The lanky fellow pulls up his trousers, so, here it comes. Franz senses something, what’s Dreske up to, he’s just standing by and watching. ‘Hey, Orge, what’s this lad you’ve brought, where’d you get snot features from?’ He keeps working at his trousers, they must be slipping of him, he needs a new button or two. The lanky fellow mocks the landlord: ‘Always let everyone have their say. Fascists welcome. Whatever they want to say, they have the freedom to say it here.’ And Dreske whoas with his left arm: ‘No, Franz, I didn’t get involved, you should see what kind of trouble you get into by yourself and your songs, I’m staying out of this, this isn’t my doing.’
‘Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall’, aw, it’s what he sung in the courtyard they’re getting at, that’s what’s bothered them.
‘Fascist bloodhound!’ the lanky boy yells in Franz’s face. ‘I want your sash! Give it me!’
Here goes, the four of them are going to set on me, I’ll keep my back to the window, better see about a chair. ‘The sash! I’ll take it out your pocket. I want the sash.’ The others are all by him. Franz has a chair in his hands. Grips it firmly. First grab hold of it, then bif bang.
The landlord is trying to hold the lanky boy back, begging him: ‘Just leave! Biberkopf, please go.’ He’s worried on account of his premises, he probably hasn’t insured his winders, well, it’s no skin off my nose. ‘Sure, Henschke. There’s no shortage of pubs in Berlin, just I happened to be waiting for Lina in this one. But are you taking their side? Why throw me out when I comes here every day, and those two new fellows never bin here before.’ The landlord has managed to pull back the beanpole, the other new one spits: ‘Coz you’re a Fascist, you’ve got yer sash in yer pocket, you’re a Swazzy Nazi.’
‘What if I am. I told Orge I was. And why. You don’t understand, so you start shouting.’ ‘Na, it was you that were shouting with that Watch on the Rhine!’ ‘If you walk over to my table and cause a commotion like now, then there won’t be any rest in the world. Not a hope. And it needs rest, so that people can live and work. Factory workers and traders and everyone, so that there’s order, otherwise no one will be able to do their job. Then what will you live off, you loudmouths? You get drunk on your slogans! All you’re good for is creating scenes and provoking other people, till they get mad enough to go and biff you. You try being walked over the way you walk over other people!’
Suddenly he’s yelling too, something has happened in him, and is bubbling out of him, there’s a red mist in front of his eyes: ‘You bunch of crooks, you don’t know what you’re doing, a man has to knock the weevils out of your brains, you’ll wreck the entire world, watch out something doesn’t happen to you, you miserable wretches!’
It’s bubbling up out of him, he has done time in Tegel, life is grim, what kind of life is it, the man singing knows it, what I went through, Ida, best not think about it.
And he goes on yelling in a fit of dread, an abyss is opening up, fight it off, stamp it down, yell it down. The pub is rocking. Henschke is standing in front of him by the bar, doesn’t dare approach him because of the look on his face, and the roaring coming out of his throat, and now he’s foaming at the mouth: ‘You’ve got nothing to say to me, not one of youze can come up to me and say “we know better”, that’s not why we was in the big house, and laying in the trenches, to have you making trouble. Troublemakers, it needs quiet and calm, quiet I say, you can put that in your pipes and smoke it, just quiet (yes, that’s it, that’s where we’ve got to, that’s the truth), and whoever turns up now to cause a commotion, they need to be strung up along an avenue (black poles, telegraph poles, a whole row of them along the Tegeler Chaussee, I know), and then you’ll believe it, when you see them dangling there, then, yes. Then you can make a note of it and what you do, you criminals. (Yes, and then there will be quiet, they’ll keep shtum, that’s the only truth, we’ll see.)’
Franz Biberkopf is rampant, rigid. He is squawking blindly out of his throat, his eyes are glazed over, his face is blue, swollen, he is spitting, his hands are on fire, the man is beside himself. All the time his fingers are gripping the chair, but only so that he has something to hold on to. Next he will pick it up and start swinging it.
Careful, danger, clear the road, fire, fire, fire.
All the time, the man who’s standing there yelling can hear himself from a distance, see himself. The buildings, the buildings want to collapse, the roofs want to collapse on top of him, he won’t allow it, they’re not to come to me with that, I won’t let them, we need quiet.
And the feeling goes through him: it will start any moment, I will do something, grab someone by the throat, no, no, I’ll fall over, hit the ground, any second, any second now. And there I was, thinking the world was quiet and orderly. In his dimness he shudders: something is wrong in the world, the terrible way they’re standing over there, he can see it plain as day.
But once upon a time there dwelt in Paradise two people, Adam and Eve. And that Paradise was the splendid Garden of Eden. Birds and animals played in it.
Well, the fellow’s clearly bonkers. They pause, even the beanpole at the back is snorting and gesturing to Dreske; let’s just sit back down, and change the subject. Dreske stammers into the silence: ‘Well, best you be going, Franz, let go your chair, you’ve done enough talking.’ And the pressure in him lets up, the cloud passes. Passes. Thanks be to God, passes. His face lightens, sags.
They stand by their table, the lanky fellow is sitting and drinking. The lumber manufacturers insist on their margins, Krupp starves his pensioners, one and a half million unemployed, up by 226,000 in a fortnight.
The chair drops from Franz’s hand, his hand has gone soft, his voice sounds normal, he has lowered his head, they’re no longer riling him: ‘All right. I’m going. My pleasure. I’m not bothered with what’s going on in your heads.’
They listen without replying. Let the renegade rascals abuse the democratic constitution to applause from the bourgeoisie and the social chauvinists. It all deepens and accelerates the breach between the revolutionary workers of Europe and the Scheidemanns and the rest of them. The mass of the oppressed classes is with us.
Franz takes his cap: ‘I’m sorry something like this came between us.’ He extends his hand, Dreske doesn’t take it, sits down in his chair. ‘Blut muss fliessen, Blut muss fliessen, knüppelhageldick.’
‘Well, I’ll be going then. What do I owe, Henschke, and for the glass and the plate as well.’
That’s his order. For fourteen children a china cup. A welfare reform from the Centrist minister Hirtsiefer: confidential! In view of the slender budget at my disposal, qualification is determined not only by an exceptional number of offspring – twelve? – but also where raising of said offspring has been performed in an exemplary and self-denying way.
Someone behind Franz yells: ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz, taters with herring schwanz!’ He needs his bottom smacking. Too bad I didn’t get my mitts on him. Franz has pulled his cap on. He thinks of the Hackescher Markt, the gay boys, the greybeard’s kiosk with the publications, he didn’t feel like it, he hesitates, he goes anyway.
He is out in the cold. Outside he walks into Lina, who is just on her way to meet him. He walks slowly. Ideally he would go back inside and tell them all how crazy they are. Crazy, intoxicated, when he knows they’re not really like that, not even the beanpole, the cheeky one who plonked himself down at his table. They just don’t know what to do with all that blood, yes, they are hot-blooded, if they were out in Tegel or had done anything in their lives, they would see the light sure enough, hundred candle-power.
He has linked arms with Lina, is looking round the ill-lit street. They could use a few more street lights here. What’s wrong with people, first the queers who he doesn’t care about one way or another, and now the Reds. What do I care, so long as they mind their own business. Leave me out of it; a man can’t even drink his beer in peace these days. I have half a mind to go back and trash Henschke’s bar for him
. There’s more flickering and throbbing in Franz’s eyes; his brow swells, and his nose. But after a while it goes away; he squeezes Lina, scratches her on the wrist, she smiles: ‘That feels nice, Franz, a little scratch of yours.’
‘Let’s go dancing, Lina, I don’t feel like going in some smelly dive, I’ve had my fill of smoke. You know there’s a little goldfinch there. It can’t be doing her any good, but do you think they even care?’ And he explains to her how right he was a moment ago, and she sides with him. They get on the tram and ride down to Jannowitz-Brücke, to Little Walter’s Ballroom. Him just exactly as he is, and Lina’s not to go back and change, she’s lovely enough without all that. And the stout one pulls out a little newspaper from her pocket when they’re in the tram, it’s all crumpled. She brought it for him, it’s the Sunday edition of the Friedensbote. Franz says it’s not a paper he keeps, he presses her hand, he likes the name and the headline on the first page: ‘From Misfortune to Good Fortune.’
Clap clap your hands, tap tap your feet, fishes, birds, all day, paradise.
The tram jolts along, but in the dim light they put their heads together and read the poem on the front page that Lina has ringed in pencil: ‘Walking is best when we’re two’, by E. Fischer. ‘When we walk alone, it’s a walk of woe, The foot oft stumbling, the heart bowed low: Walking is best when we’re two. And if you fall, who’ll take your arm, If weary, who’ll ward off all harm? Walking is best when we’re two. You silent rover through world and time, Take Jesus as your mate sublime. Walking is best when we’re two. He knows the road, he knows the lane, With word and deed he heals your pain, Walking is best when we’re two.’[5]
I still feel thirsty, though, thinks Franz while reading, two pints wasn’t enough. All that talking dried my throat. And then he recalls his singing, and he feels at home and squeezes Lina to him.
She feels optimistic. As they walk down Alexanderstrasse to Holzmarktstrasse, she presses herself softly against him: perhaps he’ll ask to make an honest woman of her soon?
The scale of this Franz Biberkopf. A match for the heroes of old
This Franz Biberkopf, previously cement worker, then furniture removal man and so forth, currently newspaper seller, weighs nigh on two hundredweight. He has the strength of a cobra snake and has joined an athletics club again. Decked out in green puttees, hobnail boots and a bomber jacket. You won’t find much money on him, it only comes to him in small amounts, but even so it’s worth trying to get to know him.
Is he prey to conscience from back then, Ida and so on, nightmares, restless sleep, torments, the Furies from the time of our great-grandmothers? Uh uh. Consider the changed situation. A criminal, in his time a man accursed (how do you know, my child?) at the altar, Orestes, has bludgeoned to death one Clytemnestra – not an easy name to say – and she was his mother. (At what altar do you mean? You’ll have a job finding a church that stays open at night.) I say, times have changed. HOI HO HATZ, terrible beasts, old raddled women with snakes, dogs without muzzles, an unsympathetic menagerie snapping at his heels, but they can’t get near him because he’s standing in front of the altar, that is an antique notion, and then the whole pack of them dance furiously round him, dogs and whatnot. Harpless, as it says in the song, the dance of the Furies, they whirl around their victim, insane delusions, bending of senses, preparation for the asylum.
They don’t bother Franz Biberkopf. Let’s make that perfectly clear, here’s mud in your eye, he drinks one beer after another at Henschke’s or wherever, interspersed with the odd tot to lucubrate his heart. That’s how the furniture removal man and so forth, newspaper vendor Franz Biberkopf from Berlin north-east, end of 1927, may be distinguished from famous old Orestes. So who wouldn’t rather be in his boots, then.
Franz killed his girl, Ida, never mind the last name now, in the flush of her youth. This happened in the course of a spat between Franz and said Ida in the flat of her sister Minna, in which the following organs of the woman received superficial injuries: the skin on the bridge of her nose, the bone beneath and cartilage, which wasn’t noticed until hospital, and was to play a part in the subsequent court proceedings, also left and right shoulders, which suffered contusions and ecchymosis. But then the argument really took off. The words ‘pimp’ and ‘skirt-chaser’ had a huge effect on the honour-conscious if somewhat lapsed Franz Biberkopf, who had reasons of his own for being tense. His muscles were quaking. He didn’t pick up any weapon beyond a little wooden-handled egg-whisk, because he was in training at the time and had hurt his hand. And this egg-whisk with its wire spiral he brought down with an enormous twofold impact on the thorax of Ida, with whom he had been engaged in debate. To that date Ida’s sternum had been fully intact, the whole little person, which was very pleasant to behold, was not – by the way, the man, who was living off her, supposed not incorrectly that she had it in mind to get rid of him in favour of a recently appeared fellow from Breslau. At any rate, the attractive breastbone had not been built to withstand the impact of an egg-whisk. At the first blow she yelled Oh! and didn’t say dirty pimp but Christ. The second impact happened with Franz in the same position, but followed a quarter-turn to the right on the part of his Ida. Thereupon Ida said nothing at all, but opened her mouth in an odd duck’s-beak-like manner, and both her arms shot up in the air.
What had happened to the female’s sternum involves mechanical laws of rigidity and elasticity, impact and resistance. Without knowledge of these laws, it is hardly comprehensible. The following formulae will be of assistance:
The First Newtonian (njuː′tƏƱnIƏn) Law, which goes: a body exists in a state of rest, so long as no force causes it to change its state (with reference to Ida’s ribs). Njuten’s Second: the movement is in proportion to the force exerted, and will continue in the same direction (the force here being Franz, more specifically his arm and implement-bearing fist). The size of the force is expressed with the following formula:
The force acceleration, and therefore the degree of disruption, is expressed in another formula: —
The outcome was wholly predictable: the spiral of the egg-whisk is compressed, the wood itself struck. On the other side, inertia, yes, very good, resistance in the form of broken ribs, the seventh and eighth, in line with the left rear shoulder-blade.
The contemporary account leaves the Furies out of it. One can follow, blow by blow, what Franz did and what Ida suffered. There are no unknowns in the equation. It only remains to list the further consequences of the process thus initiated: loss of verticality on the part of Ida, reversion to the horizontal, in the form of colossal impact, at the same time as breathing difficulties, intense pain, shock and physiological loss of balance. Franz would have gone on to bludgeon the injured party, who was well known to him, like a roaring lion, had not her sister come running in from the other room. The shrill screams of that woman put him to flight, and later that evening a police patrol picked him up in his own fat not far away.
‘Hoi ho hatz’, cry the old Furies. O the dread sight of an accursed man at the altar, hands dripping with blood. Their snores: are you asleep? Put aside your slumber. Up, up. Agamemnon, his father, had set out for Troy many years before. Troy had fallen, there were beacons announcing the fact, from Mount Ida to Athos, always burning pine torches to Cithaeron.
How wonderful, by the way, these glowing reports from Troy to Greece. Isn’t it splendid the progress of that fire across the sea – light, heart, soul, happiness, outcry!
The dark red fire, glowing red over Lake Gorgopis, and then seen by a sentry, who shouts out for joy, that’s life, lit and passed on, the news and the excitement and joy, all together, and the hop across the bay, rushing up to the heights of Mt Arachnaeon, shouting and madness, visible, glowing red: Agamemnon is coming! We have nothing comparable to offer. We acknowledge the fact.
For transmission of news we avail ourselves of some of the results of the experiments of one Heinrich Hertz, who lived in Karlsruhe, died young, and, at least in a photograph in
the graphic collection in Munich, wore a beard. We have the wireless telegraph. Through mechanical transmitters in great stations we produce high-frequency alternating currents. By oscillations of one oscillatory circuit, electrical waves are produced. These oscillations radiate out in a circular pattern. And then there is an electron tube of glass and a microphone whose glass vibrates now more, now less strongly, and which produces the same note that previously had entered the machine, and that is astonishing, subtle, treacherous. Difficult to wax enthusiastic about; it works, sujfit.
How different the pine torch announcing Agamemnon’s return!
It burns, it flares, at every moment, in every place it speaks, it feels, and everything cheers: Agamemnon is coming home! A thousand men glow in every place: Agamemnon is coming, and now there are ten thousand, a hundred thousand along the coast.
And then, cut to the chase, he is home. Things there are different. Very different. The worm turns. As soon as his wife has him back, she sticks him in a bath. In an instant she shows him just what a fiendish harridan she is. She throws a fishing net over him, so that he cannot defend himself, and then she has a hatchet with her, as though to chop wood. He groans: ‘Oh woe, I am struck!’ Outside they are asking: ‘Who is that crying out?’ ‘Oh woe again!’ The antique witch does him in, she doesn’t bat an eyelid, she even condescends to boast outside: ‘I have done the deed, I cast a fisherman’s net over him, and struck him twice, with two sighs he stretched out his limbs, then with a third blow I sent him to Hades.’ This troubles the chorus of elders, but they manage to observe, aptly: ‘We are astounded by your bold speech.’ That, then, was the woman, that witch of old, who, in the course of marital duty with Agamemnon, had become mother to a boy who was given the name Orestes. Later she was killed by that fruit of her joys, and he was the one subsequently plagued by the Furies.