94
PARTISAN REVIEW
yards away. But my grandlather's city, my cousin's city, was no longer here.
The grid of streets and avenues was as it used to be, with an occasional
patch of buildings that had survived the war. Most buildings were new.
This was true of most of the seven cities that we saw. The question of
deserts entirely aside, the Gennans had at least paid something on their )
debts. Just enough was left of the past
to
show us how much was gone.
We went to the theater and opera in Stuttgart, as we had done in
Frankfurt and Hamburg and Dusseldorf and Cologne on our way. I had
visited many of the people who worked in those theaters and some film
people, too. A
lew
of them knew my name from
Die bit
which heightened
my sense of homecoming.
Now we decided to rest for a weekend belore we pushed on to Munich
and Berlin. We rented a car and drove to the Black Forest. What an echoing
name, resonant with woodcutters' daughters and wandering princes. In fact
the Black Forest was not as beautiful as parts of the Catskills that I know.
Back in Hamburg we had anticipated this weekend of rest, and I had
asked the arts editor of
Die Zeit
to suggest a place. He had recommended a
hotel in a resort village called Hinterzarten. That hotel was full, and they
sent us to a nearby pension run by a couple in their fifties. It was a con–
sciously cute place, the Black Forest equivalent of a brand-new colonial inn in
America. The host was lean, strong, erect, quite clearly an ex-military man.
His bearing was rigid, his manner crisp. He seemed to be barking commands
even when he was being helpful. He touched a susceptible nerve in me. He
dominated me utterly whether or not he knew it or wanted it. Even my
skimpy German deserted me in his presence. I was cowed.
To the end, almost. When we left, he helped me to load our bags in the
car, adjusting sensibly what I had been liddling with. Then he took his pipe
from his mouth, fixed his hawk eyes on me, and spoke his first words in En–
glish. "Forget nossing?"
Suddenly he sounded silly and looked ridiculous. I gloated secretly and
drove away refreshed.
Munich to me was Wagner, was Hitler. It also was Brecht, the enemy
of both those men. In between the appointments and theaters and visits to
the huge tilm studio, we wandered around the city. One morning we came
to
a section of the old city wall, a tower that had been preserved. On a door–
way in the tower a sign said Karl Valentin Museum. Valentin had been a
cabaret comedian, gangly and dry, the city's hero , now long dead, whom
Brecht had adored and had performed with in his own early years. Here
was a museum honoring the irreverence that had fed Brecht's irreverence.
A museum to the enemy of the politics that had festered in Munich during his
lifetime. We went up the narrow winding stair to a room filled with pho-
