This Is What Mankind Is Like

Kindergarten / Peter Rushforth

It might be supposed that a man as old and as ill as he was – almost at the point of death, indeed – would weary of ill-doing and feel indifference as to his successor.  But it was not so.  There should be no other king but Herod!  No other king in all the world!  Hence this command – the most hideous of any he had given.         ~Pär Lagerkvist, Herod and Mariamne

   The action of the novel Kindergarten takes place on two days:  Christmas Eve and December 28, Holy Innocents Day, 1978.  The light has come.  The king tries to extinguish the light.  "But when the massacre took place in that little town," Lagerkvist writes, "the child and its father and mother were no longer there."

   Cornelius "Corrie" Meeuwissen turns sixteen on Holy Innocents Day 1978.  His eleven year old brother, Jo, gives him two birthday cards, one for a ten year old and one for a six year old.  Days before, Corrie has discovered, in a locked storage room of a former headmaster's room at the English school in which his father is now headmaster, letters dating from the 1930s.  Mr Anthony High, headmaster at the time, has opened the school's doors to German Jewish children.  Now the letters are charred and scattered, and Corrie spends his Christmas holiday sorting them out, reading them, tracing the children's stories.  All the while, a domestic terrorist group in Germany is holding a classroom full of kindergarten children hostage, threatening to kill them if their jailed comrades aren't released.  This is the same terrorist group that, nine months before, fired at random in an Italian airport, killing Margaret Meeuwissen, Corrie and Jo's mother.

   This will be the boys' first Christmas without their mother, and their father is in the United States, raising money for an organization for survivors of terrorism.  Corrie and Jo, and their youngest brother, three year old Mattie, are left in the care of their grandmother, Lilli, who plans for them a traditional German Christmas.  But Lilli has never known a traditional German Christmas.  Lilli was a German Jew, an artist known for her illustrations of Grimms' Tales, who fled Germany after Kristallnacht and never painted again, never mentioned to her children and her grandchildren that she had once been famous until two years before this story begins.

Here there's as much noise as though there were a Carnival Fair, there are a hundred thousand streets and squares.  I'd always be losing my way.  Just imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn't found all of you, and were quite alone here.  It scares me even to think of such a thing.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

Whether intentionally or not, Caligari exposes the soul wavering between tyranny and chaos, and facing a desperate situation:  any escape from tyranny seems to throw it into a state of utter confusion.                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   I don't know enough about the author, Peter Rushforth.  He was a teacher, he discovered letters similar to the ones Corrie finds, Kindergarten (1979, 1980) was his first novel, followed years later by Pinkerton's Sister (2005) and A Dead Language (2006), and was at work on his fourth novel when he was killed in a car wreck.  Kindergarten won something called the Hawthornden Prize.  I'd never heard of the novel when I picked up the small, green pocket book at a bookstore some 25 years ago.  I've read it several times since.

'How is everything in Schumann Street?' Emil asked.    'All right, thank you.  Grandmother sends you her special love.  She says if you don't come home soon, she'll make you eat fish every day as a punishment.'    'Oh, dash it all,' Emil murmured, making a face.    'Why dash it all?' Mittler minor inquired.  'Fish is so good.'    They all looked at him in amazement, as he usually never said a word.  At that his face flushed a deep red and he hid behind his big brother.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

While the Germans were too close to Caligari to appraise its symptomatic value, the French realized that this film was more than just an exceptional film.  They coined the term "Caligarisme" and applied it to a postwar world seemingly all upside down…                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   The Meeuwissens are a musical and literary family.  Corrie plays cello and piano and writes music.  Jo plays flute and sings.  Their parents were also musicians.  The family performs in concerts and plays and recite and sing.  Music, art, and literature fill the novel.  Jo listens to Bach's Saint Matthew Passion to remember his mother.  Corrie sets a German poem to music, hoping to include it in his projected Hansel and Gretel oratorio.  Lilli Danielsohn's paintings grace the walls beside Kate Greenaway playing cards and Thomas Bewick engraving bookmarks.  Mattie, "[o]f course," paints a havverglumpus.  Corrie and Jo recite Shakespeare to each other and alternate verses describing their imaginary land, Rousseau.  One series of postcards to Mr High is written by Nikolaus Mittler, on behalf of himself and his older brother.  Mittler is the name of two brothers in the 1929 German children's book, Emil and the Detectives, a fact not lost on Corrie.

   Rushforth has created a meditation – an accurate description, as much of the novel is made of Corrie's thoughts and memories in response to the horrors of his world – on the depths to which humanity sinks to create its New Worlds ("Great men are dangerous," says Morris West's Carl Mendelius in Clowns of God.  "When their dreams fail, they bury them under the rubble of cities, where simple folk once lived in peace!").  Like a symphony, motifs recur and develop, the letters of Nikolaus Mittler, Hannah Greif, and Katherina Viehmann; Corrie's music for "Auf meines Kindes Tod;" Lilli Danielsohn's German past; Margaret Meeuwissen's death; Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale; fairy tales, particularly "Hansel and Gretel."  Memory, story, music, and painting organize Corrie's thoughts as he organizes the letters from Germany.  Midway through the novel Rushforth's themes unite as Corrie imagines Emil walking, tour de force, through "the nation which was a city called Berlin," which Corrie has learned through books and movies, past department stores and nightclubs, from Caligari to Hitler.  Hansel and Gretel encounter the source of the witch's evil.

Suddenly it seemed to Emil as though the train was going round in a circle, like the little toy trains that run on rails in the nursery.  He peered out of the window and everything looked very strange.  The circle grew smaller and smaller.  The engine came nearer and nearer to the last carriage.  And it seemed as though the engine were doing this on purpose!  The train was rushing along like a dog trying to bite its own tail.  And within this black circle there were trees and a glass windmill and a large house with two hundred storeys and thousands of windows.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

The equation of horror and hopelessness comes to a climax in the final episode which attempts to re-establish normal life.  Except for the ambiguous figure of the director and the shadowy members of his staff, normality realizes itself through the crowd of insane moving in their bizarre surroundings.                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   "Caligarisme" describes the world we've created.  "Never again" becomes "Yet again."  Resolve withers as the response promises to be more frightful than the original danger.  What part of the world we don't explode, explodes itself in our faces.  The news becomes a litany of terror.  A smile makes the neighbors suspicious.  People relate better and more readily to the machine in the palm of their hand than to the people sitting next to them.  I drive home, anxious to duck into my apartment and, like Salinger's Boy in France, Babe Gladwaller, "bolt the door."

   We live in a cacophony of opinion.  None of it will save us.  Whim is taught as today's wisdom.  "Decide for yourself" is the advice given to those whose heads are still empty.  With apologies to Sondheim, "You decide what's right, You decide what's good" was answered by Adolf Hitler many, many years ago.  Thomas Elsaesser says "we have become mature enough to live with such radical skepticism, that we enjoy ambiguity and reversibility rather than being driven insane by it."  I beg to differ.  We have become immature enough to believe we "enjoy" (judging by his context, I believe he meant "master") ambiguity and reversibility while being twisted by it.  This condition has driven us insane enough not to recognize our insanity, as we destroy our world and each other, proclaiming it as progress and freedom and maturity.  What would Kracauer make of our movies?

And then – in through the street door came ten boys running into the bank, Emil leading them.  They completely encircled the man.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

In their triumph the philistines overlooked one significant fact:  even though Caligari stigmatized the oblique chimneys as crazy, it never restored the perpendicular ones as the normal.                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   Art is humanity's response to horror.  Creation fills where destruction has left its gaping holes.  Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his diaries, "Since the war culture has somehow collapsed, fallen apart.  All over the world.  Along with spiritual criteria….Never before has ignorance reached such monstrous proportions.  This repudiation of the spiritual can only engender monsters," and "every time we experience beauty anonymously, as it were, we're experiencing a touch of God."  Conrad creates The Heart of Darkness out of Kurtz' and King Leopold's "horror."  Picasso creates Guernica.  Akhmatova describes mothers waiting to hear news of their imprisoned sons.  Britten sets Owen's poetry to music in hopes that war will rest in peace.

   In view of the first two Commandments, hope generates from a single human being's response to the "Tears of the World," and, in fact, to the pain of the brother "in the dark at the foot of the wall" (to reverse Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed).  "There is no one but us," writes Annie Dillard.  "There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead – as if innocence had ever been – and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.  But there is no one but us.  There never has been."

   Without us, God can't or won't work in the world.  One lights a candle, one lays down a stone, another teaches his grandmother to speak again after her stroke, still another lets in refugees one child at a time.  Lilli tells her grandsons, "God would spare a city for one righteous man, but there were many little candle flames in all that darkness."  Like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, Lilli has realized that the work of a single individual is a beacon of light that slashes away the darkness trying to engulf the universe.  Years ago, I fashioned a middle school retreat around a slogan and a poster used by Compassion International, "I can't change the world, but I can change the world for one person."  "And how many people can one person reach," I said, holding up a construction paper chain, with several middle school kids, made of links of one good deed each student realized he or she could perform immediately, "if each of us is that one person?"

   Solzhenitsyn told us in his Nobel lecture, "world literature is no longer an abstract enveloping curve, no longer a generalization coined by literary scholars, but a kind of collective body and a common spirit, a living unity of the heart which reflects the growing spiritual unity of mankind."  The same can be said of painting and sculpture, architecture and music and all creations of the human heart.  I express to you what calls out of my heart.  You respond with what comes out of yours, with what thoughts my work has inspired, and the dialogue goes on.  The light goes on.

Jo sat down again on the bed beside his brother, leaning in against him.    "Comfort me, boy."    Corrie put his arm around Jo's shoulders.

   Le Guin and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Brown, Seymour's Fat Lady, Isaiah jumping up and shouting, "I'm here!  Send me!"  Peter Rushforth once discovered a cache of letters about German Jewish children in the 1930s, desperately trying to leave Hitler's Germany.  He created Kindergarten, a quiet novel about one family, one boy in one family, responding to the horrors of the world, both past and present, responding to the beauty of the human spirit, as Annie Dillard says in Holy the Firm, "in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned."  Asher Lev painting the crucifixion of his mother.  Bastian learning that the more he wishes the more rich and varied Fantastica will be.  Mittler minor stepping out of Emil and the Detectives to write his further adventures, a series of postcards to get him and his older brother away from a barbarian burning humanity's thoughts before he burns the human beings themselves.

   "They had names," Corrie tells us.  "They had faces."  Scattered across the floor of what was once a bedroom in the old headmaster's house, now the music building.  December 28, Corrie's birthday, is the feast of the Holy Innocents, the children Herod ordered killed, hoping to murder the Christ child.  But that one child escaped, taken into exile to a land where his father was not required to wait in line and obtain permission to enter.  Corrie's Hansel and Gretel oratorio was to end with the poem he set to music on the death of a child.  But Hansel and Gretel lived.  For which child is "Auf meines Kindes Tod," "On the Death of My Child," to be sung?  Which face does Corrie remember most?  Which name?  "Everyone is so hospitable and kind," Pieter Meeuwissen tells his son, Jo, on a bad telephone line from the United States, "but I'm lonely here without you.  I'm here because of Mum.  What I'm trying to do is for Mum."  Peter Rushforth sings for his children who never made it out of Germany, those whose stories he read in the letters and postcards he found, or those who escaped only to be trapped again.  He sings for those who lived, those whose stories he heard, researching the novel.  He gives voice to those who still have names, who still have faces.  "This," Lilli Danielsohn says, "is what mankind is like." – Kindergarten, a Symphony of Hope.

Emil turned round and waved to Herr Kästner and Herr Kästner waved to him.

~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)