On a transparent summer evening the Cafe Kloesschen was bathed in
light. The city sky of dark blue silk, upon which the white moon and
many small stars lay, enveloped it. At the rear of the cafe, alone,
a long time before he suddenly died, smoking at a tiny table, on
which something stood, sat the hunch-backed poet Kuno Kohn. People
crouched around other tables. Among them moved people with yellow
and red skulls: women; writers; actors. Everywhere shadowy waiters
darted.
Kuno Kohn was not thinking of anything special. He hummed to himself:
"A fog has so gently destroyed the world." The poet Gottschalk
Schulz, a lawyer, who had painfully flunked all the tests he had
taken, greeted him. A beautiful girl was with him. They both sat
down at Kohn's table. Schulz and Kohn collaborated with the
enthusiastic little Lutz Laus, to produce a monthly journal, "The
Dachshund," designed to refine the level of immorality. Schulz told
Kohn that the Dachshund-Laus would soon invent a godless religion on
neo-legal principles, for which purpose he intended to call an
organizational meeting in a nearby movie-house. Shaking his head,
Kohn listened. The lovely girl ate cake. Kohn said sadly: "Laus can
touch people and get things done. But there is no longer a Jesus to
make us believe. We die every day more deeply into empty, eternal
death. We are hopelessly pulled apart. Our life will remain
meaningless theatrics". As she ate, the girl looked on, with a
cheerful look emanating from the uncomprehending reddish brown eyes
on her clear face. Schulz had sunken into gloomy thoughts. The girl
said that her whole life also was a spectacle, and therefore she
didn't find it to be so meaningless. In the acting school, in which
she was preparing for a career on the stage as a sentimental lover,
hard work was done. Mr. Kohn ought to drop in sometime, to convince
himself about it. Kuno Kohn looked at the girl ardently for a while.
He thought: "Such a small, stupid girl." But he soon left.
Outside, the lyric poet Roland Rufus suddenly seized his arm firmly
and excitedly, saying: "Have you read the review written by a certain
Bruno Bibelbauer in the monthly medical journal, in which it is
claimed that the reason for my paranoia is that I imagine that I have
some paralysis. Everyone looks at me strangely; I am famous. My
publisher is giving me a large advance. But--ah, I must not say
it--I am incurable." He went immediately into a better
wine-restaurant.
A horse hobbled by, pulling a carriage, like an old man. The
hunchback Kohn idly leaned against a Catholic church, thinking about
existence. He said to himself: "Yet how odd existence really is.
And yet one props oneself up, somewhere, somehow, without connection,
irrelevant; one could just as well continue for better or for worse,
anywhere. That makes me unhappy." Before him a small, silent
whore's dog had stopped, had listened humbly, with glowing eyes.
A fiery glass wedding coach hopped by. Inside, in a corner, he saw
the pale, expressionless face of a bridegroom. An empty carriage
arrived and Kohn climbed in. He said quietly: "A seeker without a
goal... a man drift...... unknown to everyone... One has a
frightening longing. O that one might know for what."
The streets glimmered whitely when he opened the door of the house in
which he lived. In his room he looked silently, with a solemn
sadness, at the pictures of men, all of whom were dead, which were
fastened to the wall. Then he began to remove the articles of
clothing from his hump. When he was wearing only undershorts, a
shirt, and socks, he said, murmuring and sighing, "Gradually one goes
insane..."
In bed his mind slowly emptied. The reddish brown eyes of the girl
in the Cafe Kloesschen came into his mind as he fell asleep.
Strangely, on the days that followed, these eyes also shone often in
his brain. That surprised him. Frightened him. His relationship to
women was odd. In general he had an aversion to them; his urges
drove him to boys. But in certain summer months, when his soul was
shattered and inconsolable, he often fell in love with a young,
childlike woman. Since he was rejected and mocked most of the time
because of his hump, the memory of these women and girls was terrible.
Therefore he was cautious at these times. He went to a prostitute
when he felt danger.
Lisel Liblichlein had taken him by surprise, without his having had
any premonition of it. In vain he thought of the pain of failure.
In vain he imagined that Lisel Liblichlein might be one of the many
delicate creatures, confused in their wonderful ignorance and longing
for happiness, who can be found everywhere on earth, resembling one
another... On a soft evening, full of greenish yellow street-lights,
full of umbrellas and street filth, stood a small, hunch-backed man
anxiously waiting at the entrance of an acting school.