Rafael Schermann: a life in letters

 
 
1.
Adolf Loos, Sergei Eisenstein, Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokashka, and Bela Balazs, exemplary modernists all, all consulted Rafael Schermann, the clairvoyant graphologist. He was written about by all the feuilletonists as well – Robert Scheu, Alfred Polgar, Anton Kuh (Musil’s friend).
But he has largely been erased from history. Just as, in 1940, a Polish Jew, caught on the Soviet side of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement, he was disappeared into some Soviet labor camp and no doubt starved to death, or was beaten to death, or succumbed to the many illnesses awaiting a sixty some year old man breaking rocks with a pick in subzero weather.
Recently, the German novelist Steffan Mensching published a novel about him: Schermanns Augen. I haven’t had a chance to read it; I’ve only read a few interviews with Mensching. But I became aware of it after, and not before,  I ran into Schermann’s name in an article in Figaro, circa 1948. The author  referenced Schermann in an essay on Nerval and the controversy about the manner of his death.  The author argued that Nerval’s signature contained a loop that resembled a noose – and thus proved that Nerval was destined to, and did, hang himself. This was Schermann's method, the author wrote.
A bizarre but intriguing argument. So I looked around for Schermann, and discovered that he was a trans-Atlantic figure of some celebrity in the 1920s. Newspapers from the Prester Lloyd in Budapest to the New York Times worked up copy about him. He had what it took to make a good color piece: always willing to answer questions, never claiming that he understood his own powers, and exercising those powers like clockwork once he was given a piece of handwriting – written by some celebrated author or politico or musician. Of course, Schermann would not know this in advance. That was the thrill of it.
The 20s was the decade in which “Madam Sosostris” with a “wicked pack of cards” pops up naturally enough in Eliot’s Wasteland. And this is not the only reference to the tarot in his poetry from that period. At the same time, he wrote very disparagingly about Yeats’ esoterism. For Eliot, Yeats’ occult tendency trivialized the transcendent – which eventually Eliot would identify with Christianity. Always the tradition and the institutions with Eliot, from the 30s onward.  In his essay about Yeats, “A foreign mind”, Eliot goes on about heresy and the occult rather like a character in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall:

Every reader of Gibbon is acquainted with the existence of one heretical sect, among the several which disturbed the fifth century, which the historian names the fantastic, condemned by the orthodox as well as by the Nestorians and Monophysites. This party of philosophers held that the
visible Jesus, who grew to manhood and mixed with mankind, was a phantasm;
at a certain moment the son of God assumed by the banks of Jordan
full-grown the similitude of humanity. He was not really incarnate, but
divinely deceived the world; and controversy foamed about the question
whether such a doctrine did not impeach divinity with the sin of lying.”

 
The heresy of the fantastic ran rampant in the bare ruined choirs of the 1920s. Along with drugs and sex. Blavatsky and Gurdjeff have been explored to an extent for their relation to the modern attitude – for a good time, I’d really have to recommend Madame Blavatsky's Baboon by Peter Washington, who mines the mystics for their absurdities. In fact, what was absurd to the “English” mind about the “Foreign mind” – was the call upon forces that, inserted in a tradition of faith and given a bishop’s mitre, were taken to be the kind of miracles that justified the traditional credo of “Western man”.  Dante, what. Eliot definitely had the philosophical training to counter the scientific image of the world. However one might feel about that.
So did Ouspensky.
2
 
Robert Scheu was what the Germans call a Publizist – which means journalist as well as publicist. Perhaps the contemporary American term is “influencer”. Whatever. Scheu was a member of the fin de siècle coffeehouse set in Vienna, and this is where he met Rafael Schermann. This meeting was probably a little after Scheu published his book on Karl Kraus – perhaps the first book on K.K. Scheu had written for Der Fackel – and went on to write for any paper that paid, which would normally have put him on Kraus’s enemy list. But they somehow remained friends.
Was it Scheu who introduced Schermann to Kraus?
Scheu wrote extensively about Schermann – he acted, in a way, as his impresario, arranging for his big talk in Berlin in 1916, which was scandalous enough that Schermann emerged from the provincial shell of Viennese celebrity into the full glare of a Continental wide fame. In 1916, he wrote an article for the “Pester Lloyd”, the German language Budapest paper, where he introduced Schermann like this:
“Approximately a year ago the general public became aware of Rafael Schermann. “Have you heard” – the buzz went – “that there is an employee at an insurance firm in Vienna who, out of the facial features of a person, can guess his handwriting to the point that, without having seen it, he can imitate it on paper, with all its initials, abbreviations and particularities.” In some papers they reproduced the tests of such “reconstructions” – to use the technical term – that were astounding. “
Graphology itself, at this time, was not considered a marginal science in the German language sphere. It has always had a certain non-serious, drugstore science air around it in the Anglosphere, but the Germans, from physicists to Walter Benjamin, took it seriously. What made graphology acceptable was that it had rules. In a literature that goes back to a French graphologist, Jean-Hyppolite Michon, graphologists had tried to codify handwriting patterns and make correspondences to thumb nail psychological sketches. Schermann was not one of these guys. He had a few rules, but they were extremely elastic. For instance, he saw objects of note in signatures – lines resembling a knife in the signature of a knifer, for instance, or of a pistol in the signature of someone who will either shoot or be shot. It was, according to his autobiographical excursus in the book, Handwriting doesn’t lie, an “instinct” that he became aware of at a very early age. This instinct could be aroused by other things than handwriting itself – a face, or an object which he held, could often tell him a story. The story would be about the past and the future. It would not just be a note about character types, but would be very specific about the person’s circumstances and even the circumstances – the time, the emotional state – that conditioned the written example he examined.
The first time Eisenstein met Schermann, in Schermann’s Berlin apartment in 1929, Schermann imitated Eisenstein’s handwriting. He did this after passing a mere scrap of conversation with the film director. Eisenstein, who sought transcendence of a materialist kind everywhere, was suitably impressed.
3.
Schermann’s “intuition” as he called it, made him a different kind of hermeneut of the letter – a Schriftdeuter, as one of his biographers called him.
From Scheu: “For example, when he would say: this letter was written at 3 o’clock in the morning, or, after looking at an envelope: “the letter inside this consists only of a few lines, written painfully in obedience to the express command of someone else, who had asked the writer for his cooperation.”
4.
 
As the years went on and the lectures and the interviews and the famous acquaintances piled up, one notices that Schermann, whatever his instincts, was a Central European of a distinctly Dostoevskian tendency. He is never reported as saying of some signature, “this points to a man of well regulated habits, happily married, with three darling children.” It is, perhaps, due to the sensationalizing nature of the newspapers as well as to his times that Schermann more normally sees and foresees suicides, tragic adulteries, and murders. The drama owes something, of course, to Schermann’s position as a consultant. Like Sherlock Holmes, he was consulted about eccentricities and unusual events, not about who made off with the silverware. His “act”, so to speak, was to be given writing samples that did not have names attached, from famous people, living or dead. He would give character sketches from what he saw in the writing. Sometimes, reading these sketches now, one thinks: these are generalizations that could fit any number of people. Sometimes, though, the cases are all too particular.
For instance, he is given a piece of writing and he says: “the woman who wrote this is a painter.” “Nothing too extraordinary about this, but after he has considered the writing at hand more deeply, he explains: ‘the woman has recently painted an exalted figure of a woman. There I see, in the shadowy background, blood and a male corpse.’ Yes. That matches! We reply, the writer of this letter has recently painted a picture of Salome!”
Such scenes are so indelibly continental, of the time, symptomatic. The Viennese themes: the femme fatale, the sado-masochism, the blood, the expressionistic painter. We can easily imagine this scene playing out in Musil’s Man without Qualities. Although Musil was more aware of that graphological philosopher, Ludwig Klages, he must have read about Schermann. He captures the intellectual mood of the time in an essay, Among the writers and the thinkers, from 1926:

“This is not to say how many Romes there are out there, in each of which sits a pope. Not only do I mean the circle around George, the ring around Blüher, the school of Klages, but the countless sects which await the liberation of the mind through eating cherries, or the theatre, or garden suburbs, or rhythmic gymnastics, or Feng Shui, or Eubiotics, or the reading of the hilldwelling hermits, or a thousand other particulars.  And in the middle of these sects sits some great So and So, a man, whose name the uninitiated have never heard, but in whose circle enjoys the reputation of a world redeemer.”

Although Schermann never possessed a moral authority, like that of George or Klages, the fact of his intuition did heat up some Schermann-centered prose. In fact, the best essay about Schermann was written by Musil’s friend, Anton Kuh, who found his duality – a rather banal figure whose past as an insurance man was all too explicable, and a medium whose intuitions have no scientific explanation -  a sort of metaphysical clue. And Kuh was personally acquainted with another strange insurance man: Franz Kafka.

Kuh: “I like the stumpy man from Krakow, whether you call him a clairvoyant, a graphologist, or a psychologist. He has an artist’s nature. His mouth twitches, when he is feeling out a fate, nervously, on a perhaps superstitious lightning stroke, when he suddenly begins to roll his tongue over his gums and it is obvious that he is working something out. His intonations are entirely familiarly Jewish, pleasantly east Prussian. Two character types cross in him: the Hassidic rabbinic, with the star of David, and the jolly merchant, his accounting books spread before him.”

Kuh, a Prague habitue, thought of Gustave Meyrink’s protagonists, with their "mixture of Walpurgasnacht and the daily stock market report".

However, it was not simply the character of Schermann that struck Kuh, but his situation, the pleas that, day after day, year after year, Schermann lived among. The desperate tones of those who asked for help made one think that “the whole of life was like a panic on a shipwreck.” And just as, when the ship is going down, certain people reveal a desire to survive at any cost, Kuh plugged into the “greed for life”, greed as life, with its cultural meaning in the 20s in Eastern Europe.

In 1929 in Germany, there were good reasons to think that the culture's temperamental key was notched to a higher frequency, that the greed for life was revealing a panic yawning beneath it. Schermann’s is a side story, but Kuh’s essay could be matched up with, say, Elias Canetti’s description of the premier of the Three Penny Opera, which he attended in Berlin.

“It was the most accurate expression of Berlin. The people cheered [jubelt] for themselves. This was them, and they liked themselves. First you feed your face, they you spoke of right and wrong. They took these words literally… The shrill and naked self-complacency that this performance emanated can be believed only by the people who witnessed it.”

Kuh portrays Schermann as an empath whose sympathies were being stretched too tight. A sort of paranormally gifted Miss Lonelyhearts. Here’s a letter from a man who is tormented by the idea that his wife, who died two years ago, might have cheated on him. He has hired a detective, and on the off chance, he is sending Schermann a sample of her writing. “Every second letter mentions suicide.” Kuh, in the end, vows to stay away from this unsettling scene: “It is all a mess: the letter writers want to breathe as human beings, but they want to live as bourgeois.” The unbearable, which is how Marx characterized the alienation of the prole, has ascended, socially, to the middle class.

5.
Schermann wrote many articles and two books, one of which – Writing doesn’t lie – was translated into English and into French, the latter by the German-French poet, Ivan Goll. In the 1920s, there were at least two films, made in Vienna, in which he was featured as “The man with x-ray eyes”. There were three biographies of him written between 1920 and 1932: one by the German journalist Max Hayek (murdered in Auschwitz, later, in 1944); by Dr. Oskar Fischer (murdered in Theresienstadt, 1942); and by an American journalist, Eugene S. Bagger.

Schermann was also “inducted” into various novelistic feuilleton. There he figured, in the stories written by Jean Baptiste Morel, as a sort of paranormal Sherlock Holmes.

During this decade, Schermann went to the United States and was consulted by New York City’s police commissioner, Enright, about some of his difficult cases. For instance, the mysterious murder of the bridge-playing millionaire, Joseph Browne Elwell (unsolved to this very day!). He lectured with Professor Fischer in the Urania hall in Prague, “dressed in a frock coat and a white tie.” He was invited to the tables of the high and mighty, and was expected to, and did, relay anecdotes. There, he sat next to royal princesses and fashionable artists. Occasionally he would predict their futures.

In Zurich, the police give him the letter of a woman who is suspected of poisoning her second husband. Schermann feels the letter: yes, she poisoned her husband! But the letter is eight years old, written while she was married to her first husband. Meanwhile, the woman breaks down under questioning. She admits to poisoning her second husband. And, she adds, she poisoned her first.

6.
After 1933, Schermann avoids Germany. His intuition becomes shakier, more routinized. He lectures in Paris. He continues to live in Vienna. But life for Jews is filled with menace now.
He makes a move that is a curious one for a man who can see the future – at least in a limited number of cases. He moves back to Poland. He had connections, but he moves himself and his family to Poland.
There’s no letter big enough, with curves and hyphens bloody and barbed enough, to reveal his fate. Or his family’s fate. Or the fate of the millions caught in those nation state traps, in those trains, in those cities, in those fields, fleeing on those roads, carrying what possessions they could gather in old valises or backpacks, torn up letters in a trail winding behind them, private disasters that were always supposed to be contained in houses and hotels and salons, and never supposed to be so grossly, so apocalyptically spilled into the street, as Schermann’s friends, his dinner companions, the journalists who interviewed him, the Sunday supplement photographers, all of them went down down down the chute.