H. Adler - The Wall

I am still interested in the same things as always (having learned too much already, my friend!). I have prepared reams of notes for a long work, and already a first draft of some of it. I have done all of this in the years …

What years? What have I done? He will not understand what I’m trying to get at. I crossed out the sentences.

You must know that I have not sat idle. The old ideas that mean most to me in regard to the sociology of oppressed people, which always met with your approval, have naturally deepened over the course of time. They have ripened through some of my own experiences and intensive consideration. If, as one heard expressed everywhere in the first excitement over the new peace, they are serious about founding a new and more just order on earth, which many voices support in the postwar years, then one should recognize that my far-reaching plans at this moment are not at all inappropriate.

Please, say what you wish! Point me toward where most people’s interests lie today on the outside, how I might get started, how to rise up out of the depths, and, most of all, how to begin to be seen again. Perhaps you grasp what I mean. I don’t want to go on and on about it, and I trust your capacity to empathize. I trust that you won’t keep me waiting too long once this letter has reached you?

And here’s another request: Tell me as much about yourself as possible — I really need to know. All of it interests me. I even feel a bit lonely here and am hungry for news from old friends. Unfortunately, I also can’t keep from sharing with you, as I had wished, that things in this country right now seem a bit forlorn, if not hopeless. Too much is missing that one used to love — meaning some are no longer among us. But you shouldn’t be concerned about that. I can say to you with a bit of pleasure something that you’ll recall from when we used to translate the Latin authors: “Unhappiness and misery are the natural run of things when a country is consumed by war.” That’s the way it is. Old men of our circle who stayed behind here are, for the most part, no longer alive, some young men also having parted from us. Also, Franziska is gone. But, really, no more of such sad matters.

I’m taking good care of myself; I don’t let myself go and have not given up on life. And so it goes on. If you could see how I’m sitting here by an open window in the almost-summer-like foliage that still looks out unchanged at the wonderful vineyard, you would smile and shake your head and say, “That’s Arthur, just like I always knew him.”

Oh, there’s so much I could tell you, but it’s probably better if I close now. Not only concern for you demands it; one shouldn’t make the censor put so many holes through a letter.

Be well, my dear So-and-So, and write back soon! I will wait impatiently, but I know as well that the mails here don’t always run on time and things can be delayed.

Always yours,

Arthur

So, roughly, if I have rightly recalled the first draft, that’s how I wrote my first letter to someone outside the country after the war. That took me many days, because I kept discovering problems in my crimped, prim sentences, and I kept polishing them, though none seemed to improve. I only wanted something to come from my hand that at least could be answered, that was not too disturbing, while I also couldn’t stand for it to be stilted, and it had to at least be softened. I tried as best I could to patch back together what had been torn apart. When I was satisfied with the letter (meaning I wasn’t satisfied at all, but I could at least live with it), I wrote it out at Peter’s urging on several pieces of paper, though not trusting myself to send the letter off on its own, for I could not at all determine whether I had said the right things. I suffered from a stifling uncertainty, even fear, that something harmful or otherwise inappropriate had slipped into my words. My condition was bad on many different levels, and denied me awareness of any understandable relation between my feelings and my words. I especially felt that in my lines there was nothing that really spoke to my situation. I wanted to avoid that, because I was afraid — so I thought — to shamefully expose myself and to evoke unwelcome impressions of myself in So-and-So.

Consumed by such doubts I turned to Peter and subjected myself, more indulgently than I should have, to his judgment, he being someone who was often afflicted with cleverness. He was indeed good-natured, sincere, agreeable, but also a small, even narrow-minded soul. He also led a life that often bothered me. He was inclined to random lies and little dishonesties, though these things were probably also harmless and even forgivable. Sometimes it had nothing to do with anything bad but was, rather, just a meaningless fib shared while bragging, for which one couldn’t get at all mad at Peter. And yet if he was really annoying, Anna — who through Hermann was distantly related to him — had to talk to him and straighten him out, not holding back any reproaches, eventually getting to his more forgiving nature and engaging it. I granted him no real power over me, for I guarded myself against it, but I still surrendered too much of myself to him. His certainty, which felt good to me, must have replaced or stood in for mine, as he had a hold on me, causing my strength and will to fail, he fighting with the authorities on my behalf, helping me to find my way, clearing away anything uncomfortable, and I can attest that it would have been hard to survive the postwar years even halfway well without him. Peter was stateless, which at that time was a rare piece of luck for him, just as his family background served him as well after the war as before the years of occupation, because through his father he is still a part of the people persecuted and oppressed in the name of victory, while through his mother, on the other side, he is part of another people in whose name many similar, yet more intense, nasty things were done earlier. Thus Peter has escaped many dangers, having successfully held his own during all the confusion of the war, but now having to free his bride from prison and to find the most convenient means of getting her across the border and home. His luck or his cleverness often helped the much less endangered Anna and also was of use to me.

Sometimes it feels wrong to have relied and counted on Peter so much, although I condemned his shenanigans. They were outrageous, but I couldn’t do without him. What Anna did for me, what I let her do, was worth so much more to me, though I didn’t tell her about many of the woes that I suffered, for I didn’t want to overburden her. But Peter always took care of things, I have to admit, for he was tireless. Nothing that I asked of him was too much. Very often it was me who lacked the ego, the kind of versatile, practical approach necessary for all situations, and a stand-in for the man I was not. Peter also served as a stand-in rooster among the hens he strutted about with, and which he even occasionally offered to me, though when he told his stories about his girls I found it disgusting. Since I shared a room with him, it was sometimes hard not to know, but Peter, who spared me with a quiet smile, always had a solution. Once he went out with his most recent choice, letting me know the time that I should stay clear of the room, sometimes putting me up with friends of his for the night. I went along with it all and was ashamed, the more so as his bride, whom he several times visited on the sly during lucrative ventures, had asked me, when she said goodbye before crossing the border and returning home, to keep an eye on Peter and make sure that he “didn’t stray,” as she described his hardly loyal ways. That’s why I spoke to him in good conscience and pretended to be his guardian in carrying out the most pitiable role I’d ever taken on. If he was in a good mood, he listened to me and acted as if he agreed with everything I said, but when I finished talking he shook my hand trustingly and too strongly and presented me with a broad smile spreading across his entire face. Thereby I became helpless, without anything with which to respond. He undermined my ethos and forced me, without ever verbally agreeing, to look on at his activities with patient good will and leave him alone for at least a week.