The Man Outside and selected Stories E-Book

Wolfgang Borchert

• Herausgeber: CulturBooks Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 143

Beschreibung

Wolfgang Borchert was born on May 20, 1921 – a hundred years ago. He died in 1947 – the twenty-six-year-old victim of a malaria-like fever contracted during World War II. This was just one day after the premiere of his play, "The Man Outside", which caused an immediate furor throughout his native Germany with its youthful, indeed revolutionary, vision against war and the dehumanizing effects of the police state. In a very real sense, Borchert was both the moral and physical victim of the Third Reich and the Nazi war machine. As a Wehrmacht conscript, he twice served on the Russian front, where he was wounded, and twice was imprisoned for his outspokenness. His voice speaks plainly and powerfully from out of the war’s carnage all the more poignantly for its being cut short at so young an age. This collection in celebration of Borchert’s 100th birthday includes the complete text of the title play, as well as some of his most famous stories.

Leseprobe

Über das Buch

Wolfgang Borchert was born on May 20, 1921 – a hundred years ago. He died in 1947 – the twenty-six-year-old victim of a malaria-like fever contracted during World War II. This was just one day after the premiere of his play, The Man Outside, which caused an immediate furor throughout his native Germany with its youthful, indeed revolutionary, vision against war and the dehumanizing effects of the police state. In a very real sense, Borchert was both the moral and physical victim of the Third Reich and the Nazi war machine. As a Wehrmacht conscript, he twice served on the Russian front, where he was wounded, and twice was imprisoned for his outspokenness.

His voice speaks plainly and powerfully from out of the war’s carnage all the more poignantly for its being cut short at so young an age. This collection in celebration of Borchert’s 100th birthday includes the complete text of the title play, as well as some of his most famous stories.

Über den Autor

Wolfgang Borchert (1921-1947), a German author and playwright, served in the Wehrmacht during World War II. While there, a cut on his hand became infected and he contracted hepatitis, a condition that continued to worsen. In 1946, after the war ended, doctors gave him a year to live . With little time left, he wrote prose and poetry. He wrote "The Man Outside" in January 1947, shortly before passing away.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

THE DANDELION

HAMBURG!

RATS DO SLEEP AT NIGHT

THERE ARE VOICES IN THE AIR – AT NIGHT

THE MAN OUTSIDE

THERE'S ONLY ONE THING

Wolfgang Borchert

THE MAN OUTSIDE and other Prose

Translated by David Porter

Wolfgang Borchert 20. Mai 1921 – 20. November 1947

THE DANDELION

The door shut behind me. It happens often enough that a door's shut behind one – one can even imagine its being locked. The doors of houses, for example, are locked, and then one's either inside or out. The doors of houses, too, have about them something so final, so seclusive, so abandoning. And now the door has been shoved to behind me, yes, shoved, for it's an uncommonly thick door which can't be slammed. An ugly door with the number 432. That's the peculiarity of this door, that it has a number and is covered with sheet-iron – that's what makes it so proud and unapproachable: it never unbends, and the fervour of prayer will not touch it.

And now I've been left alone with that Being, no, not just left alone, l've been locked in together with the Being I fear most of all: with my self.

Do you know what it's like to be left to yourself, when you're left alone with you, given up to yourself? I can't say it's necessarily so terrible, but it's one of the most fantastic adventures that one can have in this world: To meet one's self. To meet like this in Cell 432: naked, helpless, concentrated on nothing but one's self, without attribute or diversion and without the power to act. That's the most degrading thing: to be quite without the power to act. To have no bottle to drink from or smash, no towel to bang up, no knife to break out or cut veins with, no pen for writing – to have nothing – other than one's self.

That's damned little in an empty room with four bare walls. That's less than the spider has, which squeezes a scaffolding out of its backside and can risk its life on it, can gamble between the fall and the check. What thread catches us up if we fall?

Our own power? Does a God support us? God – is that the power that makes a tree grow and a bird fly – is God life? Then he does sometimes support us – if we wish it.

As the sun took its fingers from the window-bars and night crept from the corners, something came towards me out of the darkness – and I thought it was God. Had someone opened the door? Was I no longer alone? I felt, there's something there, and it's breathing and growing. The cell became too small – I felt that the walls must yield before that which was there, that which I called God.

You, Number 432, little creature – don't let the night make you drunk! It's your fear that's with you in the cell, nothing else! Fear and the night. But fear is a monster, and the night can become as frightful as a ghost, when we're alone with it.

Then the moon trundled over the roofs and lit up the walls. You ape! The walls are as close as ever, and the cell is as empty as orange-peel. God, whom they call the Good, is not there. And what was there, what spoke, was within you. Perhaps it was a God in yourself – it was you! For you are God, too, everything, even the spider and the mackerel are God. God is life – that's all. But that is so much that He cannot be more. There is nothing else. Yet often that nothing overwhelms us.

The cell-door was as closed as a nut – as though it were never open and one knew that it didn't open of itself but must be broken open. So closed was the door. And left alone with myself, I hurtled into the bottomless pit. But then the spider yelled at me like a sergeant: Weakling! The wind had torn its web and with antlike energy it squeezed out a new one and caught me, the one hundred and twenty-three pounder, in its zephyr-fine cords. I thanked it, but it took absolutely no notice.

So I slowly grew used to myself. One imposes oneself so lightly on others and yet can scarcely endure one's own company. Gradually, however, I found me quite pleasant and amusing – day and night I made the oddest discoveries about me.

But in that long time I lost contact with everything, with life, with the world. The days dropped away from me rapidly and regularly. I felt how I was slowly emptied of the real world and filled with my own self. I felt how I went ever further away from this world, the world I had only just entered.

The walls were so cold and dead that I fell sick with despair and hopelessness. You scream out your misery for a few days – but when there's no answer you soon get tired. You beat for a few hours on door and wall-but when they don't open, fists are soon sore, and in this desert that tiny pain is the only pleasure.

But there is nothing completely final on this earth. For the proud door had opened and a lot of others as well, and each one pushed out a shy, ill-shaven man into a long row and into a yard with green grass in the middle and grey walls round it. Then barking exploded round us and at us – a hoarse barking from blue dogs with leathern straps about their bellies. They kept us moving and were themselves always moving and barked us full of fear. But when you had enough fear inside you and grew calmer, you realized that these were men in pale blue uniforms.

We moved in a circle. When the eye had overcome the first shattering reunion with the sky and grown used to the sun again, you could see between blinks that there were many trotting as disconnectedly and breathing as deeply as yourself – seventy, eighty men, perhaps.

On and on in a circle, to the rhythm of their wooden clogs, men clumsy, intimidated and yet for half an hour happier than at other times. But for the blue uniforms with the barking faces, you could have trotted thus into eternity – without past, without future: wholly joyous present: breathing, seeing, moving!

So it was at first. Almost a holiday, a tiny happiness. But in the long run, if you have months of effortless satisfaction you begin to think of other things. The tiny happiness suffices no longer – you've had enough of it, and the sad essence of the world that holds us in thrall drips into our glass. And then the day arrives when the round becomes torture and the high sky a mockery, when you regard the man in front and the man behind no longer as brothers and fellow-sufferers, but as wandering corpses, there only to disgust us – corpses between which you are bound like a featureless lath in an endless lath fence – and more than anything else they turn us sick to our stomachs. That's what happens when for months you circle round between the grey walls, barked into exhaustion by the pale blue uniforms.

The man in front of me is long since dead. Or he sprang from a puppet show, driven by some comic demon to act as though he were a normal human being – and at the same time, was certainly long since dead. Yes! Even his bald head, surrounded by a frayed crown of dirty grey tufts of hair, lacks the greasy shine of living baldness, in which sun and rain can still dimly be reflected – no, this baldness is not shiny, it's dull and matt like cloth. If this entity, which I cannot call a man, if this imitation human being did not move, one could believe this bald head was a lifeless wig. And not even the wig of a learned man or a great tippler – no, at best that of a paper seller or a circus clown. But it's tough, this wig-out of sheer spite it won't fall out because it feels that I, the man behind it, hate it. Yes, I hate it. Why must the wig –that's what I'll call the whole man now, it's easier – why must it walk in front of me and live, when young sparrows who as yet know nothing of flying hurtle to death from the guttering? And I hate the wig, because it's cowardly – and how cowardly! lt feels my hatred as it trots stupidly in front of me, always in the circle, the tiny little circle between grey walls that have no heart for us either, for otherwise they would wander away secretly at night and set themselves round the palace where our ministers live.

I've been wondering now for quite a time why they've locked the wig up in a prison – what deed can it have done – this wig, that’s too cowardly to turn round at me when I'm continually tormenting it. for I do torment it: I step on its heels all the time – on purpose, of course – and make a foul noise with my mouth as though I were spitting hashed lungs at its back by the quarter pound. lt winces each time, aggrievedly. Nevertheless, it daren't quite look round at its tormentor – no, it's too cowardly for that. With a stiff neck it turns only a few degrees back in my direction, but will not risk the half turn so that our eyes could meet.

What can it have done wrong? Perhaps it has embezzled or stolen? Or did it excite a public scandal in some sexual frenzy? Yes, perhaps that was it. Once in a drunken moment it was whisked by a hunchbacked Eros out of its cowardice into some stupid obscenity – well, and now it trots along in front of me, quietly enjoying itself, and astounded that it once dared to do something.

But I think it's secretly trembling now, because it knows that I'm behind it. I, its murderer! Oh, it would be easy for me to murder it, and it could happen quite unnoticed. I need only trip it up; then with its matchsticks of legs it would stumble over forwards and probably knock a hole in its head in doing so – and then the air would escape from it with phlegmy pfff ... as though from a bicycle tube. Its head would burst apart in the middle like whitish-yellow wax, and the few drops of red ink from it would look as ludicrously false as raspberry juice on the blue silk blouse of a stabbed actor.

Thus I hated the wig, a fellow whose face I had never seen, whose voice I had never heard, of whom I knew only a musty, mothbally smell. I'm certain he had a soft, tired voice lacking all emotion, as powerless as his milky fingers. l'm certain he had the protruding eyes of a calf and a thick pendulous lower lip that hankered after chocolates. lt was the mask of a roué, without stature and with the courage of a paper seller whose midwife-hands had often done nothing all day but stroke seventeen pfennigs for an exercise book off the counter.

No, not another word about the wig! I really hate it so much that I could easily work myself up into an outburst of rage which would expose me unduly. Enough. Finish. I will never speak of it again, never!

But if someone you would like to keep quiet about constantly walks in front of you with sagging knees to the tune of a melodrama, then you cannot get rid of him. Like an itch on your back that you can't get at with your hands, he keeps on goading you to think of him, to feel him, to hate him.

I think I shall really have to murder the wig. But I'm so afraid the dead man might play a ghastly trick on me. With a vulgar laugh he would suddenly remember having been a circus clown and heave himself up out of his blood. Perhaps a little embarrassed, as though he hadn't been able to hold his blood as other people their water. He'd dance through the prison circus ring on his hands and pretend the warders were bucking donkeys to be baited to the point of madness, only to jump in simulated terror on to the wall. From there he'd loll out his tongue at us like a dishcloth and vanish for ever.

There's no knowing all that would happen if everybody suddenly realized what he actually is.

Don't think that my hatred of the man in front of me, of the wig, is hollow and without foundation – oh, you can get into situations where you overflow with hatred and are swept so far beyond your own bounds that afterwards you can scarcely find the way back to yourself – hatred has so devastated you.

I know it's hard to listen to me and feel with me. Nor should you listen as though someone were reading you Gottfried Keller or Dickens. You must come with me, accompany me in the little circle between the pitiless walls. Not beside me in thought – no, behind me physically, as the man behind. And then you'll see how quickly you learn to hate me. For if you stagger round our loin-weary circle with us (I say "us" now, for we all have this one thing in common) then you will be so empty of love that hate will froth up in you like champagne. You'll let it froth, too, in order to feel the ghastly emptiness no longer. And above all don't imagine that on an empty stomach and an empty heart you'll be disposed to outstanding acts of brotherly love!

Thus you will totter along behind me as one emptied of all kindness, concentrated only on me, on my narrow back, my over-flabby neck and empty trousers, where, anatomically, there ought really to be something more. But for the most part you will have to look at my legs. All men behind watch the legs of the man in front, and the rhythm of his step is forced on them and taken over, however strange or awkward. Yes, and then hatred will fall upon you like a jealous woman when you perceive that I have no gait. No, I have no gait. There really are people who have no gait – they have several styles which cannot be attuned. I' m one of that sort. For that you will hate me, just as pointlessly and with as much reason as I have to hate the wig because I’m the man behind. Just as you have adjusted yourself to my rather uncertain, lackadaisical step, you will be startled to find that I suddenly stride with firmness and vigour. And hardly have you registered this new style of walking than, a few steps further on, I begin to dawdle along, spiritless and absent-minded. No, you will be unable to feel any joy or friendliness for me. You will have to hate me. All men behind hate the men in front.

Perhaps everything would be different if the men in front would occasionally look round at the men behind and come to an understanding with them. But every man behind is the same – he sees only the man in front and hates him. But he scorn the man behind him – there he feels himself the man in front. That's how it is in our circle behind the grey walls – and that's no doubt how it is elsewhere, too. Everywhere, perhaps.

I ought to have killed the wig after all. Once it made me so heated that my blood began to boil. That was when I made the discovery. Nothing very much. Just a tiny little discovery.