Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 11:03 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN SIGHTING: Berlin tennis courts
Christoph Heuke: One from the trivia department: Berlin newspaper "Der
Tagesspiegel" runs a piece about the tennis courts on Cicerostrasse,
which are in decay and threatened by real
estate speculation. The author, German novelist Peter Schneider, claims
that Nabokov has given tennis lessons on
exactly these grounds and also mentions the well-known photograph
showing him with the Siewert sisters. The
text is in German, of course: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/aufschlag-nabokov/1940968.html
JM: My
claudicating German is insufficient to give me confidence to risk a
comment or an interpretation.
I selected a paragraph, though, the one that comes right before Peter
Schneider mentions Nabokov's tennis classes, at the Cicerostrasse
courts: "Vor allem die Psychoanalytiker, die immer im Voraus
buchten, erschienen in so großer Zahl, dass Spontan-Gäste wie ich das
Gefühl hatten, die besseren Plätze seien bis Jahresende für
Seelendoktoren reserviert. Die Branche gehörte schon damals zu einem
der wenigen blühenden Geschäftszweige in Berlin." It mentions the
"Vienna/Berlin delegation," the whacking Freudian school of fish, who
represents one of the most successful crowds of
pratictioners, tennis-players and match-watchers. It describes how
these sportsmen efficiently book in advance to obtain access to the
better places available in the public domain, therefore pushing
away late-comers or spontaneous adherents. Perhaps this fact motivated
Nabokov to exclaim: "Freudians, keep out!"?
Arguments about who were the important figures in the past that
frequented these grounds, protected by the shade of high waving
popplars (are there more Roman names in the nearby alleys, like the
Shakespearean unreal-estate ones, in "Pale Fire"?), are not strong
enough to save this space from real-estate speculators, philistines
who carry not a cell of artistic or historic fetichism in their veins...