SERNER'S HANDBREVIER FU¨R HOCHSTAPLER
The counterbalance to the cool persona's aristocratic type is the confidence man. The social claims he makes do not coincide with his origins; should his actual heritage be discovered, his social existence is lost. Hence he moves on a terrain littered with traps set by the reality of his past. He moves in a world where the only mortal sin is to allow his at-tentiveness to lapse. The con man's life is the “as-if” existence par excellence, in which success depends on the virtuoso application of the behavioral codex of an alien class. “Appear civilized,” Gracián had counseled. The swindler makes this his creed: appearance is profitable. In line with courtly codes of conduct, Walter Serner declares: “Whoever you may be, say this to yourself: ALL THAT TRANSPIRES AROUND ME CAN ALSO BE FEIGNED. Then you will remain healthy and things will go well for you on earth” (maxim no. 42,2,). And maxim no. 325 makes it clear that in truth Serner's Handbrevier is a manifesto against the cult of sincerity:
The distinction between virtuoso dissimulation and genuineness is too small to be measured. The former can be acquired only through intensive practice, whereby you also develop the ability to recognize genuineness. If occasionally, however, it continues to exceed your capabilities, then forgo dissimulation (the great ruiner!) and say what you may not act out.
The “devilish” transgression of the line separating authenticity from artificiality is the characteristic movement of Serner's writing. What he prescribes in his Handbrevier he puts into practice in his crime stories: not even elemental feeling eliminates the possibility of being a “useful
[It is impossible to keep track of] where the truth of affective life lapses and where the performance of it begins. If something natural does manage to break through, ice-cold games of life immediately interpret and exploit it. Often the characters' excesses are cold hypocrisy; but they nevertheless remain under the pressure of real unconscious excess; at other times something ultimate does break out through a cocaine-paralysis of the soul.[26]
It is as if Serner sought to illustrate Plessner's anthropology with the example of the confidence man: there is no core self; the various masks have not only the function of adapting a substantial self opportunistically to a situation but also offer the possibility “of being the other to the respective roles.”[27]
Indeed, maintaining an insistence on being who one is, while certainly desirable, would be all but fatal if it were to congeal into a single role, and not only on account of the limitation entailed, but primarily because it eliminates the possibility of changing roles.[28]
It is easy to understand how the confidence man, as a type, can be fascinating in a situation broadly experienced as bottomless; con men appear everywhere, in the theater and film, in detective novels and the mass press. This eccentric character reveals how fragile are the strategies of distinction in a society in which money operates as the great leveler and what the market honors above all else is the pliability of one's attitude. In the con man, the ideal of personal autonomy appears only in the form of virtuosity in the changing of masks. He wants to be what he appears to be to others, but if he allows himself to become that, he loses the remainder of his autonomy, which exists solely in that latitude of difference.
In certain of his traits, the confidence man resembles the autodidact as described in sociology: he possesses little cultural capital of his own, learns from models, and is filled with anxiety over being discovered.[29] The broad public delights in the techniques with which he succeeds in
The practical part of the Handbrevier fur Hochstapler appeared in 192,7.[30] In it are blended the dada cult of indifference and Nietzsche's theory of masks with an ironic reference to the new objectivity imperative of action. The form is borrowed from Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom, as contemporary critics were already aware.[31] Serner's handbook contains 591 rules, divided into thirteen chapters. Rule no. 338 concerns intonation:
It is better to speak conventionally, rather than in principle, if you want to gain time, and better in a chatty, rather than informational, manner, if you want to gain power.
The maxims are delivered deadpan, in a manner reminiscent of Buster Keaton; the book offers guidance to those who are already ruined. “People tolerate you, because you cannot be ruined” is the consoling advice of no. 116. In the tradition of dada, the Handbrevier is a handbook for “the balancing act over the abyss of murder, violence, and theft” (Raoul Hausmann).[32]
The habitus recommended in the Handbrevier draws our attention to the figure of the dandy, an important link in the tradition of the cool persona. This nineteenth-century type extolled alienation as an art of living. Unscrupulousness and discretion were present alongside the fetishism of affective control, the treatment of nature and drives as mechanical systems, and the meticulous avoidance of the traps of relationship.[33] The exclusive figure of the dandy looked anachronistic to twentieth-century observers, but certain features of its habitus showed up, remarkably, in an artists' group as early as World War I. Dadaism, a laboratory of shaming and disgrace, practiced attitudes of indifference—“American Buddhism”—and its proponents tried, through a cult of meticulous exposure, to make themselves immune to power exercised to shame the subject. Even in advance of the Berlin dadaists, Serner extended the rite of self-shaming into language as such (“Every word is a Blamage”); he saw only one chance for self-consciousness: it must already have blamed itself. “Severely blamed. Outrageously blamed. Blamed entirely without measure. Blamed so horrifically, that everything else is drawn into the blame.”[34]
Conditions, however, are precarious for the modern dandy. Assimilation into the aristocracy's higher social standing does not facilitate his
From time to time, excesses are necessary [see Figure 6]. After two months of uninterrupted regularity, the body is sick of it. Allow it a brief, but furious storm, (no. 3 20)
Never show your hatred. (Hidden hate is a source of strength.) If the number of your enemies grows too large, show contempt; that will cause those whose hate actually consists in envy to assume that it would be dangerous to arouse your hatred. But where you must show it, follow it with the corresponding deed. (no. 337)
However complete your anesthesia against praise and criticism may have become, the danger of a relapse is always present, (no. 349) If suddenly you find yourself lacking the strength to lie, then at least be cruel, (no. 344)
In the Handbrevier's world no formula of authenticity is valid. The point in this hall of mirrors is “impression management” (Erving Goff-man); that is, the goal is to leave behind in others' eyes the impression of authenticity. As disconcerting and unscrupulous as this idea might be to a member of a guilt culture, for the inhabitants of a shame culture it has become a necessity. “In the case of shame,” we read from Agnes Heller, “the authority is social custom—ritual, habits, codes or rosters of behavior—represented by the eye of the other.”[36]
Serner's confidence man exploits precisely this circumstance, that he is the object of the other's gaze, playing out the various possibilities open to him. The point at which the ego-ideal of autonomy fears fiasco is where he begins the drama of his self-enactment. As a precaution he keeps with him at all times a small hand mirror so he can test his facial expressions before he puts them to use. Now and then it is advisable to make quickly for the rest room “to practice an expression” (no. 32,8). Since the distinction between dissimulation and genuineness is too small to measure on this ground of sheer mobility, the foreseeable effect of an expression is what decides whether it counts as authentic.
From time to time, excesses are necessary (Christian Schad, Der Pfiffum die Ecke [A whistle around the corner], 1917. With the permission of Christian Schad, G. A. Richter, Rottach-Egern.)
Above all, practice the effect of your eyes every day by standing in front of a mirror. Your gaze must learn to rest still and heavy on another, to veil itself quickly, to sting, to indict. Or to emanate enough experience and knowledge to shock your counterpart into offering his hand (no. 323).
The mirror serves the actor in the study of the self. The type of self-perception required is that which we have already found in the baroque duelist's conduct code: “The gaze directed at its own physiognomy in the mirror has assumed within itself the gaze of the others.”[37] The mirror of conscience, on the other hand, which a guilt culture demands that its members use offstage, is of no use to the actor. Serner's subject despises psychoanalysis, as befits the cool persona. Instead there are dietary rules: “Eat little meat (never fatty), but a lot of fruit salads and green vegetables. Take frequent deep breaths; bathe only twice a week (ten minutes, lukewarm)” (no. 316).
For melancholy moods, Serner recommends such tongue twisters as teremtete—the word games of the dadaists seem to be migrating to the ground of the soul. Unarmed, lacking a soldierly physiognomy, the dandy persona transplanted to the world of the new objectivity must not show its true face in public: “If you could appear visually as the monster of indifference you really are, a ten-minute stroll would leave you dead. No one could endure you for even a second, without falling upon you with both fists flying” (no. 108).
Werner Krauss discovers, as he reconstructs Gracián's code of conduct in the “enormous realm on which the Habsburgs' sun set,” that the “con-man morality” often occurs as a kind of “maintenance morality,” a survival technique.[38] Guided by Serner's Handbrevier, the persona moves about in a tertiary sector. It is ready to take on situations in hotels, train stations, post and telegraph offices, in vehicles of public transportation, and in private interchanges. In all these settings there is one fundamental rule: “If you stumble into a false appearance, combat it by maneuvering yourself into another false appearance” (no. 2,45). Gra-cian had already offered a roundabout version of the same advice: “One would not wish to be taken for a man of dissimulation, although it is not possible to live these days without it.” Serner's 591 tips take up the Spanish Jesuit's agonistic image—outfitted with modern requisites for moving successfully in the world of the new media:
Do not imagine that telephone conversations conducted in a hotel room or in the hall are not being overheard (no. 132).
― 121 ―Learn to telegraph in such a way that it appears to be encoded, without being so. And vice versa (no. 558).
Refuse banknotes bearing private signs and change them immediately (no. 576).
Do not go to masseuses, unless you want to be massaged. Otherwise it can happen that you will be seen and photographed (no. 433). Regard every ear within earshot as an enemy ear (no. 444).—In hotel rooms, undertake important activities very quietly and only with the curtains drawn (no. 452).
Make a habit of standing in front of shop mirrors. In this way you can conveniently observe what is going on behind you (no. 478).
Seiner's Handbrevier and Brecht's Reader for Those Who Live in Cities open a new chapter in the literature of the city. Urban decor, local color, facades, squares, building complexes or sounds appear before us only in an orienting function. The city is much more a specific terrain of behavior.[39] The eye assesses possible obstacles; it is a tactical organ and a trained physiognomist. The ear functions as an alarm, with the special task of supervising the voice's volume (and, when necessary, reducing it to a whisper). The focus of perception is entirely outward: it listens, probes, scents. The new media, such as the telephone, telegraph, and tickertape, convey the necessary information to Serner's character. Language acquires the function of an advance scout in enemy territory, identifying possibilities for movement by the person who remains undercover.
Obviously, Serner's gentleman is a virtuoso in the art of separation. Symbiotic relationships of whatever sort, even provisional ones, represent a trap. The ultimate in obligation is a “free marriage,” which Serner, borrowing from colloquial slang, terms a “mixed bag.” Here as well he advises distance: “Never live together with your lover. At most in the same building” (no. 2,13). The family is not only disqualified as a form of sociability and reproduction but also eliminated, in tip no. 3 59, as the locus of origins: “Blood ties are an invention. Not simply because only the mother can ever be sure. Once the cord is cut, it is over.”
Although Serner's con man is incomparably more flexible than Pless-ner's man of decision, the Handbrevier advises him to calculate carefully the danger of appearing ridiculous. He may surrender to mockery only in a single place, with a single person:
Everything can be ridiculed. Indulge this pleasure, however, only with your lover; it will increase her passion for you. (Every woman is a closet anarchist.)
― 122 ―Forbid it among men: it will paralyze your creatures; and your associates will quickly find you ridiculous, (no. 102)
While Plessner sought out a site of “mercy,” where the self worn out from fencing could recuperate, Serner is comfortable in the company of the female anarchist (a frightful image in the duelist's universe)—and she, of course, represents much more than an anarchist.
Serner's exercises give us no help examining our conscience, but he does offer tips on tactical skills aimed at the optimal exploitation of opportunities. The discursive ritual of confession, a favorite in late expressionism, is recommended only when it is sure to win territory; guilt feelings are dispensed with altogether. Self-knowledge can inadvertently come about, but it never results from plumbing the depths of the individual soul or cracking the family vault for secrets; it arises only in the mirror of the other's assessing perception. The individual sees himself surrounded by many gazes and uses all the vantages of surveillance to learn about his own identity in the focal point of hostile perception. Naturally, the practice demands a degree of mental awareness that can quickly lead to exhaustion, which threatens even a confidence man with melancholy. In such cases, however, the reader is referred to commandment no. 357: “If you take ill, take cover. That will make you well more quickly.”
Although many of the directives in the Handbrevier correspond to Plessner's behavioral doctrine of distance—not least because both derive from motifs of aestheticism—worlds separate the two. More precisely, what distinguishes the two texts is Serner's exploration of the underworld.
Serner bathes his unscrupulous persona in a comedic light; he teaches the armored ego dances that it can only perform awkwardly in combat boots, and, above all, a matter of life and death permits his character to be cowardly (no. 33). The attitude demanded by Plessner and Schmitt is for Serner so much ballast. Still, the comedic light is intermittent: in the end, the individual flitting through Serner's Handbrevier is as anxious as the others, as if pursued by invisible agents of surveillance. He, too, is in a chronic state of alarm: “It is easier give a pursuer the slip than it is to escape being pursued” (no. 470).
The only available shelter is the code itself, and even here conditions are precarious, for it is in the nature of language to undermine appearances. Rather than give the reader a false sense of security, Serner puts his practical manual of behavior at the beginning of the revised version
Every word is a Blamage, be it well noted. There is nothing to do beyond spewing out verbiage, performing circus tricks on suspension bridges (or over plants, canyons, beds).[41]
Serner's Handbrevier does not forget for a moment that the comedy of dissimulation it recommends is itself only a manner of speech, serving “to manufacture a redemptive heaven over this chaos of rubbish and puzzles.”[42] But, since the persona always acts only from within the awareness that unfeigned authenticity is not to be had-where language itself is already elementary dissimulation—the point becomes to deploy signifying conventions in the consciousness of their artificiality and expression in the knowledge of its schematic nature. The commandments of the conduct code thus propose the possibility of living “inside appearances” (Nietzsche).[43]
Yet the question arises of whether Serner manages to do entirely without authenticity. The crime stories that he collected in the books Der elfte Finger, Zum blauen Affen, Der Pfiff um die Ecke, and Die Tigerin lead us to locations where, he hopes, authenticity does in fact exist, in the cool version of the criminal underworld. There he comes upon an astonishingly rational codex, a high degree of self-reflection on the model of Gracián and Plessner, not nourished by interiority but dictated by the presence of mind of a chess master playing several games at once. Here he finds long-lost genuineness in a deceitfulness that has become first nature. Here too he finds the artful concentration on dissimulation that every one of his actors seeks to achieve, without forgetting about “the dissimulating, deceitful surveillance of the other,” which was one of the cardinal points of the code of courtly behavior.[44] Hope for a language of the heart runs through the criminal underworld.
In one of the stories from the volume Der Pfiff um die Ecke an international check forger wants to make a deal with the Scotland Yard specialist that has been put on the case. They share a brief moment of consensus: “Among high-level experts like ourselves, the only place to explore matters of trust with any security is at the dizzying edge of a cliff.”[45] Trust nevertheless remains a tactical move, subject, like all communication, to cynical calculation. The story of the “Ermordung der Marchese de Brignole-Sale” reports on the contact established by a male
“It's especially hard, practically impossible, to reach an understanding if at least a tiny little bit of trust isn't-given up. The way a better player gives up something to a weaker one.”
“But I'm always surprised when I pull it off. That's one of the clearest sources of mistrust.”
She fell silent. Sorhul thought he caught the hint of a smile.
“It's probably altogether impossible to talk, except as a wild gamble.”
“I'm not sure. Sometimes all you have to do is talk to recognize the opponent's aim. What actually gets said is entirely beside the point.”[46]
And then both walk right into the traps they have set for each other.
No other access to interiority seems to be available to Serner, and it is not surprising that later on he would also condemn this type: in the intellectual space of prefascism he identifies it as “cool romanticism,” alternating between iron hardness and suicidal tendencies. To this day, Serner's Handbrevier stands as a “cynical spectacle on the eve of the dictatorship.”[47] The judgment stems from the disarming quality of an amoral character about whose creatural substance nothing can be determined with confidence.
Annoyance with the type also stems from the difficulty involved in establishing anything definite about the person of its creator, beyond the evidence of his texts. By calling his crime stories memoirs, Serner cultivated a legendary identity even during his lifetime. Thomas Milch compares the author to one story's mysterious analyst of a “memorable conversation” in Florence. Responding to the question, “Who are you?” the character pisses his name in the sand, illegibly, and then disappears into the darkness. His identity has the substance of a dadaist artwork, written in chalk on a blackboard and then wiped out after the performance.[48] Serner cultivated the mask of the gentleman criminal, or the “baron among the soldiers of dada” (Hans Richter), the brilliant cosmopolitan regardless of circumstances, or the pimp.[49] For information about the “genuine” existence of the writer Walter Serner, we have to rely on the few documents that have been gathered over the course of many years' research: official records, birth certificate, university files, police reports, and hotel registrations—and deportation lists for the Theresienstadt concentration camp.[50]
The cult of sincerity does not come to an end until the inevitable anger of disillusion fastens on those who discover that even the unconscious, seemingly the last residue of spontaneity, is “entangled in inauthenticity.”[51]
If an actor rejects from the outset the attitude of sincere communication, then manipulation of the outer world, rather than the expression of his inner world, takes over his dramaturgic orientation.[52]
Those who squander the opportunity for “genuine expression” (and the assumption that the symbolic order in which it could take place offers a transparent, undisguisable glimpse into the inner world) need not wonder if what they suffer in exchange is defeat.
In his critique of American researchers such as Erving Goffman, who stresses the necessity of a dramaturgy of self-enactment, Sighard Neckel maintains that such “artificial” behavior inevitably goes wrong:
Wherever Goffman's “impression management” has become a social norm, the situative dilemma immediately comes up. It represents a particular serious latent danger where public exchange among individuals has a ceremonial coloration.[53]
Attempts to manipulate the codes of ceremonial communication always produce bad results:
The more powerfully … the protagonists of ceremonial behavior are driven … to maintain at all costs the “illusion of their own noninvolvement,” the greater may be the corresponding fear of losing their aesthetic distance from events, of bungling the performance, of suffering a minor interpersonal catastrophe. Fear as a rule only heightens one's vulnerability to embarrassment, which is precisely what coolness is supposed to reduce.[54]
Avoiding catastrophe was already the point for Plessner. The danger, for both him and his descendants, would be half as great if only they would give up the either-or attitude, combining the art of ceremonial behavior, when the situation calls for it, with the reflection that formlessness does not make a situation that has nothing to do with public formality any more authentic.
It is a macabre fact of German cultural history that the “end-to-sincerity” problematic had to be addressed through the medium of the Handbrevier—a handbook for confidence men, that relegates the possibility of humane nonliteral exchange to the criminal demimonde. Ser-ner's Handbrevier focuses on this sad circumstance through the genre of comedy, which is how a shame culture puts its humanity on display. As
Serner's fate after 1927 demonstrates that the German cultural tradition—unlike the French or Anglo-American-had no experimental space for his intellectual figures to operate in. Having had his small oeu-vre published by Paul Steegemann, he withdrew from sight, prompting legends at the time that he had vanished into the milieu of his stories. Today his disappearance suggests “the cliche … that the great cynic, after 1927, stepped down from the pedestal and lived out the lapidary bourgeois life of a married man.”[55] Thomas Milch, pointing out that Serner continued his restless life unchanged but simply avoided Germany after 1933, attempts to refute this tale of exhaustion. In 1938 Serner rented an apartment in Prague and married his longtime companion, Dorothea Herz. Their attempt, following the Nazi invasion, to get a visa for Shanghai failed:
Official documents of the time list Walter Eduard Israel Serner as a language teacher, and Dorothea Sara Serner as a housewife; they are registered in the Prague Jewish community under numbers 36213 and 36212. On 10 August 1942 they were relocated in Transport Ba (as numbers 253 and 1338, among a total of 1,460 people) to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and deported from there on 20 August in Transport Bb to the so-called east. The destination of their final journey is not known.[56]
What is it that prevents us from using the telescope of our research to peer “all the way through the bloody fog at a mirage” of the 19205, in order to recognize the humanity of that time in the refractions that, as Benjamin put it, would show it “in a future state of the world emancipated from magic?”[57] Reconstructions these days tend to raise the dictatorship and its horrors to a telos, which lends all the processes and intellectual motifs an objective function leading toward a wrong end. But in Serner's obscure case we can glimpse the mirages, which ultimately took on more concrete form far from Germany and innocent of the fear. This perception itself is practically taboo, for the faraway land was America and the place was Hollywood.
In Ernst Lubitsch's films, which he made as an emigrant in the 19305, con men, seducers, betrayers, and liars abound. Required of them as well is the mental awareness of the chess master, but the demand does not put them in the chronic state of alarm suffered by their German forbears in the 19205. In Lubitsch's films we see the slogan “Appearance civilizes” (see Figure 7) cast in the light of uninterrupted comedy. There
Appearance civilizes (Ernst Lubitsch. With the permission of Siiddeutscher Verlag, Munich.)
These possibilities are lost to German development because they arise in a place that suffers excommunication by German cultural criticism.