Oskar Loerke, “Revolutionary with a mirror” (1921)

Revolutionary with a mirror

A palm tree watered by the storm
And hung with long red banners grew
Above you, branches reaching down
To gently brush and beckon you.

Since I loom above the crowd
Bareheaded while the barrels flare,
And I don’t bellow like the others
On the ramps and in the square;

Since I’m silent like my mirror,
You see fit to strike at me,
Hands awave, tongues athunder
Like the billows on the sea.

A palm tree watered by the storm
And hung with long red banners rears
Up from the roofs and reaches down
To wave warm fronds against your ears.

What they lisp to you of lands
Of sun, in music mother-pearled—
You should listen, you should sing it,
For you must renew the world.

And yet you will grow weary soon,
Ruminating on your pain
Like Kamchatkans, who smoke, I heard,
respired tobacco smoke again.

So face the mirror silently
As in Eden before the Fall;
May you see features luminous,
Not cavernous and criminal.

For one moment it would seem
As though you gathered headless there,
A pale Venetian hangman, stolen
From some dreamer unaware.

See, you thronged up in the street,
head-to-harsh-head within the glass,
Your eyes were winging urgently
like vultures to a bloody mass.

For one moment, all stood still
and struggled in his mind a space
to see himself, and distance grew
between him and his fellow’s face.

To you, too densely domiciled,
I came here, and as from without
I saw within you, marveling
to see such vistas open out.

One of the watchwords of the youth movement of the 1960s in Europe was Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand, “Under the paving stones lies the beach.” There was a layer of sand under the paving stones, exposed when they were lifted out to be thrown during street protests. What the slogan meant was that revolutionary street action was the expression of, was a form of liberation into, a new philosophy and a new lifestyle of non-capitalistic, non-exploitative hedonism, symbolized by the sand as “beach.”

By the 1960s, of course, beach vacations in sunny southern climes had long since become a mass phenomenon in western Europe, well within the reach of the working classes and consequently a somewhat prosaic experience. The Loerke poem hearkens back to a time well before that, to a sensibility now completely lost, where the exotic otherness of the “lands of the sun” could still be felt by an urban northern European—typically wealthy and leisured, or else bohemian, and travelling as an individual—with full poetic-philosophical force. The poem is closer in spirit to Gaugin’s Primitivist paintings from Tahiti than to the 1960s. Loerke ascribes revolutionary potential to the tropical palm tree and its whisperings to the alienated and agitated urban masses. The narrator (like Loerke himself) is a far-traveler, he is standing on the streets of the city amidst the mass protests of revolutionary or early Weimar Germany. An outsider, he has come to hold up a mirror to the people, seeking to prompt revolution on the inside as an antidote to street violence. The interplay between the palm and the mirror in prompting this transformation is a bit unclear. The idea seems to be that the people first hearken to the whisperings of the palm as the branches–hung with red banners–gently brush their faces, and are then moved to stop, quieten, look in the mirror, and discern themselves each as they truly are, in their individuality, with space between them. But this only happens for a fleeting moment–einen Augenblick–and then presumably the crowd re-forms and the protest continues. It’s significant that the event is narrated in the past tense. 

Some of the imagery is obscure. I have no clue what is going on in stanza 8. Who the “pale hangman from Venice” (bleicher Henker von Venedig) and the “dreamer” or “enthusiast” (Schwärmer) are supposed to signify, or even how the stanza should be translated, is a mystery to me: does “what/whom you stole” (den ihr … raubtet) in the last line refer to the hangman, or to the moment (der Augenblick), or to the heads (masculine singular, but here in the plural) of the people looking in the mirror? Also, the comparison to the smoking habits of the Siberian Kamschatka islanders is bizarre and seems more in the character of cabaret-style comic verse than this kind of serious poem.

Ten years after this poem, in The Salaried Masses, Siegfried Kracauer would argue the very opposite of Loerke’s “Revolutionary with a mirror”: namely, that the elaborate interiors of the great Weimar pleasure palaces, with their stylized landscapes and exotica from all over the world, offered the masses temporary escape and distraction from the drab and penurious German here-and-now, thereby weakening their revolutionary potential. One of the newspaper columns he published in connection with this work is called “Under palm trees” (Unter Palmen)(1930), in which Kracauer discusses the proliferation of tropical decor in Berlin clubs and shops. There we read:

There are countless people who are punished with a hard life and therefore at least want to stroll under palm trees with impunity. In by far most of these cases, the palm tree serves as a sign from afar. Since the bad is so close, the good is sought in exotic areas, where the coconuts thrive, the cannibals live peacefully together and nobody knows anything about unemployment or the National Socialists. The growth of palm trees is, if you will, directly proportional to that of misery. (Morgenblatt, October 19, 1930; Reiseblatt, p. 5)

But whole worlds lay between Loerke in 1921 and Kracauer in 1930-31, most notably the economic crash and the rise of National Socialism.

Siegfried Kracauer on Weimar Berlin’s famous Residenz-Casino (“Resi”)

One of the texts I find most useful and illuminating when teaching Weimar Germany is Siegfried Kracauer‘s The Salaried Masses (1930), a little sociological study of the new stratum of white-collar workers that had been developing in Germany since the industrial boom of the late 1800s and massively expanded in the prosperous years of the mid 1920s. By the time Kracauer was writing, this class, devastated by the economic crash, was precarious and downwardly mobile. One of the most famous sections of the book is Kracauer’s analysis of the large “pleasure palaces” that dominated Berlin nightlife. He termed them “shelters for the homeless,” where employees, deprived of the supports of bourgeois existence but without the structures of solidarity enjoyed by the industrial workers, would go to seek “distraction” from their lives of socio-economic anxiety within a dreamworld of entertainment and consumption.

Below is my translation of a little piece Kracauer wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1930 on the famous “Resi,” the Residenz-Casino near the Alexanderplatz, famous for its table telephones, pneumatic tubes, and signal lights. Kracauer seems to have written it while working on the essays that would be compiled into The Salaried Masses.

Ghostly doings at the pleasure palace
by Siegfried Kracauer

Recently, at one of Berlin’s most popular entertainment venues, I saw a man who had practically opened up an office on location. In order to understand the particular form of enjoyment he was engaged in, it is necessary to mention that the venue is set up like a large commercial firm. On each of the many tables we find:

1. A telephone apparatus, serving to connect to the outside world of all the other tables;
2. A system of pneumatic tubes allowing written thoughts to be exchanged with all people in the venue;
3. A signal system permitting those seated to publicly display whether they wish a) a male dancer, b) a female dancer, or c) not to be disturbed.

In brief, the technical set-up is of a perfection that would do honor to the executive branch of a large enterprise. Its main purpose is doubtless to relieve the patrons rationalized that day on the job from the exertion of an evening’s amusement at their own initiative; to awaken in lower-level employees the illusion of being their own supervisors; and to liberate the public from fear of an apparatus that is normally not harmless fun, but deadly serious. The fact the place is filled every night is ample testimony to its success in meeting these goals. Not the least of reasons for this popularity may be the flood of light that bathes the hall in continually changing colors, providing a foretaste of the glories of that paradise where, one day, human beings will all live together peacefully with the disenchanted powers of technology.

The abovementioned man did not approach all this apparatus in the way it was intended. He neither succumbed to illusion, nor played with the signals, nor was he overawed by the flood of light. Rather, he took the play aspect utterly seriously. That was, in fact, the nature of his enjoyment.

He would sit for a long period of time alone at the table. His hair was parted exactly in the middle, his eyebrows were two half-circles, and his cheeks became fuller further down his face, as with many well situated gentlemen between forty and fifty. While fortifying himself with a drink of champagne from time to time (the less well off can enjoy a Turkish coffee, a beer, or a soft drink), he pursued uninterruptedly the activity to which his profession evidently obligated him. He paid no attention to the dancers; he was in his office. He telephoned, reaching for the receiver with the expression of a harried businessman anticipating the inquiry of some indifferent customer. Unexpectedly, the call seemed to promise an advantageous opportunity: his sagging jowls filled out and his neatly parted hairline glistened blissfully. Meanwhile, two pneumatic tubes had arrived in his net. He let them lie unopened for a few minutes, so as to give himself the aura of greater importance necessary for getting ahead in life. The first message put him in such a foul mood that he tore it up. He shook his head and raised his eyebrows, pushing up two concentric circles of wrinkles into his forehead—a veritably geometric embodiment of mercantile vexation. All the more did the second missive provoke him into a decisive intervention. After verifying the table of origin in the telephone index, he first conducted endless telephone conversations, then an extensive written correspondence, which he dispatched via the tube system. As he wrote, his table took on the appearance of a desk, covered with countless papers and files.

Not only did this bustle suffer hardly any pause; when the gentleman ordered a cold platter and consumed it with relish, it saw a sharp uptick. Having thusly firmed up his credit with the ladies on location, he could now hardly deal with all the incoming calls and tubes. Nonetheless, he sat there in the calm of his office, separated by invisible windows from the general commotion, receiving commission after commission, placing sizable orders in his turn, both oral and written. The eyebrows went up and down, the forehead was at one moment a gleaming halo, at another an arrow of wrath. As with all important businessmen, nothing could be learned of his successes. While other patrons were using the devices to find a suitable partner, he was using them as if for their own sake, or to secret ends. In any case, he never rose from his place, and he never received a lady at his table. Still, perhaps he had made some tremendous deal on the sly?

At a late hour, three men were given seats at his table. They watched admiringly as he directed the whole operation from his office. “One can really only enjoy oneself,” he explained to them in a superior tone, “when one has an entire table at one’s disposal.” When they showed no sign of leaving, he put them to work in his company. One of the men was assigned the telephone, the others wrote the correspondence. After a short time, the three men paid their bill and departed. Either they had been downsized, or they had given their notice. The boss remained henceforth undisturbed at his desk, devoting himself with all his energy and enjoyment to the fortunes of his great enterprise.

Presumably he will be doing this night after night. When the patrons have left and the lights have been extinguished, he will be answering calls nobody has placed and letters nobody has sent him. The pneumatic tubes will whiz back and forth, and signals will blaze at the empty tables. Alone in the darkness, driven by the bustling demons of enterprise, he will pursue the pleasure to which he is condemned.

Published in the Frankfurter Zeitung 10.30.1930

Source: Siegfried Kracauer, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo. Erweiterte Ausgabe mit einem Nachwort von Reimar Klein. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2009, pp. 93-96.