The way the light streams through the trees onto the ground makes him notice, perhaps for the first time, that beech trees have leaves on their feet; he sees the light shining through them. He hears the sound of a shovel hitting earth, with a pleasant regularity. He cannot see where this shovelling is happening, but hearing it means that he can still picture it somehow: the sharp metal edge slicing open the damp soil, a brief moment of silence, then a thud as the dug-up soil falls. It is a natural spectacle, this park, but a calming one. The sound of the river, the digging of something that could be a grave but is not, the footsteps of the few passers-by on the gravel, now and then a breath of wind in the leaves, the distant traffic muffled, smothered. Herbst, herfst, an autumnal harvest of thoughts. The traveler, we, you, he, has sat down on a bench, and is replaying what he has seen, his bronze beloved, “errichtet von seinem Volke,” erected by his people, the waving laurel wreaths, the biting horse, Athene. That was today. The Glyptothek, the propylaea, the Doric and Ionian facades belonged to yesterday, illusions of a Greece reborn, the nostalgia and the claim. The nostalgia is understandable, and he is also familiar with the notion of staking claims; appropriating a past to make the present more bearable is an option. The softness of Romanticism calls out for the severity of Neoclassicism. But here it is mixed with power, power and nostalgia, perhaps a Germanic variation on the theme. The past, once stripped of the blood and filth of history, tidied up and titivated, is a most desirable possession for rulers. If you give yourself a Greek past, if you build the constructions of another age, you distort the present. But if that is so, what about the Renaissance? That is the point: there is a difference between rebirth and appropri-ation. It is all just so much theatrical scenery: the old gods are already dead and can no longer harm your own. Erecting statues of impotent, obsolete gods, what can that mean? But he realizes that is not what is bothering him. After all, gods never die completely; they continue to make their presence felt, even if only because they are still visible and therefore convey something of their earlier selves, their effect, their origin, the luminosity of their deeds, so exemplary that they still have something to tell us about ourselves. No, it is the special relationship that the German language claims with that earlier world, made manifest in the grandiose reconstruction of Königsplatz. Was it not true that the traveler himself thought the flavor of antiquity had been preserved and reborn nowhere better than in Hölderlin’s German, that none of his other beloved languages was capable of the same achievement? Was he not himself a victim of that grammar-school culture, of the Germanic echoes in Boutens and Leopold? Of inverted word order, convoluted conjugations, purist orthography, such as the spelling of Plato’s name as “Platoon,” which meant that the American movie about Vietnam always made him think of the Greek philosopher instead of just a military unit?
All that is true, but German was the only living language the traveler knew that had retained the declensions that even Italian and Spanish, the descendants of Latin, had done away with. No, it was the claim staked by a new Athens, a presumption that was so sinister because it would culminate in Heidegger’s claim that Western philosophy had foundered in nihilism, and that those first, hazy visions that the pre-Socratic philosophers had of the mysteries of Being had been overwhelmed by totalitarian technology, and that it was his, Heidegger’s, calling to lead European culture back to that original mystery, and that the German language should play a decisive role in this “anderer Anfang,” this new, second beginning, because it had a unique relationship to the language of the “erster Anfang,” the first beginning, which was hidden in the mists of time.1 It was only later that the traveler saw, like some missing piece of evidence, a photograph of one of the Ehrentempel, the two “temples of honor” that Hitler had had constructed on Königsplatz, in commemoration of his followers who had fallen during his march on the Feldherrnhalle. The Americans later blew up the Ehrentempel, and rightly so. In comparison, Ludwig I’s Greek dream had been little more than nostalgia. Hitler’s temples made his claim very clear. Those hard, square columns with their plain capitals might seem like touching echoes of a Doric past, but the temples represented the new age of fascism, which claimed a link to a civilization that it was in fact trying to destroy.
Now, as usual, the traveler is overcome by doubt. The golden angel stands at the end of the imitation woodland path, waving down from on high, and it seems as though he can hear the wind in her (this angel has to be a female) wings. The contradiction within himself has also become more turbulent. He might call the Königsplatz “grandiose,” but he has to admit that when he walked around the moonlit square, like a figure in a watercolor from 1830, all that severity, now veiled in darkness, gave him some kind of extrasensory emotion, a sensation that briefly made him think he was somewhere else, not just a different place, but a different time. It was a feeling he remembered from reading Simon Vestdijk’s Aktaion onder de sterren and De verminkte Apollo2 when he was young and thinking that the writer must possess mysterious psychic gifts that allowed him to be in ancient Greece when he wrote: not merely there, but also then. The traveler had never experienced the same kind of sensation in front of the Palais Bourbon or at La Madeleine, and certainly not when reading the cut crystal of Corneille and Racine, and yet simply Hölderlin’s lines: “Blüht Ionien? Ist es die Zeit? Kehren die Kraniche wieder . . . ,”3 or however it went, still made him swoon with schoolboy delight. On the other hand—and now his internal debate took a less high-flown direction—was it not those same German-oriented classicists who had imposed their relentless “K” over his Catholic “C,” so now there were not only idiots who said “Kikero,” which made the philosopher sound like a particularly pretentious footballer, but also “ekke homo.”
Suddenly he could see them in his mind’s eye: the two monks who had taught him Greek and Latin over forty years ago. The Greek teacher had forever vanished behind his nickname and in the traveler’s memories he was called only Pa, because of the way he used to sigh and say, “Ach, kind,” to everyone (it was true—once, in that unrecoverable past, the traveler had been a child), and always gasped in such a peculiar fashion that it was almost as though Homer’s sculpted lines were written in the air in front of him, or as if an invisible Plato were feeding him his dialogues, like a special kind of pet. The Latin teacher had been Ludgerus Zeinstra, old, fat, white-haired, and always with ash on his habit. Admittedly, his Latin may have come with a Friesian accent, but it never had that spurious “K” of “Kaesar” and “Kikero,” no matter if the Germans repeated “Kaiser” one hundred times. The traveler had never cared who was actually right, even now. The sensuality of Rome’s seven hills would not permit the staccato of those harsh “K”s, that was all the traveler had to say on the matter, and the notion that Ludgerus Zeinstra might ever have been obliged to stand at the altar and say “Ekke kalix sanguinis mei” was anathema, nothing less. It was as unthinkable as the thought that he, the traveler, who once had been a soprano, surrounded by other sopranos, might ever have lent his high-pitched voice, created for innocence, to the words, “Regina Koeli, laetare, alleluia.” And so he brought his train of thoughts or what passed for thoughts to an end, because he had now arrived within the angel’s territory, and his history ensured that, here too, he was not free to think what he wanted to think.
Beside him, the guide’s murmuring started up again. It was not simply chatter, but sounded more like a litany. What he was seeing was the crowning glory of Prinzregentenstraße, and everything was an allusion to something, as though postmodernism had preceded modernism. The emptiness of such labels. He saw peculiar leaps and feats: architecture based on old motifs, which still had been new at the end of the previous century, and now, in spite of all those Greek, Roman, Florentine references, undeniably had a fin de siècle flavor. The eye would not be deceived. In the same way, one day, regardless of the professed polyvalence of styles, postmodern architecture would no longer look like something new, but would somehow reflect the era in which h
e had lived. It was a kind of contamination. Of course, nothing existed that did not involve borrowing, except in those days when there was not yet anything to borrow, but now that he was walking here, among all of these re-creations, that Corinthian column again, more medallions, mosaics, pilasters, Florentine landscaping, this repeated, cobbled-together déjà-vu, all those things that individually he found “beautiful,” a feeling of resentment crept over him. But it was beautiful, there was no denying that, and the idiotic thing was that it would become more and more beautiful. Give it another century or so of snow, hail, föhn, Isar mist and Alpine sun, and people who knew less and less, and this architecture would appear inconceivably, immortally old, harking back to a dim and distant prehistory of mythological figures: Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm I, Moltke. They might even join the same incomprehensible ranks as those eight adorable caryatids which had to bear the weight of the column supporting the golden angel, which was not an angel, but a Nike, a goddess of victory from Olympia, a doppelgänger, borrowed from 400 B.C., a winged woman who was supposed to embody peace, which then was as far back in the past as the next war lay in the future, which in that same future would be followed by another war, which for him now was past. Confusing.
The sun smeared a brazen layer of gold on the broken sheen of the mosaic, and he never could resist gold—it was his color—just as he could not resist the immobile womenfolk of the caryatids. If they took one single step to the side, that whole edifice, with its twenty-three-meter-high column, would collapse, and that golden figure, which of course was once again much larger than he thought, would lie in pieces at his feet, dead, a fallen angel. That was quite enough of that, he thought, and so he sat down on a park bench, among Rilke’s roses. The scent floated, literally all around him, the irresistible sensuality of a thousand sonnets. It seemed as though the archaic effect of the monuments was extending into everyday life. The tramp on the next bench, his bottle fallen over on the gravel, was not just any old tramp, but a vagabond from a fairy tale. He had kicked off his worn-out shoes and lay there with his bulging plastic bag, his sleep, his matted hair. Within the context of the clipped acacias and the classical laurels, he assumed an otherworldly allure; he was a man who might suddenly sit up and start reciting an endless poem about tournaments, star-crossed lovers and miracles. Now the traveler himself lay down and gazed up at the angel through his eyelashes. That was dangerous, because he could so easily be drawn up there, where anything might happen. This angel was a woman, after all, and that was strange. As far as gender is concerned, angels are usually neutral. He had once wondered what an angel’s skeleton might look like, and if anatomy lessons might demonstrate how the joints of the wings fitted in with the rest of the angelic bones, but of course immortals do not have skeletons. Anything that must remain invisible for all eternity does not exist.
The woman up there was filled with momentum, and for the second time that day he felt the urge to rise up, to take off, in spite of the danger. You could see the wind tugging at her. She leapt over the Isar, raced into the city. Her speed made her golden dress cling to her stomach and her breasts, folding between her golden thighs, a woman dipped in sunlight. Which golden man visited her at night to couple with her in the air, as birds do? If he closed his eyes almost completely, he could transform the gold of her statue into long, piercing streaks, stars of near-blindness. The scent of roses, golden stars; before long he would be an unreadable poet from a one-Mark anthology, Richter von Engelstein (Munich, 1876–1899).
The guide shook his sleeve. There was more. They had work to do. They stood at the base of the column for a moment. The caryatids had not moved. “Peace, war, victory,” mumbled the guide, pointing. “The blessings of culture.” But, once again, the traveler did not look where he was told to look. As always, his attention was drawn by something that signified nothing: empty ornaments, rosettes, helmets without any heads inside, cuirasses without bodies, visors without eyes, the uniform of the Hero, but without a hero. Things around something, and that something was nothing. As though, with one click, he had shot back into his own time. That was as it should be. Now he would walk across the bridge, ignoring the stones that were supposed to represent the German peoples, and head into the city. There were other Munichs to see.
1 This is how the philosopher formulated his opinion: “I am thinking of the special relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This is something that French people have repeatedly confirmed to me. When they start to think, they speak German. They assure me that they cannot succeed in their own language.” Translated from an interview given by Heidegger (“Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”), published in the 31 May 1976 issue of Der Spiegel.
2 “Aktaion under the stars” and “The maimed Apollo.”
3 Is Ionia in flower? Is this the season? Are the cranes returning? (from “Der Archipelagus”)
SECOND INTERMEZZO: ANCIENT TIMES
Some cities fulfil their obligations. They present the traveler with the image he has of them, even if that image is false. This traveler, who has left the Angel of Peace behind (he can still feel the golden flourish of her farewell on his back) and is now ambling through the green temptation of the Englischer Garten to Prinzregentenstraße, is sensitive to the martial element of the city around him. Field Marshals’ Hall, Victory Gate, Hall of Fame, the cenotaph of Ludwig the Bavarian, with its black marble, described by the sculptor as a “castrum doloris,” a “castle of grief”—the military is never far away. It shimmers even in the clothing of the passers-by, their dramatic hats, their trophies of feathers and fur, their green loden coats. It is as though the wearers of these garments, perhaps precisely because they form a minority, are moving through the city with strategic goals, all on their own missions. A German friend has explained that this is traditional attire, not a uniform, but even so. These people appear to be clad in iron, laden with loden.
They are surrounded by the air of ancient times. Tally-ho, muffled shots in a dark forest, campfires at night, incomprehensible songs. The traveler has seen a photograph of Heidegger in traditional costume. He does not wish to draw any modish conclusions from this; after all, he has himself posed in the traditional costume of the burghers of Volendam, but he found that he looked comical rather than anything else. Heidegger, however, did not look comical. Was it possible to don some kind of uniform, because that is what it was, for thinking? And was this the same man who had written about boredom, angst and time, and who had dared to wrap strings of words around das Nichts, nothingness?
You see what you want to see, his friend had said, and that was precisely the point. It was hard to remove oneself from the equation, and before you even wanted to see something, memories of what you had seen before imposed themselves: other uniforms in these settings, still so familiar and recognizable, the marches, the demonstrations. And yet when he caught vague snatches of marching music from the direction of the Hofgarten, he quickened his pace. The traveler was ashamed to admit it, but military music had always excited him. He crossed a temporary bridge over a main road and came to a ruin. The music had stopped; a group of young soldiers was standing there, as still as could be. Words came wafting over to him: death and remembrance. They were about the war that refused to die, which would only disappear when the last person who had tasted it in his own mouth was himself dead. And not until then. He saw old men down there too, people who could never have been young, not the men of the wartime broadcasts, not the soldiers he had seen on the streets as a child following the same kind of regimental colors, yet different, and the same kind of banner, yet different. The eagle on this flag was silver, but the mysterious symbol had fallen from its claws. That symbol no longer existed. He felt his own age flowing together with that of the old men standing down there in a sort of square formation. He had more to do with those men than with the young soldiers, and that was strange. He could not catch the words, but he did not need to; he knew them anyway: honor, loyalty, sorrow, sacr
ifice, once, then. These men nurtured the past so they could have a present, and that past took the form of flowers, flags, blue-and-white ribbons. All of this was happening within an enclosure, beside an excavation, in front of a ruin—the fumbling of people who are tugging at time.
The traveler goes slowly down the steps and walks to the Hofgarten. This leads to an encounter. As he reaches the bottom of the stairs and enters the Hofgarten, the young soldiers are rounding the corner, as only soldiers do: rather than take a curve as normal people would, they turn at an angle of ninety degrees. And no, these are not the same uniforms, and yes, the man who is carrying the standard with the eagle, the sunlight reflecting on its silver, is tall and blond, and no, the orders are not yelled or barked, but almost spoken, and no, the music does not sound martial, but instead is played en sourdine, as Couperus would say—muffled, veiled—and no, there is no stamping of feet, because when the music stops, he watches the big, clodhopping shoes, still marching in time, treading almost tentatively upon the stone chippings of the path, and it sounds almost like a rhythmic rustling. He thinks himself back into his earlier life, almost fifty years ago now, soldiers marching in, more men, the uniforms a deeper, more fundamental grey. The men back then had helmets that almost covered their eyes, so that all expression vanished from their faces and they lost their individuality, exchanging it for an unbearable similarity in which each of them became the other.
Roads to Berlin Page 12
