Cryptomania

It was probably an afternoon sometime in spring, Eva thinks whenever she looks at the photograph. The scene is bathed in sunlight. Yet it couldn’t have been particularly warm. The summer herbs hadn’t yet been planted in the window box on the wall. She tries to retrieve this particular moment in her memory. The portrait painter Konstantin Hummler, a close friend of her parents’, had visited them that day and allowed himself to be photographed with herself and her siblings on the terrace at the rear of the house. The wooden chair on which he is sitting, one leg casually crossed over the other, is standing in the far left corner, directly below the living room window. The view into the living room is blocked by a curtain drawn over one of the windowpanes and a potted plant on the windowsill in front of the other. The weather has left its traces on the wall in front of them. Marks of transience that offer a perfect backdrop for the intimacy being played out on this stage, Eva tells herself.

She herself is standing on the right side of the older man, her sister Lena on the left. The elderly man, in turn, has placed his arms around both girls. This embrace offers a support to Eva, who is standing on one foot only, while the left leg is bent, the tip of her foot gently rolled under. Although her younger sister nestles against the chest of the portrait painter, her head is not lying on his shoulder but is held upright. Her brother Max is standing slightly apart. He is merely holding on to the back of the chair with his right hand. His firm grip allows him to lean away slightly from the man seated on it, with his feet crossed one in front of the other like a ballet dancer’s.

The elegant clothes the painter is wearing suggest to Eva that the photograph must have been taken on a Sunday afternoon. His pale shirt is paired with a discretely patterned silk tie. A folded handkerchief is tucked into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. His large, hand-made leather brogues contrast with the children’s worn slip-on shoes. Apart from this, she and her siblings are also smartly dressed. Her brother is wearing a cardigan with large, light-colored buttons. His white, crisply ironed shirt is buttoned up to the collar. She herself has chosen a headband that matches her spotted dress and jacket to hold back her long, dark hair. Her light woolen stockings are the same shade as the lace trim on her collar and skirt pocket. Over Lena’s left ear, a bow decorates her looped pigtail braids. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that one of her knee-high stockings has slipped down toward her ankle. A small visual blemish on the otherwise perfect tableau. And yet this slight carelessness seems fitting. A contemplative reverie prevails over the scene.

None of the four people in the photograph are looking directly into the camera. The two girls gaze ahead wistfully. Her younger self is smiling mischievously, as if she has just thought of something she wants to keep to herself. Although the painter has turned his face slightly down toward her sister, his eyes are closed. Eva wonders whether he is already thinking about how he could reproduce this group portrait on canvas. As for her brother Max, he is looking down at the painter from above, squinting, as though he were intently observing him. The distance separating him from his sisters may be minimal, but it is, nevertheless, distinct. It creates a gap between his body and theirs, in which his arm casts a shadow on the wall behind. A ghostly double of himself, captured in the image.

Whenever Eva looks at the photograph, she tells herself that it couldn’t have been a snapshot. The scene is too contrived to be a chance encounter. Instead, it seems to her as if they had all assumed a pose. She can’t remember who was behind the camera that afternoon. Probably her father. He always had his camera with him whenever they had visitors. Was he the one who decided where each of them should stand? Or was it her brother’s idea to create some space between himself and his sisters? Did her father, looking through the viewfinder, notice that the visual tension this produced would make the composition of the image more dynamic? Eva tries to recreate this moment in her mind. She tries to conjure up the image of her father telling her and her sister to move closer to the portrait painter, then, after hesitating briefly, asking her brother to move away from him slightly. But she can’t actually remember that it happened this way.

One thing, however, is certain. Her father was standing apart. He couldn’t have been on the terrace with them. The moment of shared sympathy that the photograph captures takes place on a slightly elevated stage. Eva recalls that several steps led down from the terrace, separating it from the lawn behind the house. That’s where he must have been standing when he pressed the shutter. He is the director, the one in control. Even now, Eva feels his invisible presence.

Whenever she looks at this scene, frozen in time, the past comes back to life. Once more she can feel the security of the old man’s embrace and the calm radiating from him. But she can’t be certain whether this intimacy is a real memory or not. Is it in fact the photograph that has produced this reminiscence?

Only much later, years after the portrait painter’s death, did Eva realize how unusual his visits to her home must have been. Konstantin Hummler had been an influential professor at the Art Academy in Berlin since the late 1930s. Hitler, whose portrait he painted several times, even considered him to be one of the most significant artists of the Third Reich. Although her father, the son of Eastern European Jews lucky enough to emigrate to Brooklyn around the turn of the century, lived in Europe at the time, he was stationed in London. They must have met after the war, when her father was an officer in the American military, stationed in Bavaria. In Munich, he was able to continue his war against the Nazis, helping the Allies determine who should be tried before a tribunal for their actions in the Third Reich and who could be de-Nazified.

Hummler had also returned to his home in the Bavarian capital after the war. By giving up his position in Berlin, he wanted to openly acknowledge that he had profited from an inhuman political system. He chose to withdraw from the public eye. In Munich, he didn’t join the faculty of the Art Academy, where his career had begun. He didn’t accept any public offices, nor did he sit on jury panels. He only painted portraits on private commission.

The photograph had been gifted to Eva by Hummler’s wife, Katja. She was younger and had survived him by many years. When she handed it to Eva, she assured her that Konsti had felt so much at home when he visited his Jewish friend’s family. At the time, Eva had the feeling that Katja, in giving her this photograph, had wanted to prove something to her. Since then, she had often wondered whether there had been a particular reason why the painter had his photograph taken with her and her siblings that afternoon. Had he asked for this photograph? Or was it her father who had wanted to give him something? Was it a token of recognition of their friendship?

When Eva’s father returned to Munich with her mother in the early 1950s, they had moved to the suburbs. He had given up his law office in Falls Church, Virginia, because of a lucrative job offer. Konsti and Katja were regular guests in the house in which Eva and her siblings grew up. That the couple had felt so comfortable there was something Eva always wondered about. Had it become a sanctuary for them? A place of refuge, where they didn’t have to justify what they had done during the Third Reich? But then again, their home seemed to have been a neutral zone for everyone. Her father no longer practiced the religious customs he had grown up with in Brooklyn. The war, collaboration and complicity were never openly discussed. Neither was antisemitism. Any critical questions she asked always seemed to lead to her parents’ derogatory assertion: “You weren’t there. You didn’t live through it. You can’t judge.”

Unable to determine what it is about this image that continues to fascinate her, Eva shows it to her friend Samantha, a historian of photography. It was she who drew her attention to a strange detail. Owing to the camera angle, the painter’s hands appear unusually large—massive, in fact. They look unsettling, as though they were foreign body parts that had taken on a life of their own. While they appear to be embracing the two young girls, there is something possessive about this gesture. Samantha’s remark made her notice something else as well. Both she and her sister have gently curled their fingers inward, as if turning their hands into little fists. They are merely touching the painter’s jacket with their fingertips. Is this a coincidental gesture, without significance? Or does it indicate an intuitive self-protection?

Eva can’t help but notice how this encounter marks a very special moment in time. Only after the war would this scene of shared intimacy between Konsti Hummler and the children of his Jewish friend have been possible. Thirty years earlier he might have denounced her family. Or would he have put himself in danger in order to hide them or help them flee? She tells herself that this visit was possible only because things had changed after the war. But at the time, she couldn’t have been aware of this. As a ten-year-old you don’t take notes on what is going on around you. Eva is well aware that she is caught in the realm of speculation. She will never know how Konsti felt that afternoon, or what her father was thinking when he pressed the shutter. But for her, this photograph has a very particular significance—it is the family portrait with a German grandfather that she never had.

_{• • •}

“I must admit, there’s something that is still not clear to me,” Sam declares, pointing to her copy of Shakespeare’s plays, which she had pushed to the other side of the table to make room for the lunch they had just finished eating. “How are we going to connect the naughty trick Maria plays on Malvolio in Twelfth Night with the political conspiracy in Julius Caesar? In the comedy we have this vain but also pretty pathetic Puritan. I see your point. He falls for the forged love letter because he wants to be duped. He has long since entertained the fantasy that the Countess Olivia is secretly in love with him. So it isn’t just because Maria can imitate her mistress’s handwriting. What is so clever about her ruse is that she chooses to write this love letter in the form of a riddle. Because she has been spying on him, she is privy to Malvolio’s daydreams. And so she can count on him to interpret the encrypted message as a love declaration meant specifically for him.”

Eva nods in agreement. “Exactly. To him, the letter is proof of his mistress’s secret love precisely because it is encoded.”

“So Malvolio persuades himself that Olivia wants him to court her because, conceited as he is, he believes he has solved the riddle. All that makes perfect sense to me. But here’s my problem. A romantic secret is something very different from a political conspiracy.”

It had been Sam’s idea for them to meet up in her mother’s vacation home in Schliersee. It seemed the perfect place for them to work undisturbed on their “Shakespeare project.” They weren’t yet sure where it would lead them, but from the start Eva wanted to aggregate bits and pieces from different plays by focusing only on secrets and conspiracies. She was sure that they would discover something new about the Bard’s conception of the world as stage if they focused on characters who were hiding something or disguising themselves, pretending to be someone else. The two of them had already met several times in the previous months and decided which plays they wanted to concentrate on. But the actual planning of the project had not yet taken place. Something kept getting in the way. Eva, now in her mid-thirties, was very committed to her students in the department of theater studies at Munich University. But that alone wasn’t the problem. She allowed herself to be distracted by other commitments. Although she often complained about all the meetings she had to attend, Sam knew how much she actually enjoyed them. They made her feel indispensable.

Sam suspected that was why she kept taking on new tasks. She often wondered whether all this frantic activity was a screen for something. At times, Eva seemed to her like a top which had to keep spinning for fear of toppling over. But Sam herself was also partly to blame for their procrastination. As a freelancer, she couldn’t afford to turn down lucrative job offers. The preparation for an exhibition with a former war photographer had recently taken up much of her time. She had actually been grateful that Eva seemed to be preoccupied with other things.

Now the two are finally sitting together on the small terrace behind the house. Eva, who had gone to the farmer’s market that morning, had bought lots of spinach and apples and prepared a salad. The plates had not yet been cleared. Leftovers from the cheese, the salami and the bread are still lying on the wooden serving board. Eva picks at the breadcrumbs that are scattered on the tablecloth while listening attentively to her friend. She likes the way Sam asserts her train of thought. Like a word acrobat, she deftly executes each new spin in her argument, never running the risk of losing her balance. Eva, in her enthusiasm, tends to get tangled up in all kinds of spontaneous associations. But she knows she can rely on Sam, whom she has known since high school, to help her unravel them again. Now, however, she feels she must refute her objection.

“Love is definitely a kind of conspiracy. I admit, a political cabal is aimed at a particular person. But let’s not forget, those involved in an assassination or a coup conspire in secrecy. And isn’t that what happens when you are in love? You are also convinced that there is a secret bond between yourself and the person you desire.” Eva pauses briefly to see whether Sam wants to object but, as this doesn’t seem to be the case, she continues: “We can even take the analogy further. Once you have embarked on a romantic fantasy, this intimacy becomes the one and only thing of importance. Everything else disappears in the background. And, because it is so exclusive, love always has a trace of violence. The goal, after all, is to overwhelm the person you love. You want to drag them into your own vortex of desire.” Eva looks directly at Sam with her clear blue eyes, as though to challenge her. “But you are right, there is a difference. Secrecy in politics works with conspiracies; secrecy in love works with concealment.”

While Eva continues to speak, Sam leans back in her chair. She catches herself paying more attention to the movement of her friend’s hands. Eva is drawing invisible figures in the air—small squares and spirals, an emphatically placed dot and short lines, following upon each other in quick succession. Sam is reminded of what Eva told her about her father’s rhetorical skill. His success as a criminal defense lawyer, she claimed, was largely due to the way he was able to transform a body of evidence into a plausible story. If his own reconstruction of the events was more convincing than that of the prosecution, he would win the case. The legal argument was less decisive for the jury than the emotional impact of his final speech.

Though Eva’s gaze wanders into the distance as she heads toward her summation, the jury she is trying to convince this afternoon is reduced to a single person: Sam, who has been watching her intently. “What I find so compelling in Shakespeare’s plays isn’t just the sheer abundance of secrets. I am most taken by those characters who crave the act of secrecy itself. For me, it’s a kind of perversion. A bit like the kleptomaniac, who steals something even though she would have the money to buy it. That’s why I want to call this compulsive desire for secrecy ‘cryptomania.’ By withholding information from others, the cryptomaniac believes herself to have power.”

“But isn’t it also a form of self-delusion? From what you are saying, it seems to me that it doesn’t matter whether the secret actually exists or not.”

Eva smiles, happy that she can elaborate her theory. “The cryptomaniac believes that secret things are going on everywhere. She is convinced that people are keeping something from her. Or that they are doing something behind her back. And she is in the center of this deception. Everything that happens to her is meaningful because it is part of a hidden scheme. Yet she alone is alert enough to detect this while all the others are oblivious to it.”

Sam is uncomfortable with the way they seem to have digressed from their actual topic. She would prefer to bring the conversation back to Shakespeare. But she remains true to her name. Samantha—the one who listens. Patiently, she allows Eva to indulge in the spin of her deliberation a little longer. “If we decide to take cryptomania as the starting point for our project, we could then ask ourselves, what remains for the characters when everything that could be enjoyed only in secret is ultimately revealed? For me, the dramatic resolution in the final act is never really convincing. But then again, don’t we always treat a secret as though it were a hidden treasure? You don’t really want to disclose it. You want to keep it to yourself.”

Sam, unwilling to get too personal, shifts the discussion in a different direction. “I see why you are taken with a speculative approach to Shakespeare. But we mustn’t lose sight of the historical background. After all, Queen Elizabeth is famous for the intricate network of spies she cultivated at her court. You told me that she not only had her political opponents under constant surveillance but also her courtiers. Today we would call that a culture of paranoia. So why don’t we focus our project on the secret police during the reign of Elizabeth I? That would bring us back to political conspiracies.”

“And to the ghosts that haunt these plays. They are secret agents in their own right who return from the underworld with encoded messages. Just as we are haunted by what we repress. And what haunts us we try to keep secret.”

Ever since they started talking about secrets and conspiracies in Shakespeare, Sam has asked herself why the idea of being haunted by the past was so important for Eva. When Sam had approached her with this project, Eva had openly admitted that her motivation wasn’t purely academic. She was convinced that there were secrets in her family, which her parents didn’t want to disclose. There were all kinds of discrepancies in the way they talked about the past, and too many gaps. She hoped Shakespeare might help her understand this tactic of camouflage.

Now, however, Sam finds herself getting impatient. As much as she appreciates Eva’s imaginative meandering, it also irritates her when it leads her too far astray. They run the risk of not making any progress with their project. She realizes that she is the one who will have to be pragmatic. “If we don’t just treat Shakespeare’s cryptomania as a personal issue, we could also draw a clearer connection to the present. Yesterday we talked about how the fiftieth anniversary of the capitulation of the Nazis has been all over the media in the past few weeks. There is so much from that period which is hushed up. Of course, everyone who lived at the time knows what happened. But still, they don’t want to talk about it. They prefer to keep their memories to themselves. Isn’t that also a form of cryptomania?”

Eva, who hasn’t been listening properly, tarries with the phantoms of the past. “Perhaps we so fervently hold onto secrets because, for some reason, they are important to us. Which is why I like the idea of the hidden treasure. We know that we could recover it. But it is only valuable as a revelation still to come.”

_{• • •}

Later in the evening, when it has become too cold to sit outside, the two continue their conversation in the living room. Eva has opened a bottle of red wine and poured them each a glass before making herself comfortable on the sofa. The darkness behind the window shields them from the outside world. Their conversation becomes more intimate.

Sam is the first to speak. “All afternoon, while we were talking about being haunted by family secrets, I have been thinking about Georges Perec’s narrative experiment. This is the way it goes. You recall an event from the past, but each time you zero in on a detail, you begin again by saying ‘I remember.’ The memory fragments become a sequence, in which you play a double role. You are the one experiencing a scene again and the one narrating it.”

Eva, leaning back on one of the pillows, offers to begin.

“I remember visiting my father in his office one afternoon. I had to make a decision and wanted to ask him for advice.

“I remember that it was a dark, rainy day. The hazy light in the room hung like a veil over us. He got up from his desk and sat down on the leather sofa that stood against one of the walls. I sat close to him on the leather armchair next to it. In front of us both, the glass table was covered with the files he was working on.

“I remember that he listened to me attentively. Which was unusual for him. I was surprised, and flattered. I had the feeling he was taking me very seriously.

“I remember that he responded with an anecdote. At the end of the war, he and two comrades parachuted behind enemy lines. As he spoke, his facial expression became somber, his words deliberate.

“I remember the poignant punch line of the anecdote. He was the only one to survive. After he landed and peeled himself out of his parachute, he found the other two lying dead on the ground.

“I remember how he ended his story. He said, ‘There was a George Bromfield before and a George Bromfield after.’

“I remember that the scene has stuck with me, although I forgot why I had come to ask him for advice. Even then, I thought to myself, it must have been the key event in his war years, something he could never let go.”

Abruptly interrupting her reminiscence, Eva, who had been gazing at the darkness behind the window, turns to Sam. “Survivors often feel guilt toward the dead, who lost their lives in their stead. Lately, however, I have begun to ask myself whether this scene could have taken place at all. As an adolescent, my father injured his left eye while playing with an air pistol and was almost blind in that eye. He couldn’t have been with the paratroopers. And so he couldn’t have parachuted behind enemy lines. I kind of suspect that he got this story from a book about the D-Day landing. Or from one of the war thrillers he liked to read. He simply turned an imaginary event into a memory. But one thing I know for sure—when he related the anecdote, he was absolutely convinced it had actually happened.”

“But why would your father invent such a story? You’d think if you were going to appropriate a false memory it would be a pleasant one. Or did he like this story because it has to do with survival? Maybe it’s not about guilt at all but about a sense of power. Your brother always accuses your parents of being selfish, but he also admits that this willful self-absorption must have had something to do with traumatic experiences during the war. Things they preferred to idealize.”

“Or to conceal.”

“Maybe. But what I don’t understand: If you are so convinced that your parents are keeping something secret from you, why didn’t you simply ask them?”

“But I did. Constantly. You know me. I always want to clear things up, because I don’t like it when people delude themselves. But my parents have never given me a straight answer. Which is why I am convinced that they have a secret pact with each other.”

Sam has the feeling that by insisting that her parents are keeping something from her, it is Eva who is deluding herself. She wants to find out what lies behind this tenacious suspicion. “Max is still so bitter about his youth. Whenever he visits from New York, we always end up talking about the many small injuries that he still carries around with him. And yet he holds onto his family memories. The last time he was here, he showed me the thick photo album he’s been working on for some time now. Apparently, he has removed a lot of snapshots from your mother’s albums and reassembled them. As we leafed through the pages, he described the different scenes in loving detail. I realized that I only know your father from the stories you have told me about him.”

“That’s precisely the point. These photographs are relics from a past to which Max and I have no direct access. And still they concern us.”

“But why do you enjoy turning everything you don’t know into some big family secret? Maybe there’s nothing there at all. Or —and that’s something I know all too well from my mother—what you call a secret pact is simply the wish to forget.”

Eva takes Sam’s objection as an invitation to embellish her conjecture. “It has to do with the fact that there are no other relatives we might ask. When I was born, my German grandfather was no longer alive. He went missing somewhere in Russia during the war. Although Max and I used to visit our grandmother a lot while she was still alive, she and my mother weren’t really on good terms. There was some terrible disagreement, but we never really found out what it was about. As for my American grandparents, I only visited them once in Brooklyn before they died. Don’t forget, at the time transatlantic flights were prohibitively expensive. So most of what we know about our family we have from our parents. They’re not only the primary witnesses. There is also no one left who could refute what they say.”

“And your sister Lena, what does she say to all of this?”

“We never really talked about this with her. And still don’t. You remember what it was like when we were kids. Max and I were so close, we didn’t want to include her in our games. She didn’t seem to fit in. I have to admit we were probably quite arrogant, but she was also so terribly moody. As a child she used to have temper tantrums if she didn’t immediately get what she wanted. Then she would howl for hours and throw her toys around. Only our father was able to calm her down. Which is why she continues to be so fixated on him. She always pretends she is the only one privy to his secrets. She is also the only one of us who has always had a good relationship with Tash. Even before our father separated from my mother and moved to New York with her. Max visits them from time to time. But the last time we talked on the phone, he confessed that he found these visits quite weird. Our father seems to be living a surrogate family life with his former secretary—complete with a dog and a white picket fence.”

Sam can only nod in silence as Eva resolutely adds, “Clearly, there’s something odd there as well.” She would have loved to ask about the dog, but that might come across as a touch too frivolous. Any further objection at this point seems inappropriate.

_{• • •}

After Eva has retired to her room, the memories that her conversation with Sam evoked continue to preoccupy her. Questions for which she has only vague answers won’t leave her alone. Pensively, she slips into her nightgown. She places her wristwatch and her earrings into the porcelain bowl on the bedside table next to the reading lamp. She neatly folds her underwear and places it on the chair next to the bed, her dress and tights over the backrest, her shoes close together underneath. As though she were composing a still life with this discarded daytime self, meant to watch over her sleep. The final touch is filling the water carafe, in case she gets thirsty during the night.

She sits upright on the bed for a while, her bent legs under the covers. Through the open window she looks out at the clear nocturnal sky. She can’t make out any signs of the zodiac, only a few scattered stars. Her gaze zeros in on one particular star, twinkling more brightly than the others. It has taken years, she tells herself, for its light to reach her bedroom. That’s how far away it is. But then again, this particular star may no longer exist. Even though she still sees its radiance, it may well have been extinguished long ago. Only the movement through space has preserved its shape. What she now sees is what it once was.

Drawn into a deep calm by this thought, she stretches out her legs, fluffs the pillow and pulls the blanket up under her chin as she slides down under it. Lying on her back, she whispers to herself:

“I remember visiting Konsti’s studio on the top floor of the apartment building at the Maximilliansplatz. Huge glass windows look out onto the inner courtyards. He needs much light to paint.

“I remember a long wooden table, set for dinner, at the front of the room. Paintings are hanging on the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Many portraits, in various sizes, but also a few still lives. At the very back of the room stands one of his easels.

“I remember that I couldn’t make out the painting he was currently working on. On the table next to it, his palette, many tubes and brushes in dirty jars. The smell of paint hovering over them.

“I remember that I saw the final version of the family portrait that evening for the first time. It was on another easel, facing the dinner table. While the adults sat down, cocktail glasses in hand, they offered appreciative comments.

“I remember how moved I was to see my father in the center of the composition. A paterfamilias, proudly towering over the other figures. One of his hands casually tucked away in his trouser pocket. His tie swaying, giving the impression that he is about to move forward, out of the picture frame, directly towards us.

“I remember how much less lifelike my mother appeared to me in comparison. Sitting in an armchair slightly to the right of him, her hands folded in her lap. My painted self is leaning against the right arm of the chair, Lena’s is sitting on the left arm. In the far left corner, Max is sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“I remember feeling that my father is the only one Konsti got right. The entire vitality of the portrait lies with him. The rest of us seemed to me like dolls, similar to us and yet not quite us.

“I remember that, as a first course, Katja served a cream of asparagus soup flavored with lemon. I bit into a lemon seed. The bitter taste lingered in my mouth for several minutes. I remember thinking that this shouldn’t happen to an experienced cook like her.

“I remember that everyone continued talking about the portrait during dinner. Max, who had started taking private painting lessons with Konsti, asked about his technique. How he applied the colors, when he worked with a brush, when with a palette knife.

“I remember that my mother seemed to be flattered by her elegant appearance on canvas. Lena, bored as always, was sliding impatiently on her chair the whole time. Katja sat at the top end of the table. She was the only one who had her back to the portrait. She seemed pleased with the praise her husband garnered. She was the perfect hostess, intent on making everyone else comfortable, and only spoke when the conversation threatened to stall.”

“I remember feeling that I didn’t belong to this party. Instead of joining in, I was watching everyone else. I wanted to find out whether the portrait had the same uncanny effect on them. I remember wondering why it had been painted in the first place. Did our father commission it? Or had Konsti suggested it to him?”

–

Excerpt from the novel Merchant of Secrets (2023), published by Limmat Verlag. Translated from German by the author for Ursula.

Elisabeth Bronfen is an author, cultural critic and curator based in Zurich. Retired from the University of Zurich, she is currently a global distinguished professor at New York University. Her monographs include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) and Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama (2020).