Alfred Lichtenstein

“ Mechenmal tried to calm her down. That irritated her even more. She shouted: "To betray me with a crippled Kohn... I'll report you to the police, Mr. Kohn. You should be ashamed of yourselves, you swine..." She had a crying fit. Kuno Kohn was incapable of responding. Mechenmal pulled her up from the floor upon which she had thrown herself screaming. He said with a changed, stern voice, that her behavior was unseemly, that she had no grounds for jealousy, for after all, he had no obligations. Then Ilka Leipke looked at the hunch-backed Kohn humbly, like a beaten little dog. ”

“ Kohn's hump pressed hard and heedlessly, like the edge of a table, against the delicate others. It seemed as though he had the constant desire to press his hump against a dancer. He never failed to say, in a falsetto voice, "pardon," with unashamed courtesy, when a crazy woman cried out or someone blissfully snarled "damn." Lisel Liblichlein held on to the poet with one hand holding the hump like a handle, and with the other had she pressed Kohn's square head gently to her breast. In this way they danced like possessed people for many hours. ”

“ Landscape in the Early Morning
The air is gray. Who knows something good for soot?
Next to an ox grazing on the ground
Stands an astonished deeply serious mountaineer.
Soon there is a powerful downpour of rain.
A young boy who is pissing on a meadow
Will be the source of a small river.
What should one do when nature calls!
Be natural. Be yourself.
A poet roams around in the world,
Observes for himself the orderly flow of traffic
And rejoices about sky, field, and dung. ”

“ At the rear of the cafe, alone, a long time before he suddenly died, smoking at a tiny table, on which something stood, sat the hunch-backed poet Kuno Kohn. People crouched around other tables. Among them moved people with yellow and red skulls: women; writers; actors. Everywhere shadowy waiters darted.
Kuno Kohn was not thinking of anything special. He hummed to himself: "A fog has so gently destroyed the world." The poet Gottschalk Schulz, a lawyer, who had painfully flunked all the tests he had taken, greeted him. A beautiful girl was with him. They both sat down at Kohn's table. ”

“ We burrow our way through high-stemmed woods,
We pass by spaces that seem endless.
We pass through the wind and attack the towns, which speed up.
But the odors of the sluggish cities are hateful to us—
Ah, we are flying! Always alongside death...
How we despise and scorn him who sits on our lives!
Who lays out graves for us and makes all streets crooked—ha, we
laugh at him,
and the roads, overcome, die with us—
Thus we shall auto our way through the whole world... ”

“ Morosely a thin carriage horse gapes,
And winds, meagre dogs, run a dreary race.
Their skins squeak at the sharp corners.
In a street groans a madman: You, oh, you –
When I finally, my beloved, find thee . . . ”

“ In the sky the fine red of evening is burning.
Perhaps in thirteen days I'll be dead.
Romantic Journey
Thousands of stars twinkle in the gentle sky.
The landscape glows. From the distant meadow
Mute marching men slowly come closer.
Only once a young Lieutenant, a page boy in love,
Steps out—and stands lost in thought.
The baggage train waddles along at the rear.
The moon makes everything much stranger. ”

“ He thought: "I wish to avoid being happy. That would mean giving up the longing that transcends all fulfillment, which is my most exquisite meaning. To degrade the holy hump, with which a friendly destiny has endowed me, through which I have experienced existence much more deeply, more unhappily, more wonderfully, than people perceive, to a burdensome superficiality. I wish to develop out of Lisel Liblichlein her higher being. I want to make her utterly unhappy..."
While the poet Kohn was thinking these thoughts, the poet Schulz at last was stabbing himself with a salad knife. ”

“ The sky is drunk.
Like false pearls, little stumps
Of chopped up light lie around and reveal
A glimpse of streets, a few clumps of houses.
Everything else is rotten and devoured
By a black fog, which, like a wall,
Falls down and is rotten. And the rain
Crumbles like rubble in the grip—thick—gray—
As though the whole contaminated darkness
Wanted at every moment to sink.
Down in a swamp you see an auto flash,
Like a strange, drunken plant.
The oldest whores come crawling
Along out of wet shadows—tubercular toads.
There goes one creeping by. Over there a pig is being stabbed. ”

“ He said to himself: "Yet how odd existence really is. And yet one props oneself up, somewhere, somehow, without connection, irrelevant; one could just as well continue for better or for worse, anywhere. That makes me unhappy." Before him a small, silent whore's dog had stopped, had listened humbly, with glowing eyes.
A fiery glass wedding coach hopped by. Inside, in a corner, he saw the pale, expressionless face of a bridegroom. An empty carriage arrived and Kohn climbed in. He said quietly: "A seeker without a goal... a man drift...... unknown to everyone... One has a frightening longing. ”

“ Twilight
A fat young man plays with a pond.
The wind has caught itself in a tree.
The pale sky seems to be rumpled,
As though it had run out of makeup.
On long crutches, bent nearly in half
And chatting, two cripples creep across the field.
A blond poet perhaps goes mad.
A little horse stumbles over a lady.
A fat man is stuck to a window.
A boy wants to visit a soft woman.
A gray clown puts on his boots.
A baby carriage shrieks and dogs curse.
The Night
Sleepy policemen waddle under streetlights.
Broken beggars grumble when they sense people. ”

“ More of the world pressed into the small bedroom of the humpback than the entire day had contained. Kuno Kohn had lost the body that was supposed to lie in the bed: only fright and helplessness and longing were left. The worst was when the desolate indistinctness took on the shape of visions or touches. The Kohn boy then cried out despairingly. Either the cry was not heard by anyone or it carried no clear meaning. In prisons there are always yells in the night from somewhere. ”

“ Many older high school pupils looked on, amused at the lively rough-housing. Even senior teacher Laaks, who was supervising, failed to suppress an amused smile. In a window was the motionless face of Doctor Bryller.
The malformed boy continued walking without defending himself. With bent head. Often he had to wipe his eyes with his hand. Only once, when one of most impudent youths – who else but the second-year pupil Mechenmal—spat into his face while the others raucously clapped approval, did he throw himself sobbing deeply against the attacker, who immediately ran away. ”

“ And the pale moon slowly rises.
On yellow fields in red trousers, the French are ablaze,
Ashen pale from death and powder.
Among them German medics squat.
The day becomes grayer, its sun redder.
Field kitchens steam. Towns are put to the torch.
Broken carts stand at roadsides.
Panting cyclists, hot and tanned, loiter
At a scorched wooden fence.
And orderlies are already moving
From regiment to division.
The Battle at Saarburg
The earth grows moldy in fog.
The evening is as oppressive as lead.
Electric sparks crackle and whimper all around,
Breaking everything in two. ”

“ I always try to free myself. I am seldom successful. I know that an understanding woman might free me. This one wouldn't: Miss Neumann is a silly young thing, eighteen years old. The cook is an immature bitch.
The housemaid Minna is arrogant; she is unapprochable, unjustifiably. Perhaps the head of the institution, Dr. Mondmilch, is a possibility, but when I try to make my valleys and peaks comprehensible to her, looking with longing into her eyes, give myself to her—she is distant, takes notes, has secret talks with Lenzlicht, prescribes tranquilizers. ”

“ A platinum moon now streams through a gap in the houses.
Next to green lanterns under a bridge
Lies a gypsy woman. And plays an instrument.
Girls
They cannot stand their rooms in the evening.
They creep out into deep starry streets.
How gentle is the world in the streetlights' wind!
How strangely buzzing life melts away...
They go by gardens and houses,
As though very far off there might be a light,
And they look upon every horny man
As a sweet gentleman savior
After the Ball
Night creeps into the cellars, musty and dull.
Tuxedos totter through the rubble of the street. ”

“ And the movie actor with his heavy-handed emphases – for example, in a tragic, many-colored story of adultery (in period costumes) – surpasses the hammy Hamlet in heart-gripping effect.
Theaters that want to survive are compelled to think again about what they are doing. Directors must cultivate the pure art of theater. Actors – in contrast to "filmers", or better still "ciners" or "cinekers" – to maintain their reputations, must abandon all tricks and gimmicks. The public that goes to the theater in spite of movies is discriminating and can’t be taken in.
There cannot be too many movies. ”

“ Landscape
(for a picture)
With all its branches a slender tree casts
The shine of darkness around poor crosses.
The earth stretches out painfully black and broad.
A small moon slips slowly out of space.
And next to it strange, unapproachable, huge
Airplanes hover heavenward!
Sinners filled with longing look up, with belief
And tear themselves out of their tombs. ”

“ He thought of Ilka Leipke.
Then Kuno Kohn said: "Death is an unbearable thought. For those of us who are without God. We are damned to live through it in advance hundreds of nights. And to find no way past it." He became very quiet. Mechenmal wanted to show his friend Kohn that he too could express himself about perverse problems. He thought it over, and said: I have different version, little Kuno, little Kohn. However, it is an emotional matter. I also tell myself thank God for those who have no God. God is nonsense. To waste a word on the topic is unworthy of a thinking man. ”

“ He had drawn up his legs so far that his thigh was pressed against his sunken chest. His head lay between his knees. The tiny, frightened fingers clutched the tops of his shoes. If someone touched him, he shrieked. The shriek was so piercingly frightening that one instinctively let him go, as though one had been shoved. Each time it happened one was as as helpless as the first time. Doctor Mondmilch was called. She stroked him a bit. His rigidity dissolved in sobs. He received drops, was put to bed, slept badly. Mechenmal called out, so that it echoed in the street, "Kohn is mad again." ”

“ Savors quite a bit of sausage in the background.
Cloudy Evening
The sky is swollen with tears and melancholy.
Only far off, where its foul vapors burst,
Green glow pours down. The houses,
Gray grimaces, are fiendishly bloated with mist.
Yellowish lights are beginning to gleam.
A stout father with wife and children dozes.
Painted women are practicing their dances.
Grotesque mimes strut towards the theater.
Jokers shriek, foul connoisseurs of men:
The day is dead... and a name remains!
Powerful men gleam in girls' eyes.
A woman yearns for her beloved woman. ”

“ There's trouble every day. In particular, the very small seven-year old Max Mechenmal—an unusually insignificant person—causes me unusual trouble. He does not like me, because he is conscious of my superiority. He tries in every way to make me look ridiculous. He is deceitful and cowardly. No one finds him nice. He likes nothing better than to provoke us against each other, to spread angry gossip, and to do as much damage as possible. ”

“ You cast me with street lamps like briars.
Ah, when one flows in the night through your lamps
After women, silky, plump.
A man gets dizzy from the eye-play.
The little moon-candy sweetens the sky. ”