friend Annie. I have some lovely portrait shots, but they'd be out of place here, so let's make do with a distant shot from the stairwell of the big house:

Sustenance was simple** but of the essence and absolutely fresh: white asparagus, potatoes, salad from the garden, later strawberries, cherries and cakes from one of no less than three quality bakers on the main street. The Oz-men departed for their dose of War Requiem - their later verdict was much the same as mine the previous evening - and our dear Orfeuo, who has just started work in Berlin, arrived in time for our evening jaunt around the Müggelsee.

Bliss. Even the few mosquito bites I'm trying not to scratch are pleasant souvenirs. And now, back to Strindberg's married bloodsuckers and their favourite music, though it hardly suggests more than a little genteel barbarity. We have a vivid report from the director of the Intimate Theatre, August Falck, of Strindberg acting out the role of the Captain in The Dance of Death (to give its original title):

What he particularly liked to act  was the powerful scene when Alice [the wife in the nearly 30 year old central relationship], with a bored expression, plays the march 'The Dance of the Boyars' [sic] which incites and hypnotises the Captain [her husband] to dance - wildly and clumsily, terrifyingly. At such moments he was an excellent actor - a great dramatic talent. His vivid impersonation remains for ever in my mind's eye and echoes in my ear.

I found this in the Michael Meyer biography only a day after I'd been working on notes for an EMI 13-CD box of performances by the late, great Paavo Berglund. And I'd been especially struck by a work I'd never heard before, Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen's Entry March of the Boyars. Inspired by a visit to Romania, Halvorsen's encore-worthy number was also arranged for piano by Grieg.

This is the piece to which Falck refers. Strindberg felt it was integral to any production, though the fact that there's no music at all in the Gate Dances of Death, only handclapping and footstomping, is perhaps even more effective. Berglund's performance isn't on YouTube, but the below one from Iceland will do. Entry March of the Boyars is halfway to being Wild Rumpus music for Where the Wild Things Are - though nothing will replace the favourite I play alongside readings to infants, the Dance of Chuzhbog and the Seven Monsters from Prokofiev's Scythian Suite.

*very proto-Expressionistic, isn't it? But then little about Berlin in the 1920s, the era seized on for the image of Weimar decadence, wasn't happening in the 1890s. Strindberg visited a gay dance bar and wrote about it with extreme distaste (probably because he was a bit of a closet case).

**somewhat indignantly, J reminds me that this was his first attempt at making a far from simple Hollandaise sauce for the asparagus, so under the cosh I add - albeit sincerely - that it was delicious.

Hard times for the little man

Germany in 1932 is both the setting and the place/time for the writing of Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now?, but the artistically enhanced realism depicting a rather nice young couple trying to make ends meet while the economy crashes around them rings alarm bells today (and no doubt always has since then, in some parts of the world). Unemployment had risen since 1929 from 1.4 million to 6 million, wages had fallen by 50 per cent and social welfare was in tatters, a bureaucratic system made it difficult if not impossible for the poor to claim their dues - and Hitler was poised to take power, most plausible (for some) of a bad bunch of politicians.


All photos of 1932 here courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, which has a huge selection on Wikimedia Commons. The writing on the wall in the tenement shot up top, between the Nazi and communist flags, reads 'first food, then rent' - a slight ringing of the changes on Brecht's 'erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral' ('first comes a full stomach, then come ethics').


Not that you'd really be aware of the ultimate stormcloud about to burst in 1933 from the little world of Fallada's novel, apart from the presence of the odd Nazi in various institutions. The focus is on the personal realm in which the novel's hero, Pinneberg, and his adorable young wife Lammchen (no umlaut in the English translation), almost exclusively exist, though her backbone seems to come from a politically committed family. Quickly recovering from the news that Lammchen's pregnant, they marry and move to Berlin to lodge - at a cost - with Pinneberg's louche mother, soon find they have to flee to more secluded lodging, and depend on the young man's job as a very good salesman in a department store. The couple will have to mind every mark - it's no mere social documentation that Lammchen draws up a meticulous sheet of expenses - even if they want something as basic as an evening out (though they do go to the cinema, and see a film that's anything but escapist).


Emma Pinneberg, sweet-natured Lammchen, is one of the most plausible good characters in any novel, with a core of steel and an unassailable sense of what's just and fair. Her husband is more complex, if not necessarily more interesting, and many of the most striking passages in the novel deal with his sense of, and sensitivity to, the insecurity of his position. There's a troubling early scene where the doting husband, having just got a job thanks to the string-pulling of his mother's dodgy lover, stands in a desolate autumnal Kleine Tiergarten among the unemployed waiting for they know not what.


Externally, he didn't belong to them, his outer shell was smart. He was wearing the reddish-brown winter ulster that Bergmann [his previous employer in a provincial town] had let him have for thirty-eight marks, and the hard black hat, also one of Bergmann's, no longer completely in fashion, the brim's too wide, so shall we say three marks twenty, Pinneberg?

Externally, then, Pinneberg did not belong to the unemployed, but internally...

He had just been to see Lehmann, the head of Personnel at Mandel's department store; he had gone to get a job and he'd got one, it was a simple commercial transaction. But as a result of this transaction Pinneberg had the feeling, despite the fact that he was to become a wage-earner again, that he was much closer to these non-earners than to people who earned a great deal. He was one of them, any day he could find himself standing here among them, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had no protection.

He was one of millions. Ministers made speeches to him, enjoined him to tighten his belt, to make sacrifices, to feel German, to put his money in the savings-bank and to vote for the constitutional party.

Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't, according to the circumstances, but he didn't beliecve what they said. Not in the least. His innermost conviction was: they all want something from me, but not for me. It's all the same whether I live or die. They couldn't care less whether I can afford to go to the cinema or not, whether Lammchen can get proper food or has too much excitement, whether the Shrimp [the child they're expecting] is happy or miserable. Nobody gives a damn.

And all these people standing around in the Little Tiergarten, and a real zoo it was, full of proletarian animals rendered harmless by lack of food and lack of hope, they shared the same fate. Three months' unemployment and - goodbye, reddish-brown overcoat! Goodbye to any prospects for the future! Jachmann [his mother's lover] and Lehmann could have a quarrel on Wednesday evening and suddenly I'll be worthless again.

Despite the hopeless tone here, and the notion that you carry the seeds of your own failure if you perceive it despondently from the start, there's some humour throughout. Not least when Pinneberg's distinguished fellow-salesman takes him along to a naturist evening at a local baths and, in a marvellous tragicomic scene, he has a melancholy conversation with a stocky Jewish middle-aged lady who sadly and matter-of-factly tells him of the daily abuse she faces. The scenes of Pinneberg's anxiety when Lammchen stumbles to hospital to give birth and the awkward domesticity with the Shrimp are charming, too.


As is Lammchen, always - real enough not to be too good to be true.

Fallada must have drawn all this from a life which had even more severe problems that Pinneberg's, though it seems he was never on the breadline in the same way. I can imagine this would make a marvellous TV adaptation, as it's mostly dialogue. There was indeed a 1934 American film starring Margaret Sullavan, which I'd love to see, even though I imagine it must be compromised in some details.


That as much as anything, due to its Jewish artistic team, counted against Fallada in the eyes of the Nazi regime. And then, of course, we have the terrifying but always human picture of Alone in Berlin. This author is one of the greats, Tolstoyan in the way that seemingly unsympathetic characters become more likeable when you least expect it. Ultimately it's the humanity of the central couple and the way they face their vicissitudes - or, in Pinneberg's case, don't always face them - that makes Little Man, What Now? unique.