Homage to a Broken Man: The Life of J. Heinrich Arnold - Plough

Sannerz 26They laughed, too, when others might have cried or grown upset. “It’s onlyone step from the ridiculous to the sublime,” they would remind each other,when daily life took a turn toward the absurd. There were plenty of such moments,as on the day the community lost its only cow. The responsibility formilking and feeding her fell to a young member of the household called Otto.But Otto was a poet, and if a verse entered his mind while he was milking,so be it: the milking must wait. Half an hour might pass, and then an hour,and still Otto sat locked in his bedroom, writing, as the jilted cow bellowed inpain. Eva, who was in love with Otto, made sure that nothing distracted himat such times. Tiptoeing through the house with her finger on her lips, sheshushed the children: “Please be quiet! Otto is writing poetry!”The cow took her revenge. As time went on, she gave less and less milk, andwhen she grew so thin that Eberhard could hang his hat on her jutting bones,he saw that there was no other alternative but to sell her. With her went thechildren’s supply of milk and butter.In general, food was always short, unless you counted the wild spinach thechildren were sent out to pick. From the first month the family had movedinto the villa, they had been besieged by a steady army of guests—more thantwo thousand came during the first year alone—and since then, the stream ofvisitors had never stopped. Some were merely curious, and quickly moved on;others stayed longer, sometimes for days. All tended to arrive unannounced.But here again, Moni and Emmy were as likely to laugh as to sigh. If moreshowed up for dinner than expected, they would simply try to stretch whatthey had: “Ten were invited; twenty have come—put water in the soup, andbid them welcome!”Many of the guests were college-age hikers who came wearing bright,peasant-style costumes with guitars slung over their backs. They regardedDr. Arnold’s settlement as a bastion of Youth Movement values and guardedit carefully against infiltration. If a fellow guest came wearing long trousers(bourgeois!) instead of shorts, he might wake the next morning to find themHomage to a Broken Man