The magicians of the apocalypse: Germany, 1925-1933

 

To read the signs and portents of carnival shows and curiosity cabinets is no mean feat.

There were many such shows, and many readers, in Weimar Germany. As the Nazi event horizon neared, the magicians became more intrusive, and the readers became more puzzled.

Hanussen was the most famous of the magicians, a fortuneteller who, though a Jew, somehow convinced himself that he was a member of the Nazi inner circle. He was disabused of this notion on March 25, 1933, when three S.A. agents dragged him out of his apartment to a Gestapo barrack, where he was beaten and stabbed to death.

Krakauer described Hanussen’s show in a report for the Frankfurter Zeitung: „Der Hellseher im Varieté“ (The cabaret clairvoyant) in June, 1932. Kracauer found his gifts of prophecy less impressive than his “profane talent for creating a mood in the audience.” Hanussen would sit enthroned at center stage with a black band around his eyes and, receiving a card with the name of one of the spectators, tell them of events that had happened in their past. Kracauer found this part of the act rather tedious, since the events were common, and the addition of context by Hanussen was such that the spectator would agree to it without exactly having any proof – the memory of the event would, rather, conform to the words of the magician. It wasn’t in the words, though, that Kracauer saw the eeriness of the act, but in the way the audience was entirely wrapt up in Hanussen’s presence, and would stare at the black band over his eyes as if it were a portal to the future. “A heavy sense of excitement that showed how, in this crisis, there was a mounting expectation of a miracle.”

Another spectator of the stage magician’s art was Joseph Roth. He, too, wrote a feuilleton for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925 – a less fevered year – about a magician named Rha-Min-Tho. Where Kracauer’s piece was all about the magician who enchanted an audience, Roth’s piece was about the comedy of the audience member who sought to demystify the magician’s tricks. The throne on which Hanussen was mounted was at the center of his act; for Roth, though, it was the spotlight that took … well, the spotlight.

An audience member – mostly male – would come to Rha-Min-Tho’s show and at a certain point, would be invited to come onto the stage to monitor, i.e. expose, the magician – or, as the magician would put it, to show that his tricks were not explicable by natural laws or devices.

I am not sure if Roth’s reportage has been translated. But it is a shrewd… parable of sorts. Here’s the two paragraphs I like:

In any case, the audience is with Rha-Min-Tho, even when he makes mistakes;  and even evening a man climbs out of the seats and onto the stage to persuade himself that it is impossible to explain the miraculous feats of the magician in a natural way. Most are intelligent gentlemen, well adjusted gentlemen, one can even say: MEN. Men who are confident that they can catch out the magician at his tricks, who are not afraid of the stagelights and the spotlight or of the expectant and slightly mocking glances of the magician. Often it is a man who has come with his wife, and leaves her sitting in the seats, without being afraid of embarrassing himself before her, certain of his effect on the stage as of his inextinguishable power over the heart of his companion.

Unfortunately, this is a mistake. In private life he is, perhaps, a powerful personality, a sergeant, a police officer, a court official – and he wears the clothes made by some reliable tailor, allowing him to sit without wrinkling it, hiding his bodily dieficiencies and emphasizing his good physical attributes. As long as he is sitting there in the seats, he is a respectable gentlemen with gravitas. However, in the moment he ascends the stage, the spotlight falls upon him like a pitiless robber and strips him of all his virtues. In the unflattering white light we see that the good humored man has a belly, a laughable double chin, red, protruding ears. His coat is wrinkled, his pants are too short, his laces in his boots are done up any which a way, his heals are worn and the soles have a light though distinct crumpled curve.”

Ah, these men! In Roth’s view, they come out of the seats of the audience thinking that they will be the audience’s favorite – don’t they represent the intelligent section of the audience, probably dragged there by their women? And yet they find out, on stage, that the audience is with the makeupped magician, the trickster, the effeminate showman! He does, our rational man, search the stage and watch the magician’s gestures closely, but it is all in vain and was from the very beginning.

What use is this all to him? He never had the sympathy of the public, whose ambassador and delegate he actually is. On the contrary: the public is much more sympathetic to the magician. Perhaps the audiences’ pants are also too short, but at least they aren’t being displayed on the stage – and even when they are of the buckled type.“

Cagliostro and the dupes – a motif that keeps turning up, mysteriously, in times of crisis. And especially when the dupes have lost our sympathy.