Degeneration

“The fire burns them, yet the letters fly up to heaven.” — Midrash

Editor’s Note: A story from Merav Fima’s collection about a Jewish poet-artist enduring Nazi brutality on the night she is humiliated for her art. —David Michael Slater

Degeneration

Every child in Germany knows how I bestowed honor on our people there.

—Else Lasker-Schüler

Else entered the tiny studio on Regalstrasse, slamming the door behind her. She collapsed on one of the only pieces of furniture in the room, the stiff brown couch, which also served as her bed and writing desk, bumping her already bruised head against the armrest.

“Ouch,” she exclaimed, shifting to find a less painful position, but could find none. Whichever way she turned, she landed on another wound.

Lounging on the sofa from which he barely moved, her only child, Paul, exhaled shallow breaths. Despite his weakness, anxiety over his mother’s whereabouts had kept him awake. Taking her hand in his, he kissed his mother’s bruised arm.

Even Paul’s soft lips exacerbated the pain, like the lips of the angel guarding Jerusalem, its kisses simultaneously soothing and burning. “Thank you, my darling, but you must not strain yourself. I’ll be fine; it’s better already.”

Else wore a torn and stained silver gown that shimmered in the moonlight, which entered the chamber through the tiny window near the ramshackle ceiling. This was the sole source of illumination for the artist and her son at this late hour, besides the two thin flames of the Sabbath candles, which she had kindled in the hanging brass Judenstern before leaving the house. They kept vigil until her return, reminding her of the sanctity she had left behind earlier that evening. Two columns of wax once a week, though the star-shaped lamp called for six, were the only luxuries she allowed herself in this time of recession, when electricity was sporadic. The moonlight was sufficient to illuminate Else’s Kleist Prize, the only ornament on the faded, peeling wallpaper. The flames flickered against the certificate, illuminating one letter at a time, first the name of the prize, Germany’s highest literary honor, then her own name, and finally the date, barely three months before.

“The next stop can only be exile,” she lamented, flinging her head even farther back until the strain hurt her neck. “That’s the only reason I agreed to attend tonight’s ball and paint his portrait for the Reichstag.”

“What happened, Mother? Why did you respond to his summons?” asked Paul.

“This commission might have brought me enough money to purchase breakfast for us and antibiotics for you tomorrow morning, but I suppose that now we must go hungry again... for the third day in a row.”

“Don’t worry about me, Mother.”

“I know how much you are suffering, Paul, but I simply cannot afford painkillers this week.” She caressed his translucent, frozen cheek, her fingers sinking into the hollow.

Else shuddered as she recalled how the officer had seized her by the braid and pulled her to her feet while they were alone in the parlor where she painted his portrait. Still holding onto her hair, he looked her up and down, examining every inch of her emaciated body, prodding her protruding ribs and chin. He then flung her to the floor with disgust and asked, “What are you good for, anyway? Not only can you not paint properly, but even your body isn’t worth my attention.”

She noticed Paul’s sidelong glance, his eyes wide open for the first time in months, examining her scratched face. But he kept quiet, as was his custom. Even producing the softest of sounds strained his lungs and winded him. He seemed paler and more fragile than ever, like a porcelain figurine. “Don’t worry, my dear, I’d much rather retain my dignity than be fed by a Nazi,” she assured him, kissing his forehead.

She closed her eyes to alleviate her pounding headache, but a sequence of the night’s events immediately replayed against her eyelids. As much as Else hated the officer—for Else had this insight, as artists often do, and could see right through his eyes and straight into his heart—the portrait she had begun to paint of him on the finest canvas she could obtain was, technically speaking, one of her best artworks to date. A harmony of colors reigned on the canvas, accentuating the perfect proportions of the figure against the background.

She delineated the contours of his torso with charcoal and added shiny purple eyes, elongated blood-orange hands, and a square green moustache. She then flattened the figure by filling in the outline with dark brown paint. The right half of the face she painted pink, and the left half she colored blue. Else could not restrain herself and filled the background with thick brushstrokes of bright orange, yellow, and red, intertwined with the officer’s angular physique. It was the first painting in twenty years from which she excluded the white stones and golden domes of Jerusalem; Pharaoh was undeserving of such a sacred site, “God’s veiled bride, the observatory of the hereafter, the heaven before Heaven,” drowning in the Sea of Reeds on his way.

She thought of Franz, the art shop owner on the corner of her street, who agreed to open the back door of his little shop after-hours so that she could replenish her supply, even though it endangered both his life and hers. He charged her only a nominal fee beyond his own expenses and allowed her to take supplies on credit. He knew she did not have the cash now but assumed that the masterpieces she would paint on his canvases would eventually enable her to compensate him tenfold, after the collapse of the regime. Then everyone would know the source of her tightly woven, pristine canvases; their fine texture shone through the paint, making all the difference between mediocre and outstanding works.

She recalled how Franz used to sit in the corner of the Romanisches Café in her days of glory, listening to her poetry recitations. He would lean forward, afraid to miss a single syllable of her soft, hushed tone, glaring at the pastry eater at the next table who noisily chewed his Mandelbrot. The bitterness of his coffee was sweetened by her melodious voice, conjuring exotic worlds with no props other than her boa. Climbing onto a table, she, alone of the café’s patrons permitted to do so, would mime her words, the entire length of her body undulating to the rhythm of her poem Shulamite. Embodying the biblical princess, King Solomon’s beloved, she knotted her scarf as a tiara around her black tresses, reciting:

“O, from your sweet mouth

I learned too much of bliss!”

Hiding behind his ceramic mug and Berliner Morgenpost, he illustrated the scene in his sketchbook. In the center, he sketched her portrait, enthroned as Prince Jussuf among her people, only a select few of whom she admitted into her inner circle and endowed with rope diadems matching hers. He prided himself on how he had captured her facial expression and considered it his masterpiece; it hung on the wall behind the shop counter, demonstrating to his customers all that could be accomplished with his products.

He surprised her with the framed portrait the next time she entered his shop. It brought an instant sparkle to her eyes and a spontaneous “Wunderbar!” Even in her impulsiveness, she lost none of her regal bearing. So thrilled was he by her response that he gave her a huge discount that day, and a complimentary bottle of turpentine. He had been offering her discounts ever since.

Tonight she had been “offered the privilege” of painting the officer’s portrait—while other artists of her tribe were forbidden to paint at all as they were considered of lowly race—at such short notice that she did not have the chance to notify Franz. When she swung by his shop on her way to the Reichstag, he had already locked up and left for home. Circling the shop, Else discovered a back window partly open. Looking left and right to ensure that no one spied on her, she hoisted herself onto the windowsill. She heard a long tear as her stiletto heel caught the hem of her dress. She couldn’t present herself at her commission in a torn gown, but there was no time to go back and change, nor any dress in better condition at home—this had been her very best. She pushed the window open and climbed into the little shop. Landing safely among the objects of her passion, she grabbed hold of scissors from the counter and cut ten inches from the entire circumference of her gown, exposing her ankles and part of her calves, to camouflage the tear.

Guided only by the moonlight and by her familiarity with the contents of the store, she was drawn to the canvases. Remembering that they were arranged on the shelves by increasing size and quality, she raised her arm as high as she could reach and pulled down a medium-sized square canvas of the purest white cotton. Running her fingers along its surface to confirm its trademark smoothness, she rolled it up and stuck it into her purse. She then pulled open the gouache drawer and grabbed a small tube of each primary color: red, yellow, and blue. She threw them into her purse, adding them to the pastels she had brought from home. Shaking her empty wallet, she left the strip of silvery satin on the counter by the cash register as a deposit. Franz knew her limited wardrobe intimately; he would recognize the owner of the dress without any more explicit identification, which could endanger them both in the event of a Nazi inspection. Else used a stool to climb onto the windowsill and jumped into the courtyard, leaving the window wide open behind her.

Even the refinement of the canvas could not rescue her from the officer’s wrath. Or perhaps it was specifically its fine quality, forbidden to “degenerate” Jewish artists such as herself, which angered him. His curiosity aroused by the violent motions of her paintbrush, the officer rose from his seat and peeked at the portrait. So engrossed was she in her work that she did not notice the officer’s approach until he stomped his foot, furious at seeing his character thus revealed. Startled, she raised her eyes from the canvas, just as the officer pulled the Party’s artistic regulations from his pocket and reminded her of his desire to be glorified in a regal manner. He pointed to the wall behind her, where his self-portrait hung. It was modeled on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Napoleon Enthroned, except that the officer had substituted a swastika for the eagle emblem and given the emperor his own facial features. Else’s sharp eye discerned the shakiness of the lines and the tonal disharmony, which further distinguished the officer’s self-portrait from Ingres’s masterpiece, but decided that it would be unwise to point these deficiencies out to him.

“That’s what I want to see. Do you understand? All those who wish to be recognized as German artists must from now on produce the kind of art I sanction,” he declared. “How dare you render an Aryan body less than perfect, even deformed?”

Else refused to compromise and alter her style at his demand. She put down her paintbrush, crossed her arms, and turned her back to the Nazi.

The officer sneered, silently celebrating his triumph over her. “That’s it; this will be the end of your career, as well as that of all your Jewish friends from the Expressionist movement. I will no longer tolerate your incitement of the German people against the Party through your so-called art,” he threatened. Else shivered; her spine tense and stiff. “Only a true German with the blood of a thousand Aryan generations running through their veins could maintain the greatness of German art. You’re corrupting its purity and destroying the aesthetic that this most illustrious of nations has labored for centuries to achieve, all because you’re incapable of such greatness,” he hissed.

Else opened her mouth to explain the value of abstraction according to such celebrated German authorities as Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, but was interrupted by the officer. “It’s no use shunning the classical style and initiating a new artistic movement. We all know that you aspire to paint like the Masters but are simply incapable of it, and refuse to admit that; incapable because you are producing on stolen land where you have no roots.”

“Max Liebermann, who heads the Prussian Academy of Arts, is Jewish, too,” she protested.

“The days of his presidency are numbered,” responded the officer.

Rearranging herself on the threadbare sofa, Else realized that the Nazi officer had not chosen her as his portraitist in order to honor her, nor due to his admiration of her art. “He’d seen my work before,” she recollected aloud, forgetting that her grown son was within earshot, “at the exhibition featuring this year’s winners of the Weimar Art Academy Competition. I should have remembered the insults his men spray-painted on the walls above our paintings, deliberately allowing the spray to drip onto our prize canvases. I should have known that no one is permitted to espouse individual feelings anymore. That is my greatest crime, he proclaimed in his degrading speech tonight, besides my being Jewish, of course.”

To ensure that Else did not depart from the hall right away, the Nazi officer grabbed her by the wrists, spilling the pigments from her palette all over her dress. He then forced her to her feet and dragged her to the middle of the dance floor. Clasping her tightly to his chest, they moved their feet mechanically and out of synch to Richard Wagner’s Faust Overture, performed by a string quartet in military uniform. Every note sent a shiver through Else’s body. Her knees shook, and she was forced to lean closer into the officer to hold herself upright, feeling more and more repulsed with every step.

The officer finally let go of his solid grasp of her to make his way to the podium. Else commanded her legs to regain their firmness and carry her through the hall to the heavy doors, but the narrow stiffness of the dress hindered her motion, delaying her escape. She was detained at the exit by armed guards.

An easel concealed behind a thick red curtain stood in the middle of the platform. The officer slammed his fist into the podium. “You are about to witness the so-called ‘artwork’ of a degenerate,” he announced.

Pulling the curtain aside, the officer unveiled Else’s portrait. A stunned silence filled the auditorium. People remained frozen, couples detached themselves from one another, spun into frontal view, and stared, jaws dropping open. They were mesmerized by the painting’s powerful color scheme and skillful structure, but most of all by its portrayal of the full complexity of the officer’s personality, whom they all pretended to adore, but before whom they quivered.

The officer roared, “I see you’re all of the same mind as myself. There is no applause, nor a single exclamation of approbation, as this painting is unworthy of it. In fact, all it merits is laughter.”

As though on cue, the crowd erupted into laughter; softly at first, each man checking his neighbor’s reaction, and then with greater vigor. The officer was so pleased that his own laughter rose above all of theirs. It continued to resound across the auditorium long after their forced laughter had subsided.

Once he regained his composure, the officer approached the easel. Pointing a rigid finger at the canvas, he began, “The reason this so-called painting aroused such laughter, my dear compatriots, is its unfinished state, which some second-class artists call ‘abstraction’.” Raising his arm to the canvas, “Observe here how the painter’s use of non-continuous lines and short brushstrokes destroys the integrity of the painting. Further, her juxtaposition of complementary colors is a strain on the eye, while the body that disintegrates into the background is unnatural. Instead of reveling in the beauty of a healthy Aryan body, it dissolves into impasto. I am telling you, it is all part of the barbaric conspiracy to defile German culture.” The men in uniform in the front row nodded their heads in unison.

“Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, we have requested an accomplished artist to complete this unfinished painting. I welcome the newly appointed Künstlerischer Leiter, Kaspar Häusner, Germany’s Artistic Leader.” As he stepped onto the platform in his tuxedo, Else recognized the freckled man who had sat behind her in art school, always copying her compositions and distracting her with dirty jokes, until he was expelled at the end of the second year. It turned out that the portfolio he had submitted to the admissions committee had been prepared by his uncle. While she and other graduates of their class had gone on to establish avant-garde movements and sell their paintings to national museums around the globe, he worked at a soda factory.

As their eyes met, his lips contorted and his eyes shone triumphantly. His expression chilled her. Removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves, he pulled a palette knife out of his belt. The audience gasped. Else winced and turned her head, placing one hand on her chest and the other on her abdomen. She bent forward to delay the rise of the nausea as he scratched out the officer’s face with swift scraping motions. The officer exclaimed, “Cut it all out, scrape it all off, leave no trace of that filth!” Else felt as though a knife was piercing her heart. The replacement blew on the canvas to disperse the residue of her pigments.

Placing a photograph of the officer on the easel next to the canvas, he began to fill Else’s outline with beige, concealing the acne scars and the mole on his cheek. He gave the officer uncrossed blue eyes, which everyone, even from afar, could see he did not possess, and a lighter tone of brown hair with golden highlights. After straightening and narrowing his nose, he added a gold crown surmounted by an eagle with outspread wings and pinned a swastika to his gray uniform. Kaspar then cleared Else’s colorful background and replaced it with the officer’s own design of the Temple of Art, a classical, colonnaded building with a marble portico.

After signing his name, Häusner stepped aside, an outstretched hand indicating the refurbished portrait, and said, “I present to you the official portrait of our beloved General Lieutenant.”

The officer rose from his throne to inspect the canvas. “Now this is a true German painting!” He clapped Kaspar’s back with his left hand while shaking his right hand vigorously. “I am proud to hold the hand of a true German artist,” he declared. Applause thundered through the hall as two muscular men lifted the canvas from the easel and hung it on a nail above the officer’s seat.

The doors opened and the crowd departed. Else attempted to camouflage herself among them, intending to make her way to the freedom of the street, but the guard recognized her and seized her by the strap of her dress, dragging her into the courtyard, where the people had reassembled. The iron gates remained locked.

A tall bonfire danced in the center of the courtyard, glowing orange with the pages torn out of books and fed to it. A sheet of paper flew loose in the wind and landed in Else’s hand. She instantly recognized her poem “Homesickness”:

Who will anoint my dead palaces –
They wore the crowns of my fathers,
Whose prayers drowned in the holy river.

The poem was accompanied by her own illustration of Thebes with Jussuf, the prince’s profile looking out of a blue window in a crowded neighborhood of domes and stars. Else let out a loud shriek. The guard punched her ear. She almost fell over. Her entire body trembled. She wished she could flee, but she was paralyzed. One guard grabbed her by the dress, while another pulled her by her hair toward the fire. As she was unable to move, her dress tore, and a handful of her already sparse hair remained in the guard’s fist. When they reached the center of the circle, he threw it into the fire.

His hands free, he collected the books (no doubt the price of admission to the night’s gala) from the crowd and piled them beside the fire. Else noticed that those in the inner circle each held at least five of her books. For a moment, she felt proud as she recalled the days when her books were bestsellers and everyone recited her poetry.

If they had each read half the books they held, they knew her spirit intimately. How could they do this to her? Had her words not had the intended humanizing effect? What was the point of poetry otherwise? Didn’t it teach them to empathize with her as a Jew, as an artist, as a woman, as a German, as a human being? She had failed as a poet; of course, she deserved to have her books burned, she thought, if they did not move people to greater compassion.

The fire, which warmed her at first (she had abandoned her shawl in the gallery), now charred her skin. She felt her cheeks getting scorched. Raising a hand to her face, she could not feel her fingers against the burnt patches, having lost all sensation. She stood there, gasping for air.

As the guard received the books from the people, he tore the pages out of the binding and handed them to another guard to Else’s left. The second guard would read verses, selected at random, before crumpling up the page and throwing it into the fire, to the crowd’s raucous cheers.

“The rock decays

From which I spring

To sing my songs of God.”

As the sound of the syllables reached her ears, Else’s eyelids shut and her lips parted. Her tongue twisted in her mouth, silently forming the words. She saw herself back at the Romanisches Café amid a large crowd of admirers. Soon her high voice overtook his deep monotone, and he grew silent, allowing her to complete the recitation, replete with her usual sweeping gestures and swaying motions.

“And still, still the echo

In me,

When to the East, awesomely,

The decaying rock of bone,

My people,

Cries out to God.”

Else fell to her knees and ended the performance with both hands over her heart, a plea for mercy. She was overwhelmed by the silence that now permeated the courtyard, a silence she had not thought possible in the presence of so many.

The guard was the first to recover his voice. He booed. One by one, the others joined in his cry, drowning her out in a tonal wave. She was captured in the sea of voices, her poetic words reverberating inside her.

A tome hit her head, knocking her to the ground, and brought her out of her trance. She picked it up from the asphalt, where it had landed, and opened it to the title page. She recognized her own handwritten dedication to her beloved friend, Gottfried Benn, a fellow Expressionist poet. A tear trickled down her cheek for the first time that evening at the realization that he was among them. Wasn’t it he who had called her the “greatest lyrical poet Germany ever had,” and who had dedicated his second book of poetry, Söhne, to her? Didn’t he, just a few months before, send her a note, which she had memorized: “The Kleist Prize, so often sullied, was once again ennobled by being awarded to you. Congratulations to German poetry!” Had he always been insincere, or had they simply brainwashed him?

Still on the ground, Else leafed through the pages, illuminated by the towering flames behind her. Hebrew Ballads was her favorite book. She found comfort in the poems and illustrations she had produced with the same fountain pen. She traced the contours of the images with her forefinger and caressed the vellum of the cover, warming her numb hand. She attempted to focus her eyes on the words, to lull herself with their rhythm, to shut out the infernal scene at the heart of which she sat, but was distracted and dizzied by the chaos. She shut the book and slipped it down the front of her dress.

Crawling on all fours with her head lowered to avoid the flying books, she slithered through the stomping legs until she reached the gate. There, a guard obstructed her passage and pulled her to her feet. Noticing the bulge in her chest, he reached into her dress, squeezed her breast, and snatched the book. Smacking her back with it, he threw her onto the street like a sacrificial lamb sent out of Jerusalem into the Valley of Hinnom, as the magnificent Temple burned to ashes behind her.

She ran down the road along the stone wall that enclosed the Reichstag and heard feet shuffling within. Peering over the wall as she paused for breath, she heard the men chanting “Death to the Jews,” “Deutschland for Aryans”, and “Aryan beauty is perfection.” She imagined that, her disappearance noted, they had convinced themselves they had pushed her into the fire and burned her, along with her corrupt books and degenerate paintings, punishing her as the witch they believed her to be.

When she entered her studio, out of breath, Else kicked the easel with her stiletto heel before collapsing onto the couch beside her son. She breathed a sigh of relief as she resolved to leave Germany forever and relocate to Palestine, and more specifically to Jerusalem, the city that “blesses those who long for its blessing, the devout city comforts those who wish to be comforted.” She knew that there, artists like herself would possess the freedom to paint as they wished, incorporating Jewish themes with vivid colors, rather than having their artworks censored, as in Germany.

Before starting her life anew in that distant country, so close to her heart, she rummaged through her purse and pulled out the three containers of gouache and two pastel sticks she had managed to smuggle out of the Reichstag. She lifted the floorboards and retrieved a small scrap of canvas, no larger than a postcard, left over from her most acclaimed painting, Bunch of Wild Jews, produced less than a year before. She unfolded her three-legged bedside table and placed the scrap of canvas on the narrow ledge. She struck a match, lit another candle, and shut the curtains, fearful that a Nazi patrol would see the light and suspect that she was again painting against regulations.

She drew a flattened woman with cropped black hair dressed in a torn and stained silver gown. Wearing red stud earrings and a pearl necklace, the woman balanced uncomfortably on a wooden stool. Eyes shut, back curved, head tilted forward, she held a paintbrush in her right hand, while her left forearm, covered in bruises, was supported by a younger figure whose ivory hand offered her a red rose. Behind them, the background was divided in two: the left-hand side somber with a hefty neoclassical portico, while a golden stone building decorated with blue mosaics hovered on the right-hand side, its domes and pointed arches piercing the clouds. The two sections were cleft by long, yellow and orange brushstrokes, consuming the buildings.

Turning to her motionless son, eager to share her painting with him, she touched his forehead and found it to be cold. As she reached for his wrist under the blanket, a small piece of cardboard fell out of his hand, left over from her sketch of Jussuf Sculpts His Mother. She made out a soft pencil outline of her profile, with spots on the neck and chest, no doubt executed under the quilt as she sat there next to him, contemplating the night’s events.

Else dropped the cardboard and placed her own painting in Paul’s other hand. She wanted to run out for help, but feared that she would be arrested and beaten for breaking curfew so late at night. Helpless, she collapsed on the edge of the couch and cradled her son in her arms. Supporting his neck, she smoothed back his oily hair and traced his facial features with her index finger, deliberately committing them to memory. She felt his heartbeat slow and weaken, as silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

When she could no longer feel his pulse, she pulled the blanket up to his chin and placed his cardboard drawing in her clutch purse, along with her most recent self-portrait and the Kleist Prize certificate, which she unhooked from the wall. She folded the easel and lifted the wooden floorboards with her remaining strength, tucking away the pastels and tubes of gouache. Wrapping a wool scarf over her stained, torn, almost translucent gown, she walked out of the studio with only her purse in her hand.

Merav Fima is a writer, translator, and literary scholar currently based in Melbourne, Australia. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Monash University, and her work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals worldwide, including Meanjin Quarterly, Parchment, Poetica Magazine, and The Australian Book Review. She was awarded a grant for exceptionally talented writers from the Israel Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, as well as a grant from the Israel Science Foundation for her translation of Gal Ventura’s scholarly monograph, Maternal Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes in Nineteenth-Century French Art (Brill, 2018). Several of her short stories have been honored in literary contests, and her forthcoming novel, The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree, was shortlisted for the Australian Jewish Book Awards’ Wingate Award for Unpublished Manuscripts.

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Reading books with my kids before bedtime

• Children laughing in their sleep

• The multicolored roses in our garden

• Walking wild paths along the Melbourne seashore at sunset

• Dark chocolate

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• My daughters leading the congregation in prayer

• My toddler running to kiss the Torah as soon as the Ark is opened

• All of the kids huddled together under the tallit for the Children’s Blessing

• The special tastes of the Sephardic Rosh Hashanah Seder

• Kabbalat Shabbat in Jerusalem