The text by Rolland Doukhan that we publish here is drawn from a novel titled L’Autre moitié du vent (The Other Half of the Wind), forthcoming. To better understand what follows, we reproduce this quotation from a Hasidic legend that the author placed as an epigraph to the book:
“When the wind rises, splendid and pure, only the dead leaf knows where it is going. But for the child of man, what matters most is to understand where it comes from, where the other half of the wind comes from.”
The hero, Damien Chantereine, born in 1942, is the son of Heinrich Stauber, a German officer (and not a Nazi) and of a Frenchwoman. As it happens, Damien, without knowing the secret of his birth, will marry in 1965 a young Jewish woman from Eastern Europe. In this chapter, Damien, who wants to “understand” the father he never knew, finds in Lübeck, his father’s native city, Hans Wissenblatt. The latter, nicknamed Herr Concerto by Heinrich Stauber, was, toward the end of the 1930s, the music teacher and intellectual mentor of Damien’s father. (In this text, it is Damien who speaks and says “I.”)
He had gone back to sit behind his desk.
“Yes, your resemblance to Heinrich is incredible. Perhaps it’s because the image I keep of him most of all is of his eighteen years, the age you seem to be today. And yet, if you asked me what he was like the first time I saw him… Ah! when I think back on it. He must have been five or six. No more than that, in any case. It was in this very room where we are now. He stood there, where you are standing now, focused and serious, his eye fixed on the grand piano you saw in the entrance, which at the time stood near this window. I can still see him, a stiff little fellow, with an incredibly mature air for his age. His father, who had already given him some notions of the instrument, signaled to him to set his child’s little violin against his shoulder, for a first audition. From the very first stroke of the bow, clean, without a slip, I knew I would take him among my pupils. But above all…”
I don’t know why, nor how, but the sentence my mother had reported to me rose up at that moment, intact in my memory. Almost without thinking, I said:
But above all… “der erster Anschlag ist häufig wie ein erster Angriff.”
Hans Wissenblatt crossed the whole room and came to clasp me in his arms:
“Lord God! You know that too! It’s as if your father were still speaking to me.”
Then he ran his fine, wrinkled hand through his white hair before resuming:
“We were, if my memory serves, in 1919 or 1920.”
He thought for a moment.
“Yes, it was in 1920. I was thirty, then, and twice already I had escaped death during that terrible Battle of Verdun in the First War. I left a bit of my left knee there all the same, as you can see. Our country was trying to bind up its wounds at the end of those four years that had devoured so many young men. When I heard that child play — yes, yes, I’m speaking of your father, and let me remind you he was only five or six — I swore to do everything so that his life would be nothing but music. I don’t believe I ever again left Heinrich’s side. Well… until his departure for the war. He was one of my best pupils, and…”
He seemed then to absent himself, to find himself elsewhere than in this house at the edge of the canal.
He turned toward the window before adding:
“… and, I have to tell you, he had become like a son to me. Very soon he was the one I put forward for the most difficult pieces. He was the one I favored for most of the sonatas we gave three or four times a year. I remember his interpretation of Schumann’s Violin Concerto for a school celebration. The whole audience rose to applaud, for long minutes, and he was only fifteen. I had founded a music school that had, my word, quite a good reputation throughout the region, and my pupils performed on the occasion of certain festivities, in Lübeck and the surrounding area. Ah! Damien, you bring me back to days that no longer exist, to a life swallowed up…”
Once again, Herr Concerto had gone. He was traveling on other hours, on other boats that he alone knew. I listened to this man speak, I read the emotion in his eyes, in the trembling of his hands, and I said to myself: “you are in Germany, Damien. This old professor is German, and however much he speaks to you of your father, of his gifts, of all these concerts, it takes nothing away from the rest, from all that happened in this country some twenty-five years ago…”
But Hans Wissenblatt went on, without noticing the dismay into which his discourse plunged me, nor the trouble that paralyzed my tongue and my mind.
“It was him, it was Heinrich that I quite naturally chose as first violin, when it came up that I would conduct the great Hanseatic Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for a grand New Year’s celebration. I remember, it was, I think, in 1931. He had just turned seventeen. And it was at the end of that performance, after an ovation of more than fifteen minutes, that he spontaneously came up with the nickname everyone has given me ever since. We were descending the steps of the Academy of Music where the concert had taken place. I wanted to congratulate him, to thank him for his performance. It’s true, he had never played so well. He interrupted me: — No, he said to me, all of that, I owe it to you, to you, Herr Concerto!
Herr Concerto! Do you realize what a find that was! I was never so moved in my life. It was he who was decorating me. Herr Concerto! I don’t know how to tell you, I felt myself come into the world, literally. There it is, Damien! Afterward… My God, afterward there were those years when my country seemed to lose its mind.”
Hans Wissenblatt’s gaze had wandered, as it were, into a country to which I no longer had access. There was, on his face, something like the tightening brought on by a violent migraine or a toothache.
“People… People no longer understood anything about anything. Everything had become so harsh, so difficult. The years 1932, 1933 went by. Of course, I had fewer and fewer pupils because… because… Well, because I didn’t share the ideas of the greatest number, you understand me, Damien? But I saw Heinrich almost every day, and without my having noticed it, it’s true, I repeat to you, he had become like a son to me.”
The sound of a motorboat reached us from the canal. It was a mouse-like nibbling, a peaceful noise that symbolized the image of a normal life, so far from those thirties the old professor was evoking…
“My son…” Herr Concerto repeated dreamily. Then he seemed to come back down to earth, and turned resolutely toward me:
“Can you imagine what it means to me, to see a young man who is Heinrich’s son, seated before me, in this room? Well, enough nostalgia, I don’t want to sadden you. Tell me a little about yourself, about your mother… I never had a child myself, Damien. Music was my whole life, and my pupils were enough to make me a family.
— You know, I don’t have much of interest to tell you, I passed my baccalauréat, and I’m preparing for a rather difficult examination, that of the École Normale Supérieure. I’d like to take the agrégation in literature. — Good! That’s all very good. And your… your mother? — My mother met my father in 1941, in Paris. He was already a captain, but, as I told you, I never knew him at all, since…”
My tongue locked up. There I was, seated in the library of an old house in Lübeck, in Germany, peacefully speaking of a captain in the German army, killed in combat, at Stalingrad. A small town, around me, was living, going on living, as if nothing had happened, as if the images of that last war that I carried in my head were only horrible sequences, taken from some film of terror, as if the accounts by my friend Bernard Ayoune of the extermination of the Jews were only fables sprung from the imagination of a madman. I straightened up all at once.
“No! no! I’m boring you, Monsieur, and I’m making you waste your time!”
Hans Wissenblatt had a genuine grimace of pain on his face. Like a wave of anger, too.
“Damien! I know exactly what is going through your head at this moment. Would you be so good as to sit down again? I have things to tell you, things that will help you to live. — But, Herr Concerto… — You see, that’s already much better. — What’s better? — Why, the fact of calling me ‘Herr Concerto’! It was your father, after all, who came up with that name. And it means you’re beginning to learn what he was.”
I settled back into the armchair, while the old man poured himself another cup of tea. Ideas, confused images, mingled within me, where I found again my mother facing a hostile crowd, immense fields of snow over which the terrifying thunderbolts of war unleashed themselves, silhouettes of skeletal men staggering along black barracks… I did not at once realize that Herr Concerto had resumed his account:
“I watched your father climb, one by one, all the rungs of schooling, then those of knowledge and culture. He had become that tall young man of a good six foot three whose photographs your mother may perhaps have shown you. He was beautiful as one of those gods that the upholders of the new ideology would later venerate. A sort of great blond Viking, with eyes of a gray so full of clouds that one forgot his strength. It’s true, you’re right. I have many memories of Heinrich. I’ve forgotten almost nothing of him, his way of speaking, of laughing, his ideas about the world and about men, the books he loved, his friends… Ah, friends! Friendship was a religion for him. In fact, he had only two true friends. Two friends who could not have been more different, however. The first was from one of those families of old Prussian nobility that had come to settle in Lübeck after the First World War. An intelligent and cultivated young man who devoted a genuine cult to Thomas Mann. His name was Ludwig von Apst. The second, Joseph Epstein, was Jewish and swore only by the great philosophers, ancient and modern. His passion was Spinoza. These two friends, so different, nevertheless had one thing in common: they were each as frail and as small as Heinrich was strong and tall.
— Joseph Epstein? I said. I know, he had spoken of him to my mother, telling her of their mishap on Lake Müritz, I believe. — Ah! you know that too! Yes, Heinrich had a secret preference for Joseph. And don’t forget, in those years — after 1933, I mean — it was no small thing to have a Jewish friend. Joseph and he were… Wait, I’ll show you.”
Hans Wissenblatt went back to his desk and began to rummage in one of the drawers. He finally drew out a cardboard folder containing a sheaf of papers.
“There, there, I’ve found it. Do you know what I’m holding here, in my hand? These are poems written at sixteen or seventeen, some by Joseph Epstein, others by Heinrich Stauber, and a few even by the two together. It was Heinrich himself who entrusted them to me, my God, so long ago.”
My heart began to beat furiously. Lord! So my father had written poems like anyone else, like any schoolboy in the world, like I had done myself! So he had had a Jewish friend, and he had suffered to see him humiliated, rejected. Hans Wissenblatt took from his desk a pair of glasses with a fine metal frame that comically gave him the air of one of those bitter characters who haunt the theater of Chekhov.
“Damien, I’ll read you one or two of them, staying as close as possible to the text. I must tell you that the translation comes easily to me because it’s an exercise I tried my hand at, right after the end of the war, for a couple of French teachers, friends who wanted to understand whether Germany could have another face than that of Nazism. Here, this one is by Joseph. I remember he was very much in love at the time with another of my pupils:
You fly in the sky that is within me, You fly without carrying me with you. I, I have earth beneath my shoes, But when you are near me, I dream of those wings of cloud-cloth, I dream that they carry me off with you, my beloved. Your dress accompanies me, And brushes my face, Your voice protects me, enfolds me, And I find again, near you, All the gardens that are denied me.
I do believe Joseph wrote that in 1934 or 1935. He was already suffering greatly from what was happening in the city, at the University, against people of Jewish origin. Ah! here is a poem I love enormously. It’s by your father. It gives me a strange feeling to say ‘your father,’ because I always see him again with the face he had at twenty.”
He leaned over to decipher, at the bottom of the sheet, something he seemed to have trouble reading. “Here, look how strange it is, I was speaking to you of your father’s face at twenty, and I see that this poem is dated December 1933. Heinrich was nineteen, then. I suppose that’s roughly the age you are today. But listen!”
And Hans Wissenblatt set to translating again the text before his eyes, with remarkable ease:
Do not follow the red roads, The roads without sun! Neither the leaves nor the flowers are at home there, Thirst dwells in the house, The water has deserted the fountain. Follow the red roads no more.
Do not follow the black roads, The roads without a star! Men are no longer at home there, Their thought no longer leaves there The moist trace of joy. Follow the black roads no more.
Do not follow the gray roads, The roads without love! The pianos there are no more than skeletons without voice, And the violins there weep, Chained to their own strings. Ah! Follow the gray roads no more.
Hans Wissenblatt slowly folded the sheets he had just read. A kind of weariness seemed to have come over him. He repeated under his breath, in German, 1933… 1933… As for me, I made not the slightest movement, respecting the memories into which the old man was plunged.
“Don’t forget,” he resumed, as if confiding to me the result of his meditation, “that your father wrote this poem in December 1933. A few months, barely, after the seizure of power… no, it is more accurate to say, after Hitler’s accession to power.”
Too many things were happening to me in too little time. I was overwhelmed by a torrent of questions and contradictory emotions. The lines Herr Concerto had translated for me floated before my eyes. Above all those violins that wept, chained to their own strings. December 1933. How did this city behave that year? What venomous ideas were germinating in the heads of its inhabitants? How did my father live there?
“In your opinion, Herr Concerto, was my father thinking, as he wrote these lines, of what was happening in Germany that year? — Of course, Damien. We often spoke of it, he and I. We spoke of it for years. Especially after… after what had happened to his friend Joseph. But what’s the use, today, of bringing those moments back to life? — What, Herr Concerto? What had happened? — Oh! It was in 1935. The sixteenth of October, exactly. I remember it well, I can’t forget it since that day I was celebrating my forty-fifth birthday. I was forty-five. For the occasion, I had invited Heinrich and his two friends to celebrate it with me. Three months earlier, they had passed their examinations, but classes had not yet resumed at the University for the new year.
Heinrich and Joseph were preparing what you call in France a maîtrise. For Heinrich, it was a maîtrise in classical literature. But he was also pursuing, at the same time, his studies at the Conservatory of music. For Joseph, it was a maîtrise in philosophy. As for Ludwig, he had gained admission to a great engineering school.
I can see again that October day, barely cool. The sun seemed to have mistaken the season. It flooded Lübeck, made the streets clean, and set smiles on people’s faces. The three friends were approaching my dwelling in a kind of high spirits, laughing and holding one another by the arm, and I watched them walk, leaning at this window you see there. I watched their youth, I perceived their joy from a distance. They were walking along the Klugshafen quay, on the Kanalstrasse. The water of the canal shone like a mirror. It was, for me, such a comforting sight that I forgot all that had been happening in the country for more than two years already.
It was then that they crossed paths with a group of seven or eight ‘Braunen’ who had gotten out of two big cars. Do you know what they are, the ‘Braunen’? — No, I admit it means nothing to me. — The ‘Braunen’ were the ‘Brownshirts,’ young men like them, but who already had the poison in their heads. They wore that horrible armband you must know, that we’ve seen in dozens of films, a red armband with the Hakenkreuz, set in black at its center. — The Hakenkreuz? — Yes, it’s what you call the ‘swastika.’ And you see, I’ve unconsciously used the German word Hakenkreuz, because your father, precisely, liked to point out that this word, literally, meant ‘hooked cross.’ He spoke of it as he would have spoken of the legs of some horrible spider. In short, it was the mark of the disease we did not see coming. I don’t quite know what happened, perhaps a word spoken in passing, or a gesture. In any case, I saw one of the Braunen hurl himself at young Epstein and throw him to the ground. Very quickly, the brawl was joined. The fight was rough, violent. Your father, given his size and his strength, was clearing space around him. But in the meantime, two of the thugs had simply thrown young Joseph into the canal. I had remained petrified at my window. Helped all the same by Ludwig, your father managed to put the ruffians to flight and, entering the water up to his waist, hastened to fish out his friend Joseph.
Ah! I remember everything. I see again my young guests, shaking themselves off in the room you entered a moment ago. I don’t know how they had managed it, but they were as wet as if all three had fallen into the canal. I was able to find a few dry clothes for just about everyone, some good hot tea, and it was Joseph, in the end, who blew out my candles, at my request.
I saw Heinrich again a few weeks later. He was pale, prostrate.
“Herr Concerto,” he said to me, “I’m ashamed. I no longer understand anything of what’s happening to us.” He almost had tears in his eyes. I knew what was overwhelming him, but I didn’t want to worsen his state. So I kept silent. But he, he needed to speak, to confide: “Herr Concerto, toward what sort of humanity are we heading? Is everything we were taught false? Everything I believed in, does it no longer exist? — No, Heinrich, you mustn’t think like that. What you have learned, that is what must build you. The savages of the other day are not part of your humanity, they know neither Goethe nor Beethoven, and they love neither Heine nor Mozart. — But, Herr Concerto, you, you haven’t seen Joseph again. I go to his place almost every day, because he doesn’t even want to go out anymore. You can’t imagine the state he’s in. Especially since this new law, voted by the Reichstag, just a month ago, this law on blood. He can’t believe it concerns him, that he is one of its designated victims. Quite simply, he no longer understands anything about our world. — Heinrich, things may perhaps work themselves out. Our world, as you say, is going through difficult moments. But the German people has nonetheless sheltered some of the greatest thinkers of this age, poets, composers whom many other nations respect and envy us.”
Your father, Damien, was speaking to me with all the ardor of his twenty years. You can understand the passion he put into the ideals one has at that age, since it’s roughly your own, today. “What you tell me about our great men and our poets,” he went on, more and more overwhelmed, “it may be true, Herr Concerto, but I have to tell you something. — What’s that, son? — Do you know what Joseph did? He burned almost all the poems he had written and that were ready to be published. And even some of those we had written together, the ones we call our four-handed poems. Luckily I had given you three or four of them. You know, this law has truly wounded him. Every time we meet, he says the same thing to me, asks me the same questions. Just yesterday, he received me as though reluctantly. — He doesn’t want to see you anymore? I asked, worried. — No, that’s not quite it. He’s afraid for me. He told me so, afraid that I’ll be given trouble for the simple reason that I keep company with him. — But that’s childishness, you know very well, Heinrich, that you risk nothing. Your parents…”
And then I fell silent, ashamed of what I was about to say. The plague, Damien, takes possession of you without your noticing. But I want to finish telling you what Heinrich had come to confide in me that day. We spoke of it so much, he and I, until his departure for the war, that I’ve forgotten nothing.
“Here it is,” Heinrich said to me, “he’s more and more obsessed by this law on race, obsessed and humiliated to a point I could not have suspected. ‘Heinrich,’ he said to me, ‘you know what Germany represents for me. Tell me the truth: is it normal, today, for a Jew, to love this country? Am I an untermensch1 as they say?’
Of course, I tried to comfort him, Herr Concerto. I reminded him how brilliant he has been until now, not only in philosophy, but also in German, in German literature. I shook him: ‘What are you telling me with your untermensch? Just remember the grade you got in philosophy on your last examination!’ But he remained prostrate for a good while, then all at once, he seemed to make up his mind: ‘listen, Heinrich, I have to confess something to you, something you don’t know.’
I was rather astonished because I thought I knew everything about my best friend. But he, without really looking at me, went on. ‘Know that, without having really wanted it, I’ve never been able to take to Yiddish. And although my parents use that language with my grandparents, I myself don’t speak it at all and I barely understand it. Do you hear me, Heinrich? I don’t know Yiddish! My language is truly German, it’s only German!’
You see, Herr Concerto,” your father said to me, “to what stage of humiliation my friend Joseph has come: he wants to set himself apart from those who are his own, after all.”
I thought for a long time about all that we had exchanged, that day, Heinrich and I. Whenever I could, I helped your father not to lose courage, to keep faith in the future. And then, Munich came. The war was already rumbling. Heinrich began an officers’ school in the hope of not really having to do any shooting. I can still hear him say to me: “Herr Concerto, I don’t want to kill a human being! I can’t. Perhaps they’ll put me in an office to study maps or statistics?”
The war separated us all the same. There was all that you know, all those years, the Eastern and Western fronts, the bombings, and when we began to learn what was happening here, in Germany, the camps, and all of it, it was I who lost courage. And then, one day, I learned that Heinrich was dead. You see, before your coming, I was unaware even of the circumstances of his death. But above all, I was unaware that he had left a seed behind him…”
Herr Concerto closed his eyes, falling silent for a long while, almost religiously. I understood that he was observing something like a minute of silence. Something minute was rising in me, something new. I was that seed of which Herr Concerto had just spoken, I was that continuation. Imperceptibly, I felt that I was welcoming a new being. I did not yet know that it was my very precocious arrival into adulthood.
Hans Wissenblatt let out a sigh, then, as if unconsciously, he said again the sentence with which he had greeted the avowal of my name, the sentence my mother had, herself, pronounced:
“Your father, Damien, was an inhabitant of the Earth…”
And I knew there was a capital letter on the word “Earth.”
Notes
Subhuman.↩︎