I have been sitting in front of the screen for hours and now I want to go for a walk. It is night, and cold. A few shadows flit around behind the windows of the pubs, but otherwise all is quiet, and I see my city as an enclosed district floating in the middle of a country like a large ship battling upon an angry sea, even though it too is playing a part in whipping up the waves. This may be a peculiar image, but I know of no better way to describe it. There is a storm raging all around and yet it is so quiet.
December 9, 1989
1 Dove, / if my house burns down / if I am cast out again / if I lose everything / I will take you with me, / dove of worm-riddled wood, / because of the gentle sweep / of your one unbroken wing.
“Versprechen an eine Taube” from Aber die Hoffnung by Hilde Domin (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1990).
VIII
If it infuriates the people who are watching, how must the protagonists feel? Night after night, they come through the screen and into my house with yet more of their harebrained schemes, formations, reactions, edicts, threats, appeals. Every evening, when I watch the D.D.R. news show Die aktuelle Kamera, it seems as though the entire country has been participating in one gigantic, uninterrupted meeting for months now, a general promiscuity that gives the round-table discussions, inaugural meetings, press conferences and hearings the atmosphere of one huge bed that everyone, whether they want to or not, has to lie in together, and maybe even sleep together, while the people, where it all began, are leaving that busy bedroom behind, either tiptoeing out or slamming the door behind them. I have become addicted to these television sessions, which sometimes go on all day. I know it is not good for me, that the false impression of proximity can make you forget there is another country behind this one, and beneath and behind that one, there is another and yet another, with a similar kind of pandemon-ium wherever you go, but that is just how life is right now: I am living in this enclave and my enclave is at the eye of the storm.
At Christmas, I fled. I wanted to return to my peaceful homeland, where nothing ever seems to happen, because we did it all a few hundred years ago. The weather was ominous, and peering at the map I saw the word “Hermannsdenkmal” near Detmold, followed by “Teutoburger Wald” in much larger letters. I did not know who Hermann was, but this Teutoburger Wald sounded Wagnerian enough to suit the leaden sky.
As soon as you leave the nonsense of the Autobahn behind, the world mysteriously reverts to being itself: the countryside, where the invisible people live, the provinces, that tough substance that hangs like a weight counterbalancing the contrivances of the city, the majority, a region that might differ in terms of accent and dialect, but which you recognize in every country as the largely silent essence of the country itself. I was in Germany here, just as the previous night, when I had spent the night in Celle, I had been in Germany: my dinner had the grand title of Herzögliche Entenvesper and the name said it all, the feudal-religious notion of the “ducal duck vesper” on my plate corresponding nicely to the restored middle-class gentility of the city center: signs, timber-framed facades with Gothic lettering, a castle, a Christmas market with Glühwein and trees and “Stille Nacht.” An hour later, I experienced the most silent night in Europe, with only the clock of my feet ticking among the locked houses of people sleeping the sleep of the just.
So, I had gone in search of Hermann, and everyone wanted to help me, because everyone knew where he lived. They were all so friendly, so obliging, and that was just as well, because Hermann did not seem to want to be found. He kept hiding behind hills, forests, squalls of rain, but finally I found a place to leave my car in a vast, almost empty car park beside a few lonely Trabants, shivering sadly as they dreamed of hot Mercedes. If Hermann was their first destination upon being allowed to leave their enclosure after so many years, what did that signify? I still could not see him, so I walked down a woodland path, hurried along by the wind, protecting my face from the whipping rain, until, through my tears, I saw him: a towering beacon of a man on an equally towering pedestal, slicing his sword into the storm, ruling over the world. His scale took my breath away. Walking around beneath him, I studied his irrepressible calves, the huge eagle’s wings of his helmet, the curved grey plates of his miniskirt with their ominous sheen of green, the mysterious, solidified space beneath. I climbed a narrow spiral staircase to his mighty feet, but what was just a storm down below became a hurricane up there. Hermann stood firm, but then he weighs more than forty-two tons. Including his pedestal, he stands over fifty meters tall and he does not need to worry about his helmet flying off or his skirt blowing up: he is fastened together with 30,924 copper rivets. I, on the other hand, was finding it all rather tricky. Hanging on to the balustrade with both hands, I peered down at the scrambled syntax of the streets and villages all around and looked out like a bird over the dark forest where Hermann had wiped out three Roman legions in A.D. 9. He did not know that Germany existed, so he could not know that he had liberated it, but now the words are written on his sword: Deutsche Einigkeit meine Stärke, meine Stärke Deutsch-lands Macht: German unity my strength, my strength Germany’s might. History, that old anachronistic liar, is up to its old tricks again. And now I understand why the former King of Prussia and the later Alter Kaiser, who both resided in one and the same body, came to unveil this statue in 1875 (and also why those Trabants are here): it created the impression that a single, uninterrupted line ran from Hermann to Wilhelm, as though the land stretching out beneath my feet had not for centuries been a grab bag of earldoms and kingdoms, with everything that implies. “Immer zerrissen und geteilt,” said Hölderlin, always torn apart and divided—and the numbers back him up: at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, three hundred German states were recognized as sovereign, each with its own court, its own despot, enlightened or otherwise, and the accompanying officialdom and cult of obedience, which was to have such dramatic consequences even into the twentieth century.
Arminius. Hermannsdenkmal (Hermann Monument), Teutoburg Forest
Hermann was of course not called Hermann, but Arminius. A mad classicist made this error in the sixteenth century, and it stuck. After all, what is the good of a national hero with a foreign name? Emperor Augustus sent the wrong man to Germania: Publius Quinctilius Varus, a wimp and a profiteer who had previously been busy plundering Syria. He was not keen on the Teutons, this Varus (“. . . he imagined that the inhabitants had nothing human but the voice and limbs . . .”), but underestimating one’s enemy is always the best recipe for disaster. Hermann led Varus up the garden path and massacred him. And, had he not appeared in the dreams of the sculptor Ernst von Bandel, he would simply have slumbered on in the history books. For thirty-eight years, this dreamer worked on the statue—ridiculed and impoverished, as is only right and proper. While it may not quite have been a thing of beauty, it was certainly large, so large that even the Kaiser noticed it and decided to turn it to his advantage.
Over the centuries, while France and England became centrally governed units, the German nation was repeatedly blasted by fragmentation bombs of both domestic and foreign manufacture, and everyone was accustomed to this, not least of all the Germans themselves. The arrangement worked well for all concerned: any possible Middle Empire would only disturb the balance; a cordon sanitaire of foreign countries controlled the mouths of all the rivers; and Germany, which did not exist as a state, was locked within the European land mass. The inviolability of those small and large potentates, guaranteed by foreign nations, meant that the once so self-assured cities, with their free citizens, lost power and influence. A Byzantine operetta-cum-nightmare of nobility and titles, privy councilors, addiction to uniforms, heraldic excess, court balls, subjects and serfs, and bureaucracy developed in all of those inward-looking capital cities, and even though there was still no Germany, the kind of people who would later populate Germany were already being bred. Those who do not actually have to live in a state can afford to be sentimental or emotional about the nation that they only have to feel, and
all that pathos was expressed in the statue above me, which showed every sign of holding its arm aloft well into the next millennium. That was fine by me—I was escaping to the peaceful gardens of my homeland, where the statues may be smaller, but so are the problems.
Not only Hermann, but also other images, moving ones, followed me there: the East German Modrows and the West German Kohls, who together had to try to be a new Bismarck, while Europa, that old woman with all her thousands of memories, jealousies and fears, continued to scrutinize their every movement. The words she mumbles in her sleep are what people once called history; anyone who listens carefully can sometimes understand what she is saying and may hear the word Gleichgewicht—equilibrium—and know that she is dreaming about the Peace of Utrecht and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, but there were so many peace agreements and all of them were pregnant with a future war, which always necessitated a reassessment and rearrangement of the Gleichgewicht. If that did not work out, the armies started to slide forward again, because nothing is more unreliable than a set of scales that has been tampered with—and no Rapallos or Munichs can stop that, no peace accords of Vienna or Westphalia, no Versailles and no tango from Molotov and von Ribbentrop: one of the dancers always ends up on the gallows. And who will follow? Or does no one follow anymore? Will all those countries stand like ruminants behind their sealed-up rivers while the European shepherds calmly herd the German flock back together? Among all the willing, the unwilling are scarcely noticed. Reunification resembles a natural phenomenon, and any politician who knows what is good for him swims with the floodwaters while pretending to control the flow.
Now I am back in Berlin, but I have to leave very soon. Poland is roasting, Bulgaria is simmering, Romania is boiling, the Big Country beyond is prodding all of the sore spots and probing the wounds that it caused, and the leader sometimes seems a little like a writer who does not know quite how to proceed with his book, but does not want anyone to notice. And what is happening in Berlin? I am once again a slave to the television screen, watching the endless, entangled discussions, the new openings, connections, enmities, trying to envisage how all those gestures and attitudes stem from recent and more distant history and how a new history should be formed out of these countless crumbs, and yet at the same time my heart is in my mouth. There is one sentence I learned at school that I will never forget: Senatu deliberante Saguntum periit—While the Senate deliberated, Saguntum fell. It will not come to that, and there is no other solution anyway, but every day when I look at all those deliberating initials (SEDSDPLDPDBD-CDUDDRSPD and so many other arrangements of the alphabet that I have not yet internalised), I can hear the shuffling feet of the runaways, and it feels as though that round table is standing all alone on the plain of Brandenburg and all of those voices are just drifting on the wind.
Is this a fair assessment? No, of course not, and when I see all those sincere, emotional faces, not yet corroded by years of politics, I know that. Maybe it has more to do with the pernicious influence of television. What that daily spectacle presents is reality, confusion in its full extent and impact, and at the end you want a conclusion, a punch line, catharsis, as we have come to expect from the medium that brings us Dynasty and Tatort—but there is no end in sight. The series will continue tomorrow—by which time another two thousand or more will have made their escape—with the same slowness, the disagreement, the fragmentation, the pushing and pulling that are all part of the business of politics. It must be incredibly exciting for the people involved, but can the same be said for those watching? The prayers and the copulation of other people can look rather unpleasant on the public screen, and the same generally applies to lengthy political meetings, if only because real time, when inserted into a television screen, comes out as slow motion. I have never entirely understood the secret of this Einsteinian temporal quirk, but it seems pretty clear that anyone who wants to have a longer life should watch plenty of television.
As a temporary resident of Berlin, I have received a Bescheinigung from Der Senator für Inneres (Internal Affairs, which sounds very intimate) to say that I am registered in Berlin “mit niederländischer Staatsangehörigkeit,” and, as a Dutch citizen, I can pop in and out of the D.D.R. with no need for any other documents. I do so now, on my way to Munich. A little excitement, because I have never driven this way before. Signs for Gotha, Leipzig, Weimar, Dresden, but I will save them for the way back, when I have more time. Smoke billows from the Trabants, the road surface is ravaged, the service areas look antiquated, and there is none of the dogged luxury that afflicts my part of the world. This is a marked landscape—nowhere else looks like here. The enforced slowness of pace lends it an atmosphere of times forever past, and in a funny kind of way that is not unpleasant. On the other side of the border is Bavaria: an undulating landscape, dark forests, snow here and there, beauty. In my Gasthaus by the Englischer Garten, I read Gordon A. Craig’s book about this country (The Germans) and sink into his illuminating chapters on German history, but when I am outside among the people, with their emblematic hunting attire and vanilla-colored palaces, I am in history, the history of Baroque piety and Toller’s revolution, of Ludwig I’s Athenian dreams and fiery singing in the Hofbräuhaus, of the university where Hans and Sophie Scholl distributed their anti-Nazi pamphlets, and of the mastodontic homes of the Wittelsbachs.
The city touches me somehow and yet feels strange, but I keep coming back. The sun is shining, there is still ice on the pond in the Englischer Garten, where once no Jews were allowed, and that same sunlight has a strange effect on the water behind the Nymphenburg Palace, making it look as though the old ladies out walking are actually floating upon a plain of silver snow. Of course, I have to go inside the palace, and together with the usual Japanese tourists, I wander past the empty chairs, the lonely beds, the silent rooms, the faceless mirrors, the chandeliers and candelabra, the idle geese on the lawns, the swans on the ice; like a bored duke, I stand watching the citizens with their plastic carrier bags and then turn to look at Ludwig’s gallery of beauties, dozens of painted young women looking back at us from the realm of the dead, dressed for the ball. Irene Gräfin von Arco-Steppenburg, Markgräfin Pallavicini, the braiding so carefully painted on Helene Sedlmayr’s billowing blue bodice, the breathtaking chest of Gräfin Caroline von Holnstein curving perilously out of the picture: may I have the pleasure of this dance? In the restaurant, ladies in green hats munch on the obligatory pigs and the sound of the angelus drifts in from outside, carried on the wind. Twelve noon, the witching hour.
There is a Jim Dine exhibition at the Glyptothek on Königsplatz. The boyhood dream of an old Pop Artist all alone inside the boyhood dream of a Bavarian king, his later echo hanging amongst the gods and heroes, the wise men and the warriors. Ludwig made this Parthenon for his collection, Klenze created it as a magnificent structure, Greece uprooted and planted in the North, and the war completed it by destroying all of the ornamentation and showing the classical structure to its best advantage, with the focus on the statues. And what statues they are! Forty years ago, I saw them in my schoolbooks: the enigmatic smile of the kouros, the youth of Attica; Homer’s blind gaze; Aphrodite’s disfigured face, denying this desecration; Athene’s introspective wisdom, eyes downcast; the seated satyr’s troubled sleep. In the stillness of their presence, disturbed by no one, the man of two and a half thousand years later with his sketchbook and other, so much more transitory material.
Jim Dine: I remember his hammers, chisels, lonely objects pulled from anonymity and suddenly called upon to play a leading role, and then the nudes, the endless repetition of his own face, the body first dissected into individual parts and combined with etching tools (thirty bones of my body), and later as a single unit, and now, even later, a confrontation with the physical perfection of those classical bodies and the mystical added value that the earlier religious intention and intervening centuries have given them. You need to have some nerve, and he certainly has, partly, he says, becau
se the mutilation and disfigurement of most of the statues have brought them closer to modern art. For him, the work in the Glyptothek was a meditation on beauty and inner calm, but it was also terrifying to attempt to measure up to this cosmic material, as he calls it. What he has added seems at times like a form of assemblage. He has joined statues, such as Homer and Socrates, and his delicate streaks of blue mean that they now belong together, two spirits from the underworld, holy ghosts. He has removed other statues from their context, elevated them, dramatized them with a use of color that is economical, but strategically employed. He is allowed to hang there; his images exist alongside the statues, which lose none of their enigma, which permit these reflections. Walking around the exhibition is a form of happiness, perhaps because there is a connection to my childhood, to what I know, perhaps also because this loftiness remains so close and the divine has here become truly human for once—or the other way round, which is even more beautiful. The museum has held back one surprise for me, with deliberate or unintentional irony: in one corner of a gallery of Roman statues, I find a group of heads of Socrates wrapped in plastic. It is transparent, this plastic, it gleams, and, as though Dine himself had planned it, here too there is intensification, accentuation. The heads become more, not less; the artificial light shining down through the plastic softens the faces, and the philosopher smiles. And that is how I take him with me as I head outside onto the severe square that aimed to be classical in a non-classical era.
Roads to Berlin Page 10
