Ingo Schulze - New Lives

When I told him the price of the ad (one mark eighty per column millimeter), he whistled through his teeth, then angled to one side to reach under his smock and pull out his wallet, from which several hundreds spilled out over the desk. He would take care of that now, he said, and thumbed four Karl Marxes out onto the desk.

I said thank you, but he didn’t budge. I said that his ad would appear on February 16th in twenty thousand copies, at ninety pfennigs a copy. When he still showed no signs of departing, I listed our various columns: news, local politics, business, history, art, and sports, and also promised crossword puzzles, a horoscope, and caricatures. He nodded his approval. Unfortunately he didn’t have much time, was going to have to leave. I said that I didn’t want to keep him. “But now,” he said, “I need the receipt.”

A receipt. I knew nothing about receipts. I began searching and tried to make my motions look purposeful. He said he’d be satisfied with just a normal sheet of paper as long as it was “banged with a seal.” At just that moment I found our Offenburg bag of gewgaws and among them was, in fact, a receipt book, incredibly practical, including carbon paper, and cardboard backing, so that even without instructions I might have managed to fill the thing out.

Without his amiability flagging in the least, our customer apologized and said it had to be stamped, otherwise that lovely West-style receipt was of no use to him. He asked me to send him a stamped version, he trusted us. He rapped the table once more in farewell.

Monday, Feb. 12, ’90

Dear Jo,

(Maybe what life is about is finding an appropriate layout for yourself.) I never realized what layout actually means. It wasn’t until after I saw how easy it is to calculate the size of an article so that it can be transferred to the page proof that I once again believed we were going to make it. Layout is our map, our constitution, our Lord’s Prayer. Layout (Jörg accents it on the first syllable, Georg on the second) prevents you from being unfair and yielding to your own biases, there’s no showing favor or disfavor, there’s no forgetting. Layout is civilization and law, it’s courtesy and decorum, a taskmaster who grants you your freedom.

The work itself was an orgy. The fiat to complete the job was larger than our wills, than our energies, and immunized us against exhaustion. It grabbed hold of us like a demon, a three-headed, six-handed monster. A surgery team probably knows something of the same frenzy. Only now can I appreciate what a miracle a newspaper without blank spaces really is.

The days leading up to it, however, were a nightmare, as if our ship were capsizing at launching. We were drowning in material, but whole pages were still empty. The worst was Georg, who wouldn’t sign off on anything, not even his own articles. The first issue was supposed to be something special.

When Fred likewise put his two cents in — as head of sales he’d be the one that readers would first vent their anger on — Jörg threw him out of the room.

Sunday morning the only page in the folder was Jan Steen’s. The other eleven still lay ahead of us. Georg’s wife, Franka, took her boys to church so that Georg could polish his gas-station article in the living room, Jörg did yet another rewrite of his lead article, I paged through dictionaries (I now know how to spell mise en scène ) and tended the stove. Fred went to Offenburg to pick up the VW bus. On the evening before he had laid linoleum in the room opposite. It’s to be our second office.

Around eleven o’clock the doorbell rang. Three men wanted to see Georg and Fred, claimed that they had an appointment, had made his acquaintance at the public market. They hung their long coats on the coatrack, three in a row. The short fellow in charge wrinkled his nose and began snooping about the room, he had to touch everything, pick up everything. His fingers set the postal scales into stormy motion. He patted the stove tiles and the table, gave the wood on the chair arms a once-over with a thumbnail, and told his adjutants to rap the ceiling beams. “Incredible,” was his diagnosis, “truly incredible.”

His outfit — brown corduroy pants, dark green sport coat, yellow westover 47—had a refined look compared to those of his lackeys, whose taste ran to lilac and burgundy. Once their undersize boss had shaken our hands and taken a seat, he couldn’t hold back, he had to share his impressions of this “legacy of Communism.”

Jörg went right on hammering away at the “green monster,” snorting like Sviatoslav Richter. Each time their boss paused to catch his breath, the colorful guys jumped in to announce their own observations, calling us enthusiasts, men who were rolling up their sleeves at last.

When I asked their leader what his profession was, he stood up and with profuse apologies snapped business cards onto the table, as if playing a jack of trumps. Followed instantly by two aces. I was dealing with the “managing director” of the newspaper in Giessen, plus two of his editors.

While we talked and talked, I fetched our page proofs from their cubbyhole and spread them out over the table. As if decorating a table with gifts, I laid the photographs and articles on my side. To cap it off I picked up our layout design and gazed upon it with the certainty of a magician who has pulled off his trick.

The managing director bent forward, spread his arms, and exclaimed, “Hot type! You’re working with hot type?” For a moment I mistook the little tufts of hair on his fingers for flies. “You don’t even know what that is,” he barked at his lackeys, smiled at me, passed a hand over the white sheets of paper, and pointed his chin at the layout design. “That’s how it’s going to look?”

I nodded.

“Fine, fine,” the managing director said, and began asking me enigmatic questions — for instance, how many points the headlines and the subhead had — but fortunately each time provided the answer himself: twenty-two, or eighteen, and twelve for the subhead. And the text? Right, eight. And the font? We gazed out over the wide, white sea that lay placidly before us. “I haven’t even asked you,” he said, suddenly spinning around, “for your permission.”

“But of course,” I said, casting my eyes back to the horizon. Jörg hammered away incessantly at his keyboard.

The managing director, who had his jacket off by now, stretched imperious arms. His boys hurried over and eagerly undid his cuff links. He meticulously rolled up his sleeves. Suddenly his hands were hovering over the proofs, darting here and there like dragonflies above water, halting briefly, only to begin tracing their invisible pattern.

He demanded a pencil, typometer, and pocket calculator—“A slip of paper will do too”—stepped back briefly, then set to work.

What followed was an hour during which for the first time I learned something that might prove useful for earning my daily bread — that is, a craft. And for the first time since leaving school, I solved an equation with an unknown.

The managing director was not interested in getting rid of nouns and increasing the number of verbs, or in varying sentence structure, while keeping the meaning clear; the managing director asked about the number of characters and lines, about which photo belonged with which article, about what was intended for two or three columns. His hands had now become mice scurrying across the paper.

My article on Dippel the landscape gardener was six lines too long in both columns. I deleted and was terrified by how easy it was. The managing editor presented me with my next cutting job.

Life came coursing back into me. The page was finished. The managing director was already planning the next when Georg appeared and invited us all — including our guests from Giessen — to a midday meal. In their hunger the adjutants forgot the purpose of their boss’s outstretched arms. “Cuff links,” he hissed, and both began rummaging in their jacket pockets.