For 40 years a strong current has repeatedly carried me out of the west of Germany toward Berlin and held me there until the present day, against all my tendencies and instincts, against all plans and resolutions. I have had my residence in Berlin for 18 years, without really wanting to but nevertheless without being able to get away. It has been the same for many Germans of my age and social class. A giant turbine has drawn us in here. A maelstrom has dropped us to this place. Berlin has become our fate, and we, its victims, have become Berlin’s fate. For us, this problematic, volatile [aufbrecherische] capital city was more of a passage than a real city or a domicile. For numerous residents it was nothing but a restless workplace with good theaters and a lot of night business, made bearable through many trips to the lake or into the mountains, a termite colony obsessed with innovation, a Promethean furnace, and finally a crematorium. Was it also overall, viewed historically, nothing more than a crematorium and, in the end, not even that any longer but rather just a garbage can and a pile of debris?
It was much more and something completely different. There are in Berlin not only debris and rubble but also graves. A city attains its historical standing through its graves. It may be that churches and palaces dominate the picture, but the deeper effect emanates from its graves. They broadcast their songs of the dead inaudibly and ineffably. Rome is a holy city because of its graves, only secondarily because of its churches and palaces. Berlin has nothing of the holy city about it. We do not wish to speak of its churches here. But there are substantial [wirkliche] graves in Berlin. Not only simple, decent, honest graves that have not been destroyed by any handicraft experiments; not only graves of the poor, the foreign, and the unknown, which move one more deeply than false mausoleums; but also graves that ground a historical dignity.
I think here not of the famous philosophers Fichte and Hegel. Their graves did not become famous. Such idealistic thinkers have too questionable a relationship to the resurrection of the flesh for their own graves to be able to hold the seeds of historical expectations. Fichte’s immortal I will somehow domesticate for itself [sich … anbändigen] a new Not-I, and Hegel’s absolute spirit will settle somewhere in freedom in a new residence. There are some dignified graves of artists and scholars in Berlin. The Humboldt grave in Tegel is the perfect document of a successful classicism. There are also helpless graves that are the final expression of a helpless existence, such as the grave of Bruno Bauer in the cemetery of the former Rixdorf—a stone with the false title “Dr. Bruno Bauer,” about which the old licentiate in theology would have smiled knowingly.
But what do such graves set up, and what perishes with them when they are destroyed or relocated? At the Invalidenfriedhof [Invalids’ Cemetery] there are real graves of soldiers, especially of those granted the order Pour le Mérite. As far as I am aware, in the old days Ernst Jünger had reserved the right to take his place among them. I no longer know whether he continues today to hold on to this claim. It is difficult to speak of such things, for we who are still living on earth know no more about our real grave than we do of life after death. The grave still belongs to the overall picture of our earthly appearance. We learn as boys and experience as old men the cry of Solon: Nemo ante mortem beatus [“No one can be called happy before he dies”]. We can add, ante sepulcrum [“before the tomb”], and we can say, beatus vel miser [“happy or wretched”]. Of these things we can certainly speak. We are even obligated to become aware of a current problem of a new kind. The modern procedures appropriate to the age of progress have also perfected the methods of disposing of the corpses of political enemies and have modernized the ancient theme of Antigone.
I know of two graves in Berlin that bear witness to something and that make this destroyed city be, for me, more than the ashes of a Promethean furnace. Two German poets have found their graves here, and in such a way that both of these graves say more about our true [history], that is, our history of suffering, than the graves in the Fürstengruft [ducal burial chapel] at Weimar: the grave of Kleist at Wannsee and the grave of Theodor Däubler at the cemetery on the Heerstraße. On the basis of these graves alone, Berlin is no mere crematorium and no pile of debris.
* * *
Heinrich von Kleist carried in his being the dichotomy between the West and the East. As a young man he considered becoming a soldier under Napoleon; later on enmity against the foreign conqueror took hold of his soul. Napoleon—that was the West. Kleist could have had patience and waited. To date, the East has demonstrated more patience than the West. Slavic patience will become the master of our guilt.1 Of course in Berlin there was too much intellectual ferment [Geist] for a great deal of patience to have been possible. But also, intellectually speaking, Napoleon could not have conquered Prussia permanently. Only he who knows his prey better than it knows itself can conquer, and there is no question that the Prussian philosophers of that time knew more about the ideas of the West than the West of that time even suspected about the powers of the East.
Kleist’s hatred of the French was not yet an option for the East, which back then did not even exist in today’s sense. But in the concrete world-political situation, hatred of the French was already an option for Russia—the land power that had brought Napoleon low, with all the consequences that emerged from this in the course of the nineteenth century—and both for Prussia, with a Germany governed from Prussia, and for a Europe overshadowed by a powerful Germany. It was in any case an updating of the strong eastern elements within Prussia’s own mode of being. One year before his death, Kleist wrote the inexhaustible, always astounding essay “On the Marionette Theater” [Über das Marionettentheater].2 At the end a bear appears who, with unerring instinct, proves superior to all, even to those with the most intelligent technique. He exhausts the best foil fencer simply because he does not react to feints. This bearer of unknown powers is a mythical symbol and already stands in the lineage of a deep opposition between East and West.
The opposition runs right across the middle of Germany, halfway through Germany’s heart. Among the classics of German literature it is still completely unthinkable in this form. Nevertheless, it appears from the East already in the eighteenth century. A remarkable document from this period is the appeal directed to Frederick the Great from Königsberg, in the year 1776, by the quintessential philosopher of the German East, Johann Georg Hamann. The greater philosopher Hamann appealed to the King of Prussia against the philosopher of Sanssouci. The philosopher of Sanssouci, that was the West; the King of Prussia, the East. But who, in the age of Voltaire, should have read such a letter and understood such an appeal? By contrast, in the century to follow, a left-wing Hegelian like Bruno Bauer could opt for the East in full world-historical consciousness.
In the autumn of 1935 I was in Wannsee, at Kleist’s grave, with the poet Konrad Weiß and two Westphalian friends. Konrad Weiß published a magnificent essay about this. In Weiß’s historical imaginary [Geschichtsbild], which is entirely Marian, Kleist’s female forms were wonderfully Christian, while the women of Goethe were either idealistically pallid or adorably romantic. We did not speak about the death of Kleist. In October of 1944 I visited the grave together with my daughter Anima. The old, modest gravestone, which had a certain tradition, had been removed and replaced by a modern, simple stone. The old aphoristic inscription had had to give way to a verse from The Prince of Homburg: “Now, o immortality, you are entirely mine!”3—which sounded all too ambitious in this place. The carrion birds of the approaching epidemic of suicides already buzzed in the air. It was a dreadful hour. But I did not want to talk about this with a child of 13. In the meantime, my own experiences have driven me to think further and to say what has become clear to me.
Kleist’s grave is the grave of a suicide. He killed himself deliberately and advisedly; he died by his own hand. No idealistic rhetoric can embellish or dissemble this fact. On the old gravestone stood the verse:
Here he sought death
and found immortality.
Was it really death that he sought? The death wish [Todeslust] is not death. And would anyone [claim to] know what he really found? I think today in horror about the fact that this suicide, carried out in November 1811, could already have been a harbinger of those suicides that were committed in early 1945 in exactly this part of Berlin and in a particular social class.
From a modern poet, indeed the most modern of all, from Theodor Däubler, comes the line: “The plants teach us the soft dying of the heath/en.”4
I do not believe in this soft dying of the heath/en or in its plantlike character. Where the heathens were well ahead of us [Was die Heiden … vor uns voraushatten] in this regard, and what a European of the twentieth century attempts in vain to reproduce, is something else, namely the power to make a sacrament out of a suicide. Only a single person has brought this off in a way understandable to us: the Stoic philosopher [Seneca], who solemnly took the step into the realm of freedom and in doing so saw the last—in fact the only—possibility of proving his human dignity and of preserving his moral freedom. In my life I have known two men who have taken their own lives, perhaps in part with such motivations: Otto Baensch, a neo-Kantian philosopher, who died in despair in 1936, and Wilhelm Ahlmann, who by dying put himself and his friends beyond the reach of further police interrogation in December of 1944.
Only in times of civil war does the exemplary significance of this form of death come into its own. A famous historical case is the demise of the philosopher Condorcet, who took poison during the Terror of 1793 and thus evaded the Terror and by the same move succumbed to it. Yet this is already modern. In truth Seneca remains the only priest of this highly philosophical sacrament. He was a contemporary both of the heathen Emperor Nero and of the Christian apostle Paul. His speech already possessed something of the growth of the word become flesh. Upon his act there already rests a radiance of sanctification that only the death of the living God on the cross could have granted. Seneca’s nephew Lucan must also be mentioned here, for he is the poet of civil war. Both were contemporaries of the unique, unrepeatable, constantly present events that founded and [still] maintain our eon. For us the shimmering light of the Stoic suicide comes from there, from the origin of our eon. It is only a lunar light, like that of all humanistic attempts at religion, and is not capable of producing sacramental forms.
Kleist was no Stoic. His suicide was no act of combat in a civil war either. The desire for death had gripped him. He knew the fear and sought the voluptuousness of the grave. He sought the bed of the empress. Yet he did not become a Euphorion5 of the desire for death. He was no heathen—neither an unbroken, pre-Christian heathen nor a voluntary heathen in the sense associated with the modern lust for life and desperate secularity. He was driven far beyond the elements of death and the grave. He wanted to open the gates of an afterworld, to force them, and did not want to be alone in this. He took a companion with him, a victim who offered herself to him. As he went to his death with solemn pronouncements of his serenity, with a woman as companion, victim, and witness, he sought a passage into another realm and attempted the rite of opening of this passage. His act exaggerated the element and sought to attain a sacrament.
And yet he found no sacrament prepared for him. He did not even find the sign of the cross in the name of the Holy Trinity, a sign whose salvific power Annette von Droste-Hülshoff had experienced and to which she bore witness in one of her strongest poems.6 Kleist’s leap into the realm of freedom became in this way an act of violence; and the companion, instead of a witness, was in the end merely the helpless echo of male despair. It was the act of violence of a German poet whom the humanism of the German classics and the idealism of German philosophy had left unredeemed, because neither could offer him a sacrament—or even a sign. Both humanism and idealism are, as Konrad Weiß says, luminous [lichtvoll] but vacuous. In contrast, a luster from Maria Immaculata fell upon the female figures of Kleist, upon his Amazons as much as upon his sleepwalking girls; and Maria, the helpful mother, cannot have left the poet of such female figures without her assistance. A hint of her heavenly beneficence breaks up [löst] the stiff lament of this grave.
* * *
The other grave lies in the ranks of an individualistically tended metropolitan cemetery at the Reichssportfeld [Imperial Sports Complex]. It is the grave of the poet whose line on “the soft dying of the heath/en” I just quoted. Theodor Däubler came to Berlin from the South, from Trieste, via Rome, Florence, and Paris. When he arrived here in 1912, the shadows of the approaching world war already lay upon Wilhelmine Germany and its capital. The inquisitive intellectualism of this Berlin was still able, in the field of music, to follow Richard Strauß well. In painting it reacted in a lively fashion to the problematic of new concepts of space. In language and literature it was too self-satisfied to have been capable of sensitivity [hellhörig]. Young birds of death, like Georg Heym and Georg Trakl, did not remain unnoticed. Nothing remained unnoticed; and certainly not Däubler. But what should one do with this poor, unkempt Bohemian? He was a colossus of a man and had a colossal stack of works with him, the thick, three-volume epic of The Northern Lights.7 Johannes Schlaf, with his nose for cosmic scents [mit seinen kosmischen Witterungen], flagged it immediately as the epic of Europe. But who else could believe, in 1912, that this was the great European poet who had taken upon himself the intellectual and artistic completion of French and Italian art, he, endlessly more modern than all the aesthetes and literati whose pride it was to be modern?
The unkempt colossus was in reality a genius of European sensibility, a genius in languages, such as only an Illyrian can be. To that degree he was the modern, artistic counterimage to his theological fourth-century compatriot, Jerome, father of the Latin Vulgate whose phonetic beauty we have heard and felt since Charles Péguy. What the European impressionism of the nineteenth century, what futurism, cubism, and expressionism had broken open from many chaotic starting points found its unexpected fulfillment in the German language. The German poem became a new wonderwork of sound, color, and thought. It became a score whose tonal and coloristic plenitude is continuously intoned, interpreted, and conducted by the reader and hearer. Many poets were involved in the linguistic transformation, among them great names such as Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. But it was first through Däubler that the German language became the pure wonder instrument of a new tonality.
Däubler was often in Berlin, though he had neither domicile nor home [Heimat] there. He loved this passage into the unforeseeable, despite its destabilizing [aufbrecherischen] obsession with innovation and despite ugly experiences with its people. He penned no hymn to Berlin, but rather an ode to Rome, a song to Milan, hymns to Italian cities, and magnificent beginnings of a hymn to the Köln Cathedral and other German places. But he wanted to be buried in Berlin after he had traveled the long path from the Mediterranean through Western Europe.
“The wanderer would lie down with the waiting.”8
Rilke and Stefan George made their way to Switzerland and found their graves there. Däubler, the poet of gnostically illuminated verses about the resurrection of the flesh, laid himself down with the waiting in Berlin, in the sand of the March of Brandenburg. On his headstone stands the verse:
“The world is reconciled and drowned out by the Spirit.”9
* * *
Must we ask: Which spirit? The absolute Spirit of Hegel, who resided so long in Berlin? Or the spirit of the Christian Trinity, to whose sign Annette held fast? Or one of the many other spirits, which we are supposed to be able to tell apart? The poetic pantheism of Däubler encompasses them all with the same enthusiasm and pulls all of them into the stream of his rhythms. He can countenance it all. He can illuminate every word and every concept and let them ring out in limitless simultaneity. “Everything becomes a ball of unattempted dreams of rounding.”10 This poet lives with all religious and philosophical entities, just as the great Pan lives with all plants and animals. He surrounds himself by them [lagert sich zu ihnen], like Father Nile by his children in the famous ancient sculpture.11 Yet a verse that stands on a gravestone does not remain in the realm of what is merely poetically detached. It ineluctably takes on something of a religious, metaphysical, or philosophical avowal and decision.
That verse about the spirit that reconciles the world is the last line in Däubler’s great epic Das Nordlicht [Northern Lights]—its ending, its conclusion. The work itself is so full of life and soul that we need not detain ourselves here with polemical antitheses between spirit [Geist] and life, or between mind [Geist] and soul. This was clear to me from the beginning. But the actual historical–philosophical meaning of the symbol of the northern lights remained hidden to me for a long time. In a still very youthful work from the year 1916,12 I gave a Christian interpretation, and Däubler, in his limitless generosity, received it without objection. Today I know that the northern lights shine in the pale glow of a gnosis of humanity. They are the meteorological symbol of a humanity that saves itself, an autochthonous radiation that is broadcast by the Prometheans [Promethiden] of the earth into the cosmos. The ideal–historical context in which Däubler’s idea of the northern lights is to be understood first became clear to me as I came across an essay by Proudhon with a long commentary on the fate of the earth and its people. The French revolutionary, who was rich in ideas and loved such speculations, tells us that it is the fate of the earth gradually to freeze and, like the moon, to die. Humanity must then die with its planet, if it does not succeed in sublimating itself into Spirit—Spiritualité, Conscience, Liberté. For Däubler, the polar lights are the telluric witness and guarantor of just this salvation, by the Spirit and in the Spirit.
I found Proudhon’s cosmic–historical–philosophical fantasy of the fate of the earth and its people in his artphilosophical essays, which appeared in book form in Paris in 1865.13 It first fell into my hands in the year 1938, four years after Däubler’s death, a full 28 years after I had begun my studies on the symbol of the northern lights; and in this context I had initially found some remarks by Charles Fourier and Gustave Flaubert. The mysterious hand that steers us as we reach for books led me to that passage in Proudhon and opened it for me quite late. I suspect that the Promethean idea of northern lights originated in Saint-Simonian circles. There in any case it would have acquired its ideal–historical virulence. How far Theodor Däubler was initiated into their esoterics is not known to me. His intuitive understanding of ancient mysteries was astounding, and the ancient mysteries have to do with sun, moon, Earth and stars. In this context—according to the writings of Plutarch, as discussed by Bachofen14—the soul is assigned to the moon, the mind to the sun, and the body to the earth. The northern lights are no ancient symbol of mysteries. Däubler knew and worked out a great deal [unendlich Vieles] from discussions, and also from apparently accidental phonetic encounters that gave his scent ever new nourishment. The genius loci of Florence, the unforeseeable effect of Bachofen and other sources of ideas of the nineteenth century captured him as well. He often made allusions to an esoteric knowledge but never spoke of the ideal–historical connections, whereas for me familiarity with the latter means access to knowledge.
The encounter with Proudhon’s remark revealed to me the meaning of the northern lights symbol. I now recognized the origin of Däubler’s concept of Spirit, which was nourished by metaphysical German springs, by esoteric Mediterranean cisterns, and by Promethean Atlantic Gulf Stream currents. Thus I became aware retrospectively of a slow development, over many years, that had distanced me internally from Däubler. Since 1910 I had placed myself with great eagerness in the service of his work. Fritz Eisler, with his great intelligence and tact, confirmed me in this. I dedicated the Northern Lights brochure of 1916 to Eisler’s memory, after he was killed in September 1914 in France. From all that there emerged a heartfelt personal friendship with Däubler. After World War I it weakened. Däubler had made a name for himself [sich durchgesetzt]. Now Konrad Weiß, a Catholic Swabian, the poet of The Sybil of Cumae (1921), Tantalus (1929), and The Christian Epimetheus (1933),15 drew closer to me. All of this took its course without partings or explanations, without options or decisions, without consultations or discussions, just as the grain of wood grows in a tree. It belongs to the lines of our life, which we can trace later but not foresee or determine in the midst of its development.
Konrad Weiß died in 1940 in Munich and is buried there. As for my own poor person, I have abandoned the hope of being buried in the mountains above the Mosel, in the land of my forefathers. But I still hope to find a grave in the Westphalian Sauerland, in the Catholic cemetery at Eiringhausen where my parents rest, above the Lenne—a river of the Sauerland that still carried beautiful, proud mountain waters in my childhood and that I’ve seen transformed into a poor canal for industrial waste in the course of my life. Yet I would not see it as a degradation if my bodily remains returned to the earth in the sand of the March Brandenburg, in anticipation of the Day of Judgment and resurrection of the dead. I will draft no epitaph. There should not even be a hic et nunc there. If, however, my child would like to know something of the secret [arcanum] in the fate of her father and asks me about words that touch the innermost core of my life, I can quote no verse of Däubler. I cannot answer in a Promethean way, rather only as a Christian Epimetheus, with a verse from Konrad Weiß:
So will the sense, the more it seeks itself,
From dark imprisonment the soul, [be] led to the world.
Accomplish what you must, it is already
Always achieved and you may only answer.16
For my daughter Anima Louise, on August 25, 1946