JOSEPH BERGER: BIMINI - ORPLID
BIMINI
Little Birdie Colibri
Lead us on to Bimini
Fly ahead and we shall follow
in beflagged barges hollow;
On the isle of Bimini
Reigns eternal ecstasy
And the golden larks are singing
In the Blue their tirili
H. Heine
Fritz LAMPL grew up in a faceiess suburb with a large Jewish population on the other
side of the Donaucanal in Vienna. His father was a corn merchant, his two elder brothers
August and Paul, architect and bank employee respectively, and his mother, a tiny
woman, was just the perfect housewife and cook, fitting in to the perfect bourgeois
tradition. This background was poison for the youngest son, who early developed the
extreme sensitivity of the artist. He spent long periods of his childhood in bed with
painful ear trouble, and it was then that dreams and poetry started to fill his mind.
His poems were soon published in a leading literary revue called The Brenner, published
in Innsbruck and a German publisher called Jakob Hegner printed some of his
short stories. But Fritz soon realised that a writer could not make a living unless he
produced substantial novels like the brothers Mann. Nor was he willing to have his life
subsidised by his father.
In 1914, at the outbreak of the first World War, he was 22. His brother August, with
whom Fritz was very close, was killed in one of the first battles. The evenings in the
Cafe Herrenhof which had taken the place of the Central as the meeting place of the intellectuals
was a place of relaxation from the double strains of war and the family tragedy.
There Fritz met his future wife Hilde, who had been taken there by her brother, to
be introduced to his artist friends.
Fritz had grown out of his childhood malaises, although for the rest of his life he failed
to get a good night’s sieep. He was a very handsome man, with the powerful forehead
of the artist and thinker. His omnipresent sense of humour and complete absence of
pomposity did not fail to impress Hilde just as Hilde’s gentle beauty and modest behaviour
impressed Fritz. They were to be married when the war was over.
Paul, Fritz’s brother, appeared one day, smartly dressed in his officer’s outfit, on leave.
He soon seemed very much attracted by his future sister-in-law. But Hilde was taken
by the magic of artistry, and shortly afterwards Paul was killed, another victim of the
senseless slaughter. If two sons had been killed in the war other sons were exempt
from military Service, according to the rules of the war-makers , and so Fritz worked
until the end of the war in the great lie factory, the Kriegspressequartier, where many
writers and journalists had found shelter, some co-operating willingly with their military
masters, while others marked time until the inevitable catastrophe, as they saw it. After
the destruction of the monarchy, the bankruptcy of the old politicians, and the end to
military despotism, there seemed a challenge and a Stimulus to work for a new future,
Republican and Socialist of course. All progressive eyes on the great model Sovjet
Russia!
Fritz and some writer friends decided to form a co-operative, to publish the works of
young authors, eliminating the profits capitalist publishers extracted. The energetic
and well known writer Albert Ehrenstein was the other main stay of the enterprise. He
found a large firm, willing to print the co-operative’s select on a carefully limited credit
basis. Among the first paperbacked slim books, all uniformly bound in grey and looking
rather unattractive was Fritz’s Die Flucht, the Flight, a delightful little comedy, a
Variation of Buechner’s Leonce and Lena. Buechner it was whose plays Danton’s Death
and Woyzeck were the stuff social revolution feeds on eagerly.
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