Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  He’s got to take the dog for a walk, says Ulrich.

  He’s got to go home to his wife, says the landlord’s wife.

  Damn dog, mutters Heinz. Have I paid?

  Heinz’s large brown hand wanders towards the essence of Hannelore.

  No, no, no, says the golden bun, but an inner compass turns her in the desired direction.

  Have another beer, says Ulrich. And so the riotous night rages on, a web of increasingly drunken voices and forbidden gestures—it is better than television. Outside, the night air is cool. Damp, misty, the scent of jasmine, sad and lonely traffic lights at the deserted crossing, the night porter startled from his nap.

  The next morning, I see that I am not the only guest after all. Two Englishmen in a cloud of smoke talking about contracts and money, a steely businesswoman bashing her egg as she reads the latest news. There is a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine about Europa und der Orient 800–1900, the exhibition I saw yesterday before I left Berlin. Saw: that is the right word. I cannot claim any more than that. The organizers had planted a forest of references in the idiosyncratic space of the Gropius-Bau, and I wandered through that forest, at times in twilight, then in the subdued glow of a harem. The exhibition appealed on various levels: to my more base, hedonistic senses, to my penchant for rapidly acquired erudition, my thirst for everything Spanish, my exoticism, my Catholic memories, my desire for recognition. A forest of a thousand trees—that is no exaggeration. The catalogue alone, which was too heavy to take on my journey, contains over one thousand carefully considered, descriptive pages, but the logic of the catalogue is not the logic of the route through the exhibition, which is ambling and random, dependent on the gaze and the flow of other people. This means that you are always turning the centuries into loops, crossing your own path, meeting yourself, ascending, descending through time, and that time runs from the first Babylonian clay tablets to the chastely lustful, absurd yet wonderful harem fantasies of the Pre-Raphaelites—and everything in between. Everything? Of course not, but the sheer mass does suggest that word. Brueghel is there, with his Tower of Babel (another Babylonian tower), and so is Govert Flinck, with his very Dutch man in a turban, but there are also Catholic altar cloths with Mozarabic designs, incunabula, the first translation of Aristotle and the commentaries of Averroes, swords and shields embellished with Moorish enthusiasm, the breathtaking translucency of the Fatimid rock crystal, the meticulous illustrations of nineteenth-century French Egyptology, and sacred statues from ancient Egypt itself, seventeenth-century Europeans in fashionable oriental attire, the Andalusian griffin from Pisa, the cross-pollination between Islamites and Carolingians, between Venetians and Levantines, the intellectual furnaces of Toledo and Córdoba, where the Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures coexisted until that was no longer permitted, crusades, emissaries, audiences, letters of credence, pilgrimages, cloisters, scriptoria, colleges—all woven into a fabric of unfathomable complexity, which in our age of so-called global communication has been paradoxically and irreparably torn. Of course, what is on display here appears, by dint of its beauty alone, to be light years away from the destructive fundamentalism of the Khomeinis, but our own burnings of heretics and other barbarisms are equally invisible: the dirt of these encounters has been swept away, and what remains is an image of nostalgia, as if something that was once very close to us has withdrawn into itself, as though we have forgotten that it was the people of Mohammed who preserved the Greek legacy of doctors, mathematicians, philosophers and metaphysicians for the Europe of the Renaissance, and therefore the Enlightenment.

  The Frankfurter Allgemeine accompanies its article with just one image, but it is not a section of Gilgamesh, and not al-Khwarizmi’s astronomical tables. Blood will out, and this blood pulses from an East that never existed, a sensuous nineteenth-century fantasy. And so the image they have chosen is an 1886 painting by Edwin Long, and even in black and white it still achieves its effect: the pharaoh’s daughter discovering Moses among the reeds. Flamingos, water lilies, hieroglyphs, marble staircases, lush, oh-so-oriental palms, a sculpted lion, its melancholy head averted and resting on its stylized, four-toed paws. But that is not what this is all about, nor is it about the future lawgiver in his woven basket. It is about the naked and scantily clad women who populated that inaccessible realm in the fantasies of the painter and his customers. Visible, available, they sit and stand on those marble steps that run down into the water, their bodies draped here and there to please the breathless libido of the Victorian viewer, their modesty protected only by the varnish of the painting, a transparent, but impenetrable layer of lacquered time immuring them like a five-thousand-year-old tomb.

  The Harz, that is where I was planning to go, attracted by the patch of green on my Michelin map. Forests are good for the soul, and I have the image of Goethe’s Harzreise in my mind’s eye. But I am rather naive, as it proves impossible to reconcile the two things: the romantic, lonely, maybe even dangerous horseback journey that the poet undertook in 1777, when he was not yet thirty, and the civilized, tamed greenery of the restrained tourist landscape that I drive through inside my metal shell. He was already famous, even then, the creator of Werther, a high official at the court of the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, member of Secret Commissions, with a particular interest in geology and mining. He traveled incognito, called himself a painter and weaver (this was on his first, lonely journey), moving from inn to inn, his head full of Charlotte von Stein, seven years older, married, six children, the love of his life, to whom he wrote at least one letter a day.

  Strange that this incognito identity should be revealed posthumously, but that is how it is. The letters, the diary, his reports have given him away; he will never make that journey alone again. Every step has been described: the encounters, the stopping places, the routes he took and those he did not. We know everything, and so he becomes visible, riding through the snow, through the dusk, his head filled with thoughts about rock formations, Faust, his beloved, the finances of the dukedom, a poem, a letter he intended to write, a drawing he was going to do. The Dutch poet Roland Holst had a bon mot that he must have been very proud of, because he trotted it out frequently enough: “Goethe was a plaster Apollo.” However, I am unable to see the connection between plaster and the man riding through the night. Against all advice, Goethe wanted to climb the Brocken and he went ahead and did so, absorbing those mysterious mountains and forests, and the legends that had surrounded them since ancient times, and distilling it all into his Walpurgisnacht in the first part of his Faust, and his “Harzreise im Winter”:

  Dem Geier gleich

  Der auf schweren Morgenwolken

  Mit sanftem Fittich ruhend

  Nach Beute schaut,

  Schwebe mein Lied. 1

  What modern parallels can be found for such poetic genius? A few: Paz, Neruda, Saint-John Perse and Seferis were poets and diplomats; William Carlos Williams was a doctor all his life; Wallace Stevens, the greatest of them all, was vice president of an insurance company. But a diplomat is not a politician, and a politician is not a geologist, and a geologist is not a poet, and a poet is not a minister of state, and the minister of state is not an artist, and the artist is not a tragedian, and the tragedian is not a finance minister, and the minister did not measure elephants’ skulls and write letters about it to his sweetheart. So, driving along the bridleways buried under tarmac, I had every reason to think about that twenty-eight-year-old rider who passed this way, turning over a poem in his mind, dismounting to touch the granite (about which he would later write a scholarly study) or to draw a limestone formation and write about it in a letter to his love. Of course, these were the last few moments before general expertise fragmented into specialisation, and of course, he was a one-eyed king in a city where pigs still ran around free, and of course, the dukedom had little power and politics was no more than a pastime for gentlemen, but even so. And that is the “even so” of the later Italian journey, which was foreshadowed
by these three journeys through the Harz, when the tension between the poet and his other identities has become too great, the “even so” of the poems and the reorganization of the ducal finances, of the dramas he is inventing and the very real political wrangling surrounding the Fürstenbund following the death of Prince Elector Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria.

  Goethe wanted progress, and he got it. Whether he would have been willing to pay the price in lost poetry is a pointless question. Nature revealed its secrets in the Harz, and the battle between the Neptunists and the Vulcanists was settled (the world of water or the world of fire? Goethe was wrong). Now we know all that there is to know about granite and we can climb the Brocken day or night. Witches, sorcerers, trolls and spirits have no place there; Faust and Mephistopheles no longer wander around through this “Gegend von Schierke und Elend,” because today there are signposts and kilometer markers for anyone who wants to find the way from Schierke to Elend. The road has lines down the middle, a smooth surface; the mystery has fled, and, along with it, the restlessness, the inspiration. No Proktophantasmist, or Frau Muhme, no Lilith and no Trödelhexe is going to emerge from this night mist.

  One of the roles of this multifaceted individual was that of modern administrator. He wanted to open up the Harz, while I, his retrograde descendant, am trying to wish away this road, the final element in the area’s transformation, the progress that Goethe wanted, which would leave no place for the lonely rider-poet. The road becomes a path, and the undergrowth runs rampant over the straight painted lines. The trees grow denser on both sides; they are no longer ordered, tamed, regulated, but forest once more, wild, dark and sinister. Anything could happen here. It is December 9, 1777; the poet-minister has another eight kilometers to go in the snow, the forest and the moonlight. Back then, the forests were darker than the words; now the words have taken possession of the vanished secret. The pedantic future writer of two hundred years later knows exactly what the anonymous traveler was thinking back then: “He remembered his childhood; he thought about the duke, his best friend; again he reflected upon the relationship between nature and adventure”2 (and he was right about that, because where nature disappears or is transformed into a pale image of its former self, as has happened here, adventure degenerates into a drive in an Opel). At night he writes, as he does every day, a letter to his beloved, not to me, yet I am the one who is reading the words now. I know that it is perfectly normal, we have the right: Goethe is public property. Yet it seems strange that, without the slightest remorse, we do something we would never think of doing to the living: we read their intimate letters. I cannot help myself—I can see it, picture it before me, this letter, the actual object. The next morning, it leaves the inn, stashed away in someone’s bag, up onto another horse, back along the same route the poet once took, his capacious mind filled with words. Perhaps it passes from bag to bag, a piece of paper covered with writing, rolled up or folded into a rectangle, treated with respect, surrounded by the sound of horses’ hooves, the creaking of the stagecoach, the whistle of a whip, German voices, shouting, cobbles, gravel; someone carries it up a flight of stairs, gives it to someone else, who places it in the hands of a woman. She waits until she is alone, unties a ribbon or tears open paper, reads it as she lies on a sofa or stands by a window or sits in candlelight, and I, invisible in my present day, read along with her, read the words she read, and yet different—it is her living, twenty-eight-year-old Goethe, not mine. I picture her lips moving as she reads his words:

  Was die Unruhe ist, die in mir steckt, mag ich nicht untersuchen, auch nicht untersucht haben. Wenn ich so allein bin, erkenne ich mich recht wieder, wie ich in meiner ersten Jugend war, da ich so ganz allein in derWelt herumtrieb. Die Menschen kommen mir noch ebenso vor, nur machte ich heute eine Betrachtung. Solange ich im Druck lebte, solange niemand für das, was in mir auf und abstieg, einiges Gefühl hatte, vielmehr, wie’s geschieht, die Menschen erst mich nicht achteten, dann wegen einiger widerrennender Sonderbarkeiten scheel ansahen, hatte ich mit aller Lauterkeit meines Herzens eine Menge falscher, schiefer Prätentionen. Es lässt sich so nicht sagen, ich müsste ins Detail gehen; da war ich elend, genagt, gedrückt, verstümmelt, wie Sie wollen. Jetzt ist’s kurios, besonders die Tage hier in der freiwilligen Entäusserung, was da für Lieblichkeit, für Glück drinsteckt.3

  Goethe went ahead and climbed the Brocken the following day, and even though it can in no way be the same, I would like to do it too, but the Brocken is on the other side, in the D.D.R., and you are not allowed to climb it: it is a Sperrgebiet, a prohibited zone.

  I am closing the door and leaving Germany behind, on my way to the summer, to Spain. But Germany pursues me, with the duplication I have become accustomed to in Berlin: Honecker in the Volkskammer in Berlin; Gorbachev cheered by a West German crowd. All the cheering makes Gorbachev look like a general who has won a victory, and maybe that is true: he has surrounded East Germany like a strategist. Victory or defeat, we will soon find out, but faces are tense in this ideologically besieged land. The Volkskammer has assembled to condemn the vandals and “counter-revolutionary” elements in China, as though their own possible fate, surrounded as they are by neighbors who are drifting away, is written on the wall, crisp and clear. Their fate, or the fate of the man who is being applauded? A world is coming undone, and on the screens it looks like a celebration, just like that other distant celebration, only a few weeks ago.

  July 15, 1989

  1 As a bird of prey / Rests on heavy morning clouds / With wing so gentle / And seeks its quarry / Let my song hover.

  “Harzreise im Winter,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

  2 From Goethes Harzreisen by Rolf Denecke (Hildesheim: Verlag August Lax, 1980).

  3 I neither wish to examine the unrest within me, nor to have it examined. When I am quite alone I recognize myself as I was in my first youth, when I was drifting through the world all on my own. People still seem the same to me, but today I made an observation: as long as I was subject to the stresses and strains of life, as long as there was nobody who understood what was going on inside me (rather, as it happens, people did not respect me at first, indeed they looked at me with suspicion because of some of the strange contradictions within me) I had with all the integrity of my heart a multitude of false and warped pretensions—it is not easy to say, I would have to go into details—I was eaten up by misery, oppressed, mutilated you might say. Now it is curious, especially the days spent here, in the free expression of what loveliness and happiness lies within.

  From Goethe’s Briefe an Charlotte Stein, Vol. 1, Chapter 22, letter dated 9 December.

  V

  I am back in Berlin after almost four months away. The border, the guards, the house—everything is just as I left it. Except that the city is now clothed in autumn, fitting attire for all that is happening. Not on this side, but on the other side, the side you are constantly aware of. It is no more than two kilometers from where I live. I pass by the Wall almost every day, one way or another, and the tall television tower of the East is always in evidence. No need to go there; my television supplies the pictures. On Friday, it was pictures of a celebration. Torches, endless processions, cheering, laughing people, leaders on a podium, waving and laughing. The eye cannot be deceived by what it sees. We were not born yesterday; we know what a laugh looks like, we recognize the signs of real joy, and that is what I saw. Maybe the eye can only be deceived by what it does not see. It was a strange evening. It lasted for hours. The old, emaciated man stood on the podium, right beside his guest. You cannot stand closer to someone than right beside them. Their thoughts may have been invisible, but the invisible thinking, calculating, juggling of political options did not cease for a moment—and I think I saw it all happening. What goes on inside you when you see thousands and thousands of people with torches walking past you, past you and no one else, waving and shouting? Gorbachev was the very definition of unfathomable. He held on to the balustrade with both hands, firm hands. If he was impatien
t, you could only tell from his fingers, which occasionally started drumming, as though they had escaped the control of headquarters. Women in the crowd pointed at him, pointed him out to one another, laughed, sometimes ecstatically; you could see it happening, in wave after wave. The others—government, Politburo—were grouped around the two leaders. The figures in the back row had no faces, were mere outlines, shadows from Plato’s cave.

  In the spring, one of the men had been in the West, where he was applauded as he was now in the East. Back then, for one brief moment, as he stood waving in a car, he had looked like someone who was certain that he had achieved something: he had surrounded the D.D.R. His own country, Poland, Hungary and the West had combined forces to draw a merciless ring around the D.D.R. Inside that circle, nothing could remain the same. It was only a matter of time.

  The moment had to be sealed and now that has happened. With a kiss. In the moving pictures, it happened quickly; the instant vanished in the clichés of arrival. Aeroplane steps, guard of honor, old man waiting on the concrete, kiss. It is only when the pictures are frozen that you can see the intensity of the moment. I am looking now at two of those images. In one, the light is falling directly on Gorbachev’s face. There is no question about it: this is an intimate moment. He has closed his eyes, his lips are puckered; they are so tightly pursed that his mouth has become some strange object. We have a side view of the other man, the one with the white hair. He also appears to have closed his eyes; they do not need to look at each other to perform this action. His face is slightly raised, the left lens of his glasses catching a curved gleam of light. In the other photograph, you can see that he has his hand behind the other man’s right shoulder, that his eyes are indeed closed. This is no Judas kiss—you can see that too. And yet this kiss seals the downfall of one of the men, and maybe the other. After all, nothing can be ruled out now; this moment could last for a long time. The kiss is being carried out by people, but it is in fact states, strategies, political philosophies that are kissing each other. The country that was unimaginable without the Soviet Union is being kissed by the country that has made it possible to imagine the death of the D.D.R. The orthodoxy inherited from Lenin and Stalin is being kissed by heresy. The philosophy that broke everything wide open is kissing the philosophy that wants to hold on tightly to the past. The communal house is kissing the divided house. One man represents one of the greatest adventures in history, a revolution that the other man perceives as betrayal of the Revolution.