A man in butler's uniform would come to the door sometimes and announce to somebody calling by (on the off chance of meeting him) that Georg Grosz wasn't in. Some understood at once, but some were surprised when, at a party or a nightclub or café, they were introduced to a dandy in an immaculate suit-George Grosz, not even standing in the same attitude he'd assumed as a butler. People talked about his chameleon nature-he could not only tell the story of every character appearing in one of his street scenes, he could tell them serially in each character's voice-but to lose himself in the role of a butler!, what does either an artist or a businessman (1) have in common with so blank an invisibility as a butler? A duller twin he felt obligated to support was one speculation, but the majority view was that this was a doppelganger, hence his inability to appear except when the man his appearance so closely shadowed, the artist and parody businessman Georg Grosz, was out. Not that anyone gave it much sustained thought, even the major Expressionists who were famous for brooding darkly at length on the most mundane trifles, even mass murder, and suspected Grosz of persistently stealing their thunder to boot. Still, people would bring it up for years, even decades, after. Two ancients who'd survived him debated the question at his graveside; it made no appreciable difference to anyone's quality of life, but still! it had a way of nagging at you, deep beneath the conscious level where personal demons perhaps lived, bubbling up to awareness like a tickling feather at the damndest times: who was this butler with the face of one of the century's greatest artists, especially in a neighbourhood so desolate and poverty-stricken, where few could obtain the necessities of life if they resorted to honest means only? Anyone who kept a servant in so boiling and bubbling a cauldron of need was asking for the dumping of well-filled chamber pots on his head. (2)
Georges, George, Georg. Melies, Eliot, Grosz.
Stories of Georg Grosz flying above the streets of Berlin have never been confirmed, but people who remembered their dreams, particularly of flight, said he flew the way they typically did in their dreams: arms pressed against their sides, speeding along in elegant arcs and swirls and sudden swoops and dives. Actually it was rare people claimed such virtuosity even in their dreams, and those who did were rarely suspected of telling the truth.
Nobody seems to have considered the possibility of a jet pack, it was too early in the century for one thing and for another, he had little mechanical expertise and few contacts among skilled inventors. He was acquainted with a number of Futurists, but for all their militant celebration of technology, hard smooth machines and speed speed speed! few could handle so much as a screwdriver or a wrench with the easy fluency of the proletariat they reflexively despised as slaves. The usual explanation for these flights of more than fancy was that Grosz, when he set his mind to it, was one of the world's most focused dreamers. Yet in Berlin after the war and well into the twenties of an embattled century, his acid-etched caricatures were trusted, by the young especially, as news and editorial opinion both, more than any rival source. Did you ever see a dream walking? (3)
That was the War to End all Wars
a label hastily affixed by the League of Nations
whiffs of mustard gas in every delegate's terrified nostrils
like a Latin name fixed to a manufactured insect
a noxious mosquito that stings itself to death
You'd be astonished at how that turned out
you observing from a colony on Mars
settled by distant interstellar travellers (4)
you ejected from the colony to provide it a closer view
singing and dancing at cabarets, reciting calm verses distilled
from hysterical, delirious airs in the room and the world
crowded and clotted about you
sometimes in your shabby temporary digs
throwing off the scent of pursuers you can't be bothered with or interrupted by that precious
second
by pretending to be your own butler
you searching the mirror in the hall
for a true picture of the face behind the face behind the face
unaware your true status, identity but well aware
you are not home
you are not home
a whiff of Zyklon B
George by name and Georg by nature
Some thought the flights were astral projections, since it was believed the clothes he wore at any given time, always in some measure costume to accent that moment's persona, bound him not only to the earth, but in extreme cases to the character presently adopted: dressed as a Holland businessman he was obliged to outline, with fierce cynical animation, a scheme for profiting from the war by gathering shell splinters from momentarily pacified secotrs at the front-war can't possibly be bursting out everywhere at once along a little line stretching over thousands of miles, patrollers in No Man's Land might as well gather suitably sized fragments in wheelbarrows-which scalded into silence the mild pacifist dissidence of the others, and stiffened the spine of Wieland Herzfelde, who latter collaborated with Grosz and the Dadaists (and those of the Expressionists who could keep up) on ever more inventive satire on the razor edge of nihilism, so explosive it might at last blow sense into some middle and upper middle class and even sheeplike proletarian brains, a point on which history (insofar as it continues in human terms) must be forever moot; it's only certain the mild politeness of timid dissent was of no effect whatsoever. Yet no one described these flights over Berlin as unclothed, with his member dangling in silhouette across the night sky, sometimes falling like the shadow slash of a sword across Zeppelins on their way to targeted destinations. (5)
It's lucky no actual businessman, situated so as to affect the scheme, overheard this shell splinter tirade or there'd have been homilies on mangled steel everywhere in the world to this very day. The head of Krupp at the end of World War II, still in the process of being deNazified, sent bills to every allied nation for their use of a bombsite copyright Krupp manufacture in bombing raids through most of the war (they'd rescued the bombsite from a downed Luftwaffe plane)-calculating the number they used based on the number of German dead of bombing raids in the years after the allies began using them, bills that were universally wastebasketed by the foreign offices that had received them (unlike IBM's last bill to the Reich for use of their computer card system throughout the war-memorialized in the numbers stencilled on inmates' wrists, each corresponding to an old-fashioned computer punchcard. An Allied cheque was issued for the last payment owed them after the Reich and its death camps fell.) A Krupp surely would have used his influence to have promising shapes and sizes of shrapnel collected if he'd overheard this notion, and the idea would have spread among the plutocratic sphere of every combatant nation, and there'd be scraps of these in a Babel of languages still, with etched inspirational homilies- SAFETY IN STRENGTH, ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? YOU BET WE ARE, HOME SWEET HOME-though the numbers would surely diminish as metal woud be melted down so it could be put to other uses, militant mostly, the few surviving specimens popping the eyes of Antiques Roadshow experts and fetching a pretty penny at auction.
In 1951 he returns to Germany as many expatriates of distinction had before or would soon, not always to stay (it wasn't always so easy to forget the circumstances of their expulsion, fleeing, if you were lucky and could sniff the stink of shit coming in from the slaughterhouse building, in 1932, and it wasn't always easy coming home from new home like a prosperous adjunct of the Marshall Plan) dressed in a grey flannel suit, tightly knotted necktie wide and flaring with New World colour, all topped by a Panama hat. "Do you know where they're actually made, which contradicts the name they carry? In Ecuador, which is half in the northern and half in the southern hemisphere. Six leaves of what's called a Panama palm go into the making of each single hat. These are the sort of ingratiating anecdotes New World types like myself use to smooth the way among clients to a deal, mutually prosperous to be sure." Nobody ever quite figured out what he was selling and most could not have afforded it if in the least pricey-food and shelter were at a far from easy to muster premium-but those who had landed on their feet would have bought from him if they could. He scored a few commissions and moved a few paintings on exhibition or in stock at his temporary digs, but it never occurred to any of his customers that a man so accoutred could be more than a hobbyist in paint. In the old days, under the banner of DADA, in uniform of military cut inspecific as to rank he would contemptuously put aristocrats, bourgeois bankers, high ranking clergy and industrialists through close order drill, barking nonsensical instructions they carried out to the letter, unable to tell them from legitimate military commands. How now flush out the lately militant Nazis from among the bleaters full of assumed mild innocence everywhere? Once he tries the shock tactic of suddenly, and loudly, praising Hitler in a crowded theatre among the milling crowd at intermission, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost himself, leaking murders everywhere still, long after national defeat and personal selbstmord., a coup de grace no earlier prospective assassin had managed to deliver, not even the combined strategic heads of half his general staff, which led to a piano sonata of unusual colour and intensity, played with taut wire on flesh.
Sometimes one shot free of cover unexpectedly, as when a fist shook from a second story window and a voice out of an empurpled face exploded: "I'll dress you in barbed wire!" Which didn't stifle into silence the late night revellers loudly accompanying Groz to his home but only set off rounds of laughter at a higher volume than before. Bosch, you should be living at this hour! Shut up and serve in his place you, artist of the hole.
A swan, swimming free of reeds where it might have hid a nest in less solitary days, glides at so stately a pace along the shore that it might as well be posing, specially for a pencil as speedy as yours. Only once saw a pair in flight, first hearing a mild thunder in the air then catching the couple in peripheral view, wheeling in tandem in a rush of sound from air displacement about their broad-spanned flapping wings-nothing like the stiff-winged movement of an aeroplane, even if the wind displacement was equal or greater, not to mention the engine roar at take off-landing a few hundred yards down the pond, at a distance about ten yards apart. Whirling to meet each other's eyes, they swam in place a second or two on webbed feet concealed by water, then twirled, each in a complete circle but in opposite directions a number of times. Never seen before, it stirred memories nevertheless. Flight before mating. Now the lone swimmer pauses to dip beak, neck and foreparts into the water, feeding, presenting the world at large with a view bobbing up of its elegant feathered backside.
Footnotes:
(1) He described himself as both, usually a businessman among artists or an artist among businessmen, the better to provoke maximum distrust and hostility in any company.
(2) There's no record of this ever happening however.
(3) What is generally agreed is that past a disputed date-the 23rd? 27th? Possibly as early as the 18th-in July 1916, he was never seen to fly again. Curfews were not responsible-even when imposed they were widely ignored.
(4) Why do we find no other signs of intelligent life in the Universe?
Other? Wouldn't intelligent life know how to mask its presence
From bloodthirsty primitives waving dangerous flags?
(5) "Pitch like King Billy bomb balls in."
(William Butler Yeats)
