Research Note II Jüdischer Denker - Walter Calé

Every time I spend a few hours at the archives of the National Library in Jerusalem is much worse and much better than the time before in each and every respect. Better as I'm totally flabergasted by the quantity of material to be found and researched and worse because it brings fully in the open my total ignorance on all matters of the esprit and the intellecet. Today I started to share my bits and pieces with Eveline, and came to the sad conclusion that my curiously awkward research does need some partners in crime and that I can't get away with everything by myself. In short there's some institutional support, but it does mean in the end of the day that I have to share "credits" with people sitting in the idle comfort of their homes while I break my head against thick walls of German hand-writing, yellowing paper and obscure references. This heavy editing work has to be done almost for free and just for the sake of art, but in this respect I guess I've come to sympathize with Rahel Varnhagen on that "the greatest artist, philosopher or poet is not above me... we are made of the same materials, stand on the same level, belong together. That's what life has required of me". I mean to say that it has been who sat face to face with all those letters, diaries, newspaper cuts, who learnt the stories from as first hand as it is possible for us moderns to learn about our immediate past. I guess this love-erfüllt engagement with the past is as much understanding as one can get from the realm of aesthetics and in taking a personal position, a stance so to speak, one also positions himself one step ahead of aesthetics but not quite yet reaching the other side.

Today my curiosity was sparkled at having found an archive file under the name of Walter Calé, who died already in 1904 and it puzzled me to think that any of his stuff might have found his way to Jerusalem. He was no doubt an interesting character, born in Berlin in 1881 to an assimilated family... studied some Greek and Latin and then was actively engaged in the study of philosophy at the local university, wrote a large chunk of poems that were never published during his lifetime. At the young age of 23 he took his own life, that was in the year 1904 and only later his poems started to appear in three different volumes I think (although I presume, like most young poets of the time, his poems might have found their way to some cheap gazette that either was destroyed by the Nazis or sleeps a public death in the libraries of Berlin and Cracow). "Musik am Abend" and "Und keine Brücke ist von Mensch zu Mensch", both of them published shortly after his death and that might have seen a couple of re-prints during the times of the Weimar Republik, although there were also reprints of one in 1948 and the other in both 1985 and 1989. Both of these books have been for long out of print. In fact the oblivion of Calé in the contemporary world of lettrès is beyond reason; even poets as forgotten as Margarete Susman and Mascha Kaléko have internet entries and re-prints of diaries, letters, articles, etc. from rather well-known elite publishers in Germany, at least during the 90's (a new biography of Kaléko came out this month in conmemoration of her 100th anniversary and a book with letters and essays of Susman was published in 2002 by the prestigious Jüdischer Verlag). The most well-known (this is already a joke) book of Calè is the so-called "Nachgelassene Schrifte" (posthumous writings) edited by his Arthur Brückmann and introduced by Calé's friend Fritz Mauthner. This book was published in 1907 and saw subsequent editions in 1912, 1914 and 1920 as far as I know. Several copies survive all over the world. This rather hefty book contains most of his poems (if not all, but I'm not sure at all about this), a great part of his journal entries and letters.

It is a misfortune he's so little known today so that I can't put up a pic of his here, since there's none available. The National Archive holds a large notebook (that in my opinion is really hand-written by the poet) with most of his poems and a journal of his from the first months of 1904, thereof the fragments 1-150 (from 7.01.1904 to 27.02.1904) remain unpublished. Apparently the library also holds some other texts but they're off limits to the public on account of their being published somewhere else. The poems in the notebook are written in this really diminute hand-writing that somehow resembles Benjamin's and a carefully reading might reveal some pieces that escaped the original editors who might have seen them from a different source; it is difficult to tell how on earth such material found a way to Jerusalem, but I might be able to find out in the forthcoming weeks. I would like to translate some of these poems in the near future to my beloved K. and G., because of that uncanny catastrophic Romantic feeling therein. I can say I don't feel too close to him somehow, perhaps it's just too classical a model for me to want to follow, nor would I like to take my own life at the age of 23 (which is my age now)... not out of too much willingness to live but rather out of too little willingness to give up.

In the folder in question there's also a photocopy of a chapter in Theodor Lessing's book from 1930 "Der jüdische Selbsthaß" (The Jewish Self-Hatred) which is a classic on the topic and that devotes one chapter to Calè, the book tackling the personalities of a good number of prominent Jews of the generation (and that means the generation when Arendt and Benjamin were still too young) of whom little is known today. I know about Mr. Lessing from Gershom Scholem's book on Walter Benjamin where he mentions that Benjamin sent his a postcard on ocassion of his reading "Philosophie der Tat" (Philosophy of Action), a book by this Theodor Lessing, apparently a Jew. A book no one would remember these days, just like all those books on Jewish theology published around the time of Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption" and mentioned in some nice article in a collection of essays about Rosenzweig's thought edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr some seventeen years ago. I think it's really maybe my life to be dedicated to this German-Jewish heritage, because perhaps it is the only way in which my own story makes sense as a history. I can't face myself too directly, so that I need to be shielded from the world somehow in order to be able to find a place to stand thereupon.

There were in the archive, also a couple of very lacrimous essays on Calè from 1906 (one of them back-sided by a really interesting article in the feuilleton about death). They can only hint at what Katharina told me when I told her about them: "When I was in Tel Aviv I had a small book in my hand, it made me very angry at the same time that I was fascinated. It included a series of male Jewish writers of the fin-de-siécle like Weiniger and Calé who committed suicide at an early age. I hated the book because it just presented their deaths in tragic ways and not their work; moreover what should this be? Antology of suicides? But if I find correspondence of Calé... that's another matter.... We can never divine life and work of a poet, but his death is always outside to me. Yet these curious and intromisive creeps are greedy on these erotic touchy stories... Well... this is disgusting in the sense that they reduce Calé to the writer who committed suicide. They don't read his poems as poems but as if they were the embassies of his later suicide... but it is such a vulgar and sentimenal reduction!"

I couldn't agree any more... those wonderful newspaper articles are kitschy and sentimental to the point of despair and in fact they're almost image-less pornography... while it reminds one how much Europeans know to praise the dead Jews while they can barely stand by those who are still on their feet, I know this all too well. A Jew that isn't victimized or death can't be that alright. Lastly my sorrow is that eventually I'll have Calé's stuff published in Austria but not willy-nilly! I'll have to do the whole work almost for free and of course share the credit with my mentor. But I guess it's all about works of love, and from G. and K. I've learnt just so much about it that I can't care any less... and it isn't about being altruist really, it's so much about yourself as it is about them, I've learnt this. Perhaps this is my chiddush, that "Yivne Olam Chesed" is really that Arendtian "worldliness".