The Untouched Key Read online

  Käthe was one of four siblings—Konrad, Julie, Käthe, and Lise—to live beyond childhood. Her mother’s first two children died at a very early age. The last-born child, Benjamin, born after Lise, died of meningitis when he was one year old. This information held great significance for me. Experience shows that the death of a child, especially the firstborn, plays a very important role in a mother’s life. The birth of every child inevitably awakens or reawakens desires in the parents that somehow are connected to making up for their own childhoods. Either they look to the child to compensate for their not having had good parents (“At last here is someone who will show concern for me, who will treat me with consideration and respect”) or to be the child they once were (“Now I shall have someone to whom I can give all that my parents had to deny me”). If the child dies soon after birth, before the parents’ expectations are disappointed by the child’s desire for autonomy, the mother may idealize her lost child and thereby preserve its central importance for the rest of her life. Often after the death of an infant, there is no real period of mourning that runs its course; instead, the parents’ hopes become attached to an “if”: if only the child had lived, the parents think, their expectations would have been met. The belief in the fulfillment of all their hopes, originating in their own childhoods, is associated with the memory of this child, whose grave they visit and tend for decades after.

  Superhuman, even divine, qualities are attributed to the dead child; at the same time, the other children in the family grow up in the shadow of this cult. They must be dutifully cared for and raised in a way to rid them of their bad behavior and make them acceptable in the future. To be too affectionate would be dangerous, for too much love could ruin them. The parents seem to think that affection and tenderness should be carefully measured out in the child’s best interest. And so the poor well-raised mother feels a duty toward her living children to train them well and to suppress their true feelings. But it’s a different matter in the case of her dead child, for that child needs nothing from her and does not awaken any feelings of inferiority or hatred, does not cause her any conflict, does not offend her. Since she need not be afraid of spoiling the child with her love, when she goes to the cemetery she feels genuine inner freedom in her grief. Compared with that feeling, being with her other children can make her suffer because they clearly do not measure up to the dead child and its fantasized goodness and wisdom. Their vitality, their demands and claims on her can make a mother in love with her dead child feel distinctly insecure. They can cause feelings of helplessness and despair if she sees her pedagogical principles called into question.

  This does not mean that the mother consciously wishes her children dead. Quite the contrary, she is even anxiously concerned that nothing happen to them; she paints them a picture of the constant danger threatening them, and she is apparently right about the danger, for something terrible has already happened. She must always keep an eye on her children, plaguing them with her close supervision and restricting their freedom. As a result, she has long since unavoidably forfeited her own vitality and spontaneity and in her depressed state is ultimately serving death.

  We can imagine such a fate as this in the case of Käthe Kollwitz’s mother. But how did the situation look from the child’s perspective? Her mother’s concern for her children’s physical survival was a constant accompaniment for Käthe at play. In her memoirs Kollwitz mentions a pit that would make one blind if one fell into it, a sign that she took her mother’s warnings to heart. She was also always attempting to satisfy her parents’ pedagogical desires and become a quiet, well-behaved, uncritical, psychically dead little girl. Even if there are no dead siblings involved, such an attempt to suppress a child’s spontaneity will intensify the child’s depressive tendencies, because depression is an indication of the loss of vitality. When, however, as in the case of Käthe Kollwitz, three dead siblings are held up as model children, serving as proof of the mother’s supposed capacity for love, then the daughter will do everything in her power—will readily sacrifice all her own feelings—to show herself truly “worthy” of her mother’s love. Thus, psychic death, whose price is depression, gains double significance: it brings promise of the mother’s unconditional, unlimited love, which the daughter has observed but has not experienced herself, and it satisfies the longing for death on the part of the mother, whose face looks transfigured, soft, almost happy only when she is standing by her children’s graves.

  Käthe Kollwitz, A Woman Entrusts Herself to Death VAGA New York 1989

  I had reached this point in my thinking when I returned to the Kunsthaus in Zurich to see the exhibit of Kollwitz’s graphic art. Now I felt that I had found my entirely personal—purely subjective, if you will—key to these pictures. For what had previously seemed rigid and difficult to empathize with now had gained life and meaning. And my hypotheses, based on the autobiographical material I had read, were fully confirmed by the pictures I saw.

  In one picture a mother is stretching out her hand to greet Death (of whom we see only the right hand). Two little children with terrified faces are clinging to her skirts; their expression is in striking contrast to their mother’s. Her look and her handshake are calm and friendly in a conventional way, as if she had opened the door to find a familiar face, a friend or neighbor and not Death, and were saying, “Good evening, Mr. Jones. Please come in.”

  The theme “Mother with Dead Child” keeps reappearing in different ways. At the same time, death is shown as redeemer (transforming the child from an object of censure into one of love), as comforter (which the grave was for the mother), and as lover. This is how the daughter must have pictured death, I thought, when she heard her mother speak of it and watched her face. Now it was also clear to me that the stooped and lifeless woman I kept seeing, in group depictions as well, is not Käthe Kollwitz but her mother, as seen by one of her still living children. I also began to comprehend why so much resignation and hopelessness emanates from the group scenes, which lack the feeling of genuine anger one would expect from their theme: as a very young child, Käthe Kollwitz was threatened with punishment if she showed anger. The dead child being mourned is actually angry little Käthe herself.

  As an adult Kollwitz was aware of the injustice of oppression, imprisonment, and exploitation on all sides, but she did not permit herself to cry out, just as she was not permitted to cry out as a child. Her socialism was not a revolutionary step for her; her father, brother, and husband were all socialists. By being one herself, she was in no way rebelling against her family but was, rather, in harmony with it; she had also tried to be pious in the pious setting of her childhood. She never freed herself from this dependency on her family’s values and expectations of her. Her pictures express the hopelessness and resignation of a person who was not permitted to articulate her strong feelings because they made those around her uncomfortable. And because anger is missing from her works, it is not the feeling of pain that speaks in them but depression. The oversized figure of the mother mourning over Peter’s grave also shows the familiar bent-over, depressed stance, but no pain. The father in Käthe Kollwitz’s pictures hardly ever expresses anything but self-control.

  Käthe Kollwitz, Sitting Woman VAGA New York 1989

  Since I had now answered my questions in my own way, I no longer felt the need to track down all the details of this artist’s life. I was about to return her diary to the library, having read only the sections about her childhood, when my eye was caught by a passage that confirmed my conjectures. Reminiscing about her mother, she writes:

  She often speaks of her first baby, who died a year after he was born.… The death of her first child must have been the most powerful experience in her life; that is why it is still so present for her now after fifty-five years.

  And a little later she puts it even more plainly:

  Her awareness that her own child is now dead is blurred. She looks at the pictures of her babies, speaks in a tender voice of her “babies,�
� and her eyes grow moist when she speaks of the first one who died. That happened nearly sixty years ago, but she still can’t speak of him without being moved—and Julie dies and she grasps it only momentarily.

  Her mother’s eyes grow moist when she thinks of her child who died so long ago. Another daughter has just died, but this fact scarcely penetrates her consciousness. In the shadow of such a mother Käthe Kollwitz lived and painted her pictures of the dead child, which posterity would like to interpret simply as the expression of her social conscience and political commitment.

  Buster Keaton with his parents

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  BUSTER KEATON:

  Laughter at a Child’s Mistreatment and the Art of Self-Control

  Buster Keaton, the famous comedian of the twenties and thirties, could make people burst out laughing at his antics without cracking a smile himself. I can remember being bothered by this discrepancy as a child, and I wasn’t able to find his antics funny when I had to look at that sad face. Lately, I chanced upon his biography by Wolfram Tichy and found in it the explanation for my discomfort. When he was only three, Buster Keaton started appearing on the stage with his parents, who were vaudeville performers, and helped to make them famous by taking severe abuse in front of an audience without batting an eyelash. The audience would squeal with delight, and by the time the authorities would be ready to intervene because of the physical injuries the little boy sustained, the family would already be performing in another city. In his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Keaton describes his situation plainly enough, but he describes only the facts, whose significance remained hidden to him. That this was the case can be seen from the following passage:

  My parents were my first bit of great luck. I cannot recall one argument that they had about money or anything else during the years I was growing up.… And from the time I was ten both they and the other actors on the bill treated me not as a little boy, but as an adult and a full-fledged performer. [Italics mine]

  Had Buster Keaton realized that his parents were exploiting him shamelessly and brutally injuring not only his body but also his emotional life, he surely wouldn’t have made a career of entertaining other people when he didn’t feel like laughing himself. Keaton, quoted in Tichy’s biography, reveals how he became the person he did:

  A child born backstage gets makeup smeared on his face by his parents as soon as he can walk … sometimes only for fun, for their own pleasure, and sometimes to see if the child is ready for an audience.… My father dressed me up in funny clothes, similar to the kind he wore himself. So from the beginning I wore pants and shoes that were too big for me. They brought me onstage when I was three, at first for matinées. When I had just turned four, a theater owner said, “If you bring him on for the evening performance, I’ll pay you $10 more.” … From then on, I was part of the show, for $10 a week.… The first time I got paid was in 1899.

  I appeared … before many different kinds of commissions, and in some cities before the mayor. In two states it was the governor who looked me over to see if I were being injured by the work that I did on the stage. Sometimes I was barred from appearing, but as our engagements were short, we would soon be in another town where the laws might be less strict.

  In most cities and states, the laws specifically prohibited a child under sixteen doing juggling, wire work or acrobatics of any kind. This afforded a loophole for me, as I was not an acrobat. I did nothing except submit to being knocked about. When I went outside the theater, they used to dress me in long trousers, derby hat and hand me a cane to carry. In this way they fooled some people into believing that I was a midget.

  In this knockabout act, my father and I used to hit each other with brooms, occasioning for me strange flops and falls. If I should chance to smile, the next hit would be a good deal harder. All the parental correction I ever received was with an audience looking on. I could not even whimper.

  When I grew older, I readily figured out for myself that I was not one of those comedians who could jest with an audience and laugh with it. My audience must laugh at me. [Italics mine.]

  One of the first things I noticed was that whenever I smiled or let the audience suspect how much I was enjoying myself they didn’t seem to laugh as much as usual.

  I guess people just never do expect any human mop, dishrag, beanbag, or football to be pleased by what is being done to him. [Italics mine]

  If something tickled me and I started to grin, the old man would hiss, “Face! Face!” That meant freeze the puss. The longer I held it, why, if we got a laugh the blank pan or the puzzled puss would double it. He kept after me, never let up, and in a few years it was automatic [italics mine]. Then when I’d step onstage or in front of a camera, I couldn’t smile. Still can’t.

  In view of his unwavering idealization of his parents, surely no one can doubt that the scenes described by Buster Keaton himself really took place. Nobody could make up anything so horrifying, especially not someone who claims to have had an ideal childhood. Yet he completely missed the significance of these scenes for his whole later life and for his art. The biographer misses it too. After he has put the facts together, Tichy writes, “It is certain that Keaton’s parents loved their son no less than other parents love their children and treated him the way they subjectively thought right for everyone’s interests” [italics mine].

  This same biographer tells about the numerous times the father inflicted severe physical injury on his son and then even talked about it boastfully, proud that the boy put up with such treatment without complaining.

  In spite of remembering what happened to him, Buster Keaton undoubtedly repressed the trauma of being abused and degraded. That is why he had to repeat the trauma countless times without ever feeling it, for the early lesson that his feelings were forbidden and were to be ignored retained its hold on him.

  I have observed young people in the cafés and bars of a small city who also must have learned this lesson. They stare dully into space, cigarette in hand, sipping a glass of something alcoholic if they can afford it, and biting their fingernails. Alcohol, cigarettes, nail biting—all serve the same purpose: to prevent feelings from coming to the surface at any cost; as children these people never learned to experience their feelings, to feel comfortable with them, to understand them. They fear feelings like the plague and yet can’t live entirely without them; so they pretend to themselves that getting high on drugs in a disco can make up for all they have lost. But it doesn’t work. Cheated of their feelings, they begin to steal, to destroy property, and to ignore the feelings and rights of others. They don’t know that all this was once done to them: they were robbed of their soul, their feelings were destroyed, their rights disregarded. Others were using them, innocent victims, to compensate for the humiliation they had once suffered themselves. For there is no way for mistreated children to defend their rights.

  Society shares their ignorance. It puts these young people in reform schools, where they can perfect their destructive behavior at the expense of others while continuing to destroy themselves. We often hear people say that vandalism is on the increase nowadays, that young people were not always as violent, inconsiderate, and brutal as they are today. It’s hard to say whether this is indeed the case, because now certain forms of state-organized brutality such as war have disappeared—at least in Europe. But if it is actually true that today’s youth are becoming increasingly unstable, then I wonder if it might not have something to do with the advancing technology surrounding childbirth and the manipulation of babies through medication, which make it impossible for newborns to experience their feelings and to orient themselves in terms of those feelings. I see a direct connection between infants tranquilized with drugs who can find no better alternatives in later life, and the adolescents in the bars whom I have just described.

  Buster Keaton with his parents

  What are young people to do with feelings that have been totally repressed but are still strongly active in the un
conscious if the whole society ignores these feelings or denies that they are caused by child abuse? The only legal way to act out rage openly and violently in peacetime is in disciplining one’s children. Since this outlet is not available to young people who have no children, they must look for another one. Suicide, addiction, criminal behavior, terrorism, and participation in organizations that sexually exploit children all can provide this kind of outlet—unless, like Buster Keaton, one can find it in creativity. Although creativity permits survival and helps a person to live with psychic damage, it still conceals rather than reveals the truth. Thus, it cannot protect the person from being self-destructive. As later chapters will show, Friedrich Nietzsche needed his entire philosophy to shield himself from knowing and telling what really happened to him. Similarly, Buster Keaton learned to be creative without being able to laugh spontaneously. Neither of them became murderers or ended in prison, but they paid a great price for their denial of the truth. In addition, they were unable to help society understand the roots of destructive behavior and change its attitude toward children.

  Chaim Soutine, Motherhood 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM

  Chaim Soutine, Landscape 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM

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