Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in A Part of Myself with a note of reference.

One day some friends fetched me from my sylvan solitude to meet an American writer who lived in a colonial village a few hours’ drive away. Charles Jackson was his name; he had just had a sensational success with his book, The Lost Weekend.

  After the success of my play The Merry Vineyard I paid off all my debts and had been touched by all my friends, but to my amazement I still had money left - more than I could carry in my pocket. On the other hand the Austrian poet Richard Billinger had none.

  Austria’s foremost writer . . .   Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Emil (Jannings) had come home from Hollywood laden with dollars, not caring to expose himself to the hazards of the new talking movie in a language not his own. I thereupon wrote the scenario for his first sound movie based on Heinrich Mann’s novel professor Unrat - The Blue Angel, which had held its interest to this day.

  Towards noon one day I ran into Egon Friedell, the cultured historian and philosopher, on Kartner Strasse. He was also an actor, and although he made fun of himself and the theater, acting was his special ambition and probably also a good part of his sustenance, for his Cultural History of the Modern Age, a book highly regarded today, probably brought him more admiration than royalties during his lifetime.

I felt as if I were being observed by an invisible eye, as if everyone outside knew just what I had done - this, long before George Orwell had written his Nineteen Eighty-Four.

 They turned up in our Vienna apartment the day after my flight, and when they found me already gone they stripped the place, carrying off, among other things, a library of several thousand volumes which included dedication copies from most of the writers of our time, from Gerhart Hauptmann to Brecht.

 Bertolt Brecht

In Vevey a plaque commemorates the house in which Rousseau lived.

Victor Hugo spent the years of his exile in the very same Hotel Belle-Vue in Chardonnay where we were staying; he had even left an old suitcase there.

To his inference (the devil) I must attribute the terrible and utterly senseless - if we might ever rightly say that, since we do not know better - death of our friend Odon von Horvath, the playwright and novelist.

. . . at fifteen, I came upon Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom in my parents’ locked bookcase, for I had long since learned where the key was hidden.

Before a religious-instruction class I wrote his GOD IS DEAD on the blackboard. Instead of punishing me, Professor Mayer gave me St Augustine’s Confessions, which were ordinarily not read in school, and demonstrated to me that I was more intoxicated by the poetic qualities in Nietzsche than by his philosophical logic.

She (grandmother) worshipped certain heroes, for reasons largely indiscernible, whom she extolled whenever her husband was not present. Foremost among these were William II, ‘our glorious emperor upon his charger,’ Count Zeppelin, the inventor of the rigid dirigible, and Emile Zola.

Her enthusiasms included the poetry of Schiller . . .

My models were Thomas Mann’s early volume of stories, Der klein’s Herr Friedman. and Hermann Bang’s Exzentrische Novellen.

Herman Bang

I found such reading in my parents’ carefully locked bookcase; both my parents differed from the rest of their families in their taste for the ‘moderns,’ who were then thought rather eccentric. They also had the Collected Works of Ibsen and Bjornson, and plays of Gerhart Hauptmann, Schnitzler, and Wedekind.

Arthur Schnitzler

 

 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

                                  

All of a sudden, some time between 1911 and 1913, there began appearing in the window of Wilcken’s Bookstore on Schillerplatz a series of books in a novel and uniform format, with the imprint ‘Kurt Wolff Verlag.’  The authors bore such unfamiliar names as Werfel and Kafka, and they had about them a revolutionary elan missing from the writings we had previously regarded as ‘modern.’  

And finally, just before my disaster at school, we were caught red-handed. For instead of bicycling to the tennis courts we gave ourselves to the games of love like Daphnis and Chloe in the Ingelheim Meadow, which in those days was still a lonely place

The debates raged in all directions, incorporating religion, sociology, the spirit of Greece, the idealism of Kant and Schiller, Goethe’s view of the forces of nature, until the harsh voice of a drayman or Rhine sailor would shout, ‘Quiet!’ because he rightly considered sleep more important.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In Austria, the great poet Georg Trakl, who served as a medical aid in a field hospital, killed himself out of despair over the war.

It is remarkable how swiftly in such times a difference between generations develops, and how deep a gulf forms between groups only a year or two apart in age.

. . . what soldiers who went to the front in 1914 envisioned is not what those who were a year and a half or two years younger experienced . . .

Erich Maria Remarque and his age group belonged to that generation. The heroic gesture of the volunteers was barred to them; they had to sweat out their normal time in school and then be unwillingly drafted, drilled, and harassed, and they went into the field without illusions, for they had some inkling of the horrors that awaited them there.

Hours in Wilckens’ bookshop on Schillerplatz, where we could find not only the exciting Expressionist authors whom we now regarded as a flame of rebellion - Henrich Mann, Alfred Doblin, Fritz von Unruh, Kasimir Edschmid - but also the banned pacifist writers whose books were imported from Switzerland and sold under the counter: Leonhard Frank, Henri Barbusse, Henri Guilbaux.

Alfred Döblin

Fritz von Unruh

Kasimir Edschmid

Henri Barbusse

Henri Guilbeaux

I drew up a strategic plan of what I thought could be learned without lecturers and seminars.  I began with art history, for which the cities of Belgium and northern France offered visual instruction.  Then I went on to economics, studying the classical liberals, Adam Smith and Ricardo, and going on through Louis Blanc and Lassalle to Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Marx and Engels, finally reaching Max Weber.  I read all the French books I could pick up in bookshops or from peddlers' carts, and discovered for myself Rimbaud - then hardly known in Germany - and Charles-Louis Philippe.  I read Verlaine, Montaigne, and the great novels, above all Flaubert.  I devoured Strindberg, Swift, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hamsun. Eschatology attracted me, and theologians and publishers: St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, St Frances, as well as the mystics: Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, and Mechthild.  Then there were the Silesian Pietists, and the defiant Humanists and Reformers: Hutton, Erasmus, Luther and his opponents, the fanatics and militants of the Peasant Wars - the world from which I drew the materials for my first play.  I studied, pencil and notebook in hand, a history of philosophy from Thales to Plato, from the Stoa to Schopenhauer.  I was insatiable.   Buddha and Lao-tse, the Vedanta, the Upanishads, and the Bible were consolations in the frightful darkness all around me, the eclipse of hope, the continual threat to life, the fear of excruciating pain, against which in the end, however, no books or wisdom would be of avail.

David Ricardo

Ferdinand Lassalle

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Ludwig Feuerbach

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels

Max Weber

Arthur Rimbaud

Charles-Louis Philippe

Paul Verlaine

Michel de Montaigne

Gustave Flaubert

August Strindberg

Jonathan Swift

Charles Dickens

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Knut Hamsun

Augustine of Hippo

Thomas Aquinas

René Descartes

Henry Suso

Meister Eckhart

Johannes Tauler

Mechthild of Magdeburg

Erasmus

Nearly a century had passed since the days when Carl Schultz rescued the poet Gottfried Kinkel from the Spandau Fortress and galloped with him through the night across the nearest frontier.

He (Dr Wilhelm Fraenger) also reminded you of a hardheaded, eloquent disciplinarian of society and culture like Jan Amos Comenius, the great educational reformer and one of his favorite writers, from whom he quoted frequently.

The writers whom he invited to come to Heidelberg to give readings generously did so without compensation, since the audiences were students, but Fraenger used the small entry fees to provide these guests with overnight accommodations. Among them was Klabund, a frail-looking lover of mankind, suffering from then incurable tuberculosis.

Still another writer was Hans Schiebelhuth, with a circular head like a seal’s and round, somewhat protruding eyes filled with a look of infinite kindliness, sagacity, and humanity.

The poet Else Lasker-Schuler coined the phrase which still seems to me the definitive pronouncement on him (Kokoschka): ‘A latter-day old master.’

To me Kokoschk still seems, more than half a century later, the greatest among the many great artists of this time.

We felt the same way about his highly individual poetry, which in later years was followed by a completely personal and unmistakable prose.

We read the ultra-liberal book by lovely Madame Kollontai, Love in the New Russia.

During those years Stanislavsky came to Berlin with his unsurpassable company to give performances of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorki and dramatizations of the great Dostoevsky novels.

Nikolai Gogol

Maxim Gorky

I also met Ilya Ehrenburg in Berlin at the same time. He was just back from a trip to South America, and I shall never forget that he gave me a huge black Danneman Brazil cigar - the first one I had ever smoked.

As of yet we knew nothing about the despairing suicides of the two men whom we regarded as the leading poets of the new Russia, Mayakovsky and Esenin.

Sergei Yesenin

Towards the end, we recalled the verses from Shakespeare’ Julius Caesar, where Brutus parts from Cassius:

If we do not meet again, why, we shall smile;
It not, why then this parting was well made.

During the first period of my engagement Hermine Korner was producing Schiller’s Maria Stuart, mounting the play in the spirit of Reinhardt.

Her Maria was Tully Wedekind, the widow of Franz Wedekind, who had died towards the end of the war.

He (Brecht) despised the rhetoric of proclamation by the enthusiasts of Expressionism. Later on when he spoke of ‘changing the world,’ he meant a perfectly specific, concrete change for which he had provided an ideological substructure. But when I first met him he stood aloof from all ideologies, and from politics in general. We talked about these matters frequently and at length. In those days I was much more ‘committed’ politically; in time the proportions were reversed. I gave him Ernst Bloch and Lukacs to read; he did not know them, and they did not arouse his interest.

György Lukács

For his part, he gave me Kipling. You can learn from him, he told me.

Hitler, too, had to go - first to a hiding place and then, after a fairly amiable trial, to prison in the Landsberg Fortress where, twenty-five years later, the Americans hanged some Nazi doctors . . . There he was given a great deal of patient paper and he composed Mein Kampf, which subsequently befuddled the mind of the nation.

In the late fall of 1928 a novel began appearing serially in the Vossische Zeitung, a work that had been accepted only after long difficulties.

'The best comedy in world literature since Gogol's The Inspector General,' Thomas Mann said in a letter written under the immediate impact of the play (The Merry Vineyard).

With Heinz Hiplert I did a dramatization of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, mostly because Kathe Dorsch wanted to play Catherine.

Warnings came from all sides, even from those of my former friends who had adapted to the new regime, but still preserved a kind of loyalty toward us.  Most of the people I had respected had already left Germany.  Reinhardt and Jessner were forced to resign. Henrich and Thomas Mann, Bruno and Leonhard Frank, Arnold Zweig, Alfred Doblin, and many other were scattering in all directions.

Leonhard Frank

Arnold Zweig

On the high seas we received a cable from our New York friend Dorothy Thompson, who had provided one of our two affidavits and obtained our entry visas to the United States.  Dorothy, then still married to Sinclair Lewis, was one of the most influential political journalists in America.  Her name was known everywhere.

'Expecting you as guests in my apartment 88 Central Park West,' the cable read.  'Have all baggage rerouted to my address.'

Hans Schiebelhuth could no more live by his poetry than Gottfried Benn, who had once remarked that in ten years he had earned all of 925 marks from his volumes of poetry.

Driving us all back to New York, Alice made a stop at the simple frame house where Walt Whitman had been born.  To either side of the house stood a pine and a large maple.

'He saw that maple as a child,' Schiebelhuth said, 'It's older than he is .  Pines grow faster, it may not have been there then, or else it was very small.'  We waved our hats in tribute to the great 'camarado.'

I was working on material that seriously interested me: a filming of Arnold Zweig’s novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa.