Consider the following from Kiyoshi: “Art is the shadow of the bird.”

The implications buried in this simple idea are fascinating and numerous. The bird is life, the passing scene, or if you will, history itself. Under certain circumstances, the shadow is birdlike, representational. Under different circumstances, it is an abstraction, a plane geometric projection very different from its source. The artist in this allegory is the sun, whose position in the sky above the bird determines the shape that the shadow will take.

But how do we explain a shadow when there is no bird?

It is this question which was so astonishingly illustrated in the 1933 allegorical drama The Mensuren (“The Duel”) that an account of the play and its author follows here. (The notes of journalist Ruprecht Jabloner, who reviewed the play in its single performance in 1933, serve as the primary source.)

It is commonly known that the play’s author raised money for production by selling the furnishings of a house he was renting. When later challenged in a Munich court, he insisted that as an artist he was “not subject to human laws and standards.” In retrospect, his pronouncement vibrates with meaning..

As The Mensuren begins, a generalized map appears on stage in the form of a giant spider web. A large and hairy black spider sleeps in the web, downstageleft, aware nonethless that on the branch of a great tree sits an old bird, which has the power to smash the web and eat him. (After some initial puzzlement, Jabloner interprets the spider as Chancellor Hitler and the old bird as German President Hindenburg.)
The appearance on the stage, downstageright, of a flying beetle, a firefly (Stormtroop leader Ernst Roehm, Jabloner decides), suddenly rouses the spider from its sleep to the silent acknowledgement that this web is big enough only for one bug, himself. The spider extends one of its black legs, and Beetle Roehm retreats in midair above the stage. The wires break and sway, threatening to swing the beetle right into the web.

In retreat, the beetle flies backward away from the web, nearly over the audience, causing a general outcry of mingled fear and excitement. (As Jabloner points out months later, “This was undoubtedly Roehm’s agreement to put the Stormtroopers on leave for the month of July, 1934!”) The old bird on the branch ruffles its regal feathers in disdainful acceptance. The spider whispers almost inaudibly in its sleep, “My breath will last longer than the old bird’s meaning, it is surmised, Hindenburg’s.

In a later scene, the web is played by three lookalikes. They are costumed in white sticky material and joined together by loose, sticky ropes. Finely choreographed, they move as one against the black backdrop. A fierce little gray man now appears in uniform, a black spider embroidered on each sleeve, obsessively jerking a decorated yo-yo. (“It’s Hitler, of course,” Jabloner writes. Metamorphosed!”) The web-trinity mumbles invectives to the little man about the Beetle, who is now hibernating at a pond to the south.

Suddenly, the stage is filled with astrologermagicians in black robes patterned with moon and stars, with tall black conepeaked, starstudded hats. As the little man rushes offstage doing elaborate tricks with his yoyo, he is replaced by another character who is taken by Jabloner to represent General von Reichenau of the German Army. Dressed as an exterminator, von Reichenau despises insects, especially beetles. When the trinity whisper lies about Beetle Roehm in his ear, he passionately turns and cries, “The Beetles are arming themselves silently.” His words also deal with the singlemindedness of the Coleoptera order, of which the f irefly is a specie.

The little man returns, stageright, snapping his yoyo right up into his hand, inclining his head to the audience for applause for his magical control. The exterminator stamps a highbooted leg. Spiderman makes a palmsup, what’s itallabout? gesture. The exterminator yells, “Now is the time to act!”

“Don’t say more than what has to be said,” Spiderman says. The cryptic words somehow soothe the excited exterminator, and Spiderman
puts his arm around the exterminator’s shoulder, who eyes the embrace with the droll disapproval which is the stock response to a homosexual advance. As the duo move offstage left, Spiderman motions behind his back, snapping his yoyo up and down masterfully.
The lights dim quickly to black and come up with Spiderman appearing at a ceremonial procession led by a figure at once religious and military. The figure wears a floorlength white gown embroidered with purple and gold, and a highpeaked hat. But his staff, which knocks against the ground in an audience-silencing rhythm, is topped by a brilliant twisted brass spider, which a spotlight emblazons. Spotlights all about the nightlighted stage then create a strobe effect, which dizzies and hypnotizes the audience.

An apparent wedding takes place with Spiderman in the role of the bride’s father, and the play dramatically ends as bells ring and the bride and groom buzz at one another in a sexual fever. A telephone’s insistent ringing is also heard.

The play, as history has it, was forced to close after only one performance by an enraged group of cultural guardians. And the playwright, accosted at a favorite cafe, was badly beaten, the fingers of his left, his writing hand, individually broken. The script itself vanished, and only Jabloner’s notes recount the essentials of the performance. But most remarkable (if true), the play as recorded by Jabloner was a clearcut prescient representation of events that were to occur a full sixteen months later! The author was beaten by a gang of brownshirts celebrating the Reichstag fire of 1933, and the play appeared whole to him as a vision in his hospital bed.

With the energy of a religious zealot, he saw to it that a production was mounted. Following a six month prison sentence for the sale of furniture he did not own, he was hounded from Germany before a second play, Colibri, was performed. In 1935, he founded the wellknown religious order that bears his name to this day.

In reality, we know also that a telephone did dramatically and insistently ring in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Essen on the Thursday night of June 28, 1934. And that Karl Ernst, a key Stormtrooper leader from Berlin, had been the groom at an extraordinary wedding ceremony, which included Chancellor Hitler and other highranking Nazis. It was at this Essen wedding that Hitler had been targeted for assassination, though a suspicious pastry chef warned the SS, and the plot was thwarted several days earlier.

Horst Doerner, one of Hitler’s bodyguards on this wedding trip, heard the phone ring all night long. Later he saw messenger Paul Korner (a friend of Goering’s) arrive to tell Hitler in person about an “imminent” Stormtrooper uprising, an uprising the German Army (General von Reichenau) greatly feared. On Hitler’s orders, Horst was sent back with others to Berlin to alert his fellows in the SS Leibstandarte. Hitler phoned Roehm, who was vacationing in the south, lakeside, and arranged a meeting with the head Stormtroop leader for Saturday, the 30th.

Horst arrived in Berlin in the early morning hours of Friday, the 29th. Following a typically early breakfast, he attended to his official responsibilities, then called his girl (Lisel Ganz) to make a date for lunch. The wedding, prototypically Aryan, had been a special inspiration to him, and his last dream before waking had been rich with meaning.