Why had I come to Weimar? To immerse myself in Goethe, of course. There is no escaping him; the only way out is dislike, denial, and that is something I cannot do. In the year I have been living here, his plays have been performed everywhere. I encountered him in the Harz, in quotes and allusions, in the lives of his contemporaries (he intertwined his almost-century with the far shorter lives of Schiller, Herder, Kleist), and in the Staatsbibliothek I come up against the stone massif of his collected works. “Goethe was a plaster Apollo”—I cannot shake off Roland Holst’s absurd dictum, if only because his inimitable aristocratic tones made it sound as though the wretched German poet had once, somewhere, managed to lose a cricket match for Holst’s side. But even then, it is still nonsense.
Things are different now that spring is here; the house on Frauenplan basks in the sun and I stand at his windows, watching children play by the fountain. Library, antique statues, study, deathbed, memories, letters, manuscripts—I quickly become wrapped up in it all, as I did on my previous visit. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Goethe’s life is that it was so successful, as though it was itself a work of art, one that continues to have an impact. Whether you like it or not, when you wander around that house on your own, reading his writing and thinking about the person who once lived in those rooms, you are drawn in; he is still there.
Before coming to Weimar, I had grabbed a couple of essays about Goethe and Kant by Ortega y Gasset, and I am lying in bed with them now, as a kind of punishment, back at the gas-filled Elephant. The Spaniard, surrounded by this German wallpaper, has become obstinate, and I also picked the wrong place to start. Ortega is complaining about spending ten years in Kant’s prison, but he says that the prison was also his home because there is no denying that the “crucial mysteries” of the modern age are revealed in Kant’s philosophy. So those ten years were not in fact a punishment, but now, having freed himself, when he concentrates on Kant he feels like someone “visiting the zoo on a public holiday to look at the giraffe.” I try to picture Kant as a giraffe, but if Kant is a giraffe, what is Goethe? Ortega calls him the most doubtful of all the classics, a classic “en segunda potencia,” because the classic Goethe had himself read all of the classics and had therefore become the very prototype of the heir: someone who lives on the investments of the past, an administrator of received wealth. That is a great deal harsher than a “plaster Apollo” and while Roland Holst left it at those magic words, Ortega treks slowly through an entire range of rocky mountains, weighing up the pros and cons, and at the end of his journey comes to the conclusion that there is no avoiding the master from Weimar. Goethe’s contemporaries were already aware of that though, and it is here, in this city that was suddenly drawn back into Germany by the past year’s events, that his magnetism enchanted their lives; it is impossible to walk around his house and not feel that force of attraction.
Herder and Schiller, who lived part of their lives in the same city as Goethe, must have had to contend with his powerful shadow as well as his sunlight. If Kant was a giraffe, Goethe must have been a mammoth, but one that had not become extinct, an impossibility. The giraffe may have lived far away in the distant Königsberg, which is now called Kaliningrad, but his writings penetrated deep into the minds of Weimar, sparking difference and debate. While Herder reacted against Kant, Schiller became completely absorbed by him (“Certainly no greater words have ever been spoken by any mortal than these by Kant, which are also the essence of his entire philosophy: Determine yourself from within!”), while the luminary Goethe took from Kant only what he could use.
Attraction, repulsion: Schiller and Goethe had their difficulties, as Schiller’s correspondence clearly demonstrates. One day Goethe was his light, the next his eclipse. He wrote to Körner on March 9, 1789: “This person, this Goethe is simply in my way, and he reminds me so often that fate has treated me harshly. How easily his genius was borne by his fate . . .” The proximity was evidently hard to bear (“being often around Goethe would make me unhappy”). They express criticism of each other’s work and are then suddenly brimming with admiration. It must have been exhilarating and emotional, particularly when you consider what Weimar was like back in those days. Six thousand inhabitants, that was all, 130,000 in the entire dukedom. The palace where Goethe’s enlightened friend Karl-August ruled was in the middle of a city whose streets were barely paved. Every evening, the pigs were driven inside the city walls. This was the center of their world, the place where they would spin their threads to the rest of Germany, the city where their statues still live. The duke and Herder stand alone, while Goethe and Schiller are together in front of the theater where so many of their plays were performed. They stand close together, the hand of the old poet resting on the shoulder of the young poet, their other hands sharing a laurel wreath. Poet and minister, poet and natural scientist, poet and poet: the two directors of an intellectual power station that is still in operation.
I find them beside each other again in the ducal vault of the Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach family, where the two poets have pushed the duke aside. They are lying in the middle of the vault, in their bronze boxes. Two girls have brought along a small bottle of champagne and are toasting the two dead men with plastic glasses—that is not something you see every day. The aristocrats are up against the walls, literally on the sidelines. Of course, Ulbricht and his ilk did not want to discard the duke—he was, after all, enlightened—but he had to be kept in the shadows. What would Goethe have said about that? Perhaps it reveals the true state of affairs, but I suspect that Goethe’s sense of hierarchy as a minister and state councillor would have caused him to resist the thought of his duke being sidelined in his own vault. And besides, they were friends their entire lives; as young men they had gone on wild horse rides, and they had grown old together. A good word from Goethe and the duke had helped Schiller, just as he had helped Herder, and he had also allowed Goethe to go to Italy when the inner conflict between the dual identity of poet and minister became too great for that one body.
Goethe and Schiller, Weimar
The two girls have now walked over to the bronze boxes and are reading poems to each other. It has all become a little too intimate; if they are not careful, the two gentlemen might climb out of their coffins. And I know they are not dead, incidentally, because a few months ago, when the exodus from East Germany began to assume terrifying proportions, the residents of Weimar found their poets in front of the theater one morning with a big sign in their hands: Wir bleiben hier! We are staying put!
It is Sunday, and the sixth of May. I have driven to Petzow with a few friends, to a park and country estate near Potsdam. We are lying in the grass beside the lake and someone is reading aloud from Fontane. A polling station has been set up in the castle; this is election day. Fontane described the park where we are lying, and my friends are enjoying this new world they have regained. Berlin has won back a hundred new landscapes. The cage is finally open and in ten years’ time no one will be able to imagine the former prison. A D.D.R. citizen who understands this new age is selling home-made cakes and smoked trout. I leave my friends and wander round the park, through waterside meadows full of irises and speedwell. On my wanderings, I happen upon a stone that marks the spot where the owner of the castle murdered an anti-fascist in 1943. That is all it says. I try to imagine what happened, but I cannot. The maples, the full chestnut trees, the sumptuous summer, the little boats on the still water, the bodies stretched out in the grass—everything gives the impression that the evil has been dispelled. The stone is just talking to itself today.
Later that evening, I see the ministers of the four occupying forces commencing their slow peace, and somehow it does not feel real. It is as though they are performing a ballet without an audience, a ceremony of choreographed movements that mimic reality, a pantomime that we recognize because it has already happened in real life.
May 12, 1990
XIV
These things must happen in the animal kingdom
too: a species has outlived its usefulness and is on the brink of extinction, but its last representatives are unable to behave any differently from all of their predecessors, and they also look exactly the same. The courtship display of the final two members of the species will be the same as it was when thousands of them still existed.
Walking down Unter den Linden, on my way to the Museum der Geschichte, I hear the sound of marching music coming from a side street. In the distance, I see a crowd clustered in front of the Neue Wache. I have seen the changing of the guard before, but there was no music that time. “They only do it once a week, on Wednesday afternoons,” explains the policeman who is keeping the road clear. “And today might be the last time, because they’re stopping it.” Just a few days ago, in a book about Prussia by Sebastian Haffner, I came across a reproduction of a painting from 1813 depicting the same ceremony. The soldiers were wearing tall hats with cockades, short blue uniform jackets, white breeches; the spectators had top hats, crinolines, parasols. Only the buildings, the Zeughaus and the Neue Wache, remain the same. As I watch the standard-bearers coming out of the side street and turning in my direction, one creature with many feet, I remember the words on the back of Haffner’s book: “The history of Prussia is an interesting one, even today, especially today, as we also know how it ends. It begins slowly, with a long development, and it comes to a slow end, with a long death. But in between lies a great drama; if you will, a great tragedy—the tragedy of pure Staatsvernunft, reason of state.”
The tragedy, of course, lay in Prussia’s later decay, when people in their weakness and vanity ruined the analytical chess game of that earlier Vernunft and muddied the clear scheme. It all started so well; you could almost believe that it had been planned on a computer. One Hohenzollern after another sat down at the chessboard after the Thirty Years War and made his move, and it was as though all of those moves had been agreed in advance, a master game laid out for successive generations. It has become common practice to equate Prussian with German and to dismiss the state’s military aspect as dangerous, or ridiculous, preferably both, but that attitude will not get you very far if you are looking for the roots of modern German history. How was it that, out of all those German states, Prussia slowly rose to supremacy after the Peace of Münster? What was different about Prussia? All of the states had absolute rulers; trade and initiative were smothered by a network of borders, taxes, tolls and local regulations almost everywhere; wherever you went, the princes ruled with a caste of military men and civil servants, and money had to be raised to fund that system by the peasants who lived on the land of the aristocracy and had no rights. This fossilization could have continued far longer if the balance in Europe had not begun to shift. In that respect, it was a perfect prediction of what we are experiencing now: without Gorbachev and what he accomplished, the D.D.R. under Honecker could have continued to simmer away for years until only Albanian ashes remained.
Neue Wache, Unter den Linden, East Berlin, May 23, 1990
So, what was it that made Prussia the exception? A few exceptional men, who did things differently from the other German rulers, who, for example, no longer wished to depend on mercenaries to make up their armies: the army of Frederick William I consisted of more members of the local population than any other European army at that time, and the men were paid from Prussia’s own coffers, not from the pockets of foreign powers. This required obsessive economic management and a discipline that was to become exemplary of what some people admire and others despise, according to their inclinations. “I am the King of Prussia’s Minister of Finance,” said Frederick William I, who was in fact the King of Prussia. The king as the servant of the state is a Prussian concept, and because people are not stupid they could see the contrast with the despotism and profligacy of the other German princes. Of course, the system only worked if the servant was an exceptional one. After his death, Frederick the Great’s perfect machine fell into the hands of lesser gods. However, his personal legacy made itself felt for a long time. The power of the lesser gods later became the power of criminals, but for a while they continued to benefit from a legacy of sobriety, discipline, service to their country. By the time some members of this caste realized that they had been deceived, or rather, that they had deceived themselves, it was too late, and there was nothing that any Stauffenberg could do to remedy the situation. Once again, a different regime inherited the obsolete machinery that I am now watching parade in front of me.
I have described it before, so there is no real need to do it again, even though there is music this time, and even though it might be the last time. The aim was, of course, dehumanization, the temporary negation of the individual. And it succeeded, this group truly moves like an object made up of people and, as always, I have an emotional reaction to it and, as always, I despise myself for that reaction, even though I could make better use of my time by attempting to discover where that strange shiver (because that is what it is) actually comes from. I have no interest in the military, so what exactly is happening to me? I look at the others around me. They were just laughing. Someone said, “Alles Scheiße” and the others agreed, but now everyone has fallen silent, as they look at the faces that are not looking at us. Is their silence prompted by the sense of reduction, the fact that it is possible to efface people’s identity and transform them into a mechanical component of something else? A couple of black American soldiers in uniform are standing on the other side of the street. They were filming at first, but now actual reality has gained the upper hand over the later possibility of seeing that reality as an image, and the cameras hang at their sides, lenses pointing at the pavement, and I realize that they are seeing something different from what I am seeing. But what?
The marching creature has come to a halt in front of the Neue Wache. It has come to collect and take away the two soldiers who have been standing there motionlessly on guard. And that is the mysterious part: the two who are standing there will soon disappear among the others, while the two who are to take their place are still completely invisible. Seduction, a dance, that is what it looks like. There is music, high-pitched, whistling tones that remind me of tropical birds. Then voices, not so much yelling and roaring, more like words being dragged over a grater, shredded in the warm midday air. A command, and suddenly the two men among the columns start to move, a strange, shuffling step, a descent, one step, another, then they are standing beside the two others; they circle each other, a moment of idiotic intimacy, a kind of mating, and then one becomes the other, something has been exchanged for something else, no difference can be seen. Then those dreadful steps begin again, and not one of those raised boots will admit that this is the last time. This ritual performs itself; it is detached not only from those men, but also from its own meaning and history. It has served its time. Once it helped to portray a state, and that external image helped to make the state what it was. Now it is extinct, thereby sealing, once again, the fate of that state and, at the same time, the fate of that other, later republic that had adopted the ritual to conceal its inner emptiness, a literal emptiness: a state without a Volk is empty. The Piecks, the Ulbrichts and the Honeckers did not understand the lesson of the King of Sanssouci.
Their inheritance is one hundred meters away, a pathetic legacy: the museum that was intended to confirm their glory forever is now used to ridicule them, to jeer them into oblivion. This is happening by way of a special exhibition, Tschüs S.E.D. (Bye-bye, S.E.D.), with the banners from the huge demonstrations hung up and draped over the pieces that used to be exhibited there. The effect is rather comical: dummies that were designed to represent members of the armed forces now hold revolutionary placards, splendid agricultural statistics are half-hidden under ironic maxims or cries of despair, and as you wander among the familiar phrases and linger in your own recent past you can still hear the voices of those pioneers, of history that has been caught up and overtaken by its own pace, so that instead of looking only six months old it already seems like so
mething from long, long ago, as though it is almost impossible that you were ever part of it yourself. The effect of time is a wondrous thing: in a video in the exhibition space I see images that I saw as new images six months ago, but the crowd listening on Alexanderplatz is an old crowd. It looks historical, historic, not because we have seen it so often already, but because we know we are going to see it so many more times. You can tell by their expressions that they do not yet know that the state treaty is about to be signed and that the man with the beard will be the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and that they are unaware of the practice that will follow their ideas and their revolution. When those same banners hung in the museum in West Berlin six months ago, it felt like a forgery to me: the book of history cannot be written at the same time as the actual history itself. There must be at least a little distance, or it feels contrived. Here, in the ironic context of Social Realist art and nationalistic braggadocio and propaganda, it works, but the room next door, where nothing has changed at all, and the only form of irony is the absence of any commentary, has an even more dramatic effect.
Roads to Berlin Page 20
