Boys & Murderers Read online

  Hermann Ungar

  BOYS & MURDERERS

  Collected Short Fiction

  Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole

  TWISTED SPOON PRESS

  Prague

  Translation copyright © 2006 by Isabel Fargo Cole

  Afterword copyright © 2006 by Isabel Fargo Cole

  Thomas Mann preface copyright © 1960, 1974 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH

  This edition © 2006, 2013 by Twisted Spoon Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form, save for the purposes of review, without the written permission of the Publisher

  Preface by Thomas Mann reprinted with the kind permission of Fischer Verlag

  Cover image and frontispiece by Otto Gutfreund, courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague

  Commentary by Jaroslav Bránský compiled and translated from the original Czech by Jed Slast

  First published in English in 2006 by

  Twisted Spoon Press

  P.O. Box 21–Preslova 12

  www.twistedspoon.com

  The translation of this work was made possible by grants from the Foundation of the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Stiftung Kulturfonds, Germany

  ISBN 978-80-86264-25-7 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-80-86264-83-7 (e-book)

  Contents

  Preface

  by Thomas Mann

  Boys & Murderers

  A Man and a Maid

  Story of a Murder

  Colbert’s Journey

  Colbert’s Journey

  The Wine-Traveler

  Reasons for Everything

  Tulpe

  Alexander

  (A Fragment)

  Mellon, the “Actor”

  Bobek Marries

  The Secret War

  The Brothers

  Uncollected Stories

  Sanatorium

  Letter to a Woman

  A Dream

  Biba is Dying

  Little Lies

  (Dialogue for a Married Couple)

  The Caliph

  Translator's Afterword

  About the Texts

  Notes

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Preface

  I owe the melancholy privilege, the happy duty of introducing this posthumous collection of Hermann Ungar’s work to a German audience, to the fact that I was one of the first to recognize and call attention to the extraordinary talent of the deceased. Having championed his debut, Boys & Murderers, it would be wrong of me to stand by indifferently at the publication of his last, posthumous work – whose inner beauty and artistic appeal stir me still more than the qualities of his first collection did back then. Then all was hope, harkening, delight in the rising of an auspicious star, faith in life; today this life, endowed with such great gifts doomed to unfulfillment, lies in the earth.

  Did we bet wrong, then, did our instinct fail our hope? No, I am not ashamed of having commended to life one who was doomed to die. Death is not a refutation, and it would take an irreligious, Philistine view of happiness and success to make life’s blessing the criterion for what is worth loving. The deceased reflected profoundly, bitterly, and truly on victory and defeat, blessing and debasement. “Today I know,” he writes in the introductory passage of one of the stories in this volume, “that talent swiftly grasps how easily it can serve every cause, and often its most telling trait is the ability to conform to the ordinary and find a moral justification for this conformity. Seen from a higher vantage point, the victors in life are generally the vanquished. The deaths of the failures shine at times with the nimbus of victory.” That is what it means to see through appearances with incorruptible, magnanimous perspicacity, and if it is true that “you shall know them by their fruits,” one can be proud to have pupils with such convictions. Only one thing is forgotten or passed over here, that the true victories of life’s children often lie where the masses do not see them, that renown is neither a means nor a product of comprehension, and that life’s victors are also in need of humanity – which admittedly means wanting everything at once.

  In retrospect, it seems to me that I always sensed the doomed aspect of Hermann Ungar’s art and being and that this very “instinct” was the source of my sympathy, the motive for me to champion the early manifestations of his nature. In his unlaughing comic sense, his sexual melancholy, in the bitter and often uncannily deliberate way in which he expresses his vision of life – in his mental and even his physical physiognomy there is a pallor, a fatal mark, an austere hopelessness. It takes no second sight to interpret this prophetically, and it prevents me from regarding his early death as an accident. It did not surprise me that Boys & Murderers was immediately translated and much noted in France. The French esprit harbors more irony toward the fit, more inclination toward noble infirmity than do we Germans, with Goethe’s legacy of a robust aristocracy of life seated deep in our blood. Unquestionably, all that is death’s is not noble, while all that is life’s is not base. But we best show our conscience-driven mockery against even the highest forms of conformity by bowing to death’s nobility.

  There can be no talk of fulfillment here, of the grace of maturation and perfection; but before life dropped him with the carelessness which so often appalls and outrages our human sensibility, his spirit did manage to give more than might appear from what I have said above. Following the first collection of novellas, we have a novel of anguished power, The Maimed; we have The Class, less momentous perhaps, yet still in its distinctive style and vision an expression of the cultivated primal quality which we call art; we have plays whose success in Berlin and Vienna did not come from conformity to the norm. And though to rebuke fate for its carelessness would be to take after the king who had the sea flogged, one is tempted to reproach it with all the things in Ungar’s melancholy oeuvre that woo life with such poetic ardor; it should have shown more favor toward such sensual fidelity. Take, for example, what his “wine-traveler” says in the pages to follow about the secret of his wares: “In old wine is the scent of all flowers, the rays of the sun, children’s laughter, men’s sweat, the vision of the summer landscape, all ripe and heavy as the breast of a nursing mother.” That is the song of life. Art may be marked by death, but it is always love, always life. “You are an artist,” says the wine-traveler, “in a different sphere than the poet or the musician, but like them raised by your senses into a deeper and holier communion with Nature, lifted up from the inert masses of those whose eyes are as dull as their ears, their nostrils, their tongues and the nerves beneath their skin.” Ungar, too, was raised by his talent into a deeper and holier communion with nature – and it is these posthumously published stories which reveal this most vividly, showing perhaps more clearly than those published during Ungar’s lifetime what potential for development was nipped in the bud by his premature death, and their publication, for us, is a true human indictment of fate.

  What an immensely significant figure, this servant Modlizki in “Colbert’s Journey”! This story is rightly featured at the beginning of this collection; it is a minor masterpiece and would occupy an honorable place within any classical oeuvre. The others do not have this roundedness; they are sketchier, fragments and intimations of an unrealized epic world – but one need only read “Bobek Marries” to sense what a hearty grip on life this melancholy talent had, what a grotesque sacramentalism of the sensual he could muster and what he could have brought forth!

  Hermann Ungar was born in 1893 in the Moravian town of Boskovice to Jewish parents. The Ungars were a family of merchants and farmers, the father was a merchant with scholarly and philosophical leanings. Hermann graduated from the German Gymnasium in Brno, studied l
aw at the universities of Berlin, Munich and Prague and received his doctorate in the midst of the war. As a lieutenant in the reserves, he took part in the war from start to finish, spending the first years on the front in Russia and Galicia, and was severely wounded. After peace was declared he spent a short time as Advokatur Konzipient then as a bank clerk in Prague, held for a time the position of a dramaturge in Cheb, entered the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry in 1920 and was assigned to the Czechoslovak Embassy in Berlin as embassy secretary. He married a woman from Prague and became the father of two boys. Recalled to Prague in 1928, he contemplated abandoning his official career to devote himself entirely to literature. We are told of an automobile accident which severely upset his nerves, paving the way for the illness – appendicitis – which, diagnosed too late, operated too late, carried him off the following year.

  Ungar had a pronounced sense of family and origins. In him the sentiment called love of country manifested itself as the conviction that the only proper and salutary sphere for a person is that of his origin and that it is a sin and a fatal mistake to exchange it for another. Never, he said in conversation, should people leave the native soil that brought them forth if they wish to live happily and in safety. He saw in every journey something thrilling and dangerous, a challenge to fate – a mystical fear which probably played a role in the conception of “Colbert’s Journey.” He himself traveled to Italy and Paris, but admitted with rare honesty, and in contrast to the self-congratulatory bliss of the travel poets, that neither the blue south, the famous artistic sites nor the charms of the metropolis had much to say to him. For practical reasons, he best enjoyed life in Berlin, where he had friends and his sphere of activity.

  He began to write early on, long before Boys & Murderers, but revealed his literary ambitions only to two or three friends. It was typical of his character that those less close to him did not at all regard him as an intellectually interesting person. His fellow officers saw him as a good fellow who enjoyed entertaining the others, often with little regard for his dignity. His bank and legal colleagues knew him as an ordinary coffeehouse patron and were quite surprised to hear of books that he had published and that had even been praised.

  He worked hard. For personal reasons, the diary he kept during the last years of his life is unsuitable for publication in full, but a theater journal has published fragments which testify to his fanatical love of the literary art, to the burden of responsibility under which he wrote or hesitated to write, to his anxiety about his mission, the fear that his ability could fade, his work become mere craft. “During the war,” he wrote, “the immediate peril of death faced me hourly, but when I prayed, I prayed that God should let me live only if I was chosen to be a writer.” What piety! And I mean not his belief in God, but his belief in writing. – At another point, on September 30, 1928, he writes: “I have six months’ vacation. In this time no one shall hear a thing from me. Either I will have created something real by then, or I will finish with everything. Perhaps not with life, but with art. But without it there is no life for me. That is the danger.” – The fear for his higher self is identical to the fear for his life. Is such a thing still possible?

  Incidentally, he also feared for his life on the purely physical level, a hypochondriac constantly running to the doctor. That was ultimately the cause of his early death. The doctors, made callous and skeptical by his eternal fancies, underestimated and misdiagnosed his fatal illness for much too long.

  He died under peculiar circumstances. At the time of his acute illness his mother, who suffered from a severe eye ailment, was in the same clinic where his operation took place. The operation is kept secret from her, but she has a dream about Hermann’s death. Her son lives several days more, given up for lost by the doctors, but himself hopeful. Then his attendant is changed: into his room comes a nurse whom he recognizes as a childhood acquaintance from Boskovice. With horror – for he sees it as an omen. The earth has sent this face from the homeland to meet him. He must die.

  His last fantasies concerned the premiere of his play The Arbor, which recently had its fiftieth performance at Vienna’s Renaissance Theater. He died on October 28, 1929.

  Thomas Mann

  Nidden, 1930

  Boys & Murderers

  A Man and a Maid

  I grew up without parents. My father died soon after my birth. He was a lawyer in the provincial town where I was born and he was buried. I own nothing to remind me of my father but a letter to my mother.

  After the death of my father, who even left my mother a bit of money, my mother, driven by strong passion or the thirst for adventure, left town with an engineer, abandoning me penniless in her apartment with a maidservant. I never heard from her again. A Canadian court later delivered the above-mentioned letter, her sole legacy, to my home town. I was six years old at the time.

  It is obvious, or at least understandable, that nothing ties me to my deceased parents. To this day I do not know what it is to love one’s parents. I lack the organ for it: I cannot even imagine the meaning of filial love; in others it leaves me unmoved. What I lacked and what I often longed for was a warm dinner or a roof over my head or a good bed, never a father or a mother. When I say “orphaned,” I think of poverty and a hard childhood. Otherwise I have no associations with the word.

  And so my mother had abandoned me, alone and penniless. The town had to care for me, and it did so by committing me to the “hospice” which a rich citizen had endowed. This hospice had four vacancies for old men and two for boys. I spent fourteen years of my life as one of these boys.

  I was a new beginning. I grew up without tradition, with no conscious tie to the past. I learned nothing from my father, and unfortunately I inherited nothing from him either. I faced life without the preconceived, force-fed opinions and the drummed-in principles which I imagine are instilled by the very atmosphere of the parental home. Novelty astonished and lured me. And the attraction between the sexes, I feel, is somehow familiar to those who grow up in a family simply by virtue of seeing man and wife together and feeling the bond of love to a mother. Unprepared, knowing not even her fragrance, I was surprised by the awakened senses.

  But these observations are taking me too far afield; I ought to tell it all one thing at a time. How the house looked, who lived there and what went on to happen.

  The hospice was an old, dingy-green, gabled house with many windows, each casement with eight panes. At first glance the whole house made an extremely asymmetrical impression. I believe it was made of two separate buildings joined together. Two well-worn stone steps led up to the door, and to the left of the door stood a stone bench, if the word can be used for a stone slab scoured smooth by years of use and resting on two squat blocks.

  I sometimes sat on this stone bench when I tired of playing with buttons and balls.

  From within, the hospice looked no more inviting than from without. The steep, well-worn stairs to the second floor, the ramshackle door to the vestibule which made a bell jangle, the dark stains on the gray paintwork of the walls, none of that is conducive to bright childhood memories. I know that I never experienced joy in this house. I believe no one ever laughed in this house. With other children I may have been loud and boisterous when we played in the nooks and crannies of the old alley, or on the grimy square in front of the school. But when I entered the house my heart cramped with an oppression I feel within me even today when I think back upon the hospice.

  From the vestibule a door on the right led to the apartment of the hospice director, and on the left a flight of stairs led up to the rooms where we lived. Only two or three times did I glimpse the apartment of our director, whom we called by his civil name, Herr Mayer. It had tablecloths, family pictures, a sofa and upholstered chairs. To me these rooms were the pinnacle of earthly luxury. And Herr Mayer was the happiest of men. Today I know that he, too, was a poor man dependent upon the charity of the hard-hearted.

  The hospice itself, where I lived, was divided in
to four rooms. The first, entered by the stairway from the vestibule, was relatively large and had three windows. In the middle stood the long, oilcloth-covered table where we took our meals. On the wall hung a large picture of our benefactor; I was afraid of this picture. I dared only to glance at it surreptitiously and quickly look away. It seemed to me the benefactor had angry eyes. As if it galled him that I was living here from his benevolence. Unfairly, I held the benefactor responsible for my unhappy youth. If he hadn’t endowed this house, I thought, I wouldn’t be here, I would be with my parents like the other children and I’d have enough to eat and nice clothes and a ball to play with. My hatred of this picture went so far that one time I crept into the hall, as we called this room, and hung a large cloth over the picture. I never would have dared to do that in the daytime, when I felt the benefactor’s eyes upon me. The cloth remained hanging for several days. No one paid any attention to it. Until Herr Mayer noticed it and had it taken down.

  Three small rooms opened onto the hall. Each room was meant for two people. A narrow bed stood against each of the two long walls, between the beds a small table. Two chairs, a few pegs in the walls and a black chest for clothes and linens, those were all the furnishings of our living quarters. We had to wash in a trough in the vestibule.

  The windows of our room looked out onto the narrow street below and the irregular gables of the old houses nearby.

  At the time I was growing up in the hospice, not all the vacancies were occupied. Not because no paupers were found to apply for them, no old men and no boys, but because the cost of living had risen since the endowment’s establishment and the interest on the capital was no longer enough to cover the full number of vacancies. And so there were only three old men in the house with me. One place for an old man and one for a boy remained vacant.