TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Otto Julius Bierbaum was born on 28 June 1865 in Grünberg, Lower Silesia (now the Polish city Zielona Gora). Bierbaum was the son of an innkeeper and a confectioner. He spent his youth in Dresden and Leipzig. After graduating from the Gymnasium in Leipzig he studied law and philology in Zurich, Leipzig, Munich, and Berlin. In Berlin he spent two years studying Chinese with an eye to entering the consular service. In 1887, shortly before he was to complete his degree, his father went bankrupt, forcing him to abandon his studies. He then moved to Munich and began making a living as a journalist, writing light pieces and reviews for newspapers.

In addition to publishing novels and poems, Bierbaum also soon became known as an editor and promoter of others’ poetry. With Michael Georg Conrad and others, he founded the Gesellschaft für modernes Leben (Society for Modern Life), dedicated to the promotion of modern literature. He championed young poets such as Detlev von Lilencron (whose work was later an influence on Rilke) and Richard Dehmel. He was involved in the founding and editing of a number of literary magazines, including the Zeitschrift Modernes Leben in 1891, Pan in 1894, and Die Insel in

v

1899, and anthologies that included two issues of Den Modernen Musen-Almanac (The modern muse’s almanac) in 1893 and 1894. Bierbaum soon became known outside Munich literary circles. Max Brod recalled Bierbaum contributing song lyrics to the short-lived Vienna-based daily Zeit:

[For] a time even Hermann Bahr and the then famous, but nowadays sadly neglected poet, Otto Julius Bierbaum, were its editors, and one of its first numbers had some social lyrics by Bierbaum set to music by Humperdinck (I can still remember the words and the melody).1

Bierbaum lived for several years in Berlin, then Eppan in Northern Italy, before returning to Munich in 1900. There he participated. with Otto Falckenberg and Frank Wedekind, in the Munich cabaret Die Elf Scharfrichter (The eleven executioners). Bierbaum’s 1897 novel Stilpe: Ein Roman aus tier Froschperspektive (Stilpe: A novel from a frog’s perspective) had earlier inspired Ernst von Wolzogen to establish the Uberbretti, the first cabaret in Berlin (in 1899).

Bierbaum published novels, volumes of poetry (his Irrgarten der Liebe [Maze of love] was one of the most commercially successful volumes of poetry of its time), accounts of travel by automobile, artist monographs, an essay on Dostoevsky, and collections of short stories. His fairy-tale children’s book Zäpfel Kerns Abenteuer was adapted from Collodi’s Pinocchio. He is now best remembered for the novels Stilpe and Prinz Kuckuck (Prince Cuckoo) (1906-1907). Bierbaum’s literary stance was most often skeptical and satirical. The characteristically wry aphorism “Humor is when you laugh anyway,” part of everyday conversation in Germany to

vi

this day, is taken from Bierbaum’s Yankeedoodlefahrt (1909). Bierbaum remains almost totally unknown in the English-speaking world; a preliminary search finds no works available in English translation.2

Bierbaum moved to Dresden in 1907, where he died on 1 February 1910 from renal failure brought on by years of alcoholism. His ashes were returned to Munich and interred there.

Samalio Pardulus was first published in 1908, in the first volume of Bierbaum’s three-volume Sonderbare Geschichten (Weird stories). It was first published as a separate volume with the illustrations by Alfred Kubin in 1911 in Munich by Verlag Georg Müller in a limited edition of six hundred. It was reprinted by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag as a volume in its series DTV Bibliothek Kubin in October 1979.

The novella is narrated by one of the transcriber-editors of the journals of a long-dead mediocre Italian painter In political exile. Messer Giacomo, who observes (or reports as gossip) all the relevant events. The editor rightly characterizes Giacomo’s view of life and his words as being “of an unswervingly mediocre good nature and a staid philistine manner”—except, it must be said, when he is withered with terror. This placid tone, stunted of any passion but a religious fervor, is clearly meant by Bierbaum as a deliberate contrast to the outsized horror of the events he describes. He wants his readers to feel their own reactions with very little prompting or direction from Giacomo.

And for us readers, there are clear hints that Samalio Pardulus views himself as an equal to God—both because he is a creator and because his observations bring the deity down to a

vii

much lower level than Giacomo believes in—as when, for example, Giacomo records this observation: “And he treats animals and men no differently. God formed them as we all see them. This misshapen one pictures them as misshapen.” And, more forcefully: “We are more similar to him the more we take godly pleasure in the grotesque. This pleasure alone is the great wrath from which the joy of creation comes.” Bierbaum clearly did not set out to write a simple horror story; rather he aspired to something deeper, more paradoxical and tangled, something more akin to a Gnostic myth.

Samalio’s personal theology has an inexorable internal logic, along the lines of “We are imperfect grotesque imitations of God; therefore, He must want us to be that way; therefore the more imperfect and grotesque we are the more we please God.” But the questions he asks—about the imperfections of creation, about the built-in miseries of bodies, and more—are among those with which traditional Judeo-Christian theology has itself long grappled. Johannes Pauli did indeed find the tale of the anecdote of the painter raging against his Creator and being killed because of it, as is pointed out in the first sentence of Samalio Pardulus, but Bierbaum changed and expanded the story in accord with his own sensibility—and that of the literary age.

The Germany of Bierbaum’s maturity, the late 1880s to the early 1910s, was steeped in an enthusiasm for myth (however vaguely defined by its enthusiasts). Thomas Mann once declared that the difference between German art and literature and that of Western countries such as Great Britain and France, was that these countries produced art based in social and political realities, whereas the Germans looked to “the pure humanity of the mythical age,” choosing to ignore particular historical circumstances,

viii

which, Mann felt, defined “the mythical, primitive, poetic spirit of the German.”3 New literary forms were being sought out at this time. Romanticism had grown stale. Around 1880 there emerged one “strain of the German lyric […] elaborate in form and often exotic in both form and theme, [which] was cultivated to great applause by the Munich circle,” that is to say, Bierbaum’s circle.4 Expressionism would develop from these same roots, but not until 1910 or so. Bierbaum, being a journalist by trade, was always alert to developing literary currents, and from the new developments in poetics and the pervasive hunger for myth, Bierbaum created Samalio Pardulus.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Hettche, Walter. “Post aus der Heilanstalt.” www.litcraturportal bayern .de/blog?task=lpbblog.default&id=1013.

Schwerte, Hans. “Birnbaum, Otto Julius.” Neue deutsche Biographie, vol. i (Berlin, 1955), 151. www.deutsche-biographie.de/register_pnd118510762 .html#ndbcontent.

NOTES

1. Max Brod, “The Young Werfel and the Prague Writers,” in The Era of German Expressionism, ed. and trans. Paul Rabbe (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1974), 53–59, at 56.

2. There are, however, listings for two out-of-print studies by William Wilkening in English: Otto Julius Bierbaum, the Tragedy of a Poet: A

ix

Biography (Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 1977) and Otto Julius Bierbaum’s Relationship with His Publishers (Goppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik; Nr. 148,1975).

3. Quoted in George S. Williamson, Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.

4. Henry Hatfield, Modern German Literature (New York: St. Martins Press, 1967), 2.

x

Johannes Pauli, who was a Jew before he became a discalced monk, in his book Schimpf und Ernst, tells the strange, dark story of a painter who was a monster: half man, half horse, dwelling in a wild wood, but wonderfully skilled as an artist.1 But, however brightly his colors shone, however masterful his draftsmanship was, what he created always wore the horrible grimace of its creator. He was unable even to make the Savior look less than misshapen, so much so that you would have taken him for a devil rather than the Son of God. Because of this, Christ himself grew angry and appeared to the painting monster, to show him His beauty and to speak to his soul.

3

That He has spoken in the way the barefoot one reports—that is, no different from a young man who, taken with his own beauty, finds the work of his photographer not to be flattering enough—is difficult to believe. On the other hand, the ugly painter’s response is a credible position: that he had done nothing but retaliate against He who had first created him as a beast. “Truly, were it within my power to inflict on you something harsher than evil pictures—I would do so, with pleasure.”

Then, according to the monk’s tale, the Lord felt great anger and with His hands pushed the scaffold on which the painter stood so that it collapsed around him and slew him, saying, Talem perpetrat verdictam, qui per ipsam perdit vitam.1

Did this John understand Jesus correctly? Did he understand the painter’s response? No, he understood nothing of God or of art.

The history of Samalio Pardulus according to sources and according to the spirit is this:

Yes, he was a wildly ugly man; disproportionately tall and scrawny; crooked-shouldered and lame, as well; and with a ridiculously pointed head covered in frizzy bristles of black hair, which grew down onto his wrinkled forehead. But he had no beard around the narrow, withered-looking lips, and the yellow, sagging cheeks were as completely bare as a child’s. In compensation, two dense, prickly eyebrows like thick, linked

4

caterpillars perched over the globular, protruding brownish-green eyes, and his bony, long hands were thickly covered with hair. Tufts of hair even grew out of the far-too-large and protruding, parchment-colored ears, no less so than from the repulsively wide openings of the nose, which was otherwise excessively long and with a tip that hung down like a beak. Still, he was not half horse and also did not actually live in the wood, but in one of the castle-by-castle, tower-by-tower, as if assembled from gigantic stone blocks, cities of the Albanian Mountains. At this time there never was peace, but always war with its insatiable maw, whether it was the war within the noble lineage or that between these and the burghers. But one by no means lived in sadness, though certainly in constant uncertainty, but bravely, even cheerfully, always prepared to say a swift farewell to life, yet determined to be tough and strong to the end of the great adventure, whatever God or the devil might serve up. But amidst vice and virtue, death and lust, struggle and feasting, monks and priests in hoods and cassocks went darkly about, and had their own loud or soft words for all. In the churches, friend and foe knelt side by side, their nostrils breathing in the sultry sweet incense, their ears learning secrets from sounds at once imperious and as if floating on clouds of divine promise, their eyes fixed on the royally severe, yet also maternal, yet also virginal beauty of the luminous gold Madonna.

5

Samalio Pardulus, his real name, was named after the scion of the oldest and most powerful family in town, which itself dated from ancient Roman times. He was not to be found among the knights nor the priests, nor to be found at battles nor at feasts; neither was he to be seen in the church. He did not take part in the life of his day, was deaf to every feeling those people called happiness or unhappiness. He cared nothing for pleasure itself.

He knew only one desire: to be alone and to create around himself a new world of forms from his imagination, which made a powerful bid to present itself in images.

He had learned the painter’s craft from a man from Florence who, out of party enmity, had been expelled from his native country; a silent man whose eyes were haunted and filled with complaint, a man who had become Samalio’s father’s personal secretary. All that the other had been capable of doing with paintbrush and color he soon was capable of doing as well. But he wanted more. Because the other had learned to paint, while still rich and a great lord, only to while away idle hours, and painted only what the masters of his native city had already painted. He had no thought at all of equaling or surpassing what they had done. As he painted he thought of Florence, and created a pale reflection of the beauty from which he had been expelled. Samalio Pardulus, however (we do not know the reason for his

6

name), had seen no art of foreign masters (and the bad pictures in the churches and houses of his town were anything but masterly), and so he thought about nothing foreign—only about that which was inside himself and that which he saw inside himself, that which was entirely his own and not a reflection of any foreign art, least of all that of his teacher. His desire was to bring to light his innermost visions, render the wavering steady, the scattered substantial.

“I paint to have companions,” he once told his teacher. “I paint so that I am not completely alone. If I couldn’t paint I would have children with whores, but only the most shameless and dissolute ones. Even with animals, if nature would allow it. If only there were another people around me rather than this one, which is so horribly foreign to me.”

Messer Giacomo, who had never heard such talk before nor seen pictures the like of those of his wild pupil, and for whom, in the boredom of his exile, it was a kind of frightening delight to deal with the mostro, faithfully recorded in his diario (which, incidentally, was also boring because it was so monotonous) everything that he saw and heard nella selva—out in the wood—with the centauro, as he called his pupil. This diario was later found in the archive of the castle in old Certaldo when the ruin passed into the possession of the state. Messer Giacomo later returned to his home country and lived

7

out his days in that old castle between Florence and Sienna. His family’s coat of arms is still visible among those of others who followed one another in possession of the castle. Nothing further is known of him.

If it did not emerge from the remainder of his journal that he was basically a sober man, one not given to indulging in fantasy, rather, his little paintbrush hobby aside, was quite occupied with the material interests which made him a dedicated partisan, one might think that he had in some measure invented this Samalio Pardulus in an attempt at also becoming a poet. But the way in which he records the utterances of this strange man (transcribes them as they were spoken), always with the commentary of an unswervingly mediocre good nature and a staid philistine manner, does not allow this suspicion to arise. We may, as fantastical as much of what he reports may seem, accept with certainty that the Lord of Centraldo Alto had known, truly and in the flesh, the “centaur,” had seen these wild pictures, and had heard all the words that he imparts, always with expressions of horror.

We follow his notes faithfully in all essential matters, and claim only the right to add to his reproachful comments the picture of the “monster” in ways that have nothing in common with Messer Giacomo’s opinions.

8

9

Some notes have been transcribed word for word, as with what the Tuscan says about Samalio’s art and character in general:

“There is a strange thing about the art of this unruly man. It is full of the reviling of life, which in this art does not seem to be of God, rather of the devil. When he paints the forest (as he particularly likes to do, and not without skill) it is as if the trees were demonically possessed, not living plants, but animals, and are altogether like a gathering of ghosts, so much so that one is afraid to look into the darkness that seems to emerge from within them, a darkness that is not black, but has a brown tone. He has painted the pines as they stand around his castle in Felsgebirg. These are friendly trees, of noble lineage, and are actually beneficial as they provide shade from above and, because of the lack of under-boughs, they do not block the path of the breeze. But for him they are monsters with bristling skulls that they butt against one another. It is not as if he were painting their faces. That might actually be amusing. Rather, as it they were the skulls of giants no one has ever seen, of gigantic beings, tree-like yet bestial. They are evil and altogether hostile. It is as if they press against one another with these savage heads so that they, their powers uniting, might become powerful enough to tear their trunks from the earth.—And he treats animals and men no differently.

10

11

God formed them as we all see them. This misshapen one pictures them as misshapen. His horses are long-haired, like goats, and one could at the same time believe that they also were born of wild boars. He never paints them otherwise than as mottled red and black. He did, however, paint one white mare, the most shameless ever conceived: a horse with human skin, completely without hair, excepting one patch, which he has made the center point of the picture. The animal, this human animal, bends its neck at a painfully impossible angle, so its head is turned toward the startled viewer, a head which is, indeed, that of a horse, but with features that so resemble those of a woman that a man has to turn his eyes away. For it laughs in a shameful, boisterous, and yet most disgraceful manner. It has fiery blue eyes. On the other hand, he painted a woman with the fur of a blue-and-black-striped cat. This woman rides on a man who has the shaggy hair of a white sheepdog and the protruding fangs of this breed. She rides backward on him, gripping his bushy tail with both hands. And the dog-man lifts his head in the manner of a baying hound that scents his prey.

“I asked him what all this meant.

“He answered, ‘No more and no less than that which is your world: believe it.’

“I told him, ‘That mocks God.’

12

“He answered, ‘No one mocks God more than God mocked himself when he created man in his own image. Can you look at me and tell me, “This is how God looks?’”

“I was silent out of polite consideration.

“He laughed (or what was, for him, laughing— a twitching at the corners of his mouth), and said, ‘Or, when you look into the mirror do you see God’s reflection?’

“I said (sternly, with legitimate justification), ‘That is not the meaning of the scripture. God is perfect beauty; we are only imperfect images, distorted, in addition, by Original Sin and its curse.’

“He laughed again (and most hideously), saying, ‘So either God was a bungler or did what I do.’

“He walked around the room and rubbed his hands together; they crackled like pieces of firewood. He suddenly stopped and looked at me with narrowed eyes. He cried, ‘The curse! Sin! What do these words mean? That he needs grotesques in order to enjoy himself? Your beautiful God! Because’ (and this he said quietly, even seriously) ‘He is not to be thought of as a bungler.’

“He threw himself into his chair and stared at the ceiling beams, where hung the hideous chandelier that he had found in the burial cave of the heathens. It is in the form of a large sunflower, but every petal has the

13

shape of the female pudenda so every candle, stuck into it, becomes a phallus.

“He sat a long while in silence before he said, ‘No, not a bungler. But truly God, truly an artist. And we are merely apes of His fashioning. But’ (and this he again shouted loudly, high-pitched, furiously as he jumped up) ‘we are allowed to do what He is allowed to do: everything! We are more similar to him the more we take godly pleasure in the grotesque. This pleasure alone is the great wrath from which the joy of creation comes. Because love is a disgusting thing, is satisfaction with that which is, with what is boring, what is always the same, damned and damned again to be the same for all eternity. Vulva and phallus. That is the same for the herd in the pigsty and in the prince’s bed. But it is given to some to enjoy themselves like God himself, because God is most pleased with them as they are the most perfectly grotesque caricatures of Him. These are the artists. They know that God has created the world not out of love, rather out of necessity … God! What is God? What … would God be? God would be loneliness.’

“He stepped very close to me, and his eyes were terrible as he said, ‘Hear this, man from Tuscany, and remember it, because this is the truth: God was dead when He created the world. When He was alive there was nothing around Him; He was everything, the unmoving

14

15

emptiness, the perfect nothing, that is; the only possible perfection. But He would not have been God, not been the Holy Spirit, had this eternity, this dreadful, perfect eternity sufficed. The affliction of want came over Him, and He decided to die, so that out of His death, out of His loneliness, the multiplicity of the world would come to be. No different than the way worms come from a corpse.’

“I was horrified by this filth from his shameful imagination. I crossed myself three times and rose to go. But he laid his two hard hands on my shoulders—it felt no different than if Satan had come to corrupt me—and he pushed me back into the chair.

“He said, ‘Listen to the rest! It is not good to hear only half of the truth. And what I tell you isn’t impious. Don’t you see? Even if God is dead the world is still divine, because it is of Him. It is true that its creatures are only worms that live because of His death, but the nourishment they receive is still divine.’

“I gathered myself and rebuked him for his words; I called him a pagan sophist.

“He shook his head. ‘What distinguishes me from your sort of Christian is only that I have too divine a conception of God to be able to suppose that this dull world of eternal sameness could contain or express His life. I think of God as being so great that, to me, His dead body is still divine enough for the likes of us, as much divinity

16

17

as we can endure. God and the world: loneliness and life are impossible to bear. And isn’t it a Christian belief that He died for us? And what can I say to the worms except this: that He has bequeathed us original sin.’

“‘You mock God,’ I shouted, ‘and you mock eternal salvation.’

“”That means absolutely nothing,’ he said earnestly. ‘For God Himself has given it up. He wasn’t able to bear it. There was a need in Him, to die, to die as God and to compel Himself to live on in the form of worms. His great affliction was boredom. Now He is free of it. Dead God rejoices in the multiplicity of grotesques in which He lives on. And if it is certainly also an angry pleasure, it is for just that reason divine.—Here, with me’ (he pointed to himself), ‘here, in me’ (he patted his chest), ‘He feels most at home. Because my world is made according to His prescription, and I die, like Him, a death of the most furious need.’

“As he said this, I thought something glowed in his eyes. I do not know whether it was exaltation or insanity.

“The Madonna is merciful toward him. He never speaks of her and, if he assaults everything that is holy to us with his painting tools, which are for him only inducements to shameful grotesqueries, he never paints her.”

18

19

The castle in which Samalio spent most of his days and nights lay on the edge of the city, on an outcropping of rock into which terraces had been carved. Bur close to where the stone rose naked from the ground stood a dense forest: oaks, pines, cypress, and chestnuts. These were powerful, imperious trees that did not tolerate any small trees trying to grow up near them. Only lightning or age could fell these giants. Then new ones could grow in their rotting remains. There were many kinds of wild animals about, wildcats and lynxes in particular; bur mostly there were vultures and owls. Nights about the castle, so the Tuscan reported, were noisier than the days. Because, he said, “As it grew darker the predators, who during the day found the forest too bright tor them, awakened and began shouting at one another or crying bloody murder; the lynx, howling like a wolf, feral red death, treacherous yowling, but most dreadful of all the great horned owl, with its deep U-hu that sounds like lamentation but really is bloodlust.”

But this night concert of fiends was still a delight to the Misshapen One, who claimed that he, like lynxes, cats, and owls, saw better by night than by day, and this was why he took to his bed only at daybreak and slept until high noon.

“The brown night,” so he said, “has deeper colors than the Milky Way. It doesn’t twinkle, it glows. Its brown is actually antique gold, mixed with the red of coagulated

20

blood. There also is a deep violet blue there. Sometimes all contours are defined by deep purple, sometimes by a deep orange-colored light. There also are still shadows in the darkest night. They are the most wonderful of colors, but this brown is of the greatest, most spiritual depth, and is not to be found on the painters palette. It is as if the night dreams this brown.”

He painted only in these night colors, colors that only he could see, and so we can believe the Tuscan when he says that Samalio’s images were “as if from another world, one not lit by our sun. We must believe they were all in the eyes of the night-dweller who, although painring by day (and only in the light of dawn), only created night pictures, as if there were no day at all. At the same time, among his panels were those in which an indescribable dark glow trembled, comparable to the light which seems to be enclosed in many precious stones, those which still shine in the darkness.”

You would think that Messer Giacomo would have found the colors in Samalio’s pictures beautiful. But far from it. He calls their colors “hellish” or “savage,” once “bloodthirsty,” then again “shamefully lewd,” even “appallingly boorish and barbaric, with no sense of refinement and dignity.” They “pain the refined eye and call forth fear and terror, rather than exhilarate.”

The Tuscan was certainly correct, for himself, but it is equally certain that Samalio did not paint to exhilarate

21

Messer Giacomo. It in no way mattered to him that the Master of Certaldo Alto even saw them. We know from his own account that he always visited the castle uninvited. “Rode once again to the centaur’s castle on a whim. Was received badly, but saw new things. As always: abomination on abomination. But he still will not show me the large panel.”

I will return to this panel.

For now, an account assembled from the Tuscan’s records may serve to some extent to convey to us an idea of the character and life of this miraculous man. What emerges from these notes is a picture of a precursor of the Renaissance, but without the conscious bias toward antiquity.

All intellectual movements prepare for their emergence by first showing themselves, to some degree, in anachronistic individuals. Before they become the destiny of a time, before they become an epoch, they manifest themselves in some measure as a sort of ferment in the destinies of individuals who are thereby condemned to solitude and, usually with no apparent positive impact, fulfill a purpose the meaning of which we do not grasp.

He felt this himself. One evening he said to his teacher, who had informed him that the people considered him a sorcerer: “Am I not one? Am I not already living what lies ahead? Is it not sorcery that I am as if I were my own great-grandchild?”

22

“What do you mean?” asked the Tuscan.

And Samalio replied: “Everyone ofyou has the faith of the others; every one of you is a neighbor: you support and are supported; not one of you is free, a power in and for yourself. You are all affirmed by one another and find that proper. Even the violent, those who are called masters, act with regard for others, even when they wish to rule over those others. For me there are no others. I do not know you. I only know myself. I am as far from you as from the people who built the Tower of Babel. I once heard (when I was a child) that there are other people besides me, but I have come to understand that this is a mistake, a fairy tale true only for those who have no reality in themselves. He who has understood himself knows that he is alone.”

“When I heard this,” the Tuscan adds here, “I truly felt for a moment that this madness was truth. To blame (God forgive me this sin) were the accursed eyes of the beast, whose glances wound about me like glittering threads. He is most certainly in league with the devil. But I freed myself and cried, ‘How can you believe this? Remember your father, remember your mother!’”

Then Samalio replied: “My father and mother are not outside me, but inside me; and not only them, but everyone from whom they have come. And not just their people, but all the people who have ever been. This

23

is what man is: he who truly is one, is everyone—and therefore needs no one else.”

Nevertheless, Messer Giacomo reports, Samalio had been “plagued by a terrible love.”

“Everyone knows,” he writes, “and all detest him more for this than for the sake of his ugliness, that he burns with an unseemly love for his own sister, Bianca Maria, who is as beautiful as he is ugly. A portrait of the Madonna could be painted using her face as a model, as all sweetness and beauty are united in it. Two things astonish me: that these two are brother and sister, and that he, the monster, dares to raise his eyes to her whose beauty, I believe, should instead fill him with hatred and envy. Blessed be God, that the angelic girl detests him. It is said (and I do not think it is impossible, though it is only gossip with no evidence) that he had attacked her at night in her chamber, but without accomplishing his unworthy purpose; that she had struck him across the forehead with the great crucifix above her bed, giving him a deep wound (which I myself have seen). And the following day (which again was the case) he left the city, and since then has remained out in the forest. But she has since been despondent and strangely timid, so that she flees from all men’s sight; and has become engaged without objection, at the behest of her father, to a nobleman from the neighborhood whose proposal she had previously rejected.”

24

There is no comment by the painter about his sister to be found in the Tuscans journal (which is understandable, as Samalio would certainly never have spoken of her). However, closer scrutiny reveals connections of which the reporter was apparently unaware.

We find the following: “I asked the centaur why he did not paint the Madonna.

“Answer: ‘Because it is impossible.’

“Question: ‘But, have thousands not already done it?’

“Answer: ‘That is because they have never seen her.’

“I: ‘So you have seen her?’

“He: ‘Certainly.’

“I was astonished and asked: ‘Oh? In dreams?’

“He answered: ‘There is no difference between that which you divide into dream and reality.’

“I said, ‘Well, one dreams while asleep and sees while awake.’

“He looked at me in astonishment: ‘And the difference?’

“I could not explain it to him, or, I should say, he acted as if he did not understand the obvious (it is always his way to call the self-evident incomprehensible). So what he meant about the Madonna was not revealed to me.”

Another time: “Found him before a shameful picture. It was Christ on the cross between the two thieves. I was horrified to see that he had painted himself as the

25

crucified one, but, if this was possible, as even more horrible than he is. And everywhere there was blood flowing from his wounds. Clots of blood thick as a cluster of grapes hung from the centurions spear wound, and like red corncobs from the shoulder wound. Blood roosted in the chest hair like scabs, and had soaked obscenely into his loincloth. He looked like the flayed Marsyas.

‘“This is not Christ,’ I cried. ‘This is the Devil Supreme, which you have painted standing before the mirror!’

“Because I was very angry. But he did not appear to be offended. He smiled and said, “Do you not know, that if you busy yourself with paint and brush you can paint nothing but yourself? When I speak, I am the sound; when I see it is my face; when I paint, nothing appears on the panel except me. Since I can only be myself, what could come from me except myself? —Christ! Who is that? Whoever feels him, talks about him, paints him. Why are you shaking, why are you horrified? Do you not know scripture? Do you not know that he has given himself to all? Thus to me as well. And this’ (he pointed to the panel) ‘shows how we two are truly, completely, one and the same.’

“I confess that I quaked with a great anger and cried, ‘You have taken leave of your senses, and I would have to bring you before the ecclesiastical court if I did not know that madness prompts your fantasies.’ He ran a

26

27

hand through his bristly hair and murmured something, of which I could understand only‘Not yet, not yet!’

“He then said, very calmly, ‘Listen! Listen! Do you not know that all greatness is madness? When love became madness, it was nailed to the cross. Of course! Since then it is dead. Now is the time to take up with anger … But you do not understand. Otherwise you would read it in my picture, in which it is clearer to see than in every other panel of the crucifixion. One thing is true of all of them there, even the most blasphemous: they are smiling.’

“It suddenly appeared as if he wanted to seize hold of me. He strode over to me, his small eyes so narrowed that his glance fired out through slits; he thrust his fist against my chest and cried, ‘Mad dogs have greater feeling for the sacrifice on Calvary than you who have made a lamb out of a lion. It does you good to fondle His bloody fleece. It does you good to let water run out of His eyes, to let blood flow out of His body for you. It does you good to make a doll out of the Greatest One, so that you can play with Him.’

“I wanted to go. But he held me fast. And dragged me to the large curtained picture. There he let go of me and pushed me into a chair.

“And said, ‘Have you heard that spirits come to visit me at night?’

28

29

“I had heard it, and told him so, but added that I did not believe it.

“‘It’s true!’ he shouted.

“I crossed myself.

‘“No gestures needed,’ he said quietly. ‘The spirit that comes to me is not infernal. Christ Himself is here every night, and with him the Madonna.’

“God and all His saints forgive me for failing to spit in the monster’s blasphemous face. Instead I merely, if fearlessly, said, ‘You lie!’

“He then looked at me imperiously, seized the corner of the curtain, and said, ‘Kneel down!’

“I had to believe that he wanted me to call up the Devil, so I refused.

“‘Kneel,’ he growled, reaching for his dagger.

“‘Let the sin be upon you,’ I groaned, letting myself down on my knees, calling for God’s help through diligent cross-making.

“When I heard the rings of the curtain shriek, I lowered my head and closed my eyes firmly, so as not to see anything. And was most determined not to voluntarily raise my head and my gaze.

“For my part, I stayed so long on my knees, my eyelids tightly pressed together, that golden stars and discs danced before my closed eyes. Sweat ran from my forehead over my eyelids, and it was as if he were trying to force them open with his sharpness.

30

“I lay there filled with fear, believing they would be consumed by hellish fire. And I whimpered loudly.

“It was not until I heard his steps moving away from me that I grew a little bolder. I lifted my head, looked behind me, where the terrible one now sat in a chair, looking past me at the picture, his right hand forming a screen above his eyes, in the way painters look at their panels from afar.

“And he muttered, as if I were not there at all: ‘It does not glow as it did that night. The crimson tips of her breasts are still dead. The flesh is much too light. There is still too little fire in the hair. As my hand moved over it, it crackled. This is tow, not life. Otherwise … she … is … beautiful.’

“‘Get up,’ he shouted at me. ‘Thank your God, for keeping you from seeing what my shameless frenzy has now revealed to you. For on this panel is the Madonna in truth, physically and spiritually torn from naked life by the heat of my eyes. If you had seen her, I would have strangled you with my bare hands. Go now, and scream in the streets that Samalio Pardulus has painted the Madonna naked, riding on a centaur with the features of her son, who is her brother. And that with her he jumped from the rocky cliff of Golgotha, over an abyss of blood from which the tops of domes towered, to a castle of violet-colored amethyst-quartz guarded by the animals of the Apocalypse, and that this castle is the coffin of God

31

in which Samalio dwells and watches that no worms come to Him.’”

We can believe the Florentine when he writes that he “sought to put distance between us, as if evil itself were at my heels.”

Nevertheless, he did not play the informer, and shared his experiences with no one, only with the pages of his book.

However, even without his help, it became known that eerie things were happening nightly at the castle in the forest.

As Samalio had no one with him at night except an old, half-blind valet the rumors could not have come out of the castle. They originated in the city itself, in the house of the parents of the painter.

Owing to their daughters upcoming wedding, the parents had traveled to Rome to meet with the groom’s powerful relatives. They went to the Palazzo every night. Needless to say, the frightened servants would report everything they had heard and seen nightly. Accordingly, this was reported:

Every evening, as soon as it had grown fully dark (this was December, the weather was foggy and there was no moon), there came along the steepest ridge that led to the town, one usually only taken by goat herders, a huge black horse upon which sat a thin man wrapped in a black cloak, on his black-bearded head a

32

33

broad-brimmed conical hat. If not for the beard (and other things that are particular to ghostly apparitions) he could have been taken for Samalio. But it was most certainly a ghost, for out of the cloak, here and there, and from his shoulders shone yellow lights, and green lights ran along beside the horse. The watchtower for the house, which like all houses of the noble families was more a fortress than palace, stood by the city wall. All night through, as on the actual wall towers, a watchman stood on its rampart. Only he could trace the apparition as soon as it came near the wall—because the remaining windows of the palace were at some distance from the wall and so afforded no clear view. Also, there was likely neither man nor woman who would have dared to exercise the curiosity to closely observe the specter, for it was already horrible enough to watch how, as soon as the horse and rider came into the shadowed area below the wall itself, the yellow lights from the shoulders of the man rose into the air and began to fly about the house, while the green lights began to circle the space in front of the tower in wide curves. Nothing could be learned from the watchman except this one thing: the man in the black cloak stepped through the closed tower gate without the hinges being turned. The first time he had come he had told the watchman the following: “My gaze can strike you dead. I will spare you as long as you

34

35

stand guard alone. If I see you with comrades, you are as dead as they will be.” Therefore no one insisted on keeping the guard company. Likewise, everyone in the house kept their eyes open while “the black one” was within its walls. The watchdog, a huge animal, had been found with its throat slit the morning after the apparition had first appeared. The ghost always remained in the palace only a short time. His presence made itself known only by a strange tapping sound, as if of many steps, like those of a child accompanying a grown man. No sooner had this noise faded away than the more courageous could watch from their windows as horse, rider, and lights disappeared into the forest—in the direction of Samalio’s castle.

Messer Giacomo, who does not live in the palace but in a small house in the center of the city, reports all this as hearsay, based on the stories told by the servants. Because he thought it appropriate to send a messenger on horseback to Rome to inform the Master of the sinister being, but did not want to act without asking the opinion of the daughter of the house, to whom, more-over—because all of the head servants had gone along on the trip—he felt himself committed to giving protection and assistance in such a terrible circumstance, he went to Maria Bianca:

“I found the noble Lady,” he writes, “contrary to all expectation, serene of mind, though very pale and,

36

37

in spite of the smile in her beautiful eyes, almost like a patient who wants to comfort the comforter. She joked about the servants’ talk, and said, ‘I truly have no fear of the ghost; so little, in fact, that I have sent my chamber-maid who had previously slept with me from my bedroom. All of this is just foolishness, and it is not worth talking about, let alone sending a messenger on horseback.’—In accordance with the so decisive opinion of the gracious Lady, I refrained from sending the message.”

After his last, terrifying visit to Samalio, however, a new fear came over him, all the more so as peasants in the vicinity of the forest castle had already confirmed rumors that had arisen earlier, that there were also peculiar things going on there: with strange singing voices and an otherwise unseen colorful brightness behind the windows. And he went back to Maria Bianca. He writes (his hands trembling as he proceeded): “What I was forced to see! Worse than an invalid. Her eyes shone as if with fever, and I was astonished to see that they now resembled those of the monster. She is entirely changed and yet still as beautiful as ever. God forgive me the sacrilege of what I think and inscribe here: Her beauty has become shameless. How? How can I think such an impossible thing? And yet: I saw it. With these eyes I saw the glistening worm in her eyes. And if all the saints surrounded me and threatened me with all their torments and shrank back from me in fear at every

38

39

imprudent word, I must say it (and cringe and shrink back even as I write it): she had the wicked pride of the great whores in her expression. Chaste lips do not burn that way. No pure young woman would recline so in her seat. Even in her voice there is innocence no more. There is a quivering, lustfully trembling ripeness in her that is like a shameless revelation of the deepest secret. There is satiation and desire, but something menacing and yet desperate is there as well. I seek in vain to capture this in words. The Tuscan language is, as we all know, rich enough to paint heaven and hell, yet seems incapable of capturing this triumph full of anguish, this trembling from being completely filled by haughtiness.—Oh, I could just as well have kept to myself all my questions and all my reports I had come to address to her, for all at once I saw everything: This spook is not foolish gossip flowing in and out of the servants quarters, it is the truth, the fearful, disgraceful, hellish truth. The monster out there, unable to incestuously conquer this angel on his own, has allied with hell itself to send her an incubus, and this full-blooded devil has succeeded where the half-blooded one failed. The angel has fallen: a whore of the devil raises herself in the cursed pride of lust. The lecherous plague of hell now resides in this house, sent by that monster who, by way of the sight of a pure beauty, was driven to madness and from madness to the sin of all sins: to sorcery.—How great is the power of evil!

40

When she smiled at me and with a strange tone of apparent unconcern said, ‘You most certainly will not, Messer Giacomo. There are as few hellish spirits in my brothers employ as there are here, and it is certainly not necessary to frighten our parents,’ I myself was for a moment caught in the devil’s net and thought to again leave off sending the message. But, lo!, the evil one ultimately betrays himself: For then came these words (certainly from unwilling lips, for I saw how they were trembling): ‘Fate is neither to be halted nor to be hastened. It fulfills itself in its own time.’ I bowed, took my leave, and left.—The message is now on its way. If I were stronger I would have taken it myself. For it is truly better to sit in a saddle and ride along uncertain roads day and night than to be here, where terrible things are happening and even worse things are in the offing.”

There follows a prayer to all things holy and a spell to ward off demons.

Further notes made by the Florentine yield the following:

The parents immediately sent the mounted messenger back with the message that they would be embarking on their return journey without delay. This message, conveyed verbally, was sent to the daughter and arrived in the late evening hours. The servants, very delighted at this turn, immediately notified Messer Giacomo, who immediately went to the palace so as to be there on the

41

morning of the following day. Maria Bianca, instead of admitting him, told him he had done a wicked thing by upsetting her parents. If he valued his life he would keep quiet and not further pursue his inquisitiveness. Frightened, he locked himself in his room. Barely an hour later the usual sounds began. Only, so the servants asserted, more violently, and louder than usual. They heard the young woman moaning, and a man’s hoarse voice. Doors slammed in the palace, a hideous animal sound arose, howling, and turned into an angry whimpering that lasted a very long time. It seemed to come from the young woman’s bedroom.

“—The incubus!” thought Giacomo, and he crossed himself repeatedly as long as the sound lasted. At last it was quiet, but no one dared leave their room.

Early in the morning the Master and Mistress returned. The fog had not yet lilted. The father ordered a lantern and betook himself just as he was, in his fur journey coat, to Maria Bianca’s room. He had gathered from the vague contents of the message that she had been made ill by the spook. Messer Giacomo, in whose ears the terrible whimpering still sounded, led the quite exhausted and anxious old lady. The servants crowded along behind them.

A few steps from the door the Count halted and turned to Giacomo. “You have not reported everything

42

43

to me. Things are worse. Why does she not come to meet us?”

“Oh, my God,” sighed the Countess, and she walked past the Count toward the door.

“Wait, wait!” pleaded Messer Giacomo. “Don’t go in!”

“Tell me everything,” the Count ordered.

The Florentine stepped up close to him and whispered, “It is impossible to do so. I can only ask that you cross yourselves and allow me to enter before you.”

The Count stared at him. “Into my daughters bedroom? Have you lost your mind?”

Messer Giacomo wrung his hands, and whispered even more quietly, “She … no longer has any shame.”

The Count lifted his right fist—then let it fall limp to his side. Then he waved the servants away and groaned. “If you have told the truth, I will kill her; if you have lied I will kill you.”

He reached for his dagger and took a step forward.

The Countess in the meantime had put her ear to the door and raised her hand to command silence. “I believe I can hear the rasping of her breath.”

She knocked softly on the door.

A strange growl was heard.

“The incubus,” Messer Giacomo cried, and he turned to flee. The Count took him by the wrist and forced him

44

45

to the door. “Open it! Force it open!” Giacomo turned the handle. The door opened.

The room was very dark. There was only a glimmering near the window, as if the morning light burst through the heavy velvet curtains through two small holes.

“There … There … There it is!” groaned Giacomo, and he crossed himself.

At that moment two bright points flew in a great are over the heads of those entering—flew out and away. A moment later, while the three, horror-struck, sought the support of the doorframe, there came a shouting and screeching from the servants in the corridor, surmounted by a prolonged angry howling, which then went into hissing and growling before it finally seemed to expire. Then came the sound of the servants noisily going down the stairs, and the slamming of the staircase door.

The Count came to himself first. He went to the window and pulled the curtains apart. The room was empty. The bed behind its closed curtains was undisturbed.

“Where is she?” moaned the Countess, and she sank down beside the bed.

The Count looked questioningly at Messer Giacomo.

He whispered, his head turned toward the door, ‘That was she … the witch.”

“A light,” the Count cried our into the corridor.

No one came.

46

47

“They are afraid. Who here is nor afraid?” muttered the Florentine.

“What could I have left to fear,” the Count muttered tonelessly, and he walked to the door.

The lantern stood on the floor to the left of the door. He picked it up. Hie solid shapes and cut-outs of its ornamental hood threw a vine-like web of shadows on the ceiling and walls. Because the Count’s hand trembled and the lantern turned in his hand there was a scurrying dance of shadow and light. A yellow glow from the largest pane fell on something cowering, something black in a corner.

The Count went unsteadily onward, making the sign of the cross and murmuring, “Is it you?”

The creature, now shadowed again, cowered even lower, growled viciously.

A mindless rage seized the old man. He tore his dagger from its sheath and threw himself forward, fell with all his body weight onto the dark thing, dagger first. He felt a hot breath on his face and hot blood ran over his fist. Wild now, he grabbed with both hands, and in his clawing fingers the giant wildcat died. He carried her, his hands stretched out before him, panting, into the room and threw the still twitching body onto Maria Bianca’s bed. Then he knelt down, clasped his bloody hands in front of his face and prayed—for the soul of his daughter.

48

49

The Countess lay in a faint by the bed. The blood of the beast dripped down onto her forehead.

Messer Giacomo writes, “I too nearly lost consciousness. My heart was in my throat. I felt it pulsing in my brain. There was a red haze before my eyes. I do not know: was it the blood that so violently overwhelmed me, or the hellish deception? Through that red darkness I saw the eyes of the beast dying out. And they were identical to Maria Bianca’s eyes. Her last look, aimed at me, was full of rage. I resisted the evil by crossing myself, and I knelt down to pray for the poor soul. Then we, the Count and I, carried the noble Lady to her room, both of our hearts grateful that she did not awaken. Then I told the unhappy father everything I knew. Anyone who had entertained any doubt that he descended from heroic ancient Roman blood surely would have withdrawn those doubts in view of the power and strength with which the Count said nothing more after hearing my account than “All that remains for me is to exterminate him, as well.”

He called for horses to be saddled for himself, Giacomo and ten servants, drafted a will that bequeathed, should he fall in combat with the sorcerer, all his property to the Church, dipped sword and dagger in holy water, and with his companions rode slowly toward the forest. To his right rose Messer Giacomo, to his left

50

the watchman. He, otherwise the bravest among all of the Count’s servants, was unsteady in his saddle, and his face was disfigured by fear and horror. His master called for him to have courage, but the closer they approached the castle the more unsteady his expression became, the paler his face.

As they caught sight of the castle, which stood in the dim light of a sunless day like dull lead, bluish-gray, almost malignant, the Count called on the company to kneel by their horses and pray. Then, when they were all back in their saddles, they drew their swords, kept them erect directly in front of them as a sign of the cross, and sang this hymn:

We march this trail to fight

For Jesus Christ,

He is our valiant horseman,

Our invisible leader,

Whose flag, as white as snow,

Kyrie eleison,

Will lead us on to victory

“None of us,” the Tuscan writes, “except the old Lord, or so I believe in consideration of the sparkle I saw in his eye, were feeling very brave. But the song, as it rang out from us, surrounded us as if with the breath of brave

51

archangels. When we stopped at the gate, I saw that all the servants showed a hearty redness in their cheeks— except for the watchman.”

Because the gate was closed (as were all the windows and shutters), the Count pounded on it with the pommel of his sword and said, “Open up, in the name of the Trinity!”

Instead of an answer the result was a harsh, throaty rattle. Then keys clattered, the door squealed on its hinges, and from the opening came the old servant. He immediately sank to his knees and spread both arms wide. Through his agonizingly torn lips his heavy tongue could be seen, convulsing, while the palate rasped with a terrible striving for expressive sounds. The blind, blank eyes reflected the gray of the hazy sky.

The Florentine reports:

“Although the pitiful one was able to speak neither with his mouth nor his eyes, we understood him all the same, and knew that the monster was dead.”

The Count waved the servants to stay behind and commanded the dumb one to lead him and Giacomo to the corpse, but he threw himself full length on the ground, as if he wanted to claw his way down into it with his hands.

“Then we knew,” writes Giacomo, “that something still worse awaited us, something that had horrified the

52

servant even as his blindness preserved him from having to see it.

“I would gladly spare you from accompanying me, Messer Giacomo,” said the Count, “but, as you can see, I am now overcome with fear, where I was not afraid to kill her whom I had given life. Oh, my God, why do you not bless me with blindness! The noble do not fear to do terrible things where there is need and duty. But there are things that even the bravest cannot countenance, whose very idea frightens them into flight. But it must be done. I must see with these eyes what my heart already knows. Messer Giacomo, sin does not require the devil. If you are now afraid of hellish spirits, I tell you this: You can go with me calmly. But if you are not able to cope with the horror of the accursed nature all of us are made of, I tell you this: Let me alone endure it, as I must do, as I am guilty because of my blood.”

The Florentine, who wrote these words, adds, “Even now, as I record this in the calm of reflection, I do not understand it, let alone understand it when I heard it. The evil one, whose evident work my poor noble Master denied from that moment on, had confused him. Praise be to God for at least protecting my mind from such darkness.”

They walked through dark corridors, took the dark stairs leading up to the great tower, which Giacomo

53

knew was the painter’s workshop, and where he rightly suspected that they would find his corpse.

Let him tell it: “I walked forward and parted the leather curtain to allow the Count to enter. But he did not go into the room with me, but remained with his right and left hands tightly clinging to the curtain for the door. I could hear him breathing, and was glad to hear this sign of life, for now the worst horror of all came over me, so much so that I did not dare take another step forward, but slipped along without lifting my feet, as if in stockings, groping. Then my knees bumped into something soft. I warily bent forward, searching hands reaching out. Before this I had never known that the worst horror a man can feel dwells in his fingertips. All the torture of fear, of terror that, so to speak, holds one back and nevertheless like an inert weight slowly, terribly slowly and yet inevitably, heaves us forward, rested, balled up as if crouching, curled-up, under my fingertips that to me appeared (although this was surely an illusion) to shine. All this took scarcely the length of a breath and yet felt like an eternity … until the moment came when the horror, as it were, turned into rage, wanting to put an end to itself, be it through something even worse. I threw myself forward—and flew back with a horrible scream. My hands had felt two naked, horribly cold woman’s breasts; my warm mouth had touched a cold one.

54

55

“I staggered back to the curtain and gasped, ‘The witch! There!’

“The Count pushed me aside, muttering, ‘I knew it!’ Then, a few steps forward, louder, ‘I beg you, let in light. I feel the two of them, and now I need to see them.’ He seemed quite calm. I no longer could hear him breathing. A creak told me that he had hit upon a chair, in which he had settled.

“I felt my way along the wall to the window, so as not to come into contact again with one of the cursed bodies in passing through then room. A shuddering, icy horror still ran through my veins. I was so full of horror and, as it were, anxious caution, that when the Count’s hand slid down the side of the armrests, upon hearing the faint, scraping sound, my knees buckled; for a moment I thought the sound nothing other than a sigh emerging from dead lips.

“I at last reached the window and felt the tassel of the curtain in my hand. It took all my strength to accomplish this small task, the opening of curtain, so exhausted was I. But to open the window and the shutter I needed the assistance of a prayer. I called aloud for the Madonna to stand by me.

“Then I heard a horrible cursing. Was that my old, noble, pious Lord who spat out the dirtiest of words over the purest of the pure?

56

“Would that I still believed what I believed at that moment, that it was Satan himself.

“Without turning around I tore open the windows and shutters, shouting as I did so, ‘Fly out, spirit of darkness. Go thee hence, Prince of Hell; out, out!’ And I put my forehead on the windowsill to pray again. The damp, cold wind from the forest brushed through my hair, woke me, so to speak, from the pleasant slumber of devotion, which had thus far strengthened me, so that I felt it advisable not to expose myself to this flow of air any longer. I turned around, but carefully avoided looking toward where I suspected two corpses lay. Still, I saw the Count. He was seated in the painter’s flame-red silk, high-backed chair that I knew so well, with its gilded signs of a strange, pagan script. He sat stiffly, leaning back, quite motionless. His arms and hands lay motionless on the armrests. One would have thought he was dead.

“Only his eyes lived. Lived greedily.

“And they were the eyes of the creature.

“To me it felt as if these same eyes were staring everywhere, coldly glowing through the cold gray morning air. They glittered spherically from the swells of the copper wall-lights, blinked from all the facets of the glasses and bottles on the credenza, shot lightning glances from the tops of the swords, daggers and halberds on the wall, lurked maliciously in all the folds of the curtains.

57

“I clearly saw that the Evil One had not been banished by my prayers, and soon I had to hear him as well.

“For he spoke through the Count as follows: ‘You had to die, to allow me to feel how I am kin to you. With my blood you have, my blood has sinned in you. How can I condemn what I, if with horror, understand? Death is a powerful teacher. I have forgotten hell in the face of its horror. It is not on the other side of death, it is on this side of it: in this life, that which holy law prohibits, that to which the unholy spirit drives us, that which smolders in our veins. I have always restrained it. And have rightly been proud of that, because my life has been sacrificed to law. But, behold, my blood has avenged itself: my sacrifice was useless, and a pious sacrilege. I was allowed to remain clean, because these here took all my impurities into them. Where is God? Where is the devil? I see that you were very miserable and barred from all holiness: reprobate before all men; and yet I am overcome with the belief that your life was more complete than mine, and your death freer and prouder than that of the pious, who still at the last moment act virtuously. You passed away with great certainty after great sinnings; but I, the pious one, remain here, full of doubt, and fear that I cannot die either blessed or unhappy.’

“Even the voice in which this was spoken was not the voice of the Count. He had had a foil, confident, brave tone. What sounded here was like the tones of a cracked

58

59

bell. It was as though the sound did not float through the air, but came sliding from his lips, running down over his chin and his chest, dripping down the chair to the carpet, came crawling over to the pair of them.

“The words burrowed into me, as languid as they sounded, with such a magical force that I could repeat them at any time, as I do now, as if they were being dictated by Satan. (To tell the truth, I dare not look behind me at this moment, for this I know: those two eyes can be seen in the picture of the pagan ancestor of this now extinct family which I myself moved from a table in the old palace to a wall here. I know because I feel their gaze as a dull pressure on my neck.)

“Still looking straight ahead, the Count now turned to me and, in his old, somewhat tired tone, said these words: ‘Do you see how beautiful she is, Messer Giacomo?’

“I replied, ‘No, sir. God forbid I turn my eyes to this abomination. The witch is naked.’

“He spoke, not angrily but sternly, saying, ‘Do not say such foolish things; speak respectfully about my daughter. She is naked, yes, but she is so beautiful that there is nothing shameless about her nakedness. Also, she is dead, and sin and the tarnish of sun, shame and lack of shame, only reside in the living. I look at her like a work of the chisel that death has managed, and I think back to the days of my youth, when I took a torch and

60

snuck into the cellar, where in one corner stood the heathen Madonna to which my ancestors once prayed. She was Venus. But this one is more beautiful. I think she was so beautiful because my youth was lived under the star of Venus. That goddess, whose image I had smashed with my own hand when the spirit of the law had taken possession of me, avenged herself by making an even more beautiful portrait of herself out of my blood. Believe me, Messer Giacomo, the gods of the heathen are not dead. They live in our blood, and from our blood they always find life anew in visible afterimages. The shadow of the cross is but a shadow, which must revolve around the old sun. You still will not look?’

‘“God forbid,’ I replied emphatically.

“But he said, ‘I am sorry. This sight, which I had feared a few minutes ago—and a wealth of time has since elapsed, richer than all my poor life I spent in holy darkness—this sight is no terror: it is clear, calm, and solemn, but not a severe revelation. My beautiful child lies on the bed, as if Venus recreated. Her right arm rests under her head, her left hand in the hair of the brother, my ugly child, who, kneeling before the beautiful one, has died the death he himself summoned and expected. He wears a cloak of dark violet velvet, and a crown of thorns on his head. You turn away and are outraged. The sight pains me, because it seems to me a death unworthy of such an actor, of such great mimicry. But I know better, since the

61

picture before which they died has taught me that he did not die as a mimic, but as a painter. In this picture, the colors are still wet on the head with the crown of thorns, and it is as if the drops of blood are dripping from the curly hair over the yellow cheeks. He has pushed thorns into his head, to see the blood flowing, but even more to outwardly feel the thrusting of the force which had seized them inside.—You know that for me it was always disgusting that he saw the art of painting as something more than an amusing pastime. I will tell you this: I despised him for it, more so than for his ugliness and his gloomy nature. Now, this morning a bright night dawns for me: I have also learned that art, practiced with this proud, heroic devotion, belongs among the greatest human things, among those that carry us over all depths and fog, just as this centaur Christ carried the naked Madonna away from the rocks of death over the quagmires of cities to the fortress of loneliness.—I want you to listen well: I will end my days in this house and die on this bed before this picture that, then, like everything else from my son’s hand, shall be buried with my corpse and the bodies of my children in the rock of this mountain. Again and again I want to see her left had reaching into the bloody hair of the centaur Christ whose bloodthirsty countenance turns to her in the most painful, blissful love. Their fair, kind, courageous, love-filled eyes shall

62

63

also shine upon me, guide me to that rest which God himself guards.’

“Hardly had the Count finished when there came murmurs and the sound of pounding feet from the passage into the hall, and the voice of a servant begged admittance.

“The old gentleman rose quietly, loosened his fur coat from his shoulders and put it over the dead. Then he drew the curtain in front of the picture, and, in his old commanding voice he exclaimed, ‘Enter silently.’

“The murmurings and stampings immediately fell silent. The servants stepped into the chamber, bowing, pushing the watchman before them; he sank to his knees before the Count.

“‘Go,’ the Master said to the rest, and to the kneeling one, ‘Rise and speak!’

“He rose and murmured, ‘I wanted to flee, Lord, because I was complicit in the terrible events, and now I wish to confess everything.’

“The Count put a hand on his shoulder, and with the other hand he clasped the watchman’s bound hands. And he said, ‘I know. But no one but you and I shall know, for he’ (and he pointed to me), ‘does not look with seeing eyes and the others will be blind if they wish to stay healthy. You shall speak of this to no man, but remain with me in this house. Your first task will be to bury the corpses of my children in the rock; your last

64

65

will be to do the same with my corpse. Then you shall possess this castle with all that is in it.’

“The watchman, who was as little comprehending as I was, but who had long known the obsessiveness of the Count, bowed silently to the hand of his master, and kissed it.

“There was nothing more for me to do but ask to take my leave forever, and to ask what message I should carry to the Countess.

“The answer was, ‘Tell my wife that she is welcome to be with me if she feels strong enough to live with me with the demons. No one knows this as well as you do. If I know her, she will prefer to go to the protection of the other Madonna. And when she tells you this, tell her that she is right to do so, and that it will soothe me to know that she will be in the best protection in which a mother’s heart can rest. I know she will pray for me. Tell me this, too, and add to it that I thank her with respect, and with all the remains of the love that I can still feel for the living.’

“Though I understood very well that the goodness and truth in these words were by no means a sign of dawning reason, but merely a mocking disguise of the devil, who had completely confused this spirit, I, too, more unconsciously than intentionally, bent to the hand of the unfortunate one. It was quite cold against my lips.

66

“I rode toward the city with the servants, at the fastest gallop we could manage.

“The mist had lifted.

“When we had ridden the length of some two bow-shots I turned and I saw the castle, shining in the brightest sunlight, scornfully as it were, above the black forest.

“Tomorrow I will take the Countess to the monastery in Rome.

“There I will wait for better times to return to Tuscany.

“In gratitude for being saved from the cruel danger of falling into the devil’s entanglement like my noble old Lord, I have vowed today never again to take up a brush.

“Art is the worst snare of evil.”

67

NOTES

1. Johannes Pauli (ca. 1455-1530) was a German Franciscan writer. That he was born Jewish is not accepted by all historians. Schimpf und Ernst (Insults and jests), first published in Strasbourg in 1522, is his most well-known and influential book.

2. Latin, roughly: “He who perpetrates such a verdict thereby loses his life.”

68

About the Author

Otto Julius Bierbaum (28 June 1865 – 1 February 1910) was a German writer.

Bierbaum was born in Grünberg, Silesia. After studying in Leipzig, he became a journalist and editor for the journals Die freie Bühne, Pan and Die Insel. His literary work was varied. As a poet he used forms like the Minnesang or the folksong and the Anacreontics style. Composers such as Pauline Volkstein set his texts to music.

In 1897 Bierbaum published his novel Stilpe which inspired Ernst von Wolzogen to establish, in 1901, the first cabaret venue ever in Berlin, the Überbrettl. His novel Zäpfel Kerns Abenteuer was an adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. Bierbaum’s final novel, Yankeedoodlefahrt, was published in 1909 and is the source of the winged words “Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht” (“Humor is when you laugh anyway”), which has become a proverb in modern German.

PERSONAL:

Born June 28, 1865, in Gruenberg, Germany; died of a heart attack, February 1, 1910, at Kötzschenbroda near Dresden, Germany; son of Otto (a restaurateur) and Henriette (Siegert) Bierbaum; married 1891; wife’s name, Gusti (a teacher; divorced 1899); married Gemma Pruneti-Lotti, 1901. Education: Attended University of Zurich; attended Oriental Institute (Berlin, Germany), 1888.

CAREER:

Poet and novelist. Military service: Served in German military, c. 1885.

Otto Julius Bierbaum was one of the most prolific and popular German writers of the late 1800s. In addition to writing many novels, he was known for his witty and sentimental poetry and songs, which had a significant effect on the political poets of the 1920s. His poetry is direct and easily accessible, which accounts for his popularity.

Bierbaum was born in Gruenberg, Germany, and attended a number of boarding schools as a young boy. His time at the various schools was unhappy, but he consoled himself with the fact that he was destined to be a poet. After a brief tenure at the University of Zurich, he entered the German military, but was not successful or particularly happy in the armed services. Bierbaum finally settled in Munich, hoping to become employed as a journalist, and he slowly began to make a name for himself by writing for newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. During this time he also had a number of books published, but was perhaps best known for co-founding the art journal Pan with art historian Julius Meier-Graefe.

In 1891 Bierbaum married his first wife, and in about 1896 the couple moved to Castle Englar at Eppan in Germany’s South Tyrol. He then began to write extensively. The result was the epistolary novel Die Freiersfahrten und Freiersmeinungen des “weiberfeindlichen” Herrn Pankrazius Graunzer, der Schönen Wissenschaften Doktor, nebst einem Anhange, wie schliesslich alles ausgelaufen. Graunzer, a forty-something bachelor, has inherited a farm and needs a son to whom he can eventually pass on the land. He goes on a quest for the perfect wife, but endures a series of mishaps and unfortunate adventures along the way. As stated by a writer for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the strength of the novel is not its plot or characterizations, but rather “in the variety of … [Bierbaum’s] language: constant jokes; vivid reported conversations; and inserted minidramas, lyrics, and narrative poems.”

In 1898 Bierbaum’s wife ran away with composer Oskar Fried, who had been invited to Englar to collaborate with the writer. Bierbaum’s career was significantly affected in the next year by his divorce and removal from the castle. Perhaps needing to forget his personal problems, he took on many projects at once and overextended himself. He founded the journal Die Insel, but by the third year of its publication the standard of writing had dropped considerably. He also published the verse anthology Irrgarten der Liebe: Verliebte, launenhafte und moralische Lieder, Gedichte und Sprüche aus den Jahren 1885 bis 1900, as well as his first collection of cabaret songs, Deutsche Chansons. One of his poems, “Er fühlt sich lustiger Ehemann,” had been set to music by Oskar Straus and became quite popular. Bierbaum became involved in plans to combine text, music, and theater to create lyric dramas, but his stage debut failed on opening night in Berlin, perhaps because the audience was not ready for this new and sophisticated kind of theater.

In 1901 Bierbaum married again, this time to Italianborn Gemma Pruneti-Lotti. The couple took a four-month trip by car through Italy. This trip inspired a collection of letters that were first printed in Viennese papers but later published as Eine empfindsame Reise im Automobil von Berlin nach Sorrent und zurück an den Rhein in Briefen an Freunde geschildert. After the trip, the couple moved briefly to Vienna, but they soon returned to Munich.

Back at home, Bierbaum continued to write plays, poetry, and prose fiction. He also edited a number of volumes by and about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He continued to produce numerous texts, including the three-volume Prinz Kuckuck: Leben, Taten, Meinungen und Höllenfahrt eines Wollüstlings: In einem Zeitroman. After suffering a decade of poor health, Bierbaum died at age forty-four, of a heart attack.

Contributors

Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was an Austrian graphic artist and illustrator whose work had ties to the Blaue Reiter group, Symbolism, and Expressionism. He was also an author of several books, his best known the dark fantasy novel The Other Side (1909). The many authors he illustrated included Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Dostoyevsky, Mynona, and his brother-in-law, Oscar A. H. Schmitz.

W. C. Bamberger has translated works by Gershom Scholem, Emil Szittya, and Hermann Finsterlin, among others. His recent essays have addressed subjects ranging from Wonder Woman comics to the language of poet Anne Carson to the critical reception of Ray Bradbury. His most recent novel is A Light Like Ida Lupino. He lives in Michigan.