by Peter Handke
And this reality had its recurring moment: the moment when, by virtue of the words of the consecration, the particles of bread, which had, in a manner of speaking, become God’s body, were enclosed in the tabernacle along with the chalice. The tabernacle was opened; already wrapped in its cloth, the object, the cup, was placed in the glorious colors of its silken grotto; the tabernacle closed—and behold the golden radiance of its rounded exterior!
That is how I see Cézanne’s réalisations (except that I stand before them, instead of kneeling): a transformation and sheltering of things endangered—not in a religious ceremony, but in the form of faith that was the painter’s secret.
The Cold Field
Unlike the streets of Paris, even those I knew only briefly, which time and again appear to me when I least expect them, Mont Sainte-Victoire has never once turned up in my daydreams. On the other hand, the mountain returns to me almost daily in an analogy of forms and colors. Almost imperceptible slopes can lead to solitary peaks and adventurous high plateaus; and then, even without specific knowledge, I feel that I understand the country around me.
But of course the aftereffect of this mountain goes far beyond a refreshing understanding of nature.
There is a hill on the outskirts of Paris which, unlike Montmartre, can scarcely be seen from the city. I am referring to Mont-Valérien, in the western suburb of Suresnes. Barely distinguishable from the chain of hills running westward parallel to the Seine, Mont-Valérien is the site of a fort where, during the Second World War, the German occupying forces carried out mass executions.
I had never been there, but after seeing Mont Sainte-Victoire I was drawn to the place. One fine summer afternoon I went up and saw a stone cemetery against the blue sky; I picked blackberries that were hard and sweet; and glancing at the numerous little houses on the surrounding hills, where here and there a dog barked and a wisp of smoke arose, I perceived nothing but a ghostless present. Slowly, I descended the eastern slope, crossed the Seine, and on my way back to Paris passed through the Bois de Boulogne. There I climbed another scarcely noticeable hill which also has its associations with the war and is known as the Mont des Fusillés; the trees (beneath which, as everywhere else, Sunday excursionists were lying) still show bullet holes. That afternoon was the only time I ever thought of Cézanne in such a connection, though his paintings have often been likened to music; namely when, to preserve the present, I wanted to shake it “like a marimba.”
Later, at nightfall, I stood on an overpass at the edge of the city and looked down at the Boulevard Périphé- rique, which appeared to me in mobile gold colors; and the thought that then crossed my mind still strikes me as reasonable: namely, that someone like Goethe should envy me for living at the end of the twentieth century.
Without my intending them to, the circles around Mont Sainte-Victoire grew wider and wider.
My stepfather came from Germany. Before the First World War his parents moved to Berlin from Silesia. My father is also a German; he came from the Harz Mountains (where I have never been). But all my mother’s forebears were Slovenes. In 1920 my grandfather voted for the inclusion of southern Austria in Yugoslavia, which had just been established, and the German-speaking people of his village threatened to beat him up. (My grandmother flung herself between them; scene of action: “The turn of the plow”; Slovenian ozara.) After that, he seldom opened his mouth about public affairs. As a young girl my mother acted in a Slovenian amateur theater group. Later she was proud of her ability to speak the language, and in Russian-occupied Berlin after the war her Slovenian was a big help to us all. True, she never really felt like a Slovene. The Slovenes have indeed been said to lack a sense of nationality, because unlike the Serbs and Croats they never had to fight for their country; and indeed, many of their songs are sadly introverted. I’m told that Slovenian was my first language. Later the local barber told me over and over again that when I came for my first haircut I hadn’t known a word of German and our whole conversation had been in Slovenian. I don’t remember that, and at any rate I’ve almost forgotten the language. (I’d always had a feeling that I came from somewhere else.) At the country school in Austria I was sometimes homesick for Germany—which to me meant postwar Berlin. When I heard about the Third Reich, I knew there had never been anything more evil, and when possible I acted accordingly. But it never occurred to me that the Germany I had known as a child was in any way involved.
Later on, I spent almost ten years in various towns in the Federal Republic, which struck me as brighter and more spacious than my native country; and in Germany, in contradistinction to Austria, where, so it seemed to me, hardly anyone spoke my language, I was sometimes able to express an opinion with passion (though in so doing I often felt that I was betraying something else). I can still conceive of living in Germany, for I know that no other country numbers so many “incorrigibles” who hunger for their daily reading matter; so many of the dispersed and obscure nation of readers.
But it was in Paris that I first encountered the spirit of the crowd and disappeared into the hubbub. Thereafter, from the remoteness of France I moved to, as I couldn’t help seeing, an increasingly evil and sclerotic Federal Republic. Much as German groups might speak of “tenderness,” “solidarity,” and “mutual encouragement,” they behaved like mobs; as individuals, they went sentimental. (“Obstinacy, sentimentality, and travel” is the motto of a German friend of mine.) Regardless of age, the people in the street seemed worn out; their eyes had lost their color. Instead of growing, the children seemed just to shoot up. Fragments of painted high-rise buildings drove down the desolate streets in the form of bright-colored cars, and in those cars headrests had taken the place of people. The typical sounds were the whirring of parking meters and the popping of cigarette vending machines; the corresponding words were Abfluss-sorgen (drainage problems) and Fernsehkummer (television trouble). The signs on the shops were not “Bread” or “Milk” but pretentious acronyms. Almost everything, in newspapers and books as well, bore a spurious name. On Sunday, the flags on the department stores fluttered over emptiness. The many dialects, once the “accents of the soul,” had become a soulless garble which (in Austria, too) turned my stomach. True, there were mailboxes for “Other Destinations”—but no feeling for north, south, east, and west. Even nature seemed to have lost its reality; the treetops and the clouds over them moved spasmodically—the fluorescent tubes of the double-decker buses were aimed straight at me, dog chains jangled behind front doors, the people at the windows were on the lookout for accidents and nothing else; an intercom shouted into a deserted street: “Who is it?”; newspapers advertised artificial turf; and only here and there, in the vicinity of the public toilets, might one glimpse a sort of mournful beauty.
Then I understood violence. This world with its “functional forms,” labeled in every detail, yet totally speechless and voiceless, was not in the right. Maybe it was pretty much the same somewhere else, but here I saw it naked, and I wanted to knock someone, anyone, down. I hated this country, with as much enthusiasm as in my childhood I had hated my stepfather, whom in my imagination I often hit with an ax. And the statesmen there (like all artists engaged in politics) struck me as ham actors—never an utterance that came from a center—and my only thought was of “failure to atone.”
At that time, I even detested the geology of Germany; its valleys, rivers, and mountains; yes, my loathing reached deep into the subsoil. It was therefore my intention that in his book On Spatial Configurations the man with folded arms, a geologist, would describe a West German landscape, which would be known as the Cold Field. In prehistoric times two rivers had “disputed” the watershed. The one, taking advantage of its steeper gradient, had moved back its starting point beyond the original watershed and “piratically” tapped the other river. “Beheaded,” as it were, by the blade of the first, the valley of the second was laid waste. Below where it was tapped, the river became “stunted”—with the result that the valley seems much
too wide and has for that reason become known as the Cold Field.
But even before setting foot on European soil, the geologist had turned himself back into me, and since then I had been living in Berlin. I reread Hölderlin’s Hyperion, finally understood every sentence, and was able to look on its words as images. In addition, I often stood looking at the paintings in Dahlem. Once I stepped out of the Underground onto the little round Platz of Dahlem-Dorf, saw it edged with composite street lamps like the Place de la Concorde in Paris, glimpsed the beauty of a “nation,” and even felt a certain longing for something of the kind. And, in Germany, the word “Reich” showed me its new meaning when, on my long way around, I crossed the northern “flatlands” described by Nicolas Born and was once again reminded, by the curving sand roads and dark patches of water, of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings. The new meaning came from a distinction: those landscapes, if only they had a stunted tree or a single cow in them, showed the radiance of a “Reich”—while here I was moving in an utterly lackluster “district.”
Until then, moreover, it had never struck me that Berlin is situated in a broad glacial valley (previously the fact would hardly have interested me); the houses still seemed to have been scattered at random over a steppe-like plain. Then I discovered that a few streets away was one of the few spots in the city where the receding ice had formed a discernible slope. There lay the Matthäus Graveyard, the top of which, rising high above the surrounding country, is said to be the highest point in the Schöneberg district. (The artificial rubble mountains thrown up after the war don’t count.) One afternoon I set out to visit the place. The sultry air and distant thunder were just what was needed. The first barely perceptible slope in the road put me in a state of expectancy. But it was only in the cemetery that the rise became visible. The level hilltop provided a kind of terrace among the graves. There I sat (the tombstone beside me bore the names of the Brothers Grimm) and looked down into a large hollow. The city I saw looked entirely different, and from the bottom of the valley, far in the distance, a river feeling rose up to me. The first drops of rain fell warm on my head, and today I feel justified in applying a sentence from the old novels to the man who was sitting there: “In that moment no one was happier than he.” On my way down, in the gently sloping Langenscheidt-strasse, I felt the flow of the primordial waters: a clear, gentle feeling. In the evening my graphite pencil point glowed, and for a few days the flags on the Kaufhaus des Westens waved at the bottom of the valley.
Then at last I made my way to the Havelberg, barely a hundred meters above sea level, said to be the highest point in West Berlin. In a grassy clearing I saw sacks, which stood up and proved to be sleepy soldiers. By a roundabout route I reached the summit, which I myself determined, because the Havelberg forms a fairly level ridge. There I lay down under a pine tree and once again breathed the air of the present. From a shooting blind, with wild boar running about below it, I looked down in the dusk on East Berlin, where we had lived after the war.
It was by pure chance that I also went to see my father that year. We hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and I was surprised when he answered the phone. He was living in a small town in northern Germany. As we had done on our few previous meetings, we made elaborate arrangements to meet, missed each other as usual, and spent the whole evening trying to figure out why. Since the death of his wife, he lived alone in the house; he didn’t even have a dog anymore. He saw his likewise widowed woman friend only on weekends; in between, one called the other’s number each evening and let the phone ring briefly as a sign that he was still alive. (But here neither house nor man will be identified in the usual way.) In his eyes I saw the fear of death and suspected a belated sense of responsibility. Here, it seemed to me, was someone’s son. Halfhearted inquiry was swept away by the spirit of questioning, and I was able (wanting to was enough) to ask about what had long been kept silent. And he answered me, partly for his own sake. Casually, he told me that mornings, when he looked at himself in the mirror, he felt like “smashing his face,” and then for the first time I discovered in him the forlornness, bitterness, and rebelliousness of a hero. When late that night he took me to the train, a poster fastened to a tree outside the station was ablaze; some unemployed taxi drivers had set it on fire.
Once after that, I caught sight of another Germany, not the Federal Republic and its Lander, nor yet again the ghoulish Reich, nor the half-timbering of the petty principalities. It was earth-brown and wet with rain, and it was on a hilltop; it was windows; it was urban, devoid of people, and festive; I saw it from a train; it was the house on the other side of the river; it was humorously quiet and was called Mittelsinn; it was “the silent life of regular forms of silence”; it was enigma; it was recurrent and real. The man who saw it had a crafty feeling like Lieutenant Columbo after solving a case; yet knew that there could never be lasting relief.
The Hill of Spinning Tops
It was now certain that I had a communication to make about Cézanne’s mountain. But what was the law of this communication, its self-evident, necessary form? (For of course I wanted to accomplish something with my writing.)
I couldn’t be satisfied with a dissertation that would merely look for relationships in my field of inquiry—my ideal had always been the gentle emphasis and appeasing flow of a narrative.
Yes, I wanted to tell a story (and I enjoyed studying dissertations). For often, in reading and writing, I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth—the insight that came before the story—is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences. Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never.
For a time I thought of treating particular aspects—the mountain and me, the pictures and me—and setting them down side by side as unconnected fragments. But then I rejected such fragmentary treatment because it would have resulted not from a possibly unsuccessful striving for unity but from a deliberate method, known in advance to be safe.
Then, in Grillparzer’s The Poor Minstrel, I read: “I trembled with a longing for unity.” A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me. For I knew that unity is possible. Every single moment of my life hangs together with every other—without intermediate links. I need only reconstitute them with the help of my imagination.
At the same time, a well-known restriction occurred to me; for I also knew that analogies must not be arrived at lightly; quite unlike the daily muddle in our minds, they are the golden fruits of the imagination after passionate upheavals, they are the true comparisons, thus, as the poet said, forming “the far-shining brow of the work.” It therefore seemed presumptuous to trust in such analogies to hold a story together.
The next problem was when. When was this tale to unfold? It had long seemed to me that there were no longer any fitting places for a story to happen in. For the story of the man with folded arms I had to reach far back into the wilderness, and such things as an airplane or a television set came close to wrecking my project. I therefore considered relegating the action to the turn of the century and choosing as my hero the young painter and writer Maurice Denis, who had once actually visited the revered Cézanne in his home country; and, if only because of the thick black coat in the studio, which resembled my grandfather’s, I felt the atmosphere of the time.
But wasn’t it part of my truth that the protagonist should be German-speaking? This led me to imagine a young Austrian painter in the period between the wars, who moves to Provence in 1938, shortly before his country is annexed by Germany. I already had a deeply etched image of such a man: one of my mother’s brothers, who was blind in one eye and whose letters from the war, written in a clear script, I had read over and over again as a child. He was killed on the Russian front. I had dreamed of him all through my adolescence and now I felt a longing to be him again, and to see the blue background color of a wayside shrine through his eyes.
In the end, however
, I hoped it might be “me” (I had transformed Sorger, the geologist, into myself, and besides, he persisted in many of my perceptions). The “lesson” told me not to “invent” but to “realize” (réaliser) (which of course called for invention at every step); and my personal certainty was to trust in Goethe’s “good self” as the inner light of my story; as the bright and ennobling quality which inspires confidence in the reader. Nothing else is worth reading.
I then decided to take a second trip to Provence, where I expected to find the solution. But I didn’t want to be alone there again. More and more keenly I felt the need for someone who would be right for me; not someone with a certainty, but someone who was himself groping, the kind of person who, like certain children, can still be asked the great questions.
So I arranged to meet D. in Aix. D. comes from a small town in Swabia and is a dressmaker. On leaving school, she moved to Paris and rented a two-room apartment. Though at first humiliated by the buyers and shopkeepers, she was soon making a living. She still goes back to her childhood home for such things as the dentist. Her parents are members of the “hidden nation” (of readers), and from the start she has looked upon pictures as more than accessory.
Her pictures are her “creations,” each one of which represents an idea of its own. Her two-room apartment is at the same time a studio, resplendent with many-colored materials. She takes her work more seriously than anyone else I know, prides herself in it as only an artist can, and has no patience with anyone who interferes with it.
