Franz Hodjak The Boy in the

Written after spending May to August 1998 as Hermann Hesse Writer-In-Residence in .

Once, while I was driving with my wife from to Calw through the valley of the Nagold, I saw a boy holding a plastic sieve in his little hands, prospecting for gold and dipping it very professionally - so it seemed to me, at least - into the Nagold, and subsequently lifting, sifting, and carefully shaking it. We pulled over and I watched him for a while. In days gone by, very probably, there had been gold panners at work here. Why else should the river be called the Na - Gold . ? Whether they found any, and whether the find was an especially rich one, did not interest me. I watched the boy and wondered whether he was playing gold rush or was really serious about things. He.s looking to begin now that everyone else has stopped? Or was he just caught by the lust for adventure, one comparable to the fervour of anglers, who spend hours on end looking - or, rather, staring - at the float without it ever being pulled down a single time by a fish? Or did he enjoy playing, safe in the knowledge that he was only playing? Or did he just want to be important, like his forefathers who prospected for gold, at least for the time he spent standing with the plastic sieve in his little hands? Or was he not thinking anything at all, merely standing in the Nagold, concentrating on the plastic sieve in order to prevent himself from having to think of anything else? Once I had asked myself enough questions, we drove on.

When I look out of the window from my desk in the flat for the Calw writer-in- residence, I fear that the houses on the side of the hill could suddenly slide down the slope. I imagine that the same applies to the other side of the hill. Why do the houses on both sides not climb up to the ridge of the hill in order to take a peep in the other direction? Or have they, perhaps, already been to the top, before recoiling in fright? This serves to reinforce the impression that, amid the general panic, they failed to find their way back, with the houses that were once on the northern slope now being on the southern, and vice versa. That is also why the swallows do not return. Pigeons are content to live on the wrong roof rather than in the railway station in Stuttgart. Why, I ask myself, do the houses that moved from the southern slope to the northern slope, and vice versa, not come back? Or are they afraid of once again seeing what they once saw on the ridge of the mountain? Do they prefer to be unhappy rather than curious? Do they believe that one can survive in misfortune? And do they believe that curiosity and knowledge will burn them down to their very foundations? Perhaps, however, these thoughts and speculations of an itinerant scholar are superfluous.

A little bug is crawling across the sheet of paper. It leaves no marks. How lonely must this bug . about which I know nothing and which leaves no marks on the curious sheet of paper - really be? Does it come from the east? Is it a Jew or an Arab, or Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant? Will it be deported? Is it homeless? What.s it called? Why has it chosen this sheet of paper, over which it is crawling so demonstratively, without leaving a mark? Is it seeking to dedicate a monument to anonymity? So many questions, so few answers.

The guardian angels, banished from divine order, were ordered back shortly before they began to despair and, once entrusted with so many duties, the guardian angels were in greater demand than ever before. Hitherto, they had been allowed to do, or not do, whatever they pleased, always acting in accordance with their own requirements and at their own discretion, which ultimately drove them to boredom. Now, they have been given an order. They have been commissioned to buzz around us until they have compacted themselves to form bugging devices which pass on whatever we happen to be thinking, though to whom, they do not exactly know - yet it is precisely that which gives them a sense of enormous importance, the likes of which they have not previously known. The buzz they get out of divulging information, without knowing to whom, drives them wild. Now, they really can play the role of destiny. The fact that the guardian angels have been elevated to one of the most important authorities flatters them. Boundlessly.

Looking out of the kitchen window, I see to the left the rear façade of the .Hermann-Hesse-Haus,. somewhat tatty and in need of repair. A terrace connects - pretty scruffily, for this I can find no comparison - the house of Hesse.s birth to a Sparkasse building, standing to the right from the kitchen window, and on one of the two windows sits a feeding bowl divided into two sections with food and water for a tomcat, the owner of this terrace, it would appear to me. The tom.s name is definitely not Narziss or Goldmund. Yet perhaps it isn.t even a tom but a cat. And how could a cat be called Narziss or Goldmund? If it is a tom after all, it might be called Garibaldi, that would somehow be alright, and even Leo would be just about acceptable. All other names are unacceptable. And one dare not even contemplate what name this tomcat was given. If it were called Horsti, that.s the way it would look, so thank God it isn.t called Horsti. Were it called Frieder, it would be pampered by a lady called Friederike but who doesn.t want to be named. Were it called Kurt, it would behave like a Kurt, but that it doesn.t do. If it were called Fritzchen, it would wag its tail. So what is this tomcat.s name? Perhaps that.s why it looks up at me so sadly, and then I try to explain to him that my name is Franz, and this name doesn.t mean anything to me either. I want to comfort him. But the tomcat runs off. Yet then it creeps back again, and I keep trying to tell him that, when I say the name Ceausescu, it should emit a wretched shriek. I hope that, by the time I leave Calw, the tomcat will have understood this. If I put the right question, there is only one answer. If I put the wrong question, there are countless answers. Normally, therefore, I put the wrong questions because I am also interested in the other possibilities.

One can also live here, or there, or elsewhere - all you need are wings that are curious and unobstructed by obstinate roots. The gesture of being able to fly is played out to us by any tin Christ nailed to the wayside by some local public servant or other. His arms and legs clatter in the wind out of desperation and powerlessness. One leaves everything behind - the graves, the hope, the brand of cigarette, the other language, the time; all that one takes with one being memory. Every place is worth it, every place in its own way, although, secretly, we would make the memories - these witches and heretics, because they get us confused - disappear, in line with the principle of the Inquisition, yet the catacombs are all occupied, the ponds, the stones, the bonfires.

Talking of stones: If our head hits a stone, the stone is hurt. We interrupted it while it was thinking. It is the source of the raw material for monuments, facings, paperweights and, occasionally, for metaphors and myths and phrases and sayings. Using hammer, chisel, axe, saw, whetstone, we fashion it into human form. Occasionally, it is the product of our kidneys, gall-bladder, or bladder. It resembles us, we can shape it but we cannot soften it. During revolutions, it allowed itself to be hurled through the air by us, from one direction in the other. The stone wishes that it were less burdened by us, yet we need the stone even beyond death, as a visible mark of our dubious presence between stones.

Calw, was this town a home to Hermann Hesse? In the early prose, it probably was, as a Something, a place in which one felt secure yet from which one can break out at all times, at least in thought. It may well be that, at some point, that shattered his inner being. I believe not out of fear but out of helplessness. And then came the contrivances, the contrast between spirit and sensuality. This made it a demonstrative prose that had reality not in its sights but reality in its head, which became something in its own right . - is that to be welcomed or lamented? The language that carries these contrivances is anything but lumbering, in no sentence are there traps that one could fall through into the bottomless void. The bottomless is merely described. I know that sounds presumptuous, little Franz Hodjak finding fault with the great Hermann Hesse. Yet I may, after all, be allowed to speak. It is freedom that I want to practise, like a sportsman going for a record. I know it is a misery I carry around inside me.

I come from a region in which bats used to ring the bells at night. In summer, during tedding, buffaloes sought to keep the heat at bay by trying to spear the sun with their horns and howled with pain in the process. It was a noisy region. Even the snow fell from the sky with a thud. And even the schnapps, 70% proof, organized popular orchestras in the bottle, with spirits popping the corks up into the air, in which the buzzards danced and squawked with joy. When a foal was born, the children cried as if a piece of freedom still in their possession was being passed to the foal, which, no matter what might happen, could never be allowed to die. This was a place where people wept noisily. The herdsmen from the Zibin (Sibiu) mountains, when they came to market in Hermannstadt (Sibiu), had to go through the Green Forest, where wolves howled, repeatedly jumping up at the sled, and when a herdsman took an axe to smash the skull of the leader of the pack, the splintering sound resonated so loud it could be heard in the town.

My friends in Saxony or Thuringia lived in one country. Now, they live in another country . yet without ever having emigrated. When I climb up the steep slope of Marktstraße and look at the wonderful old half-timbered houses, I get the impression that they are on the run, but to where - back into the past or onwards away from the past? The secret does not last long, for then come buildings that have pinned medals to their chest, confident that they know the score. This marks the demarcation point in my strolls along Marktstraße, and each time I turn and go back. I love this indecisiveness of the old half-timbered houses, their patience, their ability to defer the mistake, for at some point we all commit the capital error, but why then so, like the houses beyond the demarcation point, which I shall never again cross. Perhaps Calw was born out of loneliness and is now returning to that loneliness, just like any other place, small or large, as evidenced by the historic plaques, which are seeking to resist disappearance, the process of disappearance into the future, which swallows, digests and spews us out, and so there we lie, thrown together and torn apart, more genuine, more falsified, depending on what historical principle happens to apply. One of Romania.s most able and best- known historians of this century - Constantin Daicoviciu was his name, should anyone be interested - once told me, My son, my son, nothing is more difficult than predicting the future of the past. Why should that occur to me while here, in Calw of all places? I do not know.

Coming from Innsbruck, two connections missed due to delayed trains, and thus already travelling for close on nine hours, I get on to the bus to Calw in Weil der Stadt. At some point, a workman boards the bus, the driver and the workman know each other well, the driver, it is evident to me after a few sentences, is a Russian German - like me, in other words, an ethnic German who resettled in Germany. Although I am dead beat, I wake up. Igor is recounting what I already know, saying that Russian Germans everywhere are bus drivers, and in Usingen, where I live, things are no different, they drive all over the entire Taunus region. They are extended families that help each other out, building each other.s houses one after the other. Igor proudly tells the workman that his house will be ready by the autumn. Igor does not stop at the bus stop but outside the house of the workman, who gets off with a farewell wave. One village further on, there is a diversion, but then comes an intersection without a sign. He stops the bus. Does anyone know the way, he calls out? In the morning, he says, this diversion wasn.t yet there. The only person left in the bus is me, someone who does not, of course, know the way. Igor, I say, the diversion took us off to the left, so we now have to turn right to get back onto the B 295. Obvious, isn.t it, says Igor with a laugh. Igor, I asked, what are your voting preferences? Right of centre, of course. And why is that? Because I don.t want the communists to expropriate my house just after I.ve built it. Igor, you once had a house expropriated, didn.t you? Yes. Igor, those weren.t communists but party members of a dictatorship and careerists. You know what, Igor, there were no communists in the east after the war, though there were some beforehand, living there illegally. But afterwards there weren.t any more, they were all just lackeys, they had no conviction. The real communists were to be found only in the west, in Italy, France, in parts also in Germany. Igor grins. The bus stops in the ZOB, at platform six. Igor is happy, and I am happy that we now have to go our different ways. Now, having committed the Igor story to paper, I feel a sweat coming on. I am afraid that all those who read this text might take for me a communist, the way Igor did.

Once here in Calw, it was absolutely tipping down, and afterwards a rainbow appeared, arching from the sky down to the mountains, down to the roof opposite, and down into the street. I saw it from the window. And I ran down, I knew I would be unable to grasp the rainbow but perhaps I could spend several seconds standing in its light, in its unpredictable colours. When I got down to the street, it had gone back to raining banally once again. Maybe we are only able to think when we have images to challenge us. The images that present themselves to us are ones we can quite definitely see. The historic plaques in Calw, for example. Who notices them? I, for my part, do not take them seriously. Everybody has the right to talk their way out of things, yet not at the expense of the future, which is sitting in a wheelchair, and to take the nice historical ladies for walks, in contemporary parks.

Hope walks the world barefoot. It has already arrived when we are just setting off. We have to walk towards it and to support it, to prevent it from collapsing. Time and again, we have to heal its aching feet. Wherever it might go, it returns to the end that we thought was the beginning. Each place that I, unmindful, drove past - that may well have been it. Unmindful, too, was each place that failed to provide any indication. Thus it was that we never found each other. At night, I roam around, perhaps loneliness will give me back what I omitted to do. Places, do you do that too, out of longing for me, this quiet wandering gypsy?

Morning is dawning because darkness has stripped itself naked. The mix-up, no matter what railway station it occurs in, is taking place. Always in the place from which I have just departed, the guardian angel is ringing. It has to display enormous amount of patience until its wings develop the courage to keep out of things and carry it off into nothingness.

Alfred Kittner, whose origins were in the Jewish-German cultural circle from Czernowitz, to which Paul Celan, Rose Ausländer and other illustrious poets belonged, wrote the following letter to Hermann from Breisgau on 20.6.1930: Respected Sir, Alone and lonesome, in a foreign land and a foreign town, having been without the slightest prospect of gainful employment for several months, I am patiently hungering my way through the days. Only this fact, only the hope that the publication of these poems will offer some chance of material income, however slim, or of finding some kind of position, however menial, with a newspaper or publishing house, prompts me, dear Sir, to submit some of my rhyming confessions for your consideration, to seek your advice as to whether you deem the poems fit to print, and whether you could put in a word that may facilitate publication (and be it only individually in magazines).

I am a German Romanian, born in the old Austria (1906), was brought up in a good family, but totally pauperized as a result of the world war. I made no progress at school, the writing bug having robbed me of any pleasure in my studies, and of any ambition to give any practical foundation to my life.

Military service tore me away from the beginnings of my position. For two years, and under all kinds of torments, I served in the Romanian army on the Hungarian border, among half-savage Romanian mountain farmers. Once, when I omitted to carry a bed from the third floor down into the yard, I was punished with ten days of .Kistchenstehn.. I was made to spend four days and three nights in a cabinet that was so small I couldn.t turn around. Rats crawled over my feet. They were merciful enough to remit me the rest of my punishment. - Whereupon I turned to Germany, following my old yearning, in the futile hope of being able to find a living here. I tried my luck as a travelling book salesman, as a laundry agent, etc. All my efforts ended in failure. - Disenchanted, deprived of all means of support, without friends able to help me, and with no chance of being able to count on assistance from my family, I am now planning to travel to my old home in the next few days and to continue my involuntary hunger cure there. Publication of the enclosed poems may, perhaps, bring in a sufficient amount for me to keep my head, temporarily at least, above water. That would make me very satisfied indeed. - They are taken from a major cycle I would like to call .Heart in Frenzy,. and were written between 1924 and 1930. - I trust, dear Sir, that you will be kind enough to reply to this letter at your earliest convenience, and remain, respectfully yours, Alfred Kittner

Just three days later, on 23.6.1930, Hermann Hesse replied: Sir, I have bad eyesight and generally fail to get through my post. Yet I nonetheless read a part of your verse and derived pleasure from several of the poems. I would be happy to comply with your request, yet that is not possible. The German people, their newspapers and editors do not have the slightest interest in poems, not even in the best, and do not care for them one single bit. I myself write many poems, and 20 years ago there were still 10 German magazines and several newspapers willing to print my poems and even to pay for them. Today, if I send newspaper editors a poem, I will get it back by return, or at best, it is printed after several months of waiting, and remunerated either poorly or not at all. Embarking on this path is thus something I am unable to recommend. I consider you to be talented but cannot for one moment suggest that you endeavour to make this your livelihood. Sincerely, H. Hesse

Once I had finally summoned up the courage to put several questions to the boy who stood in the Nagold prospecting for gold with the plastic sieve, I frequently drove to the place where I had seen him. Each time, I waited for him for hours on end. Yet the boy with the plastic sieve to prospect for gold never came back again. What do I do when I am no longer able to bear the loneliness? Well, I write, for example this text or others. That.s okay for a while, and then? Then I scatter breadcrumbs on the roof and feed the pigeons. The pigeons, because there are crumbs on the windowsill, get a little cheeky. They fly into my writer- in-residence apartment, flutter around me, sit down on my head, on my shoulders, and shit on me. I am unable to defend myself against the pigeons. Once again, as so often, I have done something wrong. Yet how can someone who is lonely do something right? As this text is neither nor, I would like to end it in definable form, to wit with a twitterbrid.

Zum Tag des Emigranten den es nicht gibt

Es ist ein großes Kreisen um das was was wir nicht sind dies Suchen das uns nicht begreift nur in uns wächst und reift denn diese Welt besteht nur aus Beweisen und wehe dem der keine hat da hilft nur Fluchen und kein Bitten so wandern wir aus einem

Spiegel in den andern und schminken unser häßliches Gesicht in dem kein

Leben ist kein Tod dies ist das Angebot mehr gibt es nicht und doch wir suchen Spuren nach einem Mittelpunkt im Rand das letzte Wort wir sind mit Huren eng verwandt die ihre Beine spreizen von Ort zu Ort von Land zu Land um das was es nicht gibt zu zu reizen So wohnen wir hinein hinaus im Greis ein Kind und wenn es uns verwehrt wird umgekehrt Begriffe nehmen wir nicht mit sie sollen bleiben dort wo Ewigkeiten wohnen und nicht mehr unterschreiben für uns die wir die vielen Straßen kehren die wir gegangen sind

[To mark the day of the émigré who does not exist

There is a big circling around what we are not this seeking that does not comprehend only grows and matures inside us for this world consists only of proof and woe be to those who have none only cursing will help and no supplications and thus we wander from one mirror to another and make up our hideous face in which there is no life no death this is the offer more is not to be had and yet we seek traces of a focus in the margin the last word we are closely related to whores who splay their legs from place to place from country to country in order to tease what doesn.t exist And thus we live inward and outward in the old man a child and if it denies us we about-turn we take no terms with us let them remain where eternities reside and no longer sign our names for we who sweep the many streets that we have walked down]

A Calw text cannot, however, end with émigré concerns, otherwise this would create the impression that Calw consists only of emigrants. And what would then happen at the elections taking place on my 54th birthday on September 27, 1998? Looking out of the window, I believe that a defining feature of Calw is the power lines carried by the masts that stand on roofs and not on the ground. That appears to me to be like an original vision. Yet when I take a closer look, none of it has anything to do with visions but with practical considerations. Who can afford any kinds of visions in this world that is administered by the predictable? A text that was written in freedom is something very different to a text that was written under a dictatorship. I don.t know, maybe it is the essence of freedom that it directs one to issues that do not really exist, inventing them itself in the face of so much freedom. Under a dictatorship, things are decidedly easier, paradoxically. One either falls in with the prevailing ideology and pens panegyrics, or one does not do so. And if one does not do so, only then can one start thinking about freedom. I am of the firm conviction that one can only think profoundly about what one lacks, and not about what one possesses. Yes, language. It was a key problem of Romano-German literature, or rather of the complexes of Romano-German literature. We used an official, a semi- official, and a private language. We spoke in Romanian. Cursed in Hungarian because the language is so coarse. Spoke in one or another or the third or the next available Transylvanian dialect. Occasionally used the standard version of the language, for the most part, however, a kind of vernacular. Spoke the language of jokes. The language of superiors and the other language of their superiors. We used a written language capable of reflection, and a spontaneously (incorrectly) spoken language. In part, we spoke in a roundabout way, in part in monologue fashion. Looks, for their part, were a different language, the gestures were a typical language. Even clearing one.s throat was a language. We even spoke silence. How multilingual were we, in fact? And, now, some western upholder of moral standards may come along and tell me he speaks five, or even eight, languages perfectly. There is only one language he will not be able to speak, and that is the language of freedom, because it is the language with the most idioms. For several days now, a clarinettist has been blowing apathetically on his instrument outside a Calw pharmacy, regaling us with everything from folk music through to Verdi and Mozart, playing neither rhythmically but capably badly. Today, a drunk - it is not even midday - is hurling abuse at any women he happens to run into, calling them vulgar whores. The clarinettist wakes up, plays really loud. The drunk listens quietly, at some point linking arms with the clarinettist and going off with him. Since then, a menacing silence has descended upon Calw.