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.
