When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, “If you had to retain everything, you’d explode. There’s simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.”
At the right time. Time. As he headed outside, through the large dining room, he could not help laughing at himself. How on earth could you ponder a concept that had forced itself into the language in a thousand different ways, obfuscating any image that you might have of it? Time has always been confused with the instruments that are used to measure it. Always. In one of the Scandinavian languages, that word, “always,” was expressed as “the whole time,” as if you could really say that about something that was not yet complete. Human time, scientific time, Newton’s time, which progressed uniformly and without reference to any external object; Einstein’s time, which allowed itself to be bewitched by space. And then the time of those infinitesimally tiny particles, pulverized, immeasurable diminution. He looked at the other people moving so solidly around him on Neuhauser Straße, each with their own internal clock upon which the little clock on their wrist vainly attempted to impose its wretched order. Watches were idle boasters; they claimed to be speaking on behalf of an authority, but no one had ever seen that authority. But they could inform him when the church doors would open, and a few moments later (later—there was no avoiding that tyrant) he was standing in the cool space of the St Michaelskirche. One of the first words he read was, of course, Uhr, hour: “Am 22.11.44 kurz nach 13.00 Uhr wurde die St Michaelskirche von mehreren Sprengbomben eines amerikanischen Fliegerverbandes getroffen”—and at the thought of those American bombs hitting the church, more memories hit home, the drone of bombers flying overhead during the war to the adults’ eager delight: “It’s the Americans. They’re going to bomb the blasted Krauts.” That noise was part of the soundtrack of eternity, an accompaniment to death and vengeance, filling the entire sky with a continuous bass tone, made by a musician who was bent on destruction. But he did not want to think about that now. The dead were dead, the church had been rebuilt, and a woman was walking through the filtered light of the pale-grey space, heading straight for her goal. She was impeccably dressed. Everything she wore was black, and her fair hair was tied back in a chignon with a black velvet ribbon. She knelt down and buried her face in her hands. Her patent leather shoes did not touch the floor, but hovered just above it. At that moment, the sun disappeared, the plaster of the vaulted ceiling grew dull, and the traveler saw three Japanese people staring at the woman. At the back of the church, a bronze angel leaned on a large font, casually, like someone who walks past a piano and stops for a moment to play something on it. He could see praying figures everywhere, confirming the scale of the edifice, dwarven supplicants in red, in hunting green, a man in traditional costume, hand on his heart, saying something to a statue. The traveler walked back to the angel and stopped beside it, just two random churchgoers, a man and an angel, one with wings and one without. The angel was larger and its bronze gleamed, but that was beside the point. He looked at the spread fingers, and then at the wings. It was his second angel today, but this one was not a woman.
Angels were officially men. They had men’s names—Lucifer, Gabriel, Michael—and yet they were not men. They were myriad, he had learnt, and they came in all varieties. Angels of darkness, of death, of light. Guardians, messengers. They had ranks: cherubim, seraphim, powers, thrones. Heavenly legions. He could not remember whether he had ever really believed in them, but he thought not. The idea was appealing though. Someone who did not have to be a human, but still looked like one, who did not need to get old, and, moreover, who could fly. Of course, there were all sorts of things they were not allowed to do, which was only logical when you considered their proximity to God. What he liked was that they were still around, and not only in churches. Made of wood, stone, bronze, on monuments to the Dead and for Peace, on secular buildings; they had maintained their position everywhere. The Arabs had them too. Did people still see angels these days? Or had they become invisible, in spite of their superhuman scale and presence? He thought not, but maybe other people did not make a point of seeking them out, of consciously seeing them, as he did, but instead perceived them as something that appears in a dream, and so the winged ones could make their way to those secret, inner places where our nameless ancestors reside without the recipient of the dream ever noticing. That brought him back to the idea of time, but he really did not want to think about that subject anymore. He had promised himself one more church that day, a church that he felt had more to do with this actual city rather than the rebirth of a wounded Athens, inspired by false nostalgia, and that is where he meant to go next. That church was in Sendlinger Straße, but then his guide popped up again, trying to send him in another direction.
Michaelskirche, Munich
He snapped at the guide. “Where do you want me to go now?” The guide must have been hiding under the table when the traveler was eating, because he had forgotten all about him. Could this kind of guide hear every thought that passed through your mind?
“The Viktualienmarkt,” the guide said.
Markets, along with churchyards, were the traveler’s weak spot, so he changed his plans without complaint. Eating is perhaps the act that is furthest removed from evil. Radishes, carrots, cheese, bread, mushrooms, pumpkins, eggs evoke the idea of nature, and therefore calm and patience, in the middle of the city, reminding the city of its origins as the marketplace for a rural district. The traveler wandered among all of those piled-up wares for half an hour or more: fresh herbs, sausages exceeding the imagination in their absurd variety, silky bacon, fish from rivers and from lakes, things that had looked exactly the same a thousand years ago, a thousand-year empire of tubers, carp and onions, surrendering themselves time and again, without protest, to be crushed between the grindstones of human molars.
The street outside the church was busy, but once he was inside the noise fell away. “St John of Nepomuk,” the guide whispered. A Bohemian saint. The traveler loved that word: Bohemia. Not only because it sounded so beautiful, but also because of all the misconceptions associated with it. The first Gypsies in France were seen as followers of Jan Hus, the Bohemian heretic, so some painters and poets were still referred to as Bohemians even now. A combination of prejudices based on a misconception—what could be better? Poets being identified with vagabonds, Gypsies and heathens never did any harm.
“Nepomuk,” the guide repeated. Once the most popular saint in Bavaria, after the Virgin Mary. A martyr’s death, drowned in the Vltava, six hundred years ago. The traveler felt a little as though he came from Bohemia himself, and so he decided to adopt Nepomuk as his patron saint. Now the guide wanted to tell him all sorts of things about the saint’s life, as it is carved on the wooden doors of the church porch, but the traveler was transported by the wondrous space around him. He would listen and read later, but not now. Now he wanted to be swept along by what he would once contemptuously have referred to as frills and furbelows. The Baroque, like opera, was a late discovery in his life; there had been a time when he could not understand what people saw in it, and even now he found it hard to put into words. There was no need for him to feel embarrassed about this failing; everyone makes mistakes. But this place? Maybe it was the sheer extravagance, combined with the contrast of the rigid framework in which this profusion was permitted. Luxuriant. Lush. And, what was perhaps the most difficult thing for an admirer of Romanesque churches to admit: lively. Even if you were alone, you had a sense of things going on all around you: angels jostling, clothes flapping, wind whipping around the stones, the marble, the gilded plaster, bustle, hustle, a cave in which faith and
piety clung to every stalactite and stalagmite. Festoons, twisting pillars, lavish crypts, curving lines: maybe here he was looking into the soul of the Bavarian people for the very first time. The Athens of the Königsplatz was imposed from outside, dreamed up by other people, but here you could even yodel if you wanted to, because the building itself was doing something similar: trills, jubilation, crazy high notes. The Bohemian saint was also commemorated in the altarpiece, an eventful biography, in which the narrators had not headed straight for their goal. Carving, polishing, embellishing, adorning, interrupting—even though the altarpiece was perfectly still, it was full of life. In fact, it was as busy as a heavenly road junction. God in his crown leaned down over the cross, flanked by two angels with their wings pointing straight up like donkey’s ears. No one else was around, so the traveler walked backwards away from the altar, looking up. He realized that when you tried to look directly up, past the pilasters, over the golden capitals, the garlands of flowers and the round-bellied pillars of the balustrade, and slowly moved your head sideways, more and more of those innocent babies’ heads came into view. This was where they lived. When he moved, they moved too, gazing at him with inappropriately ecstatic expressions on their plaster faces, a look that was far too old and knowing. It was, he thought, as though the wall up there had started to foam and froth, and that froth had taken on human form. Out of nowhere, a line by Goethe, which he knew only from a Schubertlied, popped into his head: “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?”: “what does this movement mean?” And perhaps the answer here was that the movement meant only itself. It was the ultimate in reproducing motion in material that cannot move: movement and stasis, the solidification of supreme exuberance.
Does he know the city any better now? He is not sure, but decides that this is the moment to leave. And go where? To the south, following the birds that beckoned him this morning. To some Bohemia, to the mountains, the watershed of Europe, where the languages, the states, the rivers flow in every direction and his own continent feels dearest to him, with its chaos of lost kingdoms, conquered territories, conflicting languages, clashing systems, the contradiction of valleys and mountains, the old, fragmented Middle Kingdom. He walks through the grassy meadows of the Englischer Garten, sees the trees in the last fire of autumn, feeds the swans, lies in the grass and watches the clouds heading for the Alps. No, he does not know this city yet, but other cities are calling him now, and that call that no one else can hear, the secret singsong of the Bohemians, is one he cannot resist.
1 Lord: it is time. The summer was so large. / Lay your shadow on the sundials, / unleash your winds upon the fields.
Command the last few fruits to ripen; / grant them two more balmy days, / urge them now unto perfection / press lingering sweetness into wine.
He who has no home will now build none. / He who is alone will long be so, / will wait, and read, and write long letters / wandering to and fro along avenues, / restless, as leaves tumble all around.
“Herbsttag” / “Autumn Day” by Rainer Maria Rilke
IX
Yet again I did not do as I had promised myself, because I drove northwards. My “third person” wanted to head off to all the Bohemias of this world, and I knew where to find them, even those in the past. But for me, it was now January, and 1990; I had to go to Regensburg and Nuremberg, not to Bohemia. There was already enough to think about. There was, there is. These are exciting days. I often hear the words, “We’re living in historic times.” I have caught myself doing it, not just saying those words, but also displaying the slight air of smugness that is attached to them, as though we have all suddenly become a little more important ourselves because we are no longer able to keep up with the pace of events. Everyone knows that Unity is coming, and yet we are all surprised on a daily basis about the speed with which it seems to be happening, as though these developments have a dynamic of their own that resists any attempts at control. What was unimaginable yesterday is suggested today and amended tomorrow, and what I am writing here will have become old news by the time it is published, just one tiny piece in a constantly spinning kaleidoscope. The ones who are perhaps keeping quietest about it all are the organizers and the entrepreneurs, who are busily working around the political palaver to stake their claims in the D.D.R., while at the same time keeping a close eye on the newspapers. And when you spread out those headlines like a pack of cards, you are baffled by the combination. All trumps! To the astonishment of his own party, the man called “Modrow ohne Land,” Modrow Lackland, by the SüddeutscheZeitung one day, embraced German unity the next day, albeit with neutrality, only to claim, the day after that, that he had added the part about neutrality only for the sake of discussion. “Modrow surrenders,” Die Tageszeitung announces, but then proceeds to wash away that news the next day with “NATO is looking for Lebensraum in the East.” Meanwhile, West German politicians are swarming over the future new Bundesländer in order to secure the position of their parties. I do not know whether it is a consequence of all that turbulence and historical awareness that is still evidently in force, but events are conspiring to make it seem as though there is no longer a present: the fleeting moments of all those U-turns, negotiations, decisions and conflicts already appear to belong in a history book or to have been swallowed whole by a voracious future that will only be satisfied with more and more changes. Thatcher and Mitterrand might as well be living in Australasia and even the neighboring countries have disappeared in banks of fog. Only Gorbachev is still being watched on his lonely adventure, because everyone here, according to the old laws of Gleichgewicht, equilibrium, is well aware that the place he is still in charge of is the other focal point in Europe.
I am in Regensburg, on my way back from Munich to Berlin. With the new history still simmering in the pot, or maybe even burning, I search this country that I still do not know too well, trying to find relics of the past. After all, this collection of regions, which together were once called Germany and soon will be called Germany again, after a little adjustment, also intervened in my life fifty years ago, and the buildings and the cities I want to visit on this historic pilgrimage are the illustrations for the story I am reading. The “little adjustment” I am referring to involves the borders, of course, which have prompted so much discussion and so much silence. A map on the front page of the Tageszeitung depicts Germany in its entirety, with the eccentrically located Berlin suddenly looking very close to the eastern border.
“It could actually do with another chunk of land behind it,” jokes the person who shows it to me. “A capital city should be closer to the middle, don’t you think?” You can see where that middle might be on other maps, with dotted lines indicating the claims of a nostalgic minority.
The foreigner has a rather peculiar role these days for some enlightened groups of Germans: they want to know what he thinks about it, to measure their own agitation or aversion or angst against the foreigner’s reaction, suspecting that, for historical reasons, he will somehow have a natural disinclination towards “dangerous developments.” It is as though they are frightened of themselves and would like to see that fear confirmed by an outsider, but then again perhaps not. But it is hard to find the border manipulators and the Republikaner more dangerous than you actually find them, in spite of the historical reflex reaction and the nausea they provoke. In that respect, I liked a sentence I read in the Frankfurter Allgemeine (which was in fact about something else): “History shies away from repeating itself.” Most of the people I speak to don’t agree. It must be strange to be scared of your own compatriots, but it is not unusual here. That fear is sometimes accompanied by a sudden reverence for the D.D.R., as though “in spite of everything” a sort of utopia existed there, where things “may, admittedly, not have been right,” but where life had “in a sense” been simpler, more human, not corrupted by greed, materialism, the flashiness of the Bundesrepublik. Seen from that point of view, the people who want to hand over the D.D.R. to a united Germany are of course traitors. But
the people who say this are usually already in the Bundesrepublik, and what they, in their hypocrisy, do not realize is how much the others have had to pay over the past decades for their violated utopia.
Puns are always irritating, particularly when nature is involved, but of course it would have to be raining in Regensburg, the fortress of rain. It is a pleasant city, though, and resolutely old. I look at the gargoyles on the Dom, stretched-out monsters drooling rainwater from their maws, see the stones of the Roman fortress tower and, in a hidden side wall of the Dom, bulging like a hernia, the crude remains of an earlier, ancient church, irregular giant boulders hoisted up there by the Devil. I also find foods that the rest of Europe has forgotten: catfish from the Danube, roasted hearts, braised lungs. Even eating can be an ecological issue: I can never understand why the same progressive conservative who would give his life for the preservation of the twelve-toed Saxonian Ringworm Eagle would allow a certain McDonald’s to remove the lungs from his plate.
In a bookshop, I spot something that looks like the Greek temple of Segesta, a mighty building on a deserted coast in Sicily. Here it stands among northern greenery, high above the Danube, and is called Walhalla. At first, I refuse to believe my eyes and then I decide I want to go there right away. Fred Strohmaier, the owner of the Atlantis Buchhandlung, offers to drive me there.
Roads to Berlin Page 14
