Carry Me Read online

  These young men had probably never heard of the Städel Museum, even though it was on their (south) side of the river. Niederrad folk didn’t go to art museums. Maybe they thought he was making fun of them. They gathered around him wolfishly and began abusing him, demanding he lead them to his hoard of buried gold. What rich old Jew did not have a hoard of buried gold?

  Tied to a chair Karin was forced to watch these imbeciles torment her father. The young men were strange and wild. One of them politely offered to fetch her a glass of water; another offered a cigarette. Meanwhile, their companions were dumping her father’s collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts into the fire.

  At last the baron agreed to lead them to his buried treasure. His lip was cut and blood had run down his chin and throat. Perhaps he just couldn’t stand those fellows polluting his home any longer. Maybe he planned to lead them on a wild-goose chase through the Walden woods, ending at the little cemetery where his son was buried with the soldiers from the war. Perhaps he figured they were going to kill him anyway and he didn’t wish to be murdered in front of his daughter.

  They were stupid enough, or drunk enough, to let him go into a cloakroom off the front hall to retrieve his coat and hat. His Uhlanen saber was in a dim corner, hanging on the same hook as his old army greatcoat. He dropped the coat on the floor, drew the blade from its sheath, and came out wielding it: seven hundred and fifty-two millimeters of honed steel. Weyersberg craftsmanship, always kept in superb condition. IN TREUE FEST stamped on the blade. Loyalty Forever.

  I think what Karin’s father really wanted was to die fighting them.

  ANNA

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  —Anna von Rabou. Famous old Prussia name. She laughs about this but I see is also—proud. Married to Fred Scheps but for all purposes she remains: Anna v Rabou

  —the first afternoon cold blue fall aroma of roasting chestnuts and schnapps I am introduced to AvR on the k’damm she asks ‘are you one of us?’ and (so I think) she means a kommunist but—no! she despises KPD.

  Me—‘I’m not certain what you mean so you had better explain if you want me to respond’.

  AvR—‘Are you a producer or a parasite? Do you produce to feed the soul of the human race or are you one of these young women whose decadent lives we encounter in the pages of Tempo?’

  Me—‘well I shall have to think about that. I’ll let you know.’

  Her boldness makes me angry but there is something there and she won’t let me go.

  —she is beloved by all persons high and low at the UFA.

  —very handsome and self-assured but not interested in being ‘the great lady’. She says ‘my people not grand aristo, not by any means, but der niederer Adel—country gentry?—very proud, rather poor, nothing as grand as you wealthy jews’

  —she needs to work and says everyone needs to work for the feeding of their spirit we all have the instinct to contribute something and it is important to recognize and act upon it otherwise our lives have no value and it is though we never lived at all.

  Advertisement. In Film-kurier Nummer 1472 12. ausgabe 101 vom 15. Oktober 1930 (Mittwoch). Lange Family Archive, C 12 10-1930. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  * * *

  LIEBLING DER GÖTTER

  Darstellar: Emil Jannings, Renate Müller und Olga Tschechowa

  Regisseur: Hanns Schwarz

  Produzent: Erich Prommer

  Drehbuch: Hans Müller, K. Weinbrenner

  Musik: Willy Schmidt-Gentner

  Fotografische Leitung Konstantin Irmen-Tschet Günther Rittau

  Herausgeber: Willy Zeyn

  Studio: Universum Film AG

  Verteilt Durch: Universum Film AG

  Premierenstag: 13 Oktober 1930

  * * *

  Movie Poster. Lange Family Archive, 12 HL-8-1932. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  * * *

  DIE TÄNZERIN VON SANS SOUCI

  mit Otto Gebühr

  und Lil Dagover § Rosa Valetti

  Produktionsleiter Gabriel Levy

  Drehbuch Hans Behrendt § K. Weinbrenner

  Ein UFA Film

  Die 6. Woche

  Im UFA Theater Kurfürstendamm Berlin

  * * *

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  scene: young Karin With wise Anna

  Her light is strong & is the mother I never had obviously

  She feeds cast & crew. Her delight in this

  A: ‘The writer is a telegraph wire carrying current between the picture (the pictures, meaning a sequence of images) the director imagines in his mind—and the story an audience can absorb. The total effect on the audience of a film is result of these (images, story) in combination.’

  A: ‘The film will happen like a dream does in the dark.’

  A: ‘Bild und Erzählung. Images and story. To absorb a film utterly different process than to read a book. More like a dream.’

  Really the writer makes the picture by making the story.

  A: ‘Some directors really only want to paint (with light and shadow—images) not interested to tell a story.’ Here she speaks (perhaps?) of F. Scheps her husband.

  She has no envy she believes she is great

  A: ‘Pictures will grow’

  A: ‘Wagner always’

  As a woman at Neubabelsberg she creates herself ‘Sie sind die Arbeit, die Sie tun’ You are the work you do!

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  Karl Mays “Winnetou”, Ideas for film treatment

  The university student fights the mensur, takes his scar, it does not satisfy him. He comes into America, seeking adventure. On the streets of New York confronting robbers we see this man likes to fight. His name now: Old Shatterhand. Too many people for him. West he must go.

  The railroad, controlled only by greed, pushes west. Hero accepts employment otherwise he will starve. His job: promising whiskey & blankets to Indians who sign away their ground. Only on el llano estacado, hunting ground of the Mescalero Apaches, he encounters a resolute foe, chief of Mescaleros, Winnetou. Combat they engage. Knives. Surprise: the former student Korpsbruder is a swordsman, their match is even. As they struggle to the death, a brown bear charges. They must fight the bear or each other. The bear is killed. From this moment they will be brothers.

  Adventures as they seek to defeat the Comanche and are victorious.

  Sickening slaughter. Corrupt railroad boss invites Winnetou to a ‘feast’ to celebrate his ‘victory’ over Comanche. W eats poison. Dies.

  Shatterhand dares enter camp of Comanche warriors where he faces death but a wise chief listens. Shatterhand leads Apache and Comanche to attack the railroad camp. Victory. They name him their war chief. He has located his destiny. He will take an Indian bride. A new race is born.

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  AR: ‘art is unity’!!

  But,

  K:(Art is destruction too isn’t it)!?

  AR has no patience for Max Beckmann. ‘degenerate vision’

  AR: ‘Wir sind Deutsche Juden. Wir teilen den gleichen Raum, aber wir sind nicht gleich’ which I will translate as ‘Germans and jews share the space only they are not the same people’

  AR admires ‘a german spirit’ that she will not define because ‘indefinable’ on
ly one feels it.

  AR holds one, and one feels quite safe

  Beautiful care, the hungry carpenters, the electrician, cast and crew she feeds, she gives extra food to bring home to their family

  of Dr. Goebbels she says: wicked but brilliant understanding the strange soul of an artist

  Ich nehme mir vor, dass ich sie nicht wiedersehen werde—

  I resolve: I shall not speak of her again.

  So far as I am concerned. Elle est morte.

  Karin was back at Walden for a few weeks in the spring of 1928. The New York stock market hadn’t crashed yet but the German economy was falling apart, though the Weinbrenners didn’t appear to notice. The baron was still buying broodmares in England, Ireland, and Belgium. Lady Maire and my mother were planning that summer’s expedition, to Portugal.

  I’d graduated from high school but hadn’t been able to line up any sort of job except the two afternoons a week I still put in as file clerk and translator for the lawyer, Kaufman. I didn’t cross paths with Karin until I met her walking along the gravel drive one afternoon as I was pedaling home from Kaufman’s on my ridiculous bicycle. I knew she’d been ill, but she looked strong and rosy. She wore her riding habit.

  “Hello, old Billy.”

  “Hello, Karin.” Dismounting, I walked beside her, pushing my bike. She was silent.

  “Going for a ride?” I said, finally.

  “I am.”

  It seemed so long ago when we’d first met in the Walden woods, that raw and ferocious first winter after the war; that season of blood and beggars.

  As an unemployed person, I felt life passing me by. I’d missed the bus somehow. I wanted to engage passionately with life, but I was only a tall, skinny, underemployed youth pushing a bicycle.

  “Will you come hacking with me?” she said suddenly.

  “Really? Wouldn’t you’d rather go alone? Shall I?”

  “You must come along.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  So I pedaled to Newport, changed hastily, pulled on a pair of my father’s boots. By the time I reached the stable she’d saddled two horses: her mother’s hunter, Paddy, and Prince Hal, the walking-out horse my father usually rode.

  “Does Prince Hal suit you?”

  “Perfectly,” I said.

  I followed her down the bridle path. She reached to open a gate so that we could canter across a meadow. We stayed out an hour, and didn’t speak the whole time, just enjoyed the thrilling thump of hooves, squeak of saddle leather, our gallant horses breathing hard.

  When we finally returned to the stable we looked after the animals ourselves without troubling the grooms. We stripped off saddles and tack, rubbed the horses down, fed them, watered them, and turned them out in the paddock. It was wonderful to be working alongside her. She knew how to behave around horses. Not every rider does.

  Still, she seemed different. Quieter than the rackety girl in the fast car speeding to Heidelberg. I hadn’t noticed it during our gallop. Our horses hadn’t been ridden much lately and were in high spirits. But in the quiet of the stable, I noticed. She seemed more self-possessed. Or detached.

  When we said goodbye she reached out to shake hands with me.

  “Good luck, old Billy, it’s good to see you. Such an old soul you are.”

  Somehow shaking hands didn’t feel right—it just didn’t. It dismayed me, in fact. Though I had no right to expect anything else.

  “Actually,” I blurted out, “I’m young and an idiot! Spend all my time lying in bed listening to jazz! Haven’t a proper job or any direction in life. My father’s fed up with my uselessness and so am I.”

  She smiled. “Don’t let the old ones frighten you. I’m sure you’ll find your way.”

  She headed back to the big house, and I didn’t see her again before she returned to her Berlin, roaring Berlin, Berlin of the late twenties, city of nightclubs, cabarets, and parties, a city I glimpsed only in the startling pages of tabloid newspapers.

  Never was Karin the riotous bohemian her mother imagined her to be. If she liked to live intensely, even wildly, there was also something austere to her character. It came up more after Zurich, perhaps, but had always been there—the silence of the spruce forest, the little girl ranging snowy paths with her Apache bow.

  She would sometimes go for days without leaving her flat, which was in the Charlottenburg district.

  Later, when we were spending weekends together in Berlin, she often used to talk about earlier phases of her life in the city. It wasn’t that she was trying to make me jealous or feel I’d missed important things—though I was, and I had. I believe her intention was to force our intimacy, which had been put off for so long, force it so it would blossom quickly, make up for lost time.

  She was a solitary, Karin. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she was.

  “Billy, in those days, I never was lonely. Days without speaking one word, answering to no one—excellent! What could be better? Always the tram noise, traffic floating up from the street, and voices from the café across the road. That was all right, that was the background, the structure of the city. One was not required to participate.”

  For a while she’d even stopped paying her telephone bill and her line had been cut off, which irritated her parents. Her father provided her an allowance, not an extravagant one, and she started buying pictures. Max Beckmann taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, but she first encountered his paintings in Berlin.

  The earliest sound films, the talkies, were just coming out. She became a devotee of the cinema. The afternoon she met Anna Rabou, she had just seen—heard!—Pabst’s Westfront 1918, an antiwar picture set on the western front.

  Emerging into the city after taking in a powerful picture was always a disorienting experience. “What a shock, to suddenly be walking the same old boulevards in the same old crowd—while mentally I’m still with a dying front soldier—or an Apache warrior, or a Texas outlaw about to be hanged! At such times I feel weightless, and horribly seasick, Billy, and terrific excitement, all at once. I want someplace to go, someplace jolly, noisy, fierce! A loud café, and a chocolate, because in such moods I become maudlin and contretemps if I take a schnapps or whiskey, I’ll end up lurching off by myself for another wallow in solitary.”

  It was at a fashionable café on the Kurfürstendamm, the sort of brilliant Berlin “scene” she usually avoided, that she first met Anna von Rabou, who was sharing a table with a girl Karin recognized from Lausanne, Marie-Therese von Zeiten.

  At finishing school Zeiten, the youngest daughter of a Prussian general, had declared herself a Communist. She and Anna Rabou were cousins, but family was the only real connection between them. They certainly weren’t close politically, and Anna was fifteen years older.

  It was chilly on the terrace. Marie Zeiten wore a fur stole bundled about her shoulders. She invited Karin to join them. Anna von Rabou offered her an English cigarette and ordered her a hot chocolate. Anna was one of those people who effortlessly can command a waiter’s attention.

  While they sipped their drinks and smoked cigarettes—at that time still bold behavior for women of their class, in a public place—along the Kurfürstendamm came a parade of Reichsbanner: war veterans in uniform, marching up the most bourgeois boulevard in the city.

  The Social Democrat Reichsbanner was only one of the party militias of that period. They fought street battles with the Communists’ RFB, the right-wing Stahlhelm, and the Nazi Sturmtruppen. In their ranks that day were a couple of dozen veterans blinded or crippled in the war. When Karin saw that many well-heeled patrons on the café terrace were literally turning their backs and refusing to look at the marching men, it dismayed her. “Why can’t they look at these fellows? They were heroes, now they go hungry. Why turn from the truth? What’s the use of that?”

  “What’s the truth, Miss Weinbrenner?” Anna asked.

  Karin was surprised by the intense way Anna was looking at her.
Looking right into her, it seemed.

  “Are you one of us?” Anna demanded.

  Karin laughed. “I’m not certain what you mean, so you had better explain if you want me to respond.”

  “Are you a producer or a parasite, Miss Weinbrenner? Do you produce good work to feed the soul of the human race or are you one of these young women whose decadent lives we encounter in the pages of Tempo?”

  “Well, I shall have to think about that.” Karin was flustered, and annoyed, but also intrigued. She wasn’t used to being challenged by people. “I’ll let you know.”

  Anna had gray eyes. Nowhere near pretty, but striking. She’d grown up shooting stags and riding big horses on her family’s estate in the Mark Brandenburg. Her father had died of a heart attack on the first day of the war in 1914. Like a lot of Prussian daughters, she was mostly self-educated, but she could read Greek and Latin, and had swum naked in Lake Constance with the American lyric poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. She smoked, heavily, always English cigarettes, Senior Service, and took whiskey in her coffee, even at breakfast. Slouching in her café chair, studying Karin through quick clouds of cigarette smoke, her manner was languid, even rude. But that was the style, the manner, of women of her class. When she wanted to, Anna could move like an aristocratic panther, and Karin told me she was a better horsewoman than even Lady Maire.

  “Do tell me something true, Miss Weinbrenner.”

  It seemed to Karin that if any truth was in her reach, it was contained in certain scenes witnessed at Walden during the war. She’d been a little girl then, but she remembered certain scenes very vividly and had never shared them with anyone.