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.
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