Wulf Kirsten Talking to the water ouzel Written after spending May to ...

Wulf Kirsten
Talking to the water ouzel
Written after spending May to August 1996
as Hermann Hesse Writer-In-Residence in Calw.
Right slap bang in the middle of an industrious little town that prides itself on
occasions at which brass-band music creates an uplifting mood of general
exuberance. And when brass-band music does not happen to be on the menu, daily
life on the modest little main boulevard is alive with atonal concert pieces for Bosch
hammer, stone saw, car radio, and souped-up motorbike. The buskers on the street
find it hard to compete with such a cacophony. They have to seek out a quieter hour
in order to show that they, too, can communicate with the town. And, should they not
be on hand, then - last but not least - it is the turn of a pious singer unable to tear
himself away from his confirmation suit who is joined by a sidekick handing out liberal
volumes of tracts to people hungry to believe. The city towers have been replaced by
peripatetic watchtowers. And, in the event that a pause in the constant noise does
perhaps occur, one of the hawkers under my corner window intent on boosting sales
will know how to charm canned signature tunes from some device or other. A delight
taken in opportunities to tootle and intone that simply never ceases. It is this that
assures the little town of its remarkable dynamism and liveliness. As if it were unable
to endure the silence, it has to deafen and suffocate itself with catchy little tunes and
jingles.
Raised up here to a lofty position in an attic flat rich in views, revealing the full beauty
of some of the hills and mountains surrounding the town, over which I can run my eye
at will - providing there is no fog, no rainy haze hanging over the valley. The foothills
of the mountains, tangled and tripping over one another in their narrow quadrate,
squeeze the town together, making the gables pointed and narrow-chested, piling the
houses on top of one another like boxes. Returning from one of the elevations high
above - where a fresh breeze is always caressing the back of the mountains - and
tumbling down back into the town, floor by floor, one has the scary feeling that one
will never reach the bottom, until, suddenly, one sees the church tower rising up out
of the jumble of roofs, and is relieved not to be falling into a bottomless abyss.
Sunday morning, sitting at the open window, watching the summer clouds billow up
over the mountain ridges, in the midst of a babble of voices speaking unknown
languages that penetrates up to me in a manner so unabashedly vibrant with life and
keen to saunter the streets as if it was seeking to transport me to some oriental
outpost. And, once again, a hail of drum-rolls hits the typewriter, which only
reluctantly yields up to the sentences being hammered into it.
Each stroll through town, each jaunt out into the surrounding vales, gorges and
depressions that notch the declivities of the Black Forest terrain, can be savoured
long after the event, and can be unreeled in front of one’s eyes like a film. The stroll
across the marketplace on Saturday morning has to be repeated several times before
the turbulences have been internalized. Several times, I accost persons I take to be
sellers - only for them to apologetically confess to being buyers. An attractive,
remarkably stimulating merging of forms and a sense of intermingling that goes well
with the summery sense of profusion on display in a jumbled riot of colour. A Turkish
stallholder whose silver grey bespeaks his venerable dignity, and whom fate must

have assigned such a plain and simple market stand, is carefully piling up his
luscious mound of cherries, scooping them up with his hands, peddling his wares,
peddling them with eloquence, although they are themselves quite well able to attest
to their qualities. Yet buyers are still practising restraint. An abundance of cherries on
all stalls, classified by country of origin.
Are these cherries really still grown on trees the way I remember it having been the
case when I was a child, when the crowd from a village gorged itself direct from the
tree
Just this moment, someone whose wagonload uninhibitedly revealed itself to my
gaze, passed by with a bunch of chopped-up thuja trees. Heavens knows what all
that is about. At least they were not quince trees, which are to be seen in virtually
every garden, generally thick with moss. And plots on the hillsides lovingly tended by
gardeners, occasionally no bigger than a handkerchief, can be admired throughout
the town, be it the other side of the railway line, be it in the twisting streets and
houses of the old quarter, be it by one of the long precipitous flights of steps leading
down into the town. A siren will soon begin to howl. Soon, the clock on the church
tower will strike thirteen if I do not miscount. Street loafers seem determined to put
down roots. But perhaps they are just bored. I would rather not go into the reasons, it
not being my business to interfere in internal municipal affairs, which thus prevents
me from being tempted to provide the town’s only road sweeper with good advice -
and a stable broad-headed broom to sweep with. No way do I want to pretend to
know better than others, even though what could be improved on can be grasped
with one’s bare hands.
So here I am in a small Swabian town on the edge of the Black Forest, one that I
have long known, yet without having previously set foot in it. Hermann Hesse’s
stories and some of his novels had long taught me all I needed to know. I use the onthe-spot
survey to reread, to examine myself and the place, and to ask how I find
myself here in Calw an der Nagold. Coppersmiths, metalworkers, smiths, tailors have
disappeared from the town. Just recently, the last stove-fitter moved away from the
downtown area. The last tawer has hung up his apron. Yet those wishing and
knowing where to go, and with the courage to wander ghost-like through the deserted
workshop - the house by the water is empty - will nonetheless be able to bring the
faded smell of a bundle of sheep fleeces to their nostrils. On the stony parapet, the
remains of the wall of sandbags that had to be erected to deal with the floods. Sand
is trickling out of the mouldering sacks. With a little imagination, the sand of an
hourglass can easily be superimposed onto the scene. In one of the narrow streets, a
master joiner is still plying his trade. One evening, we together go around gathering
up the scraps of a gaudy handbill scattered wildly around his house. And now I know
why the narrow little town which, for the past fifty years, has once again been
presenting its half-timbered houses lined up next to one another like an alphabet of
the town, is no longer a place for the skilled trades. It is almost impossible to
manoeuvre the vehicles through the narrow winding streets. And, should a workshop
happen to be available, there is no space in which to warehouse the requisite
materials. The joiner, too, knows that he is the last master of his guild. His sons are
studying at college.
In his poem celebrating the town of Hesse’s birth, Georg Schwarz was still able to
write: “Calw, das an der Nagold liegt / Riecht erfrischend nach Gerbereien / Men
sieht einen Tapezierer im Freien / Der geborstene Sofas stopft / Inmitten von

Seegras und Geflecht / Bis in die Gassen hört man den Specht / Der droben im Wald
an die Stämme klopft” (“Calw, a town on the Nagold / Smells refreshingly of tanners
and tanning / Outside, ones sees an upholsterer standing / Stuffing broken sofas and
settees / Seagrass and wicker around him abound / While ringing up into the streets
comes the sound / Of woodpecker hammering on woodland trees”). Nothing now
remains of the multitude of venerable trades that once shaped the face of the town.
Yet the woodpecker is, providing the brass bands and drummers are not drowning
him out, still occasionally to be heard. Similarly, kestrels and swifts add a touch of life
to the town. Barely had I arrived in the town when, with an eye to the river, I thought I
saw a swallow diving down into a watery grave. Yet the bird had outsmarted me, for it
came back up to the surface again - after a certain length of time had elapsed. I then
realized that it was the native water ouzel, or dipper, testing its urbanization. And why
not. From then on, I saw - upstream and downstream - water ouzels flapping around,
disappearing inside the Mühltunnel, proudly flaunting their diving skills, feeding their
young. One day, I saw the brood fly up into the air, skimming - swallow-like - just
above the surface of the water, scattering away from the town in search of quieter
stretches of the river. One time, in the morning, and then never again. I was standing
by the parapet of the bridge next to the chapel, looking out towards the island in the
river from which Hesse once jumped into the water, and past which the rafts had
floated. A little upstream was the workshop in which Hesse had spent a year trying
his hand as a blue-overalled mechanic. A wealth of mementoes to document this. All
of them long since detailed in the “Marbacher Magazin,” to which municipal archivist
Paul Rathgeber, whom I have to thank for some private tuition on the history of the
town, made a major contribution.
Rereading Hermann Hesse’s prose elegies for the first time in a long while, and
retracing his Gerbersau on foot, I ask myself what it was that - back in the time when,
distressed by life and with a desperate craving to read, I insatiably gobbled up
anything printed I could lay my hands on - had so taken me about Hesse, had made
me feel so ardent about him that veritable waves of passion were spawned,
prompting me to write effusive letters from reader to author In the first instance, it
was probably the disjunctures in my own biography, the less than unceremonious
way in which I left the “Oberschule” after just under two years, and switched to the
flour business. My inability to break out of an oppressive life world, in which the
reading of books was equated with laziness. To have drummed into you over and
over again that you are a hopelessly impractical individual, a ne’er-do-well - what, in
the local idiom, is termed a “Doochenischd.” Add to that a horrific inability to be the
architect of your own destiny, to shape a line your own life can follow. Not knowing
where you are heading. Dream profession tea gardener.
Like someone shipwrecked swimming on a wave of woes without a shore in sight, I
as a reader in the Meißen municipal library, fell I-know-not-how upon Hesse or, more
accurately, fell under his spell. Read ”Hermann Lauscher,” “Knulp,” “Der
Lateinschüler,” “Unterm Rad,” as if these books had been written with no one but me
in mind.
Hesse sent private prints or got Suhrkamp Verlag to mail me some of his works. The
first of these prints contains the 1955 story Ein Maulbronner Seminarist. Hard to
describe the dizzy heights to which such mail lifted me, elevating me out of the rural
world in which I lived, or how strongly this echo from Switzerland resonated in me,
how it urged me to hunt down books by Hesse, stirring an urge to read everything he

had ever written. It was during these years that the first individual editions of his
works appeared in the GDR. Plain covers, spartan in terms of overall presentation
and make-up, and with light-green cloth binding. From time to time, I managed to win
the bold game of trying to get my hands on a copy, it occasionally having been the
sole one the bookseller had been allocated. This made owning it all the more
precious an experience. The postmarks enable me to ascertain that the period of
infatuated admiration, the obsessively direct relationship between reader and writer
lasted from 1955 to 1961. In the seventies and eighties, I was to enter into a closer
form of relationship to Hesse. As a reader working at the Weimar office of Aufbau-
Verlag, where the “cultural heritage” was fostered with varying degrees of fervour, I
was, without realizing what was happening to me, given Hesse on one of the
occasions when authors were being assigned to editors. From that point on, up until I
left in 1987, it was incumbent upon me to represent and support him, i.e. to stand up
for him, something that, in his own particular case, was no easy task since there was
an enormous gulf between the cultural and political constraints, the conditions that
were imposed upon one, and actual demand for the works. The bookstore owners,
whose central distribution apparatus was governed by a restrictive allocation system,
were in such a helpless position that the only way they could get around it was by
placing imaginary orders. If, for example, they ordered ten times the number they
expected to be required, the best thing they could hope for was to get just one or two
copies assigned to them. All the reader could - nay, had to - do was to attempt, over
again and again, to get new and repeat impressions included in the crazy planning
game - knowing all along that, in the battles for tonnage quotas that are an
ineluctable feature of a society characterized by chronic shortages, he was not going
to be consulted but had, instead, to accept cuts, postponements and cancellations.
And because these types of Hesse editions then available under licence are,
fortunately, now but a part of history, there is little point in mourning that pile of book
projects which one rolled and heaved in front of one, seeing it advance from planning
session to planning session, like a snowball that kept getting bigger and bigger, or in
listing what might have been if … Notwithstanding this, the odd thing or two did come
together at fairly lengthy intervals, actually turning out to become a book at the end of
the day. Among them was, for example, an absolutely essential element in any
definitive image of Hesse - his correspondence with the Leipzig-based writer, literary
critic and committed social democrat Heinrich Wiegand, a volume meticulously edited
by Klaus Pezold. And this is, in fact, the only book by Hesse to be held in the Calw
Hermann-Hesse-Museum that I actually worked on as a reader/editor. Marking the
beginning of a larger collection are the three volumes compiled and edited by Fritz
Hoffmann, which include “Über Literatur” (1978, pp 725), “Bilderbuch der
Erinnerungen” (1986, pp. 570), and “Die blaue Ferne. Reisebilder und
Naturbetrachtungen” (1989, pp. 700).
Once a few of the major novels - from Peter Camenzind to Glasperlenspiel - had
appeared in at least one impression, I considered it to be an urgent and long overdue
task to introduce readers to Hermann Hesse as a master of the shorter work, i.e. of
his countless and varied reflections, observations and contemplations, and to
facilitate an overview by grouping these works thematically. To briefly direct attention,
in other words, to the fact that his narrative excellence is also reflected in his
cultivation of shorter formats. The fourth volume would have presented political
writings. A hot potato that was rolled around for too long - far too long, in fact. The
three years of publication alone were to demonstrate how marginally Hesse’s
“legacy” was considered part of the planned positions, and how much effort the
business of supporting and “moving the process along” actually involved. Yet I am

nonetheless grateful for this second stage in my reception of Hesse, which enabled
me to reread Hesse - this time from a critical distance - and to grow closer to him
while doing so.
And now: the opportunity to make a third attempt, to engage in a very different kind of
revisitation in the form of an on-the-spot survey of sites in Calw. A search for familiar
sights and signs. Recidivist efforts to visualize scenes and figures with a view to
facilitating a comparison. I now know where Hermann Hesse’s father stood and
waved to his son when he used to take the train back from Maulbronn. The plain
wooden veranda above the uniformed drugstore - which does not fit at all badly into
the slabs of concrete that have been since inserted there - still stands by the stretch
of railway that connects the little town in the Swabian hinterland with the outside
world. Only the beautiful railway station, six minutes (on foot) outside the town,
further upstream on the Nagold, is now disused, lying idle and forlorn on the deadend
line like an abandoned freight car shunted off into a siding.
The path of ascent up the rock face, as portrayed so vividly by Hesse in the story
“Der Zyklon,” is easy to make out from my quarters, though it does not seem to have
been able to find any successors keen to put their own youth in Hesse’s footsteps.
The cyclone described by Hesse struck the town on July 1, 1895. Local historians put
in a considerable amount of work on this, and did not cover this aspect alone. At the
time when the whirlwind swept through the valley, Hesse was on the site of the textile
mill that is still famous today, the “Calwer Decken- und Tuchfabrik.” It was in a garden
house forming part of the mill owner’s villa that, in 1890, Rudolf Schlichter - who later
made a name for himself as an artist and painter, while his literary efforts remain,
even up to the present day, known to just a handful of mavens - first saw the light of
day. His view of the home town confirms and complements Hesse’s image of
Gerbersau, even if it is accentuated quite differently in social terms, and
autobiographer Schlichter has a fatal tendency to indulge in scatological delights in
the course of his effort to “reach into the teeming pool of life.” On one of the rocky
peaks above the hospital, the pyromaniacal fireworkers of joy must have lighted their
rockets, of which Hesse repeatedly writes with such remarkable meticulousness that
one might be forgiven for thinking that the obsessive pyromania Hesse attributed to
his younger brother inspired and “fired up” the writer at least as much as it did his
sibling.
On going back to reread parts of “Knulp” after several decades - firstly with a view to
visualizing the scenes - I see the character of the tramp and social failure as an
outstandingly successful figure in artistic terms, a self-portrait in futurum: also, in
other words, a kind of nightmarish image, even though a healthy portion of romantic
glamorization, and a consequent lachrymosity, were also at play here. That could
have turned me, as one considered (in the eyes of both family and townspeople)
incapable of coping with life, into someone who doesn’t know what he wants to
become because he doesn’t yet know who he is. KNULP - the prospect of a
menacing life-form carefully thought through right to its very end. Knulp is quite
undoubtedly way off beam, and additionally also a descendant of Eichendorff’s
“Taugenichts.” Following repeated readings of the Gerbersau stories and
recollections I, too, am only able to echo what has frequently been observed: the
most beautiful memorial the writer left the town of his birth is the 1907 story “Schön
ist die Jugend,” which is probably the one that sticks closest to his own biography. A
thirty-year-old who pretends to be coming home from the mountains of the moon

after years of absence, as was once the case with Abu Telfan. A homecomer
carrying ample experience of life in his baggage, who has become cosmopolitan in
outlook and outgrown the narrow confines of the small town. He is thus able to look
back on himself and the town with the detachment of a serene individual richly
endowed with inner calm and composure. It is this attitude that gives the prose its
consistency. What has remained, however, is the underlying elegiac current and the
inimitable glissando in the form of a bite-sized fluency of language. A prose that
builds on the novella-type structures of the 19th century, trusting in these as a
supporting structure, yet one that, more than anything else, takes its cue from
Gottfried Keller. Even if the Swabian Seldwyla is no longer seen in such “sharp
outline,” as in “Unterm Rad,” Calw never become an Orplid. Many of the locations
between the “Bleiche” tourist café in Schweinbachtal and the “Marmorsäge” in
Teinachtal, a valley in which marble is still cut and polished, are easy to track down,
others only with the help of a trusty Theban. Yet the house in which resided the
erstwhile bookseller from whom Hesse once emboldened himself to order a Heine
edition as yet boasts no commemorative plaque. At the time, the outraged bookseller
ensured that Hesse’s wicked request became the talk of the town. In the same way
that the citizens of Weimar once admonished their offspring by saying, “If you are
naughty and do not do as you’re told, you’ll be sent to the Bauhaus!” children in Calw
were, a century ago, told: “If you don’t learn what they teach you at school, you’ll end
up being a failure like Hermann Hesse.” It’s somehow odd that it is always those
purported to be so impractical, so unable to cope with life, so far averse to the spirit
of business - the outsiders, in other words - that are best able to act as testimony to
the world and the age in which they live.
The qualities that Hesse ascribes to the middleman and agent Joseph Giebenrath
were intended in a representative, pars pro toto sense. My summer sojourn in Calw
was too short for me to ascertain whether mentality and civic spirit have survived the
intervening century unharmed. The “affectionate admiration of money,” of which
Hesse speaks in ironic alienation of the other, lives on in the old affectionate manner,
as it also does elsewhere. If one specific element has remained, then it is, perhaps,
that modesty and contentedness of a pietistic nature, a remaining-sufficient-untooneself
that has been internalized, i.e. made part of the mindset, over a period of
centuries. The inhabitants of small towns generally tend to be distrustful of everything
that is unfamiliar, of everything that flows in from outside. It may well be that the
annual requirements in terms of artistic delights is still adequately catered to by
amateur performances staged at the local “Bürgerverein.” The poster in the glass
case outside the town hall would, at any case, seem to suggest this. It appears that a
puppet theatre put on “Little Red Riding Hood” back in the spring.
I walk up and down “Hundert Stäffele,” counting up to one-hundred-and-fourteen, and
delight in the little gardens that have been wrested from the steep, rocky terrain - this,
too, another life-form in which modesty manifests itself. Indeed, the town would be
well advised to take this nooked-and-crannied world with its flights of steps and
walkways, together with the surrounding world of gardens, and to not shirk from the
task of creating greater awareness of them as jewels symbolizing a certain quality of
life and culture - and as a specific and distinctive feature of the old quarter - rather
than as a mere playground designed to meet the needs of tourists. Beautiful facades
and staggered gables, the likes of which Hesse was unable to see, are one thing
there is definitely no lack of here. It is when leaning on the parapet of the
Nikolaibrücke, cherishing the still and highly presumptuous hope that the water ouzel

may be coaxed into conversation, that I am closest to Hesse. It is this place, and this
particular location, that he loved more than any. I see him, I see Schlichter jump onto
one of the rafts and float off down the Nagold, furtively and clandestinely. In the same
way that I, in my village in Saxony, had to be content to ride as stowaway on harvest
wagons piled high with produce, no matter how short the running-board. In my
capacity as bridge-stander, I happily take on the role of being but a temporary Hesse
epigone.