Reading Claudius

CHAPTER ONE

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Arrival in Prague

Summer 1933

Liese Florsheim was nineteen years old when she first met the Heller brothers on the shores of the Alaunsee, a lake nestled among the wooded hills of the Czechoslovakian countryside. It was late June 1933, just weeks after Liese had arrived in Prague alone. She spoke not a single word of Czech and knew no one in the country, yet her parents believed that Czechoslovakia, known throughout Europe for its benevolence toward refugees, was the best place for her until life in Germany returned to normal.

She entered the city alongside thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler in Germany and moved into the Msec Castle, a fortresslike building being used as temporary housing for refugees. Soon she found a student room in an old stone building in Prague’s Staré Mesto (the Old City). Across the hall lived a second-­year medical student, Franta Kraus, whose fluent German made him a perfect guide to the city and to nearby Charles University, where she planned to enroll as a medical student that fall. A friend of the Hellers’ since childhood, Franta invited Liese to join him and his girlfriend, Eva Hirsch, for a swimming outing with the Heller boys and other friends.

Liese had changed into her skirted swimming suit and was lying on a towel in the warm sand, immersed in a book, by the time the others arrived at the lake—­Franz Gollan and his girlfriend, Edith Abeles, Hans Posner, Paul Schülle, and Tomas Berman. She felt very much the outsider among this close-­knit group of Czech students, whose families lived in the sleepy towns surrounding Prague and were part of the young nation’s flourishing Jewish community. Most of them were bilingual; some, because of the lingering influence of the Hapsburg monarchy, had grown up more fluent in German than in Czech. Liese was relieved that they didn’t ask many questions about the situation in Germany, instead showing their concern with their eyes and warm handshakes.

Soon Paul Heller arrived at the lake, winding his way toward them through the dense beach grass at the edge of the sand, wet reeds clinging to his legs and the straps of his sandals. He was a sturdy, gentle-­faced boy with gray-­green eyes and black hair combed straight back, in the style of the times, revealing shiny peaks and valleys of comb marks. He had a scattering of pimples and summer freckles on his sunburned nose, making him look younger than his eighteen years. Liese noticed his hesitation when he shook her hand, the shy tilt of his head as he took off his glasses. Erich would be late, Paul told the group apologetically, as if he assumed it was his brother’s arrival that they more eagerly awaited. As usual, Erich had stayed up late the night before, writing, and was still asleep, he said.

“The task of morning sleep requires all Erich Heller’s best energies, Liese,” Franta explained as he, Eva, and Hans climbed into one of the shiny green rowboats tied to the nearby dock. “The man goes to bed with the dawn chorus, but it never seems to do him the least bit of harm.”

Liese wondered about this absent fellow who, even before his arrival, seemed to command so much attention.

Paul headed for the water by himself, swimming across the lake and back before placing himself on his towel on the sand near Liese. Out of his rucksack he pulled a tin of bilberries, a thermos, and a volume of Thomas Mann stories, its pages pulling loose from the cardboard binding. Mann was all the rage among young people.

“I have the same edition,” Liese told him, glancing up. “The pages are falling out of mine, too. Such a thin cover. But it’s light and good for travel.”

“Tonio Kröger just came out in leather,” Paul said, an excited grin filling his face as he dried off his glasses and replaced them on his nose. “You can buy it with its own oak slipcase. Too beautiful to bring to a picnic, though!”

“Do you have a favorite?” Liese asked, sitting up and wrapping her arms around her knees. She was full-­breasted and slim, with dark, wildly curly hair and intent brown eyes that shimmered when something interested her, a quality that gave a sense of something tender in her personality, something inviting.

“Depends on my mood,” Paul said. “But really, I suppose, it’s always been Tonio Kröger. Maybe because I read it first. I remember thinking then . . . Well, you come away thinking that you haven’t really lived yet. There is all this life to live!” Paul’s neck and face reddened.

“It’s impossible to read Tonio Kröger without thinking Mann wrote it just for you. I mean, me,” Liese said, and they both laughed.

When the rowers returned, they spread out an immense picnic—­salami, rolls, bottles of wine, chestnuts, strawberries, Paul’s bilberries, chocolate (Liese’s contribution), even bananas, a rarity. Franz Gollan began to whistle a tune from a Hofmanns­thal operetta while balancing a chesnut on his nose.

Paul wanted to ask Liese more questions, to talk about other Mann stories, about the Tolstoy she was reading. He wanted to tell her she’d just missed Prague’s spring lilacs, which blossomed into more colors than anywhere else in the world. He wanted to recite to her the poem that had been in his head as he swam. This happened to him often—­a nonsense poem would enter his head, a Christian Morgenstern or a Joachim Ringelnatz—­and wouldn’t leave until he recited it out loud. This time it was Morgenstern’s “The Picket Fence.”

One time there was a picket fence

With space to gaze from hence to thence.

An architect who saw this sight

Approached it suddenly one night,

Removed the spaces from the fence,

And built of them a residence.

The picket fence stood there dumbfounded

With pickets wholly unsurrounded,

A view so loathsome and obscene,

The Senate had to intervene.

The architect, however, flew

To Afri-­ or Americoo.

“Hence to thence” was Paul’s newest favorite line with which to tease himself about his incessant need to carefully plan his future. “Hence to thence, Paul! But focus more on hence than thence!”

Erich Heller arrived soon, a tall, slender, startlingly handsome figure in a rumpled shirt and long striped swimming shorts under his open robe. His light brown hair was tousled from sleep. He couldn’t stay long, he announced immediately, glancing at his wristwatch, for he was expected at a party in Prague and had to catch the six o’clock train. He took off his robe and shirt and bounded into the water before joining their feast.

“Unbedante Weise,” he said to Liese, shaking her hand. All my very best to you, though I do not yet know you. Liese watched him as he shook the water from his hair and laid his towel in the warm sand beside her and Paul. She listened to his rapid-­fire stories and his opinions about literature and history, which she thought showed a remarkable command of whatever subject he touched upon. He had spent much of the night before, he announced, working on an essay about Goethe, the poet he loved above all others. He felt that suddenly, that very night, he’d recognized in Goethe’s work what no one else ever had.

“Oh, Erich Heller, don’t show off! There’s nobody here who will take notice!” said Edith.

“No, I’m entirely serious. Goethe did not comprehend his own history!” Erich said, jumping to his feet, sandwich in one hand and paper cup of wine in the other. “He would not admit to his own despair at the tragedy of Germany. Do you not see? While he foresaw the fragmentation . . .” No, this was not the word he meant. He paused, staring at the sand. “Breakdown!” He seemed to revel in this retrieval. “Breakdown! The breakdown of German culture. Do you see? Do you not see that Goethe refused to recognize this tragedy? His optimistic heart simply could not accept it. He was accused of aloofness from politics, but his only choice, if he wanted to be a poet, was to identify completely with his own inner order. Does this not sound like a lesson for us?” Erich asked, his gaze fixed dreamily on the steep wooded hills across the lake.

Turning back to his friends, he offered a toast to the lake, then another to Liese. “To our new acquaintance from Frankfurt! To optimism amid tragedy!” After polishing off his wine, he collapsed on his back, stretching his arms out in the sand.

“To the lake and to Liese!” the others added, raising their cups toward her, coaxing a smile to her face as she sat, transfixed by their sense of celebration.

“What should the lesson from Goethe be?” Edith asked Erich as she replenished everyone’s paper cup, then pulled him up to a sitting position, falling back into the sand herself. “You left that part out. That we should all aspire to his inner order?”

“No one should aspire to anyone else’s inner order!” He tossed a grape at his friend and lit a cigarette. “For him to create, he couldn’t accept the idea of evil. He could write his poetry, his plays, only because on some level he refused to let himself comprehend real evil. I mean, look at his Mephistopheles in Faust. In Goethe’s hands, even the devil himself was nothing but a fool.”

“No one in his right mind comprehends evil,” Hans said. “Goethe’s not alone in that.”

“To the incomprehensibility of evil and to Goethe’s inner order!” Franz said, and they raised their cups again.

“But I only mean we should keep reading him,” Erich said. “Even as Hitler now claims him as his. We can’t let Hitler have him! But this is self-­evident! What would Tante Ida say, Pauli?” Erich asked, turning to his brother, who’d taken off his shirt and glasses and was heading off for another swim.

“ ‘Life is a mess!’ ” Paul called back in a perfect imitation of their late father’s oldest sister, the Heller family matriarch.

“And then she would scold me for wearing fürs schlechtere [messy clothing] to the beach when I meet such an elegant stranger,” Erich said, turning to Liese.

“To Tante Ida!” said Franta. “And to finishing off the wine right here and now.”

As they sat on the beach through the afternoon, debating politics, books, the best way to peel a chestnut, Liese felt the first shiver of joy she’d known in months. It surprised her. So this was what it was like to be in Czechoslovakia. A line from a Matthias Claudius poem her mother used to recite to her at bedtime came into her head: Where the sorrow of the day you shall forget and sleep away. Here was everything that was still normal, that belonged to everyday life—­choosing what book to read, what poet to take hope from, making fun of Hitler without having to be afraid. This feeling began to thaw the frozen places in her mind, as if she were being dug up from the ice.

Lying in the sand next to Erich, Liese felt quiet and beautiful. When her eyes met his, she looked away, at the ashes falling from the end of his cigarette, or at the sand wedged between his toes, or at the soft cotton sash that tied his robe. The sun set behind the hills, the beach lanterns were lit, a fire was built. Erich decided to skip his party in Prague that night. And so it was that Liese began to build herself a world as an émigré.

She heard from Erich a week later by way of a note Franta Kraus delivered to her room. He would be meeting friends that evening at the Café Continental. Later there would be a get-­together at the apartment of his friends the Mayers. Joszi Mayer’s father ran one of Prague’s major newspapers, Prager Tagblatt, and Joszi’s husband, Fredy, was the managing editor. Their apartment was the center of life for writers and social democrats. Would she accompany him?

Tall black statues stood along either side of Charles Bridge, which linked the somber Staré Mesto to the lively cafés across the river. At twilight, when the mist formed above the Vltava, the shadowy statues took on a life hidden from daylight, ominous and ghostly in appearance. But that evening, walking on the path along the river to meet Erich, Liese saw them as loving, benevolent gods.

When she got to the entrance of the café, she saw Erich sitting at a corner table, his eyes turned away from the doorway. Very good, she thought. She could find a washroom, tidy up, get her bearings, and look around before he knew she was there. Every table and almost all the seats at the bar in the center of the room were full. The Continental felt to her like a wonderfully festive university library. Most of its inhabitants were young. On the tables, amid fat beer glasses, half-­full wine bottles, and wooden bowls filled with salted nuts, were stacks of newspapers, open books piled on top of each other, and handwritten sheets of paper scattered about. Other newspapers, more than she’d ever seen in one place, hung over rods attached to varnished oak pillars against the wall. On the walls themselves were dark pictures of serious faces, some of whom Liese recognized—­the untamed hair and sumptuous mouth of Rainer Maria Rilke, the piercing eyes of a young Kafka.

“Liese, Liese, dear Liese,” Erich called over to her before she could find the washroom. “Congratulations! We must celebrate your first visit to our spiritual sessions at seventeen Na Prikope, where we all practically live!” He pulled out a chair and motioned to her to sit, pouring a beer from the pitcher on the table into a cup and handing it to her. Still standing, she quickly licked the foam running down the outside of her cup, then felt mortified by her unguarded moment.

Seated beside Erich at the table was Hans Posner, whom she’d already met at the Alaunsee. Hans had sandy-­colored curls and wore rimless glasses; he was growing a not terribly successful beard. He introduced her to his older brother, a medical student a year ahead of her. Also named Erich but nicknamed EP, he had kind eyes and a fine mustache and was smoking a short English pipe, his hands stretched over a good-­sized belly.

“Liese and I are already great friends,” Erich Heller told the group. He lit a cigarette and ground the lighted match into the floor with the sole of his shoe. “By chance, Liese, did you read my piece in the Prager Tagblatt on Tuesday? I must give you a copy if you haven’t. An essay about Karl Kraus. Have you read Karl Kraus? Have you not? Have you not read Karl Kraus?” All this before Liese sat, before she spoke.

“I haven’t. But of course I will. Tonight, possibly,” Liese said. She was distressed by the sound of her own voice, words coming of their own accord, and they weren’t even the truth. She’d read a good deal of Karl Kraus. She corrected herself. “I actually read parts of The Last Days of Mankind last year in school, and I enjoyed it immensely.”

“Immensely?” Erich said, smiling. “You enjoyed it immensely? Tell me more, Liese. Might you choose a word, as Kafka would say, where you wouldn’t be misunderstood? What does ‘immensely’ mean to you?”

Liese brushed her hair back with her hand and let herself down into the chair. “I enjoyed him. I liked him immensely.” She was dazed for a moment, surprised that she’d repeated herself. “I don’t know him well, really,” she added, when in fact she’d read his play several times and discussed it at length with her best girlfriends, Lilo and Ille, in Frankfurt.

“Yes, well,” continued Erich, as if speaking for her—­and she found herself strangely grateful for this—­“if Kafka will one day be known as the greatest writer of Prague, Kraus will be claimed as the greatest of Vienna. His satire is so very Austrian, if there can really be such a thing as ‘so very Austrian.’ This is my claim!” He leaned toward Liese. “If I only had the courage, I would travel to Vienna tomorrow to insist that I become his literary biographer. Do you think he’d permit someone twenty-­two to write his l...