Francesco Mazzaferro. The 'myth' of Emil Nolde in the novel 'The German Lesson' by Siegfried Lenz

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Francesco Mazzaferro

The ‘myth’ of Emil Nolde in the novel ‘The German Lesson’ by Siegfried Lenz.

Part Three

[Original Version: January 2017 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 3) The English translation by Ernest Kaiser and Eithne Wilking (1971)

Go Back to the Beginning

We are continuing to quote the passages of the novel 'German Lesson', published by Siegfried Lenz in 1968, in which the novelist mentions - through literary descriptions – selected paintings by Emil Nolde, albeit modified by the author so that they would adapt fully to the novel's narrative. Lenz's pages are compared with the description of the same paintings made by the art historian Werner Haftmann, who 'rediscovered' Nolde in a famous 1958 monograph The similarities between fictional narrative, literary criticism and paintings reveal the mechanisms that have contributed to 'revolutionize' the image of Nolde in those decades, in Germany and in Europe.

5. Suddenly on the shore (Lenz) - Trio (Nolde)

Klaas Jepsen, soldier and elderly son of the policeman, lives hidden in painter Nansen’s house, after having deserted from the Wehrmacht. The policeman knows that the son has deserted, has therefore decided to repudiate him as a son, and is even ready to denounce him, once he comes back home. He has the intuition that the painter is clandestinely breaking the ban on painting, but ignores that he is even committing a much more serious crime: hosting a deserter. In fact, the painter produces clandestinely a new picture during the night. Fully concentrated in his latest painting, called “Suddenly on the shore” (Plötzlich amStrand), Nansen forgets to black-out the window of his studio. The policeman notices it, and discovers him violating the prohibition of painting. For God’s sake, the policeman finds out the painter is violating the ban on art, but does not find out he is also hiding his own son, who is also hidden in the same studio. The fictional painting spreads a sense of fear around this scene, through which the reader becomes aware that what is happening might lead to the ruin of the painter and the deserted soldier. The corresponding picture by Nolde, according to Ms Petersen, is called “Trio” and dates back to 1929.

The literary portrait is just at the beginning of the eight chapter, called “The Portrait”. The opening sentence “Mann im roten Mantel, jetzt muß ich von dir erzählen“ sounds in metrics like the Vergilian verse Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris, opening Virgil’s Aeneis. It cannot be a coincidence.

“Man in the read cloak, now I must speak about you. At long last the time has come for you to perform your handstands on the desolate beach, or even to dance on your head before my brother Klaas, who happens – though it’s not entirely chance, either – to be standing next to you. Now you can make us ask, yet once again, why it is not gaiety that pervades the picture, but greenish-white flaming fear. You, with your ancient face, with your ancient cunning, now advance to make your contribution; for it was, I surmise, on your account that the studio wasn’t blacked out according to regulations. Because Max Ludwig Nansen wasn’t satisfied with you, because he had to go on changing you, with embittered slashes of his brush, because he was helping you, sometimes rashly, wildly, to look like yourself – in the morning as well as in the evening – he did not find the time to walk round the house and make sure there were no chinks in the black-out! Anyway, he was busy with you, improving you and correcting you, and hence failed to notice that one of the blinds had got stuck, the way a sail gets stuck, letting a ray of light – his working light – out of the window. So all at once there was a trembling light hovering over the dark plain (…) So far I know it was the first light that had appeared in the plain for years. It stretched out thin as a finger across the ditches and canals, and anyone seeing it could only wonder: ‘Who is going to see it first? Who within an angle of a hundred and seventy degrees will discover it first, work out its position and draw his conclusions? Blacked-out ships on the North Sea? Secret agents? Or the Blanheims? Long before any ship, agent, or Blenheim bomber the Rugbüll policeman had observed the illicit light, he whose duty it was to see that after darkness fell everything stayed dark round our way. (…) The light came from the studio. All the big house’s windows were blacked out according to regulations; only from the studio a sharp beam of light fell into the garden. The Rugbüll policeman went up to the offending window. He paid no attention to where he walked, simply stamper right through a bed of asters, past the summerhouse, pushed through dripping shrubs and bushes and finally got so close that he could dip his hand into the beam of light. (…) There was a man in a red cloak and there was Klaas – or, anyway, a chap who instantly reminded one of Klaas – and facing them, partly blocking my father’s view of them, there was the painter, his hat on his head. The painter was working. With short, slashing strokes of his brush, talking, scolding, he was working at the man in the red cloak. He foreshortened the coboldish feet that stuck out from under the cloak. He made the blue background stronger, to contrast with the red of the cloak. And the red cloak shone out over the desolate shore of a black, wintry North Sea, glowing and floating, denying the force of gravity, for although the man who wore it was walking, even dancing, on his hands, the open bell-shaped cloak didn’t drop down over him. It didn’t drop down and cover his face in which, as he poised there on his hands, an ancient cunning was very perceptible indeed. How thin his wrists were! How delicate the curving, poised body! He was obviously laughing and giggling, trying to infect Klaas with his laughter, he was eager to please my brother, he wanted to get round him and cheer him up, and he was trying to do it by – of all things – walking or dancing on his hangs, which he did, it must be admitted, with the greatest of easiness to stand on.

But, however easily he was able to stand on his hands, he couldn’t win Klaas over, he couldn’t even persuade him to stay. The fear he had unintentionally aroused in my brother, a greenish-white flaming fear, made Klaas try to work his way out of the scene. Klaas had his fingers spread out, his head thrown back, and the dropping shadows under his open mouth made one think of a choked-off scream. Just two or more hesitant steps, one could see even now, and Klaas would be running, driven across the beach by his fear, running towards the indifferent skyline, anywhere – just to get away from the man standing on his head in the red cloak. The picture was called ‘Suddenly on the Shore’. Or at least that was what the painter had called it, but in his diary he had also given it the title ‘Fear’. (…) Perverse satisfaction must have been what my father felt, there at his observation-post, where he remained longer than he ought to have in view of the fact that the beam could be seen from far out on the dark plain (…) The offence against prevailing regulations that he was here contemplating afforded him a complex sort of pleasure, and who knows how long he might have stayed out there if he hadn’t thought, all of a sudden, that he heard Ditte’s voice [note of the editor: the painter’s wife]. He scrambled down from the table. Then he put it back in its place, pulled the pointed ends of his cape out from under his belt, and then – at least is how I imagine it – cast a final glance at the lighted window before knocking at the studio door” [29]. 

It may perhaps be of interest to know that the painter destroys the picture, cutting it in pieces, to avoid being denounced by the policeman; however, the policeman’s younger son (i.e. the narrator) secretly recovers the pieces, tries to repair it and keeps it for himself. It will be the first case in which he is secretly hiding a painting on his own initiative, even not advising the painter where it holds it. He has now stolen yet, simply recovering the pieces of a torn up picture, but this is perhaps the first step towards his future kleptomania.

Both Grothmann as well as Petersen have identified in the 1929-dated "Trio" the corresponding painting by Nolde. This is an excerpt from Haftmann on that painting: “The tendency towards the grotesque, magical and burlesque has always been highly acute in Nolde. (...) ‘Trio’ belongs to this series. Its musical title is not accidental; the sound-like harmonic interaction of the three colours blue, yellow and red is quite obviously; the combination releases from itself this burlesque threesome society of cloud spirits. The picture is quite fluid, painted in a watercolour-like technique that allows all freedom for colours to grow in any direction. The colour combination is simple. The image - initially primed in orange - is based on the complementary contrast blue-orange. The blue fills the bottom of the surface. The orange breaks to yellow and yellow-green (on the right side), and to red (on the left side). These simple complementary tones and their passages provide a bright decoration of colours. Some special highlights - the emerald green of the tie in the middle, the purple of the cloud bank, the scattered red elements - make the tones precious and rich. The three actors appear in a fairy-tale yellow golden light, sorting out of the blue background; two parade and dispute on a violet clouds bank, while the third dives into the air space with a bold leap“ [30].

While Lenz provides a reading of the fictional picture inspired to the fundamental feeling of fear, for Haftmann the original painting is rather a piece of burlesque. To be noted, the colours of Nolde’s original painting are different from those described in the novel for the fictional painting of Nansen. Lenz refers to a white-green complementary combination signalling a sense off fear, in the original the complementary combination is blue orange, and inspires the fresh feeling of a light tale.

6.      Cloudmakers (Lenz) – High Waves and  Flowers and Clouds (Nolde)

The painter has been denounced by the policeman, but there is no firm evidence yet that he has effectively broken the ban of painting. Thus, two Gestapo officers come to his house to bring him to town, in order to query him.

He is given only thirty minutes to prepare himself, before leaving. He immediate priority, however, is to save his pictures, which are hidden in his house. The most important of them is the “Cloudmaker” (Wolkenmacher), an image dominated by a forceful brown colour, strangely the political colour of the power oppressing the painter, thereby intensifying the sense of drama in the scene.

“The painting was walking to and fro. He dragged a crate along the floor, opened it and shut it again. He turned on the water tap. He threw an empty tin on to the pottery table. Making use of all the nooks and crannies and keeping hidden behind the makeshift bunk, I worked my way as close to him as I could so that in the end there was only a narrow passage-way separating us. I pushed aside a blanket that had been hung up as a curtain, and there he was, standing right in front of me. Cautiously, he pulled open a wide cupboard, listened for a moment, and then bent down. And out of that cupboard – I shall never forget what came rolling out of it: an irresistible, relentless brown, a brown occupying the whole of the horizon, a brown that was streaked and bordered with grey, unrolled and went on growing and growing over a countryside sinking into dusk. The picture was called ‘The Cloudmaker’. The painter looked at it, he tilted his head, he stepped back, he came so close to me that I could have touched him with my hand. He was not convinced by what he saw. Thoughtfully he shook his head, walked up to the picture and put the flat of his hand on the place out of which the brown grew. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here’s where the action starts.’ He let his hand sink and hunched up his shoulders as though suddenly chilly. ‘Stop jabbering, Balthasar,’ he said. “I can see for myself what’s missing. There’s no foreboding, no foreboding of the storm. And so the colour has simply got to say more about flight, what it takes is watchfulness, alertness, somebody there revealing how frightened he is. Somebody opened the door of the studio, but Nansen didn’t hear. I felt the draught and I waited for the sound of the door shutting again. But there was no sound and so I lifted the blanket, came out of my hiding-place and, pressing my forefingers to my lips, walked up to him and touched him. He started, and turned round in a fright, his mouth fell open. He was about to say something, but then he realised what my outstretched arm meant, pointing towards the door. He seemed to have been prepared for it and, quickly grasping the situation, he hastily took the picture from the wardrobe door, rolled it up and pushed it under the wardrobe. But he instantly pulled it out again. He looked round. There were a hundred hiding-places and yet non that was suitable for “The Cloudmaker”. There were dark corners, nooks and crannies, cracks in the wall and in the floor, the gaping mouths of jugs, all of them offering their services, and yet there was no suitable place. In that moment they all seemed useless to him. He had discovered me. He pulled me towards the cupboard and looked at me closely and with an urgency he’d never shown before. I smelled the scent of the soap and the tobacco on his breath. I felt the coldness in his grey eyes. (…) for a moment he strained his ears in the direction of the door, and then he whispered (…): ‘Can I trust you? We’re friends, aren’t we? Will you do something for me?’ Ýes,’I said, nodding. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ And then I realises what he wanted me to do, and I pulled out my patched green pullover, right up to my armpits, and the painter put the painting around me, pulled the pullover down, and pushed it inside my trousers. The pullover was too tight all round and so I pulled it out a little to make it appear natural. I tried to move, to find out if it would work. ‘Take it out of the place and keep it safe somewhere,’ he whispered. ‘And bring it back later to Aunt Ditte. I shall be needing it” [31].

 Admittedly, Nolde painted a very large number of painting with clouds and storms. Grothmann lists a number of titles, Petersen proposes “High Waves” (Hohe Wogen, 1940) and “Flowers and Clouds” (Blumen und Wolken, 1933), because of the use of intense brown across the horizon. These are some excerpts from Haftmann on the two pictures.

On “High Waves”: "The pictures that have come into existence since (...) 1930 could have shown us how the painter’s feeling for nature permits him to invent metaphors of fate from the dictionary of nature. The colour becomes blazing and mysterious and looks for unusual tones. It releases a light that - peculiar and phantasmagorical - embeds figurative objects in a magical atmosphere, in which things themselves - puzzling and difficult – assume a fatal destiny. On the surface, liquid and agitated streams of luminous colours spread in peculiar indefinite transparency. The objects are actually not identified through their profile, but through the boundaries between colour areas, moving and clashing among each other, and the shape-defining accents of coloured light. (...) Throwing a dull light over the scene, a heavy purple brown is superimposed over the transparent, rhythmically moving blue of the waves. A bright yellow counteracts this dull, inexorable unfolding of brown. A dramatic battle of light and darkness develops in the area of the sky. Below, the rhythmic breathing of the blue. (...) In the interaction between evocative colours, it arises the fateful tone that resounds through all the late works of Nolde” [32].

On “Flowers and Clouds”:  "Flowers and clouds - these were the two natural symbols in which the drama of nature presented itself for Nolde. Clouds – they were the seat of the gods and of fear, the ever-changeable and yet imperishable, the threat or consolation of the heavenly region, the form and carrier of the light sinking across them, the fate of the earth coming from afar. Flowers - they were the ephemeral shapes that grew from the womb of the earth, full of secret, strange, inwardly full of figure, organisms of a shouting fragile beauty, which often could have something desperate and hectic, due to their fleeting transience. Flowers and clouds are the only vehicles of objective expression in this picture. (...) The orange casts a sinister light over the bottom ground; opposite to, it is a black grey, which overwhelms the light. A green movement penetrates from the bottom upwards, giving an earthy sound to the brown violet and black grey. The association to heaven and earth is created, in the painter, by the abstract colour movement and from the memory of a by now thousand- times-experienced nature. The dramatic unfolding of orange and black grey becomes a struggle between light and darkness on the stage of heaven" [33].

There are intriguing similitudes in the parallel reference to an irreversibly expanding brown and the grey bordering it, with a sense of colour violently spreading across the picture, through colour contrasts, while the wide horizon is designed as the border between colour areas.


7.      The last Self-portrait (Lenz) – Self-portrait (Nolde)

War has by now finished, and the destiny of Max Ludwig Nansen should (at least in theory) be free of major concerns, if he had not remained widow. British officers visit him announcing not only that art critics and galleries in the United Kingdom are interested in his art, but that he has been appointed member of the Royal Academy in London; art experts from everywhere in Germany (and in particular those who had refused him any support or simple solidarity under the previous regime) suddenly compete to visit him, even if he lives in the most northern village of the country, to propose him exhibitions and art sales. He accepts with pleasure the British honour (but respectfully explains that he intends to remain a painter of his own region in Germany: “My own metropolis is here” [34]). A high officer of the British army and an art historian from London ask him about the ban and on how it was implemented. At this stage, it would have been very easy for him to report to the British army the activities of policeman Jens Jepsen, and make sure he would at least be deprived of his job, but he does not spend a single word against him: for him, the policeman is above all one of his co-villagers, part of the same community. To the contrary, he dismisses strongly any offer from those German art experts who had once banished him (rather than cooperating with them, he would prefer remaining in the “chamber of horrors” to which he had been condemned by the same art critics) [35]. 

Finally, he can paint again in full freedom, and decides to work at his last self-portrait (Selbstbildnis). It is an occasion to reflect about an entire life, about what has been achieved and what has not, but also about his relationship with art. It is not necessarily an easy reflection. As always, the son of the policeman is the narrating person:

“More difficulties, then. Differences of opinion between him and the colours. Dissatisfied glances. He was working on his last self-portrait. He had made himself his own interlocutor, and he was coming to realise that there was no agreement between the two. ‘I simply can’t see myself,’ he would say. ‘Nothing stays put, it keeps on changing too fast, I can’t resolve the contradictions in paint.’ All at once colour ceased to be ‘amicable’ and became a transition state, with an accursed tendency to emancipate itself, he said. It kept turning into involuntary energy. ‘Now just look at this, Siggi, try to describe this, that’ll show you how you can’t get anywhere with description, if colour turns into energy. Into movement. Into movement in space.’ I was sitting behind him on a crate covered with cloth, and I was following his attempt to ‘get himself on to canvas’ in a particular place, under a given sky, in a landscape through which Balthasar walked in his fiery-red fox-skin coat, rather subdued, in fact rendered pretty harmless by means of perspective. The Japan paper, saturated with paint, suggested fabric, and the face, divided up by various kinds of light, was reminiscent of a very thin transparent mask with the world showing through. The left half of the face was a strengthless reddish-grey, the right half greenish-yellow, the ground reddish, patchy. That was how he’d confronted himself. A face with two different halves, and the eyes, gazing from far off, through blueish veils, betrayed something of the effort of concentration. If now I say: the mouth was slightly open, as if about to speak, at once the gleaming white brow contradicts. If I say: the shadow blue over the bridge of the nose mediates between the two separate halves of the face, then I must also admit that it can also accentuate that separation. Nothing was unequivocal: neither the mouth nor the eyes, not even the ears, which struck me as artificial looking, as though made of metal.

‘What do you get out of it? He asked impatiently. ‘Well, what do you get out of the picture? You must be able to say. If you reflect: not without speech. If you see: not without words. Well, then, what?’ I did not know what he wanted of me. I didn’t understand why he could or would not come to terms with two different halves of the face, the reddish-grey and the greyish-yellow. ‘Content’ he said, ‘content isn’t what you should get out of a picture. But then, what? No, Balthasar, the colour can’t become texture. Think of the winter when the water-colours were suddenly frozen on the paper, when the snow bled them, when, in the thaw, they ran together. What happened? Did colour turn into energy? The same energy that produced crystals and algae? Moss? What do you think (….)? Why can’t we find colour for anything? Is it that we can’t submit? Or is it that we can’t see? Balthasar thinks we have to start learning to see again, right from scratch. Seeing – my God, as if everything didn’t always depend on that!’ He laid two studies for his self-portrait on the easel, placing them side by side. He stepped back, and the tense, slanting way he held himself from the waist up was an expression of dissatisfaction and fault-finding. ‘You can see it here, Siggi,’ he said. ‘Too poor, too immaculate. This gleaming blue that seems to come from within, covering the whole face, doesn’t leave any room for movement. Do you know what seeing means? Enhancing. Seeing means penetrating and enhancing. Or inventing. In order to get your own likeness, you have to invent yourself, over and over again, with every glance. Whatever is invented turns into reality. Here in this blue in which nothing wavers, which has no unrest in it, nothing has become reality. Nothing has been enhanced. When you see, you yourself are also seen. Your gaze comes back to you. Seeing – heavens! It can also mean investing or waiting for something to change. You have everything spread out before you, the things, the old man, all that – but they weren’t what did it, unless you yourself did something about it. Seeing doesn’t mean putting something on record. After all, one has to be prepared to recant. You go away and come back, and something has been transformed. Don’t talk to me about registering thinks. The form must waver, everything must waver. Light isn’t such a good boy.

‘Or look at this, [Siggi], this little picture all warm and sunny: Balthasar holding out a tiny mill to me on his outstretched hand. And I’m taking no notice of him. There you can see: wherever there’s someone else, there has to be a movement leading towards it. Seeing’s a sort of mutual swapping. What that produces is mutual transformation. Take the rivulets in the flats, take the skyline, the moat, the larkspur: the moment you get hold of them, they get hold of you. There’s mutual recognition. Another thing that seeing means is coming closer, diminishing the distance between. What else? Balthasar thinks all that’s not enough. He insists that seeing is also exposure. Something gets laid bare in such a way that nobody in the whole world can pretend he doesn’t understand. I don’t know, I have something against this-tease act. You can strip all the skins off an onion until nothing is left. I tell you: one begins to see where one stops playing the beholder and simply invents what one needs: this tree, this wave, this beach. And now here: do you get anything out of this picture? I had to divide the face, here reddish-grey, there greenish-yellow. I don’t know how else I could say it, but the whole thing doesn’t clinch. Looking at this self-portrait I could easily say it doesn’t concern me. There’s too much missing. It lacks its potentialities. That’s the point: when you make something – a face, a thing – you have to provide its inherent potentiality as well. Some have done it in their self-portraits. You look at the man’s face and recognise the illness he’s had, perhaps even the financial situation he’s in. Here there’s simply too much missing. It hasn’t been seen, and so it hasn’t been mastered. And that’s something else that seeing can mean: mastery, taking possession. I shall have another go at it, doing it differently. What do you think?” [36]

Before considering Werner Haftmann’s words on Nolde’s self-portrait on 1947, let us me first say that I do not remember any page of an equal strength on the role of art creation – art vis-à-vis nature, the artist vis-à-vis the art object, reproduction vs. invention, and on the interplay between art and the artist – in the Memoirs of Nolde. Nolde had always referred to art creation as a purely instinctive process, which always took him by surprise, like if he suddenly produced something he did not really want to create, in truth. As a consequence, he never managed to establish any coherent view of art creation. These statements by Siegfried Lenz – while being obviously part of pure fiction – are nevertheless absolutely plausible. Lenz offers ideally to his reader the ‘expressionist’ formulation of 'seeing' as being equal to 'enhancing, inventing and dominating'. Nolde had never been willing, or able, to include a statement of such a strength in his writings. Lenz wants to do better and lends his hand to the painter.

These are the excerpts from Haftmann: “Nolde painted four self-portraits in his life (...).Now, in 1947, he painted one for the last time, to celebrate his 80th birthday. The image is extremely truthful and, according to the statements of the people who were closest to him, just the essence of the old painter. It is a very quiet, simple image and shows the painter in his everyday clothes without any substantial pretension: a silent, a little absent face, with eyes that watch as of far. From what has been painted, one can tell that he lingers in his own detached layer: he is away from 'life' and alone with himself, in the circle of his dreams and visions. It is a last picture also in another special sense. It is the last time that Nolde directly confronts himself with the image of nature, with the model of what is visible. For once again, he abandons his dream world - that had embraced him since the ‘unpainted pictures' - and stands directly in front of nature. Now, it is very curious to see how this direct contact with the image of nature, in a pure art activity, summons again the type of painting from which Nolde's independent development had formerly originated - late impressionism. The broad, impetuous painting style of his mature expressionist period is hard to discover” [37].

A comparison between Lenz and Haftmann reveals here both similarities as well as obvious divergences. As for the first ones, there are common reference to the ‘last’ self-portrait and to theme of comparison with nature; as for the second ones, Lenz elaborates a theory of  expressionist painting, while Haftmann refers to 'late impressionism'. 


8.       The Dancer on the Waves (Lenz) – Dancers on candles (Nolde)

The end of the war has not led to an end of the persecution, for our painter. The policeman feels still in a duty to make sure the painting ban is executed. He discovers all drawings of Nansen and destroys them. Obviously, he acts on his own initiative, without any legal basis, breaking the law because he is pathologically compelled by a maniac sense of duty.

Only a few days later, he receives an anonymous letter, containing a picture in an art magazine of a painting by Max Ludwig Nansen. It reproduces his own daughter (Hilke) as a “Dancer on the Waves”. As soon as he realises that the daughter has served as model for a forbidden painting, i.e. an image produced in violation of the ban he himself had to implement, the policeman has an explosion of rage. This becomes the occasion for a final showdown between the policeman and his wife on the one hand, and the daughter on the other. What happens in the following hours is not immediately clear, but the painter rushes to the police station, also in full excitement, denouncing the disappearance of “Dancer on the waves”, and accusing the policeman of having stolen it, without any authority to do it. Turning to the literary portrait of the fictional painting, its vibrant theme – wild dancing – serves as the perfect primer for the violent explosion of rage among all those involved.

“ ‘Nothing for us?’ (…) Well, only one, a large brown envelope, block capitals, no sender’s name. No sender,’ [the postman] said, wagging his head dubiously, possibly contemplating keeping the letter back. Finally he pushed it towards me and pointed to the house. ‘Off you go, take it in and tell your old man in future to accept only letters with the sender’s name and address on them’. (… ) Here‘s a letter for you’. My father was cleaning shoes. Once a week he cleaned all the shoes in the house he could lay hands on. He hauled them all in to the kitchen, set them in a fairly straight line, and treated them to three processes: brushing applying polish, shining up. I had to lay the letter on the table. Polishing away at the top of a boot with a woollen rag, the policeman glanced at the letter, shrugged, turned away, glanced at it again as though something had just stuck him, and this time looked at it longer. He was about to turn away again, but the mounting curiosity that was always so instructive to watch in my father was by now too much for him. Now he looked to see who the sender was, then he put down the boot and the rag, ripped the envelope open, read, still standing, seemed at a loss, sat down on the bench and went on reading, went back over something he had just read, held the letter to the light, and still seemed unable to grasp what it was all about. He looked at me blankly and shouted: ‘Get Mother! Get her to come down! Look sharp!’. So I got Gudrun Jepsen out of her bedroom, let her go first, then overtook her on the stairs and was able to watch as she came into the kitchen, to watch the disgruntled but longsuffering look on her face as she stopped by the table, shivering in her dressing-gown. My father didn’t notice her. Or perhaps he did notice her and was just reading the letter over again to make quite sure before he handed it to her. She waited. He went on reading. She seemed to realise that he was having difficulty in understanding something. He turned the letter over on the table, reading it now with is head on one side. Suddenly he pushed both the letter and the envelope towards her, jumped up, took her by the shoulders and gently but firmly made her sit on the bench. He remained standing behind her while she began to read.

Was he calm? One couldn’t say he was. ‘Just read that,’ he said, or: ‘Just have a look at that,’ or:  ‘Do you get it?’ or:  ‘Makes you goggle, doesn’t it?’ She paid no attention to him. She wouldn’t let herself be rushed. She too turned the letter over on the table. Then she raised her head and stared fixedly in the direction of the range. She made an attempt to say something, but didn’t succeed. I should like to leave the two of them to themselves in that dumbfounded or disconcerted state for a while, gasping for air, for words, and at long last recount what it was that the mail had brought into the house. As I have said, there was no sender’s name on the envelope. Inside, there was a single page torn out of a magazine. One side was almost taken up by the reproduction of a painting entitled ‘The Dancer on the Waves’. Written in block capitals in the margin were the words: ‘Note the interesting resemblance.’ It was a painting by Max Ludwig Nansen. It was Hilke dancing. She was dancing among little among little rippling waves only a short way out from a dazzling beach, under a read sky. She was dancing with her hair down, wearing nothing but a short, striped skirt, and her breasts seemed to be a nuisance to her as she danced, for she was already lowering one arm in order to press it on them. Her head was flung back, and on her face was a look of resentment and exhaustion. She was dancing with the waves, against the waves, the rhythm of the waves determined the rhythm of her dancing, which, it was quite easy to see, was taking her farther and farther away from the beach, out to sea, where her dance would end. So the Dancer on the Waves was my sister Hilke. (…)

‘She’s like me,’ Hilke said. ‘The dancer on the Waves is like me, that’s true.’ ‘Anyone can recognise you,’ my father said, ‘it’s not only us who can. There! Someone’s sent it to us anonymously. And there may be plenty of other people who‘ll react in the same way when they see that picture. You don’t need to wonder what anyone’ll think when they recognise you. If at least it had been painted by someone else. But him! Him, a law unto himself! With the arrogance of his! With that scorn of his for people who are only doing their duty. You can’t tell me you’ve never heard the way they talk about him and me.’ (…) Just try to realise what you’ve done to us, what this means to us.’ I couldn’t help glancing at my mother, who suddenly stirred, awakening out of her apathetic brooding, pulling herself up and murmuring : ‘Terrible’, then again: ‘It’s terrible what he‘s made of you: the foreign thing, the alien that peers out of it. Possessed. Intoxicated. And what’s made of your body. The gleaming hip. The crooked thigh. And your face. Oh, you can’t tell me the face he’s given you.’ ‘It’s an insult,’ my father said. ‘He’s always insulted everyone he’s ever painted’, my mother went on. ‘And he’s done the same thing for you. A gypsy might dance like that.’ ‘Yes,’ my father said, ‘a gipsy. He’s turned you into a gipsy.’ ‘It’s an outrage,’ my mother said. And the policeman said: ‘I suppose you know what you have to do now.’ ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ my mother said. ‘This picture – a picture like this must not be allowed to exist. For your sake and for our sake.’ ‘You helped with the making of it,’ my father said. ‘Now you can help to rid us of it. It can’t be so hard for you’ ” [38].

Indeed the painting has disappeared from the painter’s studio. It is the first time the son has stolen a painting, in order to save it. The painter has an intuition, searches Siggi’s room, but does not find it. The son goes on with his narration: “I cleared away the camouflage, the bottom layer of which was several sheets of oil-paper. I removed the lid and sat down. When I saw my new collection all intact, the tension and the drawing sensation ceased, and the pressure on my temples diminished. I took out ‘The Dancer on the Waves', propped it up against the side of the crate and, with the thin light slantwise on it, gazed at Hilke dancing for me among little tumbling waves. And all at once she was a personal concern of mine, there under the red sky, her hair loose. All at once it was important for me to understand her, there in that short striped skirt, with those pointed breasts, this Hilke who did not cease dancing despite her exhaustion, alone there by the dazzling beach. Nobody, nobody would ever see this picture again, that was settled, and the other pictures, too, were there only for me now. I had learned something, I had found out something about myself and what I needed in order to live with myself” [39].

Ms Petersen mentions the “Dancers on theCandles” (Kerzentänzerinnen), as Nolde’s reference painting, one of the most famous art work produced in the years in which he is establishing himself as a leading innovative painter in Germany before World War I, i.e. in 1912. Haftmann calls it a ‘tableau manifeste’, a programmatic painting.

“We do not know what the subject - flickering fire and dancing bodies – really meant to the painter; while commenting a corresponding lithography, he once wrote only: "It should demonstrate passion and my joy." We can see what he achieved with this picture – the coming into being of a fully prompted passion in a Dionysian dance ornament, the evocation of the Dionysian and the primitive-Orphic world, which is embodied in dance and has become image. From such mysterious depths originates this image. ‘Out of mind and knowledge’ - as reported by Nolde - ‘I passed to great and free images, which were made then, entirely outside of any time frame.’ This possibility of such a spontaneous evocation lays however in a new conception of the technical instruments. (...) Now, Nolde abandons entirely the reproductive and spatial illusionist character of the background of the painting. He represents the surface as an evocative background and the location where a world of images appears; he gives this background to wear an expressive colour pattern of burning, flashing red and yellow, which already determines mood and substantial options, before any topic can materialise itself intensely. ‘From a vague idea only of heat and colour’ he now represents the figurative. Simplified to expressive hieroglyphics, spread out on the surface, the dancing figures enrol themselves symbolically to the surface. These figures relate to each other in a eurythmic proportionate relationship and draw a Dionysian ornament on the surface, which supports their entire expressive direction. In cooperation with the movement of colour on the surface, this ornament originates independent movement pulses (the superimposed ornament of the skirts for example) that move the ornament of the surface rhythmically and also bring in spatial vibrations (the beats of the candles). Everything is designed to apply the visual means - colour, background, design of the objects, ornament, and rhythm - as design materials with an evocating power. The image comes from inside to outside; and an idea which was long discharged in the unconscious now comes to birth on the surface - unreal, rhythmic, ornamental” [40].

As one may see, the key words pronounced by the mother sound very similar to the one of Haftmann:  ‘The foreign thing, the alien that peers out of it. Possessed. Intoxicated’ [41]. There is however a main difference: Haftmann considers this as the implication of pure instinctual, primal, orphic and panic state of mind of the painter, something not controllable, like if the painter were in trance. The wording in Lenz’s novel is much more direct: “He‘s always insulted everyone he’s ever painted” [42]. There is a direct responsibility, a clear capacity and intention to deform reality. 


9.      Garten with Masks (Lenz) and Masks and Dahlias (Nolde)

Siggi, the son of the policeman, now suffers of a specific form of kleptomania, consisting in a recurrent, maniacal theft of any picture of Max Ludwig Nansen. Therefore, he cannot be trusted any more by the painter, who removes him out of his studio. A few years after, also the policeman throws his son out of family house. In such a situation of complete lack of any reference point, Siggi visits the vernissage of an important retrospective exhibition on Max Ludwig Nansen in Hamburg, where he recognises many participants (while only the old critic Theo Busbeck recognises him, even if he is not any more a 10-year child). He tells us about the introductory speeches of a number of art critics (one of them must be indeed inspired by Werner Haftmann, as I already mentioned). Then he focuses the attention on a new painting, whose content will be a prophecy of immediate future troubles for him.

“I don’t want to repeat it all, especially because it’s high time to get to the painting that I hadn’t seen before and which was hanging on a wall all by itself. So there, all of a sudden, was the painting ‘Garden Masks’, and I simply couldn’t tear myself away from it. The garden glowed like a workshop full of colours, a frantic blossoming, an extravaganza of forms and apparitions, but everything distinct from everything else, all of it in its own right. And dangling from a tree, from a long branch that had to be imagined, hanging on green strings, were these masks, two of them men’s faces, the other one a woman’s. Sunlight struck these masks from the side, lighting up one half of them. There was a terrible certainty emanating from them, some enigmatic authority. The eye-slits were earth-brown, the sky behind them was bright and cloudless. Were these masks a menace to the garden? I conjured up a breath of wing, first a gentle breeze that set the masks swaying, then the wind rising, throwing them against each other, making them spin round. Whom did these masks resemble? They struck me as familiar, they seemed to be taken from faces I had met somewhere before, but I couldn’t put a name to any of them. I imagined them multiplying by night, hanging from all the branches, from all the bushes, rising on dried stalks out of the flower-beds, and I went closer to the painting, to the garden full of masks, and I can remember wishing I had a thin, hard stick to strike the masks off the stalks, off the bushes and branches, I wanted to behead everything the way one beheads flowers and afterwards, for all I care, cart them off to the compost-heap.

Then they took up their stand beside me. Then they lifted me up, taking me under the arms with their arms. I kept on looking at the garden, at the masks, and yet at the same time I recognised the pale waterproof stuff of the trench coats. The garden camouflaged itself. It was only now I realised how many things tried to camouflage themselves when confronted by those dangling masks. Without using force, jerkily, but with constant pressure, they were shifting me to one side, pushing me away from the painting. The presence of the masks in the garden seemed to be all that was needed to make everything pretend to be something else: either bursting into blossom or hiding it, enhancing the glow of the colours or toning them down. To left and right of me I was aware of two vaguely familiar faces. Even at this moment they wore the stamp of reliability and professional suspiciousness. An elbow and a gentle fist introduced themselves to my ribs, still only in such a way as not to hurt. Twisting to one side, I saw, hidden among the flowers, two eyes gazing spellbound at the dangling masks. Why should I turn round, raise my voice, and protest, when I knew perfectly well who had closed in on me like pincers, and why? They let go of me, but the rustling that their trench-coats produced at every movement didn’t stop, it was still right beside me. We didn’t need to come to any agreement that everything had to be done without causing a stir. No fuss, nothing of that sort, no arguing. I reacted the way I had seen other people react in similar circumstances at the cinema: passive, calm, resigned. That kept them happy” [43].

Ms. Petersen suggests “Masks and Dahlias” as corresponding painting by Nolde. These are excerpts from what Werner Haftmann wrote on it. 

“ ‘Masks and dahlias’ is a full-fledged work, deliberately balanced and realised with highly pictorial culture. One may feel how much the self-forgotten painter devoted himself exclusively to his own craft; he overlooked for a while the passionate struggle for poetic images and expressive metaphors filling him, and lose himself entirely to the task of creating a beautiful object in itself. This sense of silence, collection, intimacy is rare in his work. (...) The beautiful intimacy of our picture also shined back from the objects to the painter. All objects stay in an intimate connection with the painter’s quiet, introverted life. (...) The masks came from his small collection which he had brought back from the journey to East Asia. This aura of intimacy fills the whole picture and its precious coloured tone. To the restrained, dark and dense green of the background responds the sunken red of the flowers; the yellow of the vase and the masks is toned down to a silent Naples yellow. A shadow shape, designed in a completely free manner in emerald blue, wraps up the contours of the objects in an abstract cantilena and binds together green and red. Despite any density of the impression of reality sensation, the image is far away from any naturalistic reproduction. The indefinite managing of the light (which sets brightness accents as a pure ‘interior light of the image’ solely serving decorative purposes), the shadow-less surface, the fact that the objects spreading their forms within the outline of the surface, the emerald blue form of the background (freely growing without justification) - all of this clearly shows the distance from any naturalistic intention” [44].

Also in this case, we have two different interpretations: sense of suspense and tension in Lenz, sense of controlled and sophisticated beauty in Haftmann.

10.      Lenz’s tenth literary portrait – the forthcoming new art

There is a tenth portrait in the novel, but is about a (fictive) piece of avant-garde painted by another artist, and not about Max Ludwig Nansen anymore. Siggi is now warranted by police, but succeeds temporarily to escape arrest, at least for a few days. He his hosted for a few hours by the brother (the former deserter), living in a shared flat in Hamburg. There he meets a young artist, a certain Hansi Wolken (another fictitious name), who delivers a striking judgement against Nansen. “ ‘Now you just listen to me, Hansi said. ‘Your friend Nansen is the very type I regard as a disaster: back-to-land and all that, visionary and political’ ” [45].

And here is the portrait of the avant-garde art piece. “How shall I describe Hansi’s room? (… ) under the window, fixed to a sheet of pale-grey cardboard, Hansi’s declaration of faith” [46]. “I said nothing. In silence I walked past Hansi, and they all watched as I squatted down in front of the series ‘The Rebellion of the Dolls’ and with infinite leisureness looked at the pictures one by one. Well, here were the rag-doll people: triangular faces, flattened spherical faces, pin-man faces. Arms that could be bent in any direction. Legs that could have two knots ttied in them. Floppy, patchy, but above all imperishable bodies. Dolls climbing up a factory chimney and occupying it. Blowing up a water-tower, destroying a bridge, derailing a train, hauling the flag down from the top of a building. Dolls digging a grave for K.A. [Note of the editor: Konrad Adenauer, possibly]. Dolls leaning into a head wind. Dolls on the Munsterlager rifle-range. Dolls tying up a sleeping girl (…). Dolls escaping from a humming-top, riding on a cock, slashing an upholstered chair with twelve pairs of scissors” [47].

Well, what is clear is that – with the tenth portraits – Max Ludwig Nansen’s world (the same is true for Emil Nolde) belongs irreversibly to the past.

NOTES

[29] Lenz, Siegfried - Deutschstunde Roman, Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 2008, 462 pages. Quotation at pages 167-170.

[30] Haftmann, Werner - Emil Nolde, Cologne, DuMont, 1958, 140 pages. Quotation at page 92.

[31] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 228-229.

[32] Haftmann, Werner - Emil Nolde, (quoted), p.124.

[33] Haftmann, Werner - Emil Nolde, (quoted), p.118.

[34] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p.377.

[35] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 338.

[36] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 334-336.

[37] Haftmann, Werner - Emil Nolde, (quoted), p.134.

[38] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 400-404.

[39] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 413.

[40] Haftmann, Werner - Emil Nolde, (quoted), p.68.

[41] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 404.

[42] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 404.

[43] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), pp. 428-429.

[44] Haftmann, Werner - Emil Nolde, (quoted), p.104.

[45] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 438.

[46] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 434.

[47] Lenz, Siegfried – The German Lesson, (quoted), p. 438.