Chapter 28“An Ordinary Herr von H...”»EIN GEWÖHNLICHER HERR VON H...«
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
At home in the “Waldfrieden” I was now working on my “Moloch Love.” — Christl visited me for a few days, but Schmargendorf was to him only the springboard for getting to know Berlin and its clinics; he caught cold on the electric tram and moved out of the “Waldfrieden” under protest, because it was “damp and cold” there and he “could not possibly get well” in it. He said this with so evil an expression that it suddenly shot through my mind: why, that is the perfect model for the Moloch1.
In the autumn I went to Sulden, meaning to train myself for climbing the Ortler. On the descent from the Düsseldorfer Hütte I fell in driving snow and got back to Sulden only with difficulty, helped by two tourists. The doctor there diagnosed a slight fracture of the kneecap. At first it was not bad, but once I was allowed out again I made a small mountain tour in the splendid weather. The damaged place became inflamed by it, and I now had to go into plaster. When the season at Sulden ended I had to be carried to Meran and pushed about there for three weeks in a wheelchair. To recover I then went to the Grand Hotel at Trient. Christl was just then serving his year with the Kaiserjäger there and came to table every day. We also made fine drives out together. Then I went for a while to my friends the Scalas at Innsbruck. I travelled so much and so long because the children were always being begged away from me to Höckendorf2.
When I came back this time, Inge was with me again at last. One day a letter came from Christl:
“Dear Mio!3 I have become engaged; please see in me again an ordinary Herr von H...”
I was thunderstruck, and resolved to travel to Vienna that same night and find out every detail. Inge I gave meanwhile to Frau Kwiet, who took her in with open arms and gave her up only unwillingly when I fetched her back after two nights and a day.
I wanted to see whether I could not at least save his friendship for myself.
At ten in the morning I appeared at the flat of Christl and his brother. I had to wait a while, the young gentlemen were still asleep. But I then had to recognise that Christl's love had been only a short delusion. With a thousand pains I had to recognise it. In the evening he took me back to the station and ordered himself roast venison and Nockerl at my expense. At that I grasped the kernel of the matter:
“Life is nothing but tragedy and farce.”
The father had known his son better after all. I had really been only an episode to him. But this experience and this forced journey were no beauty cure for me.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑that is the perfect model for the Moloch — The picture is Moloch Love, the god children were burned to, swinging a torch before a sea of skulls (chapter 27) — and the face she paints on him is her lover's, caught complaining about the damp. It is the coldest sentence in the memoir and the most professional. Two chapters ago the first studies for the picture were made in the cypress woods of Corfu, in the middle of the affair; here the affair curdles into the head of the god. She reports it as a painter's stroke of luck, not as an injury — the same instinct as chapter 16's “disappointments give me material,” and the same one that made her paint a dead woman from a photograph of herself laid out as a corpse. The picture was finished: this is where “das vollendete Molochmodell” comes from, and the Grand Duke of Hesse, who had asked to see it, was already lost.
- ↑the children were always being begged away from me to Höckendorf — Höckendorf near Stettin was the Zitelmann family seat — her dead husband's family. This half-sentence, dropped in to explain why she travelled, is the run-up to what happens to Helga and Inge. Her daughters were adopted away from her in 1906, and the memoir has so far said nothing about how that came about. Here, in a subordinate clause, is the mechanism: the paternal relations kept asking for the children and kept them at Höckendorf, and she filled the resulting emptiness with journeys — which in turn made her the absent mother the arrangement assumed. Read forward, it is a small chapter of a custody story told entirely in asides; chapter 30 is called “The Adoption.”
- ↑“Dear Mio! — The only place in the whole memoir where anyone calls her anything but her name — and it is the man ending it who does. Mio is Italian for “mine,” in the masculine; as a pet name for a woman it is not Italian at all, which is what makes it theirs. She sets the two lines down without comment and lets the salutation do the work: the letter opens with the private name and closes by asking to be seen as an ordinary Herr von H., which is to say as a stranger with a title. That sentence gives the chapter its name. He was twenty-two when it began and she was fifty; the engagement is the end of the year the last chapter announced.