Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I reassured him. Once again, I said, he had come to just the right man. I was now hardened by experience, since a few other writers had kept me at the machine for months. It had even been a pleasurable, exciting task to type out manuscripts for Robert Graves, although Laura Riding’s were generally boring. With Laura, you always knew what was coming next.

I began by copying out the first volume of Kessler’s memoirs. I suggested to him the same fee arrangement that I had made with Graves. He agreed, although the Englishman probably had an easier time coming up with money, since Harry Kessler — yes, Count Harry Kessler, this fascinating literary stylist, this master of the German language — had fastidious taste when it came to paper and to his personal scribe. He used small-format linen stock with a bluish tint, which he no doubt ordered through his sister in Paris, for no such luxury item was available in Palma, not even in the elegant Casa Mir. For his manuscripts he used German script, but preferred roman cursive for his correspondence. This was symbolic of the impressive artistic and intellectual division within his personality. In his letters he was a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan by reason of his lineage, his exquisite international education, his gift for learning and his wide-ranging travels, his career as a diplomat, his way of dealing with people who lend the world their special stamp, questionable as that may be, and through his relationship with the world of Antiquity (he read Latin and Greek authors in the original, better than others are able to read in their own tongue). He was a man who stood above other men and above any and all fatherlands.

He actually had three fatherlands, together with their languages. But it was only German that he acknowledged as his “mother tongue,” based on decisive experiences in Hamburg that forevermore made him feel that he was essentially a German. Goethe’s concept of Humanität and the spirit of Romanticism guided him as he underwent a by no means painless rebirth. As a writer he became a citizen of the tragic country of his choice, more and more so as his destiny led him onwards. This soon brought him in conflict with his ideas about German liberty. “How has it come about,” he asks in his memoirs, “that in Germany, the homeland of Schiller, Kant, and Fichte, such degradation of character can have occurred?” As I typed out his words I hazarded an answer to this question: because we Germans are also Hagen’s nation, a people that likes to sing for a fee about “honor,” a “disloyal nation” as Ernst Bertram once called us, a purblind collective that for the Führer’s sake was taking the side of the Angel of Darkness. Kessler once wrote that in order to measure the greatness of Walther Rathenau, one must always add that man’s personality to whatever he said and did in his lifetime. Or on the other hand, one must subtract that personality from his achievements. This is equally true of Rathenau’s biographer, who lived and accomplished more with his imponderable artistic sensibility than with a calculating mind.

Over time we grew closer, one to another. I gradually got to see his true face beneath the mask of politesse .

I was now typing like some ink-crazed coolie — if you will permit me this odd simile, since it was only the author who was making the ink flow. Kessler’s script wasn’t always easy to decipher, but Beatrice helped me out. I delivered the typed results with the proper gestures of humility, and a few days later, with the proper gestures of humility, they came back to me together with fresh pages of manuscript. Each time this happened, I was asked to grant the author a thousand pardons — which I willingly did, although it was no circus to retype pages and pages incorporating emendations, additions, and deletions in gothic script. In this fashion there arose a multitude of different versions of Kessler’s memoirs, variants that text-critical scholars like to designate with letters of the roman alphabet. That is how the scholars do it; for me it meant difficulties of the purely mnemonic sort. There were versions of certain sections that reached the letter M. And to change or add anything, even a single word, meant retyping the entire page with several carbons. But it was only in this manner that the author could gain clear oversight over what would eventually become the “final edition.”

Epochs and faces, nations and fatherlands started spinning madly inside my brain. It was like a parade of jumping frogs, but one with many leaps backward and very few that went on ahead. How I longed for a return to my Unkulunkulu or to my stupid Huns, both of which I had abandoned. Are we a “disloyal nation”? It all depends. Count Kessler was punctual with his fee payments. The further the variants reached in the alphabet, the more I earned as a typist. Kessler will have been thinking: this guy is half crazy, so he’s the ideal copyist. I began to comprehend the scribal playfulness of the medieval monks to whom the German language owes its cockamamie orthography. But unfortunately I was not permitted to indulge in such aesthetic games. On the contrary, I was obliged to consult meticulously the Duden Dictionary, because Count Kessler wrote Imperial Austrian German, and soon enough I was confused as to whether the word Thron is written with an h or without, whether Kamel had two e’s or just one, or whether Gränze was the correct spelling of the word for “border.” During this process, “Thelen” most often got spelled as “Thälmann,” but I soon made my peace with this third dimension of my Vigoleis, with no hurt feelings.

Everything, or almost everything, was now democratized in accordance with the regulations of the Association of German Book Printers, Inc. I had a free hand. The final judge was our mutual friend Dr. Theodor Matthias, whose competence Count Kessler doubted from time to time but, like a good German, accepted as our authority, thus relieving him of one worry. We had a harder time with Gustav Wustmann, whom I knew only by name, since I never had much scholarly interest in that man’s book German Language Blunders . Language is custom, and as such it can never avoid blunders. On the contrary, it has made great strides in the direction of blunders, even so far as to engender de-humanized human beings.

Once I had become used to Kessler’s little manias and literary tricks, one day I took it upon myself to point out to him, as discreetly as I could, a few stylistic glitches — offering apologies if I had misread his handwriting. But these were genuine howlers, he said, and asked me to be so kind as to look them up in Wustmann right away. I didn’t own a Wustmann. “What!? And you claim to be a writer and a Germanist!?” I was a failure at both professions, it seemed, probably because I had my own ideas about languages, blunders, and similar synonyms.”But that’s terrible! We must get you Wustmann’s Language Blunders right away,” said the Count. I was told to go visit the little Swabian at the German Shop and order the book at Kessler’s expense. He was unwilling to lend me his own copy, which lay ready at hand on his desk. But how come…

I ordered the book, but the course of history had seen to it that the older Blunders were out of print. It took months for a new edition to be released, one adapted to the universal blunder of the Third Reich by a certain Herr Schulze, and containing an obligatory motto ascribed to Hermann Goering saying that it was a particularly noble task to foster pure language that was understandable for the masses. Obviously the linguistic purifiers had said “yes” to the Hitler regime. When I showed Count Kessler this genuflection of the German language to the German Führer , he took fright and with a visible attack of embarrassment said that it would be an insult to present me with this book. A thousand pardons. I countered by saying that in spite of my dubious university training as a Germanist, I was at least aware that the people who take delight in pointing out linguistic mistakes are the ones who commit the very worst ones. Then I asked him if I could write down something to this effect in his book. He firmly rejected this idea, saying that it would be tantamount to speaking of the devil. This was a smart move on his part, since the exiled Count’s memoirs were due to be published in Berlin by the renowned Samuel Fischer.