Hans Richter in his studio, Southbury, Connecticut, c. 1970

POSTSCRIPT

All of my friends who died young of natural deaths, like van Doesburg, Tanguy, Eggeling, and others, were not confronted by old age—nor were the many other contemporaries who were driven from their various countries and who perished, somewhere and somehow, during the mad cannibal years. It was a mass migration in which we were involved, like the ones we had read about in the history books. We were all, or we still are, forced to leave our homes, to set out, to go forth.

This historical coercion sent many into regions where they received new impulses and were fired to greater achievements. Others, Olympian in their motions, were untouched by fate, even though they sometimes had to flee in horror through private countries and nights of cloud.

And there were those who, in the Pyrenees, on the lovely Côte d’Azur, or condemned in concentration camps, committed suicide or were murdered. Thousands whom I did not know personally, but only by name—and friends, too, like Walter Hasenclever, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, and the friendliest of friends, Otto Freundlich. His name was his nature.

On Freundlich’s staircase in Berlin, primeval giants in plaster and cement towered up to the next floor. He himself was big, with a heavy body, a heavy head, and a heavy manner of speaking. He was the very first German abstract painter and sculptor; even before I had met him in 1912, he objectified the nonobjective, in gigantic forms or in minute calligraphic drawings in which countless parallel lines made free and dancing movements. Ludwig Rubiner, usually sarcastic and strict, used to announce even in those days that he was going to set up one of Freundlich’s primeval gods as a memorial to him, in some park or another.

Later, Freundlich and I sat together in his studio in Paris not far from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and we heard Hitler vowing on the radio that the Rhineland occupation was the last of his demands, that peace would be guaranteed—and we were dismayed. With sinking hearts we contradicted our French friends in the Closerie des Lilas when they said, wishfully thinking, that they believed Hitler’s vows. By then we knew that we were trapped.

Chance spared some of us the worst, while others went to their doom, without hope. Our task, as the more fortunate ones who survived, is to remember those who were lost to us, and whom we shall not see until the next resurrection.

The small portion of eternity that they represent must not be lost in the great eternity.