September. Berlin twenty years ago, Berlin ten years ago, Berlin now. The first time, I was invited by the D.A.A.D.; the second time, I invited myself; the third time, it was the government of Nordrhein-Westfalen. During that first visit, I had started my notes on Berlin in all innocence: a writer lives in a foreign city and makes notes about what he experiences, what he sees and reads. A concert by Mauricio Kagel, a walk in Charlottenburg, a visit to Lübars, which was just inside the Wall. All of it normal, except Berlin was no normal city, and for anyone living there in that eventful year of 1989 it will never be normal again. I will never be rid of it, that double line of separation, the line running between two political systems, the line between two eras. Long before 1989, I had seen the bare, snowy space of Potsdamer Platz from the windows of the Hotel Esplanade, with the obscene bulge of the Führerbunker in the distance and, so much closer, the geometric lines of the chevaux-de-frise, dark pieces of metal, angled upwards, designed to thwart any escape attempt.
That is not something you would wish to discuss again. It is in the past, just as the photographs of the same square in 1929, full of old-fashioned cars and crowds rushing or strolling past, were already part of the past back then. Later, during my first return, I saw the foundations of what were obviously going to be enormous buildings being rammed into the sandy ground, which looked like some immense mass grave. And now that the buildings are there, you have to crane your neck to take in their entire height, Babylonian temples, which have crushed the past beneath them. I look for the Hotel Esplanade, but when I finally find it I recognize nothing. A section of the former Kaisersaal is preserved behind glass, but it is like the double death of butterflies pinned inside a display case; they should have perished long ago, but they are still here, although they will never fly again. I wander among the big buildings for a while, a homunculus in a giant architectural model, but this is not a model; it is real. Do I miss anything? The Berlin of the past? No. I am simply unable to delete the past from my system in such places; the only option would be to go and live there again. In that sense, my three months in Westphalia are perfect practice. I shall surrender myself to the city once again, a visitor from a small European country in the capital of a large European country that shares some of its past with the small country. I can read the drama of my first farewell in my own book. I wanted to know what would become of Germany “when it is big.” As I read those lines again, I detect a sense of pathos, but that sensation is never entirely absent in the vicinity of the Reichstag and the Brandenburger Tor. Such buildings are out of keeping with the introspection of Bach or the intellectuality of Schönberg; if they could sing, they would produce a different kind of music, heavy and dramatic. Wagner is the most German of all composers, the generals around the Grosser Stern could be taken for heroes from an opera, given the poses they are striking, and for someone who comes from a small city with narrow streets and quiet canals, the open spaces and wide avenues of Berlin, with their imposing buildings and statues flanked by heraldic lions and eagles, seem like an expression of power. Memories of Prussia, film images of parades, never entirely forgotten, of heroic music drifting on the wind . . . and then that other pathos of the two living Russian statues planting the flag of victory, and therefore defeat, on the Reichstag: damage and destruction, division and reunification, a Wall and an airlift, a city pushed to and fro like a chess piece on the board of history. Try acting normally after all of that. But there lies the miracle: the Germans have managed to do so. Germany has succeeded, as far as such a thing is possible, in coming to terms with one past through grief and understanding, by realizing that it will never entirely disappear. Not only that, the country has also internalized, again as far as it is possible, that other past and, without wiping it out (you can never do that to a past), has transformed it, through accountability, habituation, wear and tear, into a present that looks like today.
Potsdamer Platz, Sony Centre, detail
Der Löwenkämpfer by Albert Wolff, 1861, in front of Das Alte Museum, Berlin Mitte
But am I right about Wagner and Schönberg? With Schinkel, wouldn’t you be more likely to think of . . . actually, which composer would you choose if you wanted to express his architecture as music? What music did Goethe listen to? I can’t come up with an answer. The gigantic Greek columns of his museum beside the Dom call for lofty triumph, Apollonian radiance, but less than half an hour later, near the Nikolaikirche, I come across a statue of a horse and a dragon engaged in a furious fight, and that takes me back to Wagner.
How have I not noticed this statue before, even though it is not far from Zum Nussbaum, a pub I used to visit back then when I came to the East? There is nothing else for it: I shall have to get to know Berlin all over again. I begin with the humblest of lessons: I disguise myself as a tourist from Phoenix, Arizona, and I go on a boat tour. It is a glorious day in October, not yet the grey tundra weather that will reign in a month or so, and you can still sit outside, on the top deck. It is not busy, the wind is tugging a little at the words coming from the loudspeakers, at the names and the dates, but that is fine by me. I am happy to let the city glide past. Almost everything I see comes with a memory attached, but I do not want to think about that now. I want to see the city as a stranger, as someone who has never been here before.
I find the Bundeskanzleramt modest, and actually rather beautiful. Is this where the government of the third-largest economic power in the world has its seat? Is this the place that somewhat reluctantly sends soldiers, who once appeared to have returned home for good, to hostile deserts on the other side of the world, because it does not want to let down its allies? Power has a gentle face here; somewhere behind all those windows sits a person who does not believe that German savings should be handed out to all of those other Europeans who have been living on credit on such a grand scale, a person who embraces old-fashioned values and will not be forced by friend or foe to push up inflation until the dollar becomes so cheap that America can pay off its immense debts to China and the whole game can begin all over again. The world as a roulette table is not an attractive image; protectionism is not an option, nor is the state as the owner of the means of production, or Lafontaine as a reincarnation of Marx. These are confusing times. The people are grumbling, quietly for now, but their complaints may soon become louder. There is a constant stream of foreign guests here, the man from Russia and the man from China. This building may not be the center of the world, but it is an intersection that no one can avoid. The Obama who lives here is a woman, but her opposition is in the government with her. The cacophony of the media is rising; everyone knows what should be done; tables, figures, prognoses are carried into the building and back out again; press conferences, spokespeople, editorials . . . Everything whirls around this building that was not even built twenty years ago, when that other whirlwind raced through this city.
But the water of the Spree does not care. That is how rivers are, like the birds rocking on the waves made by the boat. Agitation is for humans. Seen like this, from the boat, the building rejects the drama, as though it is itself a river. It has no agitation of its own; it soothes the past, like a long, pink sedative pill. As I pass beneath the Moltkebrücke, I feel myself returning to the nineteenth century. Winged mythical creatures in reddish stone guard their lost era with anachronistic zeal. Claws, vicious beaks . . . they are prepared for the worst, but their might is deflected by the innocent restraint of this building, which refuses to express the power that resides within. Griffins have no place in the twenty-first century, and neither do the swords and trumpets of the helmeted beings along the bridge, or the hexagonal, atavistic crown above the eagle with its overlong tongue, forked and curling, on the other bridge beside Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. The iron of this giant bird is rusty. Through my binoculars I can just about make out the wings spread on either side of the chest, which carries the Prussian coat of arms (which itself features another bird and another crest). Beneath it are the orb and scepter, the symbols of royal power. Absurdly, someone has hung a modern bicycle chain around the bird’s leg, as though hoping to park the empire on the bridge until better times came along. The voice on the boat babbles on. To the right is the station where I had to pass through the border checkpoint so many times, and later I see the ruins of the Palast der Republik. Now that it is no longer there, it seems as though it was much larger than I actually remember. The stairwells are still standing, on this autumn day, towers of steps surrounded by cranes and bulldozers, the demolished church of a forgotten religion, ridiculed by the mighty shadow of the Dom behind, with its triumphant golden cap. There is something unutterably sad about buildings that have not yet been entirely demolished. Rusty iron bars protrude from the bare concrete of the walls; rubble lies on the steps that no one will ever walk on again. I can see the distant quadriga of the Brandenburger Tor between two of the towering stairwells. Sometimes I think this city does it on purpose—the constant intermingling of now and then, and the associated layers of memory—and when I look in the other direction I see the television tower on Alexanderplatz with that strange glass bulge at the top and the absurd red-and-white level-crossing barrier pointing into the sky. What thoughts might run through the mind of someone who once got married in this dismantled building? Someone who once governed here? Before long, the stairwells will have vanished too, and their memories will be destroyed in the demolition, and whatever remains will later be buried beneath that other form of nostalgia that wants to rebuild the Schloss of an earlier era, which has disappeared and is gone for good.
I wrote the above in autumn last year, but 2008 was not 1988. The torrent and the momentum of those days have given way to the gentle flow of democracy, to the blank pages that Hegel wanted to tear from the book of history. Of course, history continues to be made here, but suddenly I realize that I am an outsider, much more so than I was back then. The unification of Germany, like the long-ago war and the occupation of my country, was part of my own history. The dramatic events of 1989, so much more recent, also had a significant emotional impact on anyone who experienced them, as did the struggle of the years immediately afterwards, and the mutual attraction and repulsion that the two Germanies continue to show. However, the practice of democracy, with its ritual mating dances, the courtship behavior of the politicians, the masquerades of giving and taking, the posturing of talk shows and parliamentary debates, that was something you could watch with fascination, but always from the outside. You have your own country, your own home, in those distant lowlands, your own government and your own parliament that people here know little about and understand even less. Your interest is that of a stranger. And indeed, it is as a stranger that I have watched that chorus of the goddesses of fate who control much of public debate in Germany. Their television news representative is Marietta Slomka, who, with her Snow Queen demeanour, really knows how to get a minister hot and bothered. Eyes like icicles, set with frightening symmetry in that deep-freeze face, a face clasped within a helmet of blonde hair. Her diction is gentle, but extremely effective, and she dissects politicians’ answers with the precision of a surgical instrument. It is a pleasure to watch, especially when she brings her conversation to an end and turns to her more masculine counterpart, looking like an Egyptian hieroglyph, a cross-section of a woman who now consists of one single dimension, a Wayang shadow puppet. The other three are mistresses of the talk show, who gather the mighty of the republic around them in order to play them off against one another. Left and right, union and employer, banker and minister: these are almost always high-quality debates to which the Volk also contributes, in the form of articulate, carefully selected victims or other interested parties, reminding the politicians of their promises or confronting them with their dilemmas. Anne Will, Maybrit Illner, Sandra Maischberger—sometimes they have to swish the cane to keep order in their lively class of the high and mighty, all of whom are aiming to break the world record for talking, backed up by their own conviction that they are in the right. What I am watching is the parlour game of the polis, a game that people long to play when playing it is forbidden. This is the luxury of freedom. Politics as entertainment. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben speaks somewhat enigmatically in his Kindheit und Geschichte about the poverty of experience, distinguishing between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the two words that capture different concepts of “experience” in German: “The modern individual returns home in the evening, completely exhausted by a jumble of Erlebnisse—entertaining or boring, unusual or everyday, terrible or pleasant—without a single one of these events becoming an Erfahrung.” The talk show is simply an extension of such a day, a drama that takes the form of a battle, and therefore an event, even though, fundamentally, it is not one. Is that bad? Is Heidegger’s banality of the everyday a disaster or a formula to live by? If peace is boredom, why do we yearn for it when it is absent? Is true experience something that can only come from outside? I live here now in the settings of my earlier excitement and, together with the city, I become normalized, an urban nomad, a passer-by, a consumer. I find a sentence related to this experience in Agamben too: “They are like those characters in the comic strips of our childhood who can continue running in mid-air until they become aware of it: when they notice, when they experience it, they tumble helplessly into the abyss.”
Weidendammer Brücke, Berlin Mitte
Demolition of Palast der Republik, Berlin Mitte, October 2008
In the café on Stuttgarter Platz where I go in the morning for my coffee and newspapers, I watch my contemporaries doing the same thing. They read the reports from places where there is no avoiding fate and history: Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, Darfur, Kosovo. I cannot work out what they are thinking. When we go back outside into the gloomy autumn weather, we are not thinking about bombs and attacks. The abyss into which we have helplessly tumbled cannot be read on our faces. Or have we discovered the secret of being spared from banality by suffering it? Agamben is referring to Walter Benjamin when he states that what we experience are only Erlebnisse, experiences in the sense of brief events and sensations, rather than accumulated wisdom. Benjamin’s example involves the “Armut der Erfahrung,” the poverty of experience—and specifically deals with soldiers returning home after the First World War: “A generation that had travelled to school on horse-drawn trams stood under an open sky in a landscape where nothing had remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath them, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.” One might think that these were in fact existential experiences, and as I read I feel myself becoming entangled in a semantic game, as the philosopher puts forward as evidence the fact that this era is unable to come up with any new proverbs, because they have been replaced by slogans. But how long does it take for a proverb to become a proverb?
I have barely got here before I have to return, and it is for the sake of a paradox, as where I am heading is all about the place where I am. The Cobra Museum in Amstelveen is staging an exhibition of work by the Leipziger Schule, which it has invited me to open. So I shall travel to Amsterdam in order to go to Leipzig. And of course my speech in Amsterdam begins with a memory:
It was back in the days of the D.D.R. I was living in Berlin and I went with the Dutch ambassador on a short trip to Leipzig, in what we called East Germany back then. Our aim was to meet up with some students of Dutch. Before I was about to speak to them, the female professor, who committed suicide after the Wende, told me not to expect any questions from them, because, as she put it, the students were not used to asking questions. Twenty years later, that seems like a strange thing to have said, but it is exactly what happened. Even so, we still ended up having a chat in a lovely old pub afterwards. The students had read a great deal, were rather well informed about our literature, and when, after the Wende, I returned to the same place, the climate had already changed.
Why am I telling this story? To give an impression of the atmosphere that existed at the time, an atmosphere we can scarcely imagine nowadays. It has already become history, you can read about it, but you can no longer feel it, just as you can no longer feel the sense of threat that hit you when you had to cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie or Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, or when you tried to imagine the lives of the people who lived there, and who were unable to leave, unless they happened to be, say, a writer or an artist and were on such good terms with the regime that they were trusted to return.
History, past, twenty years ago, the age of an adult who never experienced any of that. I actually find it a little embarrassing that I am still talking about it.
The people who taught the painters and photographers whose works are exhibited here lived inside that system; some of them were even ideologically entwined with it. I remember seeing large scenes of the peasants’ revolt by Werner Tübke, who, along with Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, was one of the greats of those days. They are still the teachers of many of the younger people whose paintings hang on these walls, who have themselves become the teachers of younger artists. I found Tübke’s enormous frescos strange, yet impressive. They had no connection to what was happening on our side of the curtain, but they were certainly big, so much larger than life, with an incredible amount to see, and all of it was most definitely painted. This was art created to serve a view of history and so, by definition, art that shielded itself from art that served another ideology or even no ideology at all.
And what do we see in this exhibition? Painters, first and foremost. What they have in common is their connection to Leipzig. Sometimes they had the same teachers at the famous institution where they trained or, like Neo Rauch himself, still work as tutors.
What they do not share is a style. So I would not go so far as to use the term “school.” The word “school” refers instead to their common origin; the style and subject matter of the work exhibited here is so heterogeneous that it seems as though the Leipziger Hochschule must have had twenty different exits, and the students, painters and photographers all found their own way out. That does not bother me, because it means that there is plenty to look at. Subdued contemplation, exuberance and expressive pleasure in painting, realistic documentary-style photography, alongside extravagant, staged photography and, as in the case of the stylistically very different Neo Rauch and Matthias Weischer, an almost wanton love of the preposterous, which strays far from Socialist Realism without ever renouncing the lessons of painting as a craft—on the contrary. It is remarkable that the work varies considerably even within the oeuvres of individual artists. At first sight, Weischer’s insanely crowded Innenräume, with their absurd logic and surreal notions, appear to have little to do with his gouaches of cars, which, with their photographic precision, look more like advertising brochures. Rauch’s paintings from 1993 might, as far as I am concerned, be by an entirely different artist from the painter of the 2005 work Kommen wir zum Nächsten, that very same Rauch. This piece is a painting by one single artist, but the dreams of several different people seem to be depicted on the canvas and, as is always the case with dreams, these images present us with puzzles. What is that young man, dressed in the classic costume of German Romanticism, downcast eyes, sad expression, doing in what appears to be a contemporary setting? He is sitting, anachronistically, on a plastic garden chair, and, at the point where his knee-breeches and silk stockings should meet, some kind of unpleasant black stream or slick of oil is swirling out. The young man’s right hand is tucked into a large, modern-looking briefcase beside him on the ground, while his left hand is resting on some papers that are lying beside a thick, unlit candle on the tomato-colored, slightly shiny tablecloth, which might be made of plastic or linoleum. A woman is leaning forward, with both fists on the table, and looking at the young man, who has not noticed her. Behind them is some kind of craftsman in a stained apron and with a rope binding his wrists. Two other craftsmen are holding large beams of wood and standing on a sort of scaffold that is decorated with green garlands, beside a device that could be a guillotine, but probably is not. Is that everything? No, far from it. Two houses, with trees behind, a blue sky with a few light clouds and perhaps a flock of birds, all lined up and ready to serve, but there is also something that is far more difficult to describe: glistening, fatty growths or clots that have no name and possibly no function, but which exude a threat of the unknown simply because of their presence, so detached and autonomous among these absurd, but familiar images. A peculiar, broken sea-green object in the foreground on the left plays the same role. Its function is unclear, as is that of the oily, bilious green blob of unknown origin that is lying on the table.
If I have gone into too much detail here—and yet at the same time nothing like enough detail—it is because this painting expresses something of the long way these artists have come, as do a number of other paintings in this exhibition, even though, once again, their styles are so different. While their masters were bound to an ideology that would have viewed opacity as a personal luxury, here doctrine has given way to ecstasy, chaos and the problematic issue of freedom, which everyone solves in a different way. And so a bunker can be photographed in an unnatural, apocalyptic light, as in Erasmus Schröter’s mannerist photography, which appears to be as far removed from Rauch as Henriette Grahnert’s subtle Netzwerkprobleme, or Christian Brandl’s delicate, traditionally painted symbolism. As an outsider, one can only guess at the ideological battles and disputes that have been fought in Leipzig over the past thirty years; I have only been able to touch upon the range and variety of the art that has been made there.
Hans-Werner Schmidt, director of the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, writes about this subject in his introduction to a book I read about the Essl Collection. One day in 2000, he received an invitation to view an exhibition by a group that called itself LIGA. He explains that he went to see the exhibition without any real expectations, just to get out of the house for a while. But he goes on to say that he will not forget that afternoon any time soon.
What he encountered were canvases painted with enormous self-confidence, works of an entirely different calibre than he had expected. What really struck him was the difference between this art and the art of the period immediately following the fall of the Wall. There were still late echoes of Cobra and Joseph Beuys, but also, as he phrases it, memories of “the art of verismo and late Expressionism,” somber in nature, dark in palette. LIGA was light, fabricated, focused on the city and its architecture, and had in a sense bid farewell to the teachers at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Three years later, Schmidt organized a new exhibition at his own museum, “sieben mal malerei.” The rest is history: that evening, gallery owners from all over the world came in droves, the phenomenon of the Leipziger Schule was born and, to cut the story short, because otherwise it will become far too long for this occasion, a new School needs a mastermind to collect its output and the new artists found this person in Karlheinz Essl. Essl’s background is in construction, but he is also a passionate collector, who attempted to interest a Viennese museum in his collection before the painters had achieved the fame that they now enjoy, or suffer—both enjoyment and suffering being possible. Vienna refused—not everyone sees the light—and so Essl built his own museum in Klosterneuburg, ten kilometers or so from the capital. The Cobra Museum was able to draw on this collection and those of Leipzig galleries to create this exhibition, providing a glimpse into a world that, not so long ago, was closed to us, and which has produced new names that will soon become well known here too, if they are not already, names such as Tim Eitel, Tobias Lehner, wild Wunderkind Sebastian Gögel and photographer Matthias Hoch, who has two superb architectural photos of Amsterdam in this exhibition, which form a wonderful counterpart to Ulf Puder’s paintings of architecture, which are also full of light and free of people. The perfect hanging of these works in the bright, open spaces of the Cobra Museum succeeds in uniting pieces that perhaps do not in essence belong together, and the effect is as it should be: a wonderful surprise from Leipzig.
October 2008
Post. A strong, ornate Baroque hand that I recognize. Prof. em. Franz Rudolf Knubel has sent me some kind of exhibition catalogue. The narrow, elongated book does not have a title so much as a note written in small letters, preceded by dots “. . . zur kleinsten Schar / . . . with a chosen few,” followed by the words “In memoriam Mildred Harnack-Fish.” At the front of the book is a portrait of a woman with strong features, looking out at the viewer. Her hair, carefully combed close to her head, gleams; her eyes are watchful; this is a woman who exudes seriousness. Inside the catalogue, I find poems, photographs. It was published by the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, the German Resistance Memorial Center, and when I start reading I understand why.
This woman whose face I have just seen for the first time was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1902. She studied literature at the University of Wisconsin, where she met Arvid Harnack, whom she married in the summer of 1926. After moving to Germany with him, she taught at the University of Berlin until she was dismissed from her teaching position in 1932. She then taught evening classes and, together with a number of her students, participated in a discussion group led by her husband, which focused on social and political issues. Until 1942, she still had contact with the American embassy, which gave her access to speeches by Roosevelt, news of the Spanish Civil War and also commentaries on Hitler’s policies, which were not available in Germany. She passed this material on to a small group of people who were critical of the Nazi regime, so supporting her husband’s underground movement. There is a photograph of the two of them sitting together in the peaceful countryside: a smiling Mildred wearing a fur collar, Arvid with a pipe in his mouth, more thoughtful, a flash of sunshine among the dark pines. I never read far enough in Agamben’s book to understand exactly what he means by experience and the absence of experience, but I feel myself drawn into these two lives in a way that appears to contradict his words: “No one would recognize an authority whose only legitimization was founded on Erfahrung . . . This does not mean that Erfahrungen no longer exist nowadays. However, they occur outside of the human being.”
Mildred Harnack, ca. 1930
I must be on the wrong track somehow. When is an experience something that takes place without a person? At the end of 1941, Mildred Harnack was awarded her doctorate by the University of Giessen. On September 7, 1942, she was arrested with her husband in Preila on the Kurische Nehrung, the Curonian Spit, a mysterious name for a place. The Reichskriegsgericht sentenced her to six years in prison on 19 December, but Hitler did not accept that sentence. He wanted a new trial, which duly occurred, culminating on January 16, 1943, in a death sentence. A month passed before Mildred Harnack was beheaded at Berlin-Plötzensee. During that month, she worked on her translation of Goethe’s poem “Vermächtnis,” and she continued to do so until the final hours before her execution. Her last words were: “. . . und ich habe Deutschland so geliebt”: and I loved Germany so very much.
Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen!
Das Ew’ge regt sich fort in allen,
Am Sein erhalte dich beglückt!
Das Sein ist ewig; denn Gesetze
Bewahren die lebend’gen Schätze
Aus welchen sich das All geschmückt.
And in Mildred Harnack’s translation:
No being can to nothing fall.
The Everlasting lives in all.
Sustain yourself in joy with life.
Life is eternal; there are laws
To keep the living treasure’s cause
With which the worlds are rife.
What kind of moment might that be, as an American woman waits in a German cell to be executed and continues to work on her translation of the most classic of all German poets? The banality of everyday life is so infinitely distant here, an intellectual abstraction that evaporates when confronted with the weight of history and the fate of the people within it. But haven’t there always, throughout all the centuries of history, been such moments of intense experience within the ocean of banality where most people’s lives take place? And how does that, and how does Walter Benjamin’s own fate, relate to his notion of the poverty of experience in the modern era?
In his letter, Franz Rudolf Knubel writes not only about the how, but also about the where, providing details of the location of the prison: “Plötzensee liegt im Norden Charlottenburgs am Saatwinkler Damm am Hüttigpfad.” The photograph in the catalogue shows the innocence of the red brick and the guilt of the black bars. A Berlin building like so many others, probably not built for the purpose it served during the war. Above the two windows are arches of upright vertical bricks amidst the horizontal bricks of the wall. The surroundings are neutral, but take on the color of what has been done there. Three thousand people were executed in this place. A metal bar in the execution room still has hooks for hanging people, and a scaffold with a guillotine once stood there. After these events, the gaze of posterity could never again be neutral, just as it is impossible to read Goethe’s poem and Mildred Harnack’s translation without thinking about how and when that translation was created. Knubel’s homage to Mildred Harnack, because that is what it is, involved visiting the places that were connected to her and searching for her traces—but he has to admit that he rarely finds them. It is, in his words, “ein nicht gelingendes Unterfangen,” an undertaking that will not succeed, a hopeless cause, as the pale innocence of some of the photographs demonstrates: addresses where she once lived, houses that prove nothing because they could have been anyone’s house, front doors, pavements, garden fences. Here, the banality of our lives becomes visible, but not the lives themselves, not anymore; that happens only in the places where the tragedy occurred, in that brick room behind those bars, where a woman who has just turned forty looks her executioner in the eye. The old professor took large sheets of paper to the place of execution and, kneeling on the hard ground, rubbed charcoal over paper on the concrete floor. The surface was uneven, irregular, and the traced image consisted of streaks, stripes, grainy marks, which now form the cover of the catalogue. He writes about this:
“A red cordon divides the room. Above the windows, the bar with the hooks. Beneath that, a wreath and dried flowers on the window ledges. I step over the barrier and take out my 70 x 100 sheets of paper and box of pencils. I go down on my knees and calmly carry out the work I have planned as an act of remembrance: tracing marks from the rough concrete floor, which has so many scars. In the front third of the divided area is a narrow drain with seven iron bars, not much bigger than a sheet of A4. Close to this drain stood the killing machine: the guillotine. The whole process is incredibly peaceful: I observe myself, I listen to myself, as I transfer the traces of the iron grate onto the paper, check the result, repeat it on a smaller sheet of hand-made paper. I immediately see that the second attempt was superfluous . . . I changed my materials once, but there was no need. As it is, this work can only be read if it is called ‘Spiritual Exercises in the Incomprehensible.’”
The advantage of the big city: when people become too much for you there are always animals and plants to provide instant healing, the balm of creatures without any visible guilt or history, whose only goal is to perpetuate themselves into eternity. Wolf and owl were already wolf and owl a thousand years ago. If any evolution occurs, it takes place over tens of thousands of years: a slightly longer claw, a shift in the color of the plumage, three more thorns on a twig, that kind of thing. Around the time of the Wende, I often used to go to the zoo in the East. The animals did not belong to the Party, nor to the opposition; they did not denounce one another; all that happened was that lion and eagle attempted to convince the visitors of their endless, immutable nature. You might look into their eyes for a minute or an hour and, as usual, not see any sign of communication there; the only statement consists of the creatures themselves and the way they look at us without any form of encounter. I can spend hours there, just marveling at the fact that everyone has eyes: fox, deer, snake, crocodile, elephant, grasshopper, seal, monkey, all of our travelling companions in their prescribed uniforms, fur, hair, scales, shells, feathers, spines, and every single one of them is equipped with eyes. If you look into those eyes for long enough you start to think about how you can never see beyond pupil and retina, the point where the strange, unapproachable other begins. I find that a calming thought. I saunter past the cows, feel the autumn leaves tumbling down on me, hear the metrical feet beneath me penning an ode to the panther and the heron, sense the gradual healing flowing through me. I am ready to face humanity once again.
Plants generally do not say very much, even though, given the right wind conditions, they can of course whisper and sigh. A famous line of poetry was written in my language by the Flemish priest-poet Guido Gezelle, a sort of Olivier Messiaen of poetry: “Mij spreekt de blomme een tale”: to me, a flower can speak. One afternoon in 1989, as I wandered around the Nikolai-Viertel, I happened upon a pub called Zum Nussbaum. Nussbaum means “nut tree,” as does Nooteboom, so it was probably the name that tempted me inside that first time. Inside, it was a little like an old Amsterdam bar: small, brown, a few gleaming wooden tables, a sense of cosiness. Although it was in the East, it reminded me of home: dimly lit, quiet people, a gentle buzz, cold outside, mounds of snow on the icy streets, a vicious wind from Siberia rubbing the Spree up the wrong way, but inside it was warm, and the Glühwein made you glow. It used to be a rather exclusive place: you had to go through all those checks at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße to get there, so there was something adventurous about it. For a brief while, you were in another world, even though you felt as though you were sitting in someone’s living room. You stood out as someone who had come to have a look around, which meant you were too visible, a feeling that no longer exists today.
And today it is autumnal; it might even start drizzling. I have had a drink, one of those beers we do not have in Holland, tall, tapering glasses that you are allowed to take an hour over: meditation beer. Maybe that explains why, once I had finished my beer, I could not quite remember what I had been expecting from that day. I had already read all about the crisis in the newspaper; I had seen Angela Merkel guarding Germany like a mother hen and refusing to allow Gordon Brown to tempt her into throwing baskets full of money into the wind. Even though, just a few months later, we would be unable to imagine that he had not been there forever, Obama had yet to be elected, but we were not allowed to vote, suicide attacks in Afghanistan and car bombs dominated the front pages, the world was a panopticon of unbearable atrocities—perhaps that was why, when I saw the 48 bus coming, with its sign saying, “Botanischer Garten,” I got on without hesitation and climbed up to one of the box seats to watch Berlin gliding past, all sorts of districts that I did not know, shops selling exotic food, snatches of the Third World among the big grey buildings. I wanted to preserve something of that day, so I made a few helpless notes in my notebook: “Hauptstraße, Dominicusstraße, Günlük Taze Ve Halâl Et, Rathaus Friedenau, Kaisereiche, U-Bahn Schreiberplatz, Losgehen um anzukommen, Halte Kielerstraße, Malik.” I do not understand half of my notes when I look at them now—it looks like a secret code for spies. But no one wants to rifle through my papers, and no one arrests me. I listen to the quiet conversations on the bus and to the whining voice of a woman behind me as she divulges her love life to her mobile phone, an excerpt from a novel, written without the refinement of art. I am a man wrapped up in words. One person’s freedom is another’s captivity, and when I get off at the botanical garden her failed marriage is hanging all over me like cobwebs and, still in that state, I enter the realm of multi-colored silence and walk along a hedge of angel’s trumpet and tall, pink stalks of gamba grass. Copper sunlight, the threat of rain. I pick up a big tanned leaf that would like to tell me something about the autumn; it is as purple as a bishop, lined with a system of golden veins. Why is the decay of plants beautiful while the decay of humans usually is not? Everywhere, the green is starting to assume the colors of death. Lonely leaves fall in slow, floating circles like suicide parachutists, as though they still have one last secret mission to perform on the way down. I marvel at a tree fern that has not yet decided what it would rather be: a fern-like tree or a tree-like fern, poet or novelist. Soon I am standing before the powerful leaves of the Peltiphyllum peltatum, which hang contemplatively over shining, black water. Their silence is breathtaking, and yet if I stand still for long enough I can hear what they are saying: it comes down to the fact that they know they are there; it is a thought about presence in the here and now. Paths, tracks, the occasional illusion of wilderness, then the first drops that force me into the big glasshouses where the exiles from the tropics reside. If they are feeling homesick for the savannah or the rainforest, they do not show it. I write down their precious names, which I will soon forget, and think how strange it is that they themselves do not know what they are called, even though some of these plants are such good matches for their wild names: hairy festoons, rolled-up leather sheets for which a new variation on green has been invented, twelve curved daggers poised around a blood-red heart, cacti in all the forms of the Euclidean catalogue. How amazing to be a cactus, if only for a night and a day, a silent and meditative creature covered with all those needles that send out only one message: I Am Thinking. Do Not Disturb. Leave Me In Peace.
I read in the newspapers that Tempelhof is being closed down. Images of the Airlift1 and the associated stories come to mind. I once wrote a story2 featuring a short scene that takes place at that airport, and I can still picture the long hall, the neon strips high up around the edges of the ceiling, the glider hanging beneath them. It is a day of final flights, imminent dismantling. A man is holding a placard: “Wir dürfen uns das nicht gefallen lassen, es gibt hier nichts zu feiern”: We should not stand for this—there is nothing to celebrate. His expression says he knows he has already lost. The flights on which I departed from or arrived at Tempelhof always involved small aeroplanes, which, along with the peculiar design of that long hall, which I had not seen at any other airport, made the experience of flying feel rather old-fashioned, as though you were playing a part in some 1950s spy movie. But there was something else about that airport, something that has to do with a deeper layer of my past. Whenever I see and hear an aeroplane taking off on television, the noise takes me back to the first day of the war. On the tenth of May, 1940, I was woken by the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns, by planes diving and then accelerating away. It was daybreak and the planes were bombing the military airfield at Ypenburg, not far from our home in The Hague. I do not remember now whether they were Heinkels or Junkers, but the noise I can hear now is unmistakably the same as back then, the sound of the pre-jet era. For me, it is associated with the red sky over Rotterdam in the distance, with parachutists slowly floating down to the green meadows below. Now I would like to hear that sound once again for real. I read something about the Rosinenbomber and a Zeitreise, a journey in time—apparently they are planning one last flight in the old planes that were used in the Airlift—but that is no good to me. The past I am in search of is even older. On the square in front of the entrance to Tempelhof is the head of an enormous eagle, black and gleaming, its beak pointing downwards like a sharpened dagger, but when I go inside everything appears deceptively normal. There are still people at the check-in desks; the floors are polished to a gleam; an aeroplane engine is displayed like a monument or a stray work of art by Beuys, sparkplugs and electrical wiring sticking out in every direction like a Gorgon’s hair; stewardesses stand at the Air Service Berlin desk in their cappuccino-colored uniforms; and the light-blue hands of the clock on the big dark wall indicate the time, time that is connected to scenes of arrival and farewell, and which therefore always has a different significance at airports than on a church clock.
Tempelhof airport, October 2008
Poster: Journey through time with the Rosinenbomber, October 2008
I walk around the building, along an extremely bare and simple gallery that once looked so modern that totalitarian ideologies found it easy to appropriate its sober, geometric forms, which were inspired, I feel, not only by Adolf Loos, but also by Cistercian architecture. Outside, I walk towards Tempelhofer Damm in the hope that I will be able to stand behind the fence and watch the aeroplane of my childhood taking off. As I walk, I realize how large Tempelhof actually was, a huge space carved out of the center of a metropolis. I find some stairs that bring me closer to the metal fences. I am not the only one there; a group of plane spotters stands beside me, glued to the iron net. Together, we watch the prehistoric machine speed past us and into the air, with that little jump that always comes as a surprise, as though it is briefly mocking gravity. When I look around, I realize that I cannot share the memory of that sound, which I am hearing again after almost seventy years, with anyone here, simply because the people around me are too young. When you listen with the ear of memory, what you hear is the same, yet different; that is what it comes down to. A historical event needs only to have occurred sufficiently long ago to become deformed. Then it assumes the characteristics of the mythical, the legend, or the fairy tale. One day, someone in this world, or another, will read about a city which, during some distant, misty prehistoric era, unthinkably long ago, was once saved by birds.
October 2008
Ein Punkt ist, was keine Teile hat. Een punt is wat geen deel heeft. Why do I find this sentence easier to understand in English? “A point is that which has no part.” Perhaps there is some interference from the Dutch: deel hebben aan. But would it not be better to say that a point consists entirely of itself? I am on dangerous ground here, having ventured out to an exhibition about math, a failed student, perversely drawn to the traps and snares of his earlier defeat. If there is anything I regret, it is missing out on the mysteries of mathematics. I was, to stick with the terminology, a zero, and to hide from that unavoidable truth I took refuge in my imagination. During tests that cannot really have been all that difficult, I invented theorems that I thought were perfectly plausible myself, but which actually made no sense at all. I would arrive at sound results, but they were valid only for me, within some made-up system of mathematics where everyone was drunk or belonged in an institution. My teachers had given up on me. I did not really mind at the time, but I do now. Between my chaos and the order of mathematics, there was a barrier of unwillingness that the teachers could not break through. I do not want to apportion blame, but sometimes I think that if someone had taken the trouble to come and find me within the maze of my adolescent stupidity and lead me out into the big, bright garden of figures, formulae and logic, I would not be seized by the unholy terror that seizes me even now when I am reading certain books, ones that I understand until the author suddenly starts spouting magic formulae that everyone can read except me. This is part of the reason why I never took my final school examinations. My past, short though it was at the time, consisted of chaos, and I was on the run.
For years, my greatest nightmare was having to do a math exam and failing hopelessly. In 1998, when I received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Brussels, I said that I viewed that day as my last day at school, and I hoped my nightmare would never return. And that is what happened; the illusions disappeared. This is in itself a miracle of autosuggestion, but my regret remains. And so it is with a certain hesitation that I enter the Deutsches Technikmuseum, the museum of technology, where they are putting on an exhibition called “Mathema.” My old desire to share in that world of transparent mysteries, from which I cut myself off so long ago, is apparently still there. There is a plane hanging on the front of the building that will never fly anywhere again, and as I enter the museum I fall straight into the arms of a quote from Einstein: Das, wobei unsere Berechnungen versagen, nennen wir Zufall.3 Einstein is soon demanding attention again: someone has written on the wall that, in light of his special theory of relativity, we should imagine the world in four dimensions, with the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time forming an indivisible whole. The underlying principle is the notion that there is no absolute time, which is a pleasant thought. Dalí must have been thinking something along those lines when he melted his watch, and anyone who spends a lot time travelling the world will often have seen time condensing, racing backwards, and acting as though it does not exist, which may in fact be true. That notion gives me a strange sense of freedom: time as a fluid element in which you can swim around, even against the current if necessary. I once wrote that time is the system that ensures everything does not happen simultaneously, and even though there is an odd tautological kink in that thought, I am comfortable with it.
It is quiet inside the exhibition and I walk undisturbed around the wondrous world of hyperbolic geometry. I feel myself curving along with this space; I tick inaudibly somewhere in the world as a watch and, when no one is watching, I allow myself to be enticed into flying through a virtual city with a pair of wings on my shoulders. In short, I join in with the game the exhibition has devised for me; I surrender to it. I learn that the interwoven ornamentation of the Alhambra, just like the patterns on a Gucci bag, falls under the heading of “Patterns with Translational Symmetry” and that Gerhard Richter used a random generator to determine the colors for his big new window in Cologne Cathedral.
How different my Berlin days now are from that chaotic time when I saw Modrow racing down the corridors of Schloss Bellevue and Krenz at the Dom, desperately and against his own better judgment, attempting to turn the tide of the Weltgeist. Order and calm reign here. Instead of the chaos and turbulence of everyday history, this is Pythagoras’ theory of harmony, the golden mean, the story about the butterfly that causes a hurricane with its fluttering. That is, of course, also agitation, but it is logically explicable, which helps. Kant said that mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge, but elsewhere I have read that it is sometimes better to allow oneself to be guided by chance when working on certain scientific problems if you cannot solve them by other means. My life was not a scientific problem, and so did not need to be solved, but when I look back, I see that it depended on variable series of random events, each of which may have had a certain inescapable logic of its own—you are, after all, born at the moment and in the place where your mother happens to be—but which was still dependent on the fact that my father once happened to see my mother walking past and found her attractive. And that made me a Dutchman from the twentieth century, but probably has nothing to do with my not becoming a mathematician.
Frankfurt. Anselm Kiefer is receiving an award, the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. The Paulskirche is full of familiar faces. People know one another; the public face of Germany is sitting here. It is a church without a church, a pulpit now standing where once the altar was. I know that spot; I once stood there myself. You have to climb some steps to get there, and then you feel strange, as though it is not entirely right to be standing there. If that sounds dramatic, it is not intended to, but still there is that brief, peculiar sensation of loneliness; no one is standing beside you. No matter how often you do such things, that feeling never entirely goes away. The gentle murmuring of voices, then the usual speeches, the praise, and finally the prize-winner himself. When he starts to speak, the room falls silent. He is in black, an ascetic figure, and perhaps it is because of the church-like atmosphere, but what he most closely resembles is a Benedictine monk.
The award is not without controversy; Kiefer’s preoccupation with the German past, with its Teutonic aspects, has not been universally appreciated, particularly at first. Werner Spies addresses this in his eulogy, and says that he had his own doubts at the time, that what was in fact a quest was perceived as identification, at a time when no one wanted to hear about the past. The artist went in search of it, and what he brought back, accentuated, emphasized in his work was viewed as empathetic nostalgia, a longing for the wrong era. The man in the pulpit also refers to this issue. He starts talking about his own past, about his youth, and one word leaps out. When I read the speech later, it is printed separately, on a line of its own:
Langeweile.
Boredom. The source of so many things. A childhood without television, without the internet, without the cinema and without the theater. Emptiness, tedium. Then poetry. Poems as buoys in an ocean of emptiness: “I think in images. Poems help me to do so. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the next; between them, without them, I am lost.” As he speaks, I consider the peculiarity of the situation. I imagine what it would have been like to hear one of the great painters of the past give a speech: Zurbarán, Delacroix, de Chirico.
More so than writers, painters have always disappeared behind their images, and suddenly that becomes a puzzling notion. I can picture one of Kiefer’s monumental paintings behind him as he stands there, assuming the pose of a speaker and resembling other speakers in such situations, speakers who do not have an image of lead and straw behind them, of a rust-colored landscape of sand and clay and dried paint, lead-blue, ash-grey, coal-black, accompanied by words that refer to history, and I do not know why it should be that particular painting, but it is a seascape that I see there. The slender figure in the pulpit is dwarfed by the width of the painting that my imagination is projecting behind him, white foaming waves of cracked paint, great sweeps of movement and, within them, the sinister forms of submarines, orange, and in the ominous sky above them, words over the horizon, like a natural phenomenon, as though there are always words floating in the sky, words that only the artist sees: “Seeschlachten alle 317 Jahren oder deren Vielfachen”: Sea battles every 317 years or multiples thereof.
Puzzling: the word is no coincidence. The man in black who is standing up there conforms with the environment in which he now finds himself, but his art does not. That art derives from the knowledge that beneath the semblance of order that is civilization, an indomitable chaos always resides. In this of all places, within the civilized conformity of the world of editors-in-chief, ministers and ambassadors in this church-like space, that is an additional irony. I once wrote the following words: “When do paintings rid themselves of their painter? When does the same material become a different thought?” Does “Guernica” still belong to Picasso, and if so, for how long? When I look at Hieronymus Bosch’s “Haywain” in the Prado, does it still have anything to do with the painter who created that painting, or have later gazes, throughout the long centuries when that object of wood and paint remained its material self, transformed it into something completely different, as Borges essentially contends in his famous story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,” which is about a man who, centuries later, writes the same book as Cervantes, word for word, and yet still a book that was completely different? Will future eyes take Kiefer’s paintings from their creator and make them so autonomous that the painter himself would no longer recognize them? Only great art makes us contemplate such questions. The painter himself has only his circumscribed life, the concerns that have fuelled him, a fascination with the history of his country and the pits and precipices within it, and his own confrontation with this history, which people have not thanked him for because the “Unfähigkeit zum Trauern,” the inability to mourn, prompted the desire to cover up, hide, deny that shameful past. What remains is the whispering in his library, the poetry of Bachmann and Celan, the notion that a mythological image can be stronger than science, which is constantly changing, and that what is lacking in an artwork must seek an alliance with what is lacking in history and in nature, which are also incomplete. All of this has inevitably penetrated Kiefer’s paintings, his gigantic books of lead, his library without words, written by all of the words that he has ever read and recorded as he swam from buoy to buoy: words of poets, of the Sephiroth, the echoes of Chassidic legends, a legacy guarded against disappearance, visible and invisible, the painter as a scribe, who became what he read, and created what he was.
As I leave the hall after the event, a friendly man offers me a pamphlet, a protest against this award ceremony. I take it and I thank him. Sometimes democracy makes it clear that there are things that remain invisible, even to the well-meaning.
October 2008
Berlin, an autumnal afternoon, a sudden urge. I want to go back to Falkplatz, to see what has become of the trees I once planted, along with some other people, twenty years ago. I still remember the peeling paint on the buildings, the expressions of the people on the balconies; they probably thought we were mad. I attempt to remember something of the atmosphere of that day, but with little success. The presence of the People’s Police created a strange sense of sudden goodwill on all sides. We were dreamers, but there is no shame in that. So what is it like now? There are plants, bushes. The ones that we planted? Some of the trees look too tall; they must have already been there. In the background, there is a sports center that I recognize. I had had a sort of vision too, that “in fifty or a hundred years’ time, I would like to shelter under the mighty crowns of this forest in waiting,” and had hoped the planters would not be disappointed. Have they been disappointed? I do not know. It has not turned into a forest, and maybe I am the only one who can still remember that day. But there are a few small trees. Maybe the same ones, maybe different. They are swaying gently in the wind, as trees do on an autumn day, and they are not revealing what they think.
November 2008. The Freie Universität Berlin is awarding me an honorary doctorate in philosophy and the arts, and the war child of back then cannot ignore his memories because, along with everything that happened to him here later, they have defined his relationship with this country. I am honored, but I hesitate for a long time about what to say on the day and whether it is a good idea to start talking about the past again, as I have recently done in my story about Tempelhof, but I also know that ultimately I am that past, and so that can be the starting point of my story, which begins with the same abruptness as the event, which has always remained unforgettable for me. A war is only over when the last person who lived through it is no longer around. This is the story I tell:
The first Germans I ever saw in my life came from the skies. The next ones came from the water, in the disarray that is typical of death. Only after that did they come over the land, in long, grey lines. I was six years old and standing beside my father, holding his hand, just as I had been sitting beside him on our balcony on that early May morning in 1940 when the parachutists fell from the sky. My father, who later died in that war during an English raid, had put an armchair on the balcony so that he could look out over the meadows behind our house. Am I telling you this so that I can start talking about the war again? To “rub it in,” as they say in English? No. I am telling you because it is an unavoidable part of my story, because stories have to have a beginning, and because my age will not allow me to forget the beginning. I did not suffer, I make no claims to suffering, I do not even know if I am right to say that my writing may have begun on that day, because if that were the case everyone would have become a writer that day. No, my only justification for telling this story again is because I think my life as a writer has been determined by the idea of memory, by that special form of memory that we call the past, or better still history, history that for me is not an abstraction, but a form of existence, a story written by the world and written by each of us at the same time, which often means that we are inventing our own history in the midst of the inevitable events that are presented to us by the world. I had not made up the war; my memories of it, and the way in which I tell them, repeat them, formulate them, invent them or maybe even lie, belong to me, a story that, as you grow from one age to the next, constantly requires new words.
Reincarnation does not take place after our lives, but during, I once wrote in Zelfportret van een ander (Self-portrait of an Other),4 in one of those moments of possible clairvoyance when you already know something before you know it, one of the inalienable privileges of poetry.
What kind of person would I have been if I had not remembered that first day? The Stukas and Heinkels, the incredible noise that I believe wiped from my memory everything that preceded that day, depriving me of that basic material that other writers, such as Proust and Nabokov, utilized to such great effect, with the result that I have no recollections of those first years to draw on—it is as though I was not born until that day, as a fully formed six-year-old, an impossibility and therefore a miracle, but I cannot shake the feeling associated with that miracle. I look in amazement at the photographs that prove I existed as a three-year-old and that I really did receive my first Holy Communion, but my inner archive refuses to confirm the truth, for that is what it must be. And it is that feeling that tempts me to think I may in fact have invented my life, complete with the actual fabrications that are part of that life and which we call novels and stories, a double layer of fiction that is inextricably entwined with the actual person of the Dutch citizen who is now standing before you. Does that citizen want something from that war? No. I was not a victim, not a perpetrator, I was a child. But the historical fact of that war wanted something from me.
The soldiers who fell from the sky were parachutists. The ones from the water had driven into the water, car and all, and were dredged up later—a first sight of death. Water dripping from long grey leather uniform coats. The six-year-old will not forget that, or the apocalyptic noise of the V2s fired from a site near our house on their way to England, an early precursor of space travel.
Rhyme is a concept from poetry, but it has, probably by analogy, another meaning for me: events that reflect other events, sometimes also forms of historical justice, confirmations of a prophetic inkling, an almost metaphysical relief that history is not only changing course, but making a radical about-face and seeking its opposite, while retaining all of the intervening time—because eliminating it is impossible; history is made up of time and of people—and yet making it apocryphal. In 1956, I stood in a smoldering Budapest and watched Russian tanks, and in 1989 I stood in Berlin and watched the Wall fall. That is what I mean by rhyme: when history finds a connection with itself, without the intervening period of crime and destruction, which is also history, itself being destroyed. Three old men in Yalta, splitting Europe in two with their wicked spell and then the moment when another spell cancels out the first spell, and the consequences that both of these spells have had for Germany and for Europe. That too is rhyme. There is an expression for this in English: full circle. If you live long enough to see it happen, there is a sense of satisfaction in knowing that evil often wins, but not always. In 1957, I was on a bus from Miami to New York. We were driving through the southern states, whites in the front, blacks in the back, separate restrooms and restaurants along the route. I remember a deep feeling of shame. As I write these words, it appears possible that a man who once would have had to sit at the back of the bus is going to be the next American president, and that too is rhyme. History, an amalgam of fate and chance, the story of everything that was the case.
War is chaos that later looks deceptively like order. My youth was a chaos in search of the clarity that, for me, could be found only in writing. This is something that takes a long time to discover. Chaos creates outsiders. Outsiders have to invent their own worlds in order to survive, the chaos of the self among the ordered world of others. My intention here is not to paint a psychological portrait; it is to show how the work that you wish to honor today has come about. The invented world of my first novel and my first poetry was a non-existent world of romantic longing, an escape. No one has seen that more clearly than Rüdiger Safranski. It is a blessing to meet people who recognize in your work what you did not see yourself when you were writing it. You had already written it, but you did not yet know it. This is, for me, the paradox of my writing. It has happened to me twice, both times in Germany. And that brings me to the next rhyme. There is a kind of line running from that moment when the men fell from the sky to the present day. This too is perhaps a paradox. This line is made up of friends; first the friends from my own country who suffered because of this country, but wanted to share with me their relationship to that past and so brought me here, starting my fascination. They were later joined by other friends, people I met here and who have remained my friends to this day.
After the war, Germany was not my country. It was destroyed, and somber, like my own country. Anyone who wants to know what the Netherlands was like after the war should read the two great novels by my fellow Dutchman Willem Frederik Hermans: De tranen der acacia’s (The Tears of the Acacias) and De donkere kamer van Damokles (The Darkroom of Damocles), dark masterpieces, magnificent literature, miles away from my own poetic debut, which did not describe the real and bitter world of post-war society, but rather a dreamer’s escape to an imaginary paradise, where the light of the south shone, a fantasy world that could not be sustained, but which I will never deny. Since that time, I have constantly lived in two worlds, the world of the north and the world of the south, of the visible reality of my travels and that other world, interwoven with it, the world of fantasy. You do not want your dream to fade, but the discrepancies between the fantasy and the world around you are too strong, and you reject the course of cynicism, sarcasm or other forms of self-delusion. Your only solution is to turn and face the world of chaos, with your imagination as your only weapon. So you sign up for duty on a ship and sail to the tropics, that other form of light, where it gets dark at the same time every day, a darkness in which a cruel chaos can strike. You attempt to escape from the dilemmas of writing or not writing by writing a book in which a writer comes to grief on that very dilemma. And as though it were you yourself who had committed suicide in that book, De ridder is gestorven (The Knight Has Died),5 you let fiction remain fiction and ceaselessly make your way through the epiphany of the world. What takes place in the hidden layers of your being can be said only in poems now, poems which, as Anselm Kiefer said this week in his acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis, are buoys, buoys that he swims to, from one to the next, because otherwise he is lost, a feeling I recognize. Poems, then. You still lack sufficient knowledge of the world for stories, and you know it, because even imagination requires a foundation and abhors the anemic vacuum. You have to wait and you do not know whether that waiting is a lazy lie or the acknowledgment of a destination. This uncertainty dominates your life for a long time. You take it with you to America and Australia, among Muslims and among Buddhists, when you attempt to describe the things you perceive, until the moment comes when you can let go of the world of appearances and write about all that it has left behind in you, and so create a story according to your own laws, a narrative that was visible only in your own imagination. Later, people will say that this world is “light,” and intend this as an accusation or a compliment, and only you will know that the lightness was wrested from a gravitational force originating in the darkness of the chaos that has surrounded you since the beginning, the Dionysian chaos that lies beneath the thin skin of civilization, waiting for us with unflagging desire.
Then, once again, comes a moment of rhyme. The book you waited so long for is translated into German and published by Volk und Welt in Berlin. Together with two friends who were in Natzweiler and Buchenwald, you travel to this city, which knows more about the history of the twentieth century than any other and lives on the sharp dividing line between two mutually hostile systems. Your other, non-fictional self, is going to cover an S.E.D. conference, where Khrushchev will speak. The friends who have brought you with them to the land of their former fate take you to the most German of all restaurants, in an orgy of cathartic nostalgia. And they talk. You write your first notes on Berlin, which you will dedicate to one of these friends, notes that, although you do not realize it, are sketches for the novel that is already stirring deep within you, a novel in which they will play a part. A year later, you are living in Berlin. These are the years just before 1989. You are invited by the D.A.A.D. and it changes your life. You meet other people who become friends: a painter, a philosopher, a poet, all of whom will be woven into your web of appearance and reality without you or them being aware of it. You travel around their country, read their history, are there when another bronze page is turned as a wall falls with a crash that reverberates around the entire world. That was yesterday. The circle is full, or so it seems. In Tübingen, you meet an old man with white hair who once had to flee from Austria, where he studied philosophy and Germanistik, and who learned German poetry by heart on a tractor in New Zealand. In Hölderlin’s tower, he gathers young people around him and they read poems together.
He invites me to one of these legendary gatherings. When he dies a few years later, I write the poem that I would like to read now, in conclusion. It is called “De dichter van het lezen,” the poet of reading, a title that his widow had engraved on his tombstone in his beloved Latin: Poeta Legendi. His name was Paul Hoffmann.
De dichter van het lezen
In memoriam Paul Hoffman
Kwam mij tegemoet
in mijn verduisterde onschuld
een lichtspoor,
in een toren
van heilige waanzin,
deze ene,
hoorde wat ik zei
toen ik het niet hoorde,
hoorde mijn ander,
stemde mij,
met het fijnste oor voor verhulde gezangen,
stemde mij toe,
in een leeg land van anderen,
woorden herhaald en geslepen
tot ze zich werden.
Gewapend kwam hij terug
naar hun eerdere schande,
hun van leugens
geluidloos geworden,
hun bedorven taal
die hij opneemt en koestert,
geneest met gedichten,
teruggeeft aan zichzelf.
Licht groeit uit zijn ziel
sneeuwlaurier om zijn hoofd.
Schitterend ben jij het, de leraar,
de dichter van het lezen.
The Poet of Reading
In memoriam Paul Hoffman
Towards me
in my shuttered innocence,
came a trace of light,
in a tower
of holy madness,
this one man,
when I did not hear it,
heard the other me,
found my chord
with the keenest ear for hidden songs,
gave me his accord,
banished into exile
in an empty land of others,
he had repeated words, polished them
until they became themselves.
Armed, he came back
to their former disgrace,
to their language
silenced by lies,
their corrupted tongue
which he embraced, nourished,
healed with poems,
returned it to itself.
Light grows from his soul,
laurels of snow around his head.
You are dazzling, the teacher,
the poet of reading.
October 2008
It is almost time for my farewell. Yet again, I am leaving Berlin, and like every other time it will not be easy. I go through the enormous pile of newspaper cuttings once more, read about all the things I have not written about, look at a page of designs for the Schloss they are planning to build on the site of the old Volkspalast. In real life too, I visited the Kronprinzenpalais one cold winter’s day to look at the models based on those designs. On days like that, arctic winds blow over the wide open spaces and Berlin reminds you that it borders on Russia. The designs were hung on the walls, lots of losers alongside the one winner. There were so many of them. I tried to imagine what Unter den Linden would look like when the winning design was in place, but I could not picture it, perhaps because I did not really believe in it. Nostalgia in stone, an antiquated grammar of construction, a half-hearted attempt to bring something back to life that had disappeared for good: archaeology in reverse.
What does it mean when a city does not wish to make the leap into the modern day, but instead harks back to a vanished past, which is then masked with a little pseudo-modernity? Friends say that, one way or another, Berlin will be “beautiful” in fifty or a hundred years’ time, but I have learned to mistrust such predictions, and besides I do not have enough time to wait that long. I see tiny human figures populating the large courtyard of the Schloss in the designs, and I imagine that I am one of them. It is 2089 and the little man who is me has just taken out his notebook to write something about the great day that is being celebrated all around him. But no, I will not be there; it will be other people who are walking around in a festive mood to mark the passing of a hundred years, even though they were not around to see the first of those years, the year when everything changed, when a city and a country began to heal the wounds that had torn it in two.
December 2008. The Frankfurter Rundschau has asked me to write a Christmas article for the space where the editorial usually goes, and because I am on a book tour of various German cities, I decide to collect things I encounter on that long journey and hang them on my Christmas tree. The resulting article was published on Christmas Eve, with the title of “Dunkle Tage,” Dark Days:
And so it came to pass in those days that a Dutch author went on a reading tour of Germany. He travelled from east to south and from west to north, visiting a different city every day and reading from his book Roter Regen, and yet again he realized how large Germany is, how varied the landscapes, and how different the people who live there, who are called Germans by foreigners, but who usually think of themselves as residents of Bavaria, Hessen, or Brandenburg, and who generally eat the food from their own part of the world. Night fell at half past four in the afternoon, but fortunately there was always room for him at the inn, in every town and village he passed through.
Berlin, Hauptbahnhof, detail
I am that Dutch author and my journey took place during what we in the Netherlands call the “dark days” before Christmas. Every one of the newspapers I read on my travels talked about the worst crisis since 1945, as though it had not been preceded by something far worse. The forecasts were gloomy and the weather outside the train windows was attempting to match the melancholy of the stock market and the money. And yet, at the market in Berlin where I buy my vegetables, everyone wished me a happy first day of Advent, a wish that is not common in the Netherlands, but which put me in a gently euphoric mood.
Everywhere I went, there were Christmas markets, with Glühwein and lots of light, as though everyone wanted to gather as much light as possible for the dark times that would soon be upon us, the Armageddon of the last days, the final catastrophe, which would wash over all five continents in a storm flood, with no lifeboats.
Maybe it was because everyone is so nice to you on reading tours, but I simply could not work myself into a gloomy frame of mind. I once watched a video of the English painter Francis Bacon. He was slightly tipsy, the interview took place in a gay bar in England, and the interviewer was trying hard to discover the life credo of this painter, who is known for the dark, sometimes almost cannibalistic themes of some of his paintings. As an admirer of his work, I too was waiting with bated breath for the magic words that would bring relief—you really want to know what kind of mentality it is that drives someone to produce works that are so extreme and brutal, yet also so fantastically well painted. The moment when, after much insistence, Bacon finally answered the increasingly desperate interviewer was an unforgettable one, or at least it was for me. Theatrically, he tilted back his head so the light caught his face—painters know about such things—and he crowed (there is no other word for it) into the camera, “I believe in nothing! I’m an optimist.”
Since then, this paradox has been my motto, one that serves me well in this dark season. Cold fog in Hamburg, the first flurries of snow in Berlin, melancholic forests around Frankfurt, frost on the fields of Idar-Oberstein, drizzle over the straw-colored landscape along the Elbe—I stored all of these images in my inner archive, but it seemed that I was determined to find everything magnificent. The Deutsche Bahn stole through forests and mountains; I read my work and signed books, sat in lonely hotel rooms watching Steinbrück and Merkel and the others who were weaving a huge safety net to catch all of Germany. They were greatly hindered by an impetuous French juggler and an English grocer who had managed the finances of his island kingdom for years and yet had not seen the crisis coming, a crisis that he himself had helped to create with his policies, while a banker from Bavaria, who had just narrowly avoided bankruptcy, thought he was the only one with better schemes for preventing the certain ruin of the entire country.
If you are constantly travelling, you cannot take a Christmas tree along with you. And so I decided to decorate my own virtual Christmas tree with the images I had gathered on my wintery tour, images that had given me cheer during those dark days. Firstly, there was the large black man in Idar-Oberstein, a figure from a book of fairy tales. It was raining in Idar-Oberstein. Writers on reading tours may be compared to souls in Purgatory. They are waiting for the rest of eternity to arrive, without knowing quite how to fill their days until that happy moment. By doing penance, of course, but provincial hotels are not really equipped for such purposes. Yesterday’s reading in Birkenfeld was over, the audience had been quiet and attentive, I had spoken without a microphone, no one had coughed, and now I was free to walk down the high street of this gemstone town and peruse the window displays of opals and sapphires as though all of these treasures belonged to me. Suddenly I heard loud voices speaking a language I did not recognize; it sounded like singing. I walked over and found that these voices belonged to three black kings who had arrived too early for their appointment, one of them wearing a long robe in the liturgical color of Advent, the superlative form of purple. It cast a blinding glow over the entire rainy street.
Schlossbrücke, Berlin Mitte
Maybe they had just sold a bag of precious stones from their bloody homelands, but they were in high spirits, their voices resounding in the cold winter air, and I decided to hang them on my Christmas tree as a point of light.
The next morning, still in Purgatory, I was walking along the Main in Frankfurt, on my way to the Städel to see the exhibition “Der Meister von Flémalle und Rogier van der Weyden.”
There is something peculiarly touching about those paintings. You look back over more than five centuries at people wearing the same bright colors as that man in Idar-Oberstein, telling a story that has occupied the world for some two thousand years. A man with wings and Flemish features, who probably, like all people from Flanders, speaks my language, has suddenly appeared in this small room and is delivering a message to a woman who has sat on the floor in shock or joy. The woman too has a Flemish face, full of radiant beauty. He is bowing reverently and delivering his mysterious message: she will be the mother of God.
We have heard this story so often that, whether we are religious or not, the immensity of what he is saying no longer hits us. The sound of those wings, the sudden physical presence of the bird-man in the snug, bright, Flemish interior. It is no wonder that the woman, confronted by the sight of so much heaven, has sought the proximity of the earth and fallen to the floor in her full, richly colored dress with its fantastically painted folds. I hang that angel and all those other colorful, magical creatures hanging on my Christmas tree.
That evening at the Literaturhaus in Frankfurt there is lots of rowdy coughing—perhaps Birkenfeld is a healthier place to live—but I travel on to Göttingen and read, in a large attic full of serious faces, about my first journeys and the Spanish island where I live in the summer and about my neighbors’ donkey. The following morning, I go to an exhibition about the brilliant scholar Albrecht von Haller, who once studied in the Netherlands, in Leiden, and looked more deeply into the human body than anyone before his time. I gaze at the flowers he mounted in his herbarium almost three hundred years ago, flowers that once bloomed in an age without cars, when the world was still quiet. I thank the old botanist, and add his flowers to my tree.
At the end of that week, my German tour is over. I read in Lüneburg, walk down the quayside at night, along the still, mysterious water. Someone comes to pick me up the next morning. Not far from Gorleben, I see motionless human figures standing in the fields and on the roadside. They are deceptively real, as though someone stopped the film when they were working in their fields. They are designed to express the local people’s fear of the radioactive waste that is going to be stored in the ground here and is now hanging as a threat over the daily lives of these people.
That same evening, I travel back to the Middle Ages. Some friends of mine live near the castle of the von Bernstorff family, and the count is going to dress up as Santa Claus and address the local children. Everything looks like a painting by Brueghel. Open fires are crackling, and festoons of lights lend luster to the dark night. Candles glow in the windows of the simple pink castle. The children push forward and the count speaks to them first from the balcony, flanked by two angels, figures of light from another world; it would not surprise me if they suddenly flew away over the market stalls and the expectant crowd, who have to step aside for a tractor pulling a trailer bringing another regiment of winged beings. At that moment, the music begins: a group of older men and boys with trombones and trumpets. I can see their faces in the light of the torches, red, with chilled, round cheeks from all that blowing, small puffs of white among the gleaming copper as they draw breath, and I hang that image too on my imaginary Christmas tree, which I now throw over my shoulder before heading off through the other Christmas trees to the stand where two men with faces by Rogier van der Weyden are serving up hot lemon punch with honey liqueur. My reading tour is at an end and, together with my invisible tree, I can disappear into the merry crowd, which, like me, has sought light in this darkness, and found it.
December 19, 2008
1 In response to the Berlin Blockade (June 24, 1948–May 12, 1949), during which the Soviet Union blocked the railway, road and canal routes into those areas of the city under Allied control, the Western Allies organized the Berlin Airlift, delivering necessities such as food and fuel in more than 200,000 flights over the course of eleven months.
2 Lost Paradise, translated by Susan Massotty (London: Harvill Secker; New York: Grove Press, 2007).
3 What our calculations fail to solve, we refer to as chance.
4 Self-portrait of an Other, translated by David Colmer, with drawings by Max Neumann (Chicago/London/Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012).
5 The Knight Has Died, translated by Adrienne Dixon (Louisiana State University Press, 1990).