In Time

by C K Williams

  Many lifetimes later, the Romanian, Paul Celan, living in Paris, writing in German, is hyperconscious, too, of what the city might mean:

  MEMORY OF FRANCE

  Together with me recall: the sky of Paris, that giant autumn crocus . . .

  We went shopping for hearts at the flower girl’s booth:

  they were blue and they opened up in the water.

  It began to rain in our room,

  and our neighbor came in, Monsieur Le Dream, a lean little man.

  We played cards. I lost the irises of my eyes;

  you lent me your hair, I lost it, he struck us down.

  He left by the door, the rain followed him out.

  We were dead and were able to breathe.

  (Translation by Michael Hamburger)

  Walter Benjamin’s project for the last part of his life was a study of the “passages” of Paris, the series of commercial arcades within buildings that were constructed as a means of vitalizing new neighborhoods in the north of the city. The mysterious inwardness of the passages intrigued Benjamin; their existence reinforced certain aspects of the urban reality that already existed. The entire city seemed to have acquired an unconscious of its own, one in which were revealed symbols and implications it had kept hidden even from itself until the poets and writers arrived to reveal them. Even today, strolling or stalking through the city seems to involve some kind of problem of mind, a project of imagination, even if we aren’t aware of it. Merely strolling in Paris can seem to have a meaning, a resonance, as though one were a note of a great, inaudible chord. (Miłosz wrote: “Then I gave you the eyes of various people, so that you could look at the same city.”) And if we are involved in a project, that of keeping our eyes open and our imaginations acute, aren’t we making a kind of progress as we advance through the streets, or through our imagination of the streets? Aren’t we making headway through certain elusive systems of self, a self that, now that it has a vast city as a symbol embodying it, has also to be larger, possibly vast, too?

  So Paris becomes the city of the soul, a place of profound spiritual struggle; it becomes an agent of transformation, perhaps the most powerful. Isn’t this why Rilke’s Malte comes to Paris in the first place? To be able to enact his intuition that the essential task of the heart now is the transformation of itself and everything else, of all existence? And the first thing Rilke learns in his desolate young poet’s loneliness is that the city will both wound and abet him in this project because the city demands transformation; to a sensibility like Rilke’s, it is intolerable as it is, untenable, swarming with desire and death, with time and decay, with human sadness and ecstasy.

  Here is Rilke in the fullness of his genius, in Malte, articulating the terrible dramas the city can reveal.

  But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.

  The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

  (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

  “An indescribable effort.” Yes, that is what our transformations demand. But really, isn’t this finally why everyone, all, come to Paris, the real city or the one of our hopes? Because nowhere else is the transformation of self, and the mysterious unknown possibilities of self, so apparent? Yet the city, in its transformative mode, will always stay out ahead of us, always in some sense elude us, the way consciousness itself can elude us, so that often the way through the city, just because it promises so much, can be loneliness, pain, unbearable compassion, and a constant and acute sense of what life might be, and isn’t.

  “The shape of a city changes,” Baudelaire writes in “Le Cygne,” “faster, alas, than a human heart.” (La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel.)

  Letter to a German Friend

  This essay was written over a period from 1998 to 2001 after a stay of some months at the American Academy in Berlin. It was subsequently published in a different form in Germany and the Netherlands. After the attack on the World Trade Center, it seemed to me to have become somewhat dated—primarily of historical interest—and I presumed I would save it to publish one day in a collection of essays.

  There are two elements that have made me decide to publish it in English now.1 First, the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle and Far East, and perhaps in America as well, if many of the commentators on the recent (2004) film The Passion of the Christ are correct in their evaluation of it.

  And of course since 9/11 and since our ill-conceived war on Iraq, Americans have had to begin to come to grips with the sad fact that our country has become “symbolic” in the same sense in which I use the term in this essay to describe the Germans. Americans are troubled and confused just as the Germans are, since so few of us feel we’ve ever participated in even the most distant way in any of the offenses of which our nation is presumed guilty by those who see us now as a symbol, more than a people. We are being forced to examine our history and our common conscience in a way we never expected we would have to. If our symbolic identity does not have, or does not have yet, as much sway over our perception of ourselves as it does to German and Jew, it is no longer something to which we can afford not to attend, and we have certainly realized already that it is not an uncomplicated matter to try to shed such definitions.

  1

  Another television documentary about the Holocaust, this one made by Germans. Some recently unearthed films, the usual horrors; one which I found especially rending of a mother being herded like a sheep away from her crying child, just a toddler, eighteen months or so, like my youngest grandson—awful. Then several German war veterans speaking of atrocities, some who claimed to have seen nothing, and done nothing, some who had seen, yes—one nearly tearful as he recalled an old Jew holding his two daughters against him as they were shot—but done nothing themselves, but no one who had both seen and done anything. Many recited the usual litany: were the Germans guilty, are they still guilty? Yes, no, yes. None of the poor old men realized that what troubles them has little or nothing to do with guilt.

  I thought of you, naturally, of your work, of our conversations. I thought, too, of how complex the connection still is between German and Jew. Even us: we’re close friends now, we have no apparent conflicts or tensions, nothing either of us wouldn’t say to the other, yet it can still feel as though there’s some mystery between us, perhaps not so much as individuals, but certainly as representatives of our two peoples: the German and the Jew. We can seem to be terribly different from one another, embodying radically divergent realities. Sometimes it can even seem we’re demonstrations of something; I’m not sure what. Perhaps human beings always signify more than we think we do, or intend to. This can be a good thing, when we’re regarded as admirable, but even then it can be distressing because it has more to do with what the world thinks of us than how we conceive ourselves.

  I think that’s why I’m writing this, because no matter how we put to one side what happened between the Germans and the Jews, there’s still something almost inevitably awry in the way we are in the world together, and I’d like to find a way to better situate us in that complex, possibly saddening affiliation.

  It would be good to be together again to talk about all of this, especially if it could be in Berlin. I miss Berlin. That’s a statement a few years ago I’d ha
ve been taken aback to find myself making; I probably never would have come to the city at all if I hadn’t been invited for a residency, and I’m still surprised at how sympathetic I found it to be and how quickly my affection for it grew. Needless to say, from time to time I questioned my feeling of warmth towards a Germany city, and occasionally I’ve thought that the source of my positive feelings was due at least partly to the feeling I often had when I was in Berlin that I wouldn’t be harmed. I was certain, and at some level was quite taken aback to be certain, that although I was in the very heart of what had once been the heart of evil, I was in no jeopardy; I even felt somehow protected, like a child whose vulnerability is taken into account by those around him.

  And I wasn’t harmed, even at the farthest edges of my spirit, even in those parts of me that can be as sensitive as unknit wounds. Not only most of the people I met, but the ambiance of the city, its streets and parks, its forests—so many unlikely hectares of trees—seemed to want to be sure that none of my ancient suppurations would be so much as breathed upon.

  Wouldn’t be harmed. Amazing. For in other times and places in Germany I had been harmed. When I visited Dachau when I was in my twenties, before I’d even really begun to meditate on what took place there, I knew I was being hurt, injured, that my spirit was being irrevocably afflicted with an anguish I would take to my grave. It was so desolating to be in a place that was the very incarnation of iniquity, in which one’s ethical meaning as a human seemed sullied and rent. As I gaped at those strands of wire, those decrepit barracks, that plaque in the earth marked “Ash-Grave,” I had the impression that I was supposed to do something, and when I didn’t, because I had no inkling of what I might do or what might be done, I realized for the first time how powerless we can be in our moral universe.

  Yet in Berlin, the place where so much of that evil was conceived, even in Wannsee, where I lived, and where the notorious Wannsee Conference took place, where men actually sat around a table, with cups of coffee, I imagine, to plan the annihilation of races—even in Wannsee I was exultantly unwounded; nor at the Savignyplatz, nor the Literaturhaus, nor the Altemuseum with its gorgeous Greek platter depicting Achilles solicitously bandaging Patroclus’s arm. Even in the old synagogue in Mitte, which, because it was located too perilously close to other, blameless buildings to be blown up or burnt down during the war, instead had been degraded by being turned into a stable—even there; nowhere did I feel betrayed by the least moral or historical toxicity.

  But my time in Berlin wasn’t completely untroubled; there were things that did disturb me—some directly, some more obliquely, abstractly. While I was there, a well-known German author gave what quickly became a controversial speech about German Holocaust guilt, during which he expressed more than anything else how sick and tired he was of it all. He said he believed the Germans’ “historical sensitivity” was being exploited by people whose motives were “nefarious at worst, monetary at best.” There was a response by the head of the German Jewish community, the argument escalated, and soon became, as such things mostly do, sensational and rhetorical and off the point. I heard nothing I hadn’t heard before, although the author’s tone, his frank irritation and animus, was new to me.

  What interested me much more while I was in Berlin, and made me more uncomfortable, sadder, I suppose I should say, was the perplexity I sensed still afflicted my German friends about the Holocaust, about what their obligation was to its memory, what the limits of that obligation should be, and whether there should be any enduring sense of responsibility at all. I came to feel that there was something the Germans, even the most perspicacious, even you, didn’t quite understand about themselves, which I thought I might.

  For a long time now the Germans have argued with the world and among themselves about Germany’s guilt, or lack of it, but it seems to me that what the Germans haven’t comprehended is how much in a peculiar, and essential, way you’re like the Jews now. That is, how much you’ve become, like the Jews, a symbolic people.

  We both know all too well that when one even mentions German and Jew together in our time, the Holocaust immediately intrudes. It can seem absurd that events that occurred more than fifty years ago should continue to be so pressing and to generate so much intense feeling on all sides. There have been enough catastrophes in our past; if the word “genocide” has come to be used too freely, certainly some atrocities well merit the term. Sometimes I think the reason the Holocaust retains such vitality, and appears so absolutely singular, might be aesthetic as much as moral. Perhaps we cling to it so much more tenaciously than to any of those other horrors because none of them has as much purely dramatic coherence. I mean “dramatic” in the strictly theatrical sense of the term, because all that happened during the years of the Third Reich can seem to have a certain unity, a self-containedness, like Greek tragedy. Just as the classical tragedies have a temporal coherence that makes them strikingly apprehensible to the imagination—all taking place in the course of a day, from dawn to night—so the twelve-year period of the Nazi epoch has a similarly cohesive, comprehensible structure. It had a well-demarcated beginning, when Hitler was appointed chancellor of the republic, and an equally definite ending, when Germany was overrun, Berlin destroyed, Hitler’s corpse burnt on the ruins of the city, the death camps revealed to the world, and their remaining prisoners released. The period even has some of the near-ritual quality of tragedy, in the way its plot inexorably unfolds, with shifts of tone and texture as the crimes accumulate and begin to generate their own retribution; the whole narrative seems to take place close to the very essence of the psyche, the way myths do: Oedipus or Antigone, Moses or Christ. None of the other disasters of our recent and even long ago history is so structurally coherent, and surely this is one of the reasons why they don’t have quite the same emotional and moral fascination for us; none has what might be called the tragic glamour of the Holocaust.

  And of course there are intrinsic reasons why the Holocaust still burns so for us. The sheer numbers involved, the brutal, methodical industrialization of murder, the overt moral malignancy of the Nazis, their apparent dedication to situating themselves, and all Germany, in contempt of ordinary norms of civilization—not to speak of those images recorded on film, then after the war in words, that seem etched into consciousness itself: the faces of people on their way to the gas chamber; the gaunt, ravaged bodies of the survivors, with their hollow, stricken gazes; men bludgeoned to death in public; women and children shot by high-powered weapons intended for the battlefield; starvation, degradation. They’re distressingly reliable, these little playlets of horror and dread—the alertness they evoke, the vehemence of attention: they demand an utter absorption from us. Like the erotic, they’re irresistible, and they feel connected to that fundamental place in us where good and evil and beauty and ugliness are grounded. Our historical grief for that time is very much like grief for a person: just as after months, years, decades, the memory of a loved one can erupt with freshened sorrow, all the hours of mourning coming together to inform this new sadness, so these racks and tangles of corpses, these ashes eternally burning their way towards the molten center of existence emerge in us, and in a hideous epiphany we are forced to think again: This happened, this really did happen!

  2

  I am not “guilty,” I experience neither “guilt” nor “shame,” I am quite convinced all of those dreadful matters which happened so long ago have nothing to do with me, and yet I feel afflicted, and, I feel, too, that the world, or certain elements of it, wish me to feel afflicted.

  This is the essence of what I heard when the famous writer stirred up his tempest while I was in Germany; he implied, of course, that he wasn’t alone in this, that many if not most Germans feel the same way, and I believed him. The Germans are “normal” now, he was saying, why can’t I, we, be allowed to live normally?

  What he had not understood, I think, was that the Germans have been for several generations, and will continue to be for
at least some time, not a normal nation, like the French or Italians, but, as I have said, a symbolic people, like the Jews, one of those social groups whose definition in the minds of others is not who they are, nor what they do, but what they stand for. As much as human beings can be, they are emblems, signs.

  To be emblematic, symbolic in this way isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. Sometimes the connotations that inform the symbolic identity of a group can be positive, particularly if they are evaluations the group has generated for itself. Thus the Jews considered themselves the “chosen people” long before that notion came to have the opprobrium attached to it that signified those who had refused and continued to refuse the new spiritual cosmos Christ inaugurated. But for the most part, and certainly in this context, symbolic characteristics attributed to groups are negative—so the fact that the Jews defined themselves as a unique, “chosen” people, surely added to the intensity of gentiles’ antipathy towards them. Similarly, the apparent wholeheartedness with which the Germans welcomed Hitler’s promises of racial purity, and their eager acceptance of his depiction of them as conquerors, destined to dominate Europe and the world, intensifies the negative force of the symbolic identity you must bear now.

  It’s been remarked that some people who have been blind their whole lives and recover their sight feel resentful to realize that during the time they were blind they’d been visible to other people, without their having been asked and without having suspected what being “seen” consisted of. There has to be an equivalent perturbation in confronting that one isn’t what one thought one was but, rather, a symbol of something else. I feel genuine solicitude for Germans, at least those like you who’ve seriously tried to understand their place in history, when I think of the confusion you’d have had to feel in realizing at some point in your process of maturation that you were enwrapped in an invisible, seemingly gratuitous robe of emblematic identity, something that meant nothing to you and too much to too many others.