Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen!
Das Ew’ge regt sich fort in allen,
Am Sein erhalte dich beglückt!
Das Sein ist ewig; denn Gesetze
Bewahren die lebend’gen Schätze
Aus welchen sich das All geschmückt.
And in Mildred Harnack’s translation:
No being can to nothing fall.
The Everlasting lives in all.
Sustain yourself in joy with life.
Life is eternal; there are laws
To keep the living treasure’s cause
With which the worlds are rife.
What kind of moment might that be, as an American woman waits in a German cell to be executed and continues to work on her translation of the most classic of all German poets? The banality of everyday life is so infinitely distant here, an intellectual abstraction that evaporates when confronted with the weight of history and the fate of the people within it. But haven’t there always, throughout all the centuries of history, been such moments of intense experience within the ocean of banality where most people’s lives take place? And how does that, and how does Walter Benjamin’s own fate, relate to his notion of the poverty of experience in the modern era?
In his letter, Franz Rudolf Knubel writes not only about the how, but also about the where, providing details of the location of the prison: “Plötzensee liegt im Norden Charlottenburgs am Saatwinkler Damm am Hüttigpfad.” The photograph in the catalogue shows the innocence of the red brick and the guilt of the black bars. A Berlin building like so many others, probably not built for the purpose it served during the war. Above the two windows are arches of upright vertical bricks amidst the horizontal bricks of the wall. The surroundings are neutral, but take on the color of what has been done there. Three thousand people were executed in this place. A metal bar in the execution room still has hooks for hanging people, and a scaffold with a guillotine once stood there. After these events, the gaze of posterity could never again be neutral, just as it is impossible to read Goethe’s poem and Mildred Harnack’s translation without thinking about how and when that translation was created. Knubel’s homage to Mildred Harnack, because that is what it is, involved visiting the places that were connected to her and searching for her traces—but he has to admit that he rarely finds them. It is, in his words, “ein nicht gelingendes Unterfangen,” an undertaking that will not succeed, a hopeless cause, as the pale innocence of some of the photographs demonstrates: addresses where she once lived, houses that prove nothing because they could have been anyone’s house, front doors, pavements, garden fences. Here, the banality of our lives becomes visible, but not the lives themselves, not anymore; that happens only in the places where the tragedy occurred, in that brick room behind those bars, where a woman who has just turned forty looks her executioner in the eye. The old professor took large sheets of paper to the place of execution and, kneeling on the hard ground, rubbed charcoal over paper on the concrete floor. The surface was uneven, irregular, and the traced image consisted of streaks, stripes, grainy marks, which now form the cover of the catalogue. He writes about this:
“A red cordon divides the room. Above the windows, the bar with the hooks. Beneath that, a wreath and dried flowers on the window ledges. I step over the barrier and take out my 70 x 100 sheets of paper and box of pencils. I go down on my knees and calmly carry out the work I have planned as an act of remembrance: tracing marks from the rough concrete floor, which has so many scars. In the front third of the divided area is a narrow drain with seven iron bars, not much bigger than a sheet of A4. Close to this drain stood the killing machine: the guillotine. The whole process is incredibly peaceful: I observe myself, I listen to myself, as I transfer the traces of the iron grate onto the paper, check the result, repeat it on a smaller sheet of hand-made paper. I immediately see that the second attempt was superfluous . . . I changed my materials once, but there was no need. As it is, this work can only be read if it is called ‘Spiritual Exercises in the Incomprehensible.’”
The advantage of the big city: when people become too much for you there are always animals and plants to provide instant healing, the balm of creatures without any visible guilt or history, whose only goal is to perpetuate themselves into eternity. Wolf and owl were already wolf and owl a thousand years ago. If any evolution occurs, it takes place over tens of thousands of years: a slightly longer claw, a shift in the color of the plumage, three more thorns on a twig, that kind of thing. Around the time of the Wende, I often used to go to the zoo in the East. The animals did not belong to the Party, nor to the opposition; they did not denounce one another; all that happened was that lion and eagle attempted to convince the visitors of their endless, immutable nature. You might look into their eyes for a minute or an hour and, as usual, not see any sign of communication there; the only statement consists of the creatures themselves and the way they look at us without any form of encounter. I can spend hours there, just marveling at the fact that everyone has eyes: fox, deer, snake, crocodile, elephant, grasshopper, seal, monkey, all of our travelling companions in their prescribed uniforms, fur, hair, scales, shells, feathers, spines, and every single one of them is equipped with eyes. If you look into those eyes for long enough you start to think about how you can never see beyond pupil and retina, the point where the strange, unapproachable other begins. I find that a calming thought. I saunter past the cows, feel the autumn leaves tumbling down on me, hear the metrical feet beneath me penning an ode to the panther and the heron, sense the gradual healing flowing through me. I am ready to face humanity once again.
Plants generally do not say very much, even though, given the right wind conditions, they can of course whisper and sigh. A famous line of poetry was written in my language by the Flemish priest-poet Guido Gezelle, a sort of Olivier Messiaen of poetry: “Mij spreekt de blomme een tale”: to me, a flower can speak. One afternoon in 1989, as I wandered around the Nikolai-Viertel, I happened upon a pub called Zum Nussbaum. Nussbaum means “nut tree,” as does Nooteboom, so it was probably the name that tempted me inside that first time. Inside, it was a little like an old Amsterdam bar: small, brown, a few gleaming wooden tables, a sense of cosiness. Although it was in the East, it reminded me of home: dimly lit, quiet people, a gentle buzz, cold outside, mounds of snow on the icy streets, a vicious wind from Siberia rubbing the Spree up the wrong way, but inside it was warm, and the Glühwein made you glow. It used to be a rather exclusive place: you had to go through all those checks at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße to get there, so there was something adventurous about it. For a brief while, you were in another world, even though you felt as though you were sitting in someone’s living room. You stood out as someone who had come to have a look around, which meant you were too visible, a feeling that no longer exists today.
And today it is autumnal; it might even start drizzling. I have had a drink, one of those beers we do not have in Holland, tall, tapering glasses that you are allowed to take an hour over: meditation beer. Maybe that explains why, once I had finished my beer, I could not quite remember what I had been expecting from that day. I had already read all about the crisis in the newspaper; I had seen Angela Merkel guarding Germany like a mother hen and refusing to allow Gordon Brown to tempt her into throwing baskets full of money into the wind. Even though, just a few months later, we would be unable to imagine that he had not been there forever, Obama had yet to be elected, but we were not allowed to vote, suicide attacks in Afghanistan and car bombs dominated the front pages, the world was a panopticon of unbearable atrocities—perhaps that was why, when I saw the 48 bus coming, with its sign saying, “Botanischer Garten,” I got on without hesitation and climbed up to one of the box seats to watch Berlin gliding past, all sorts of districts that I did not know, shops selling exotic food, snatches of the Third World among the big grey buildings. I wanted to preserve something of that day, so I made a few helpless notes in my notebook: “Hauptstraße, Dominicusstraße, Günlük Taze Ve Halâl Et,
Rathaus Friedenau, Kaisereiche, U-Bahn Schreiberplatz, Losgehen um anzukommen, Halte Kielerstraße, Malik.” I do not understand half of my notes when I look at them now—it looks like a secret code for spies. But no one wants to rifle through my papers, and no one arrests me. I listen to the quiet conversations on the bus and to the whining voice of a woman behind me as she divulges her love life to her mobile phone, an excerpt from a novel, written without the refinement of art. I am a man wrapped up in words. One person’s freedom is another’s captivity, and when I get off at the botanical garden her failed marriage is hanging all over me like cobwebs and, still in that state, I enter the realm of multi-colored silence and walk along a hedge of angel’s trumpet and tall, pink stalks of gamba grass. Copper sunlight, the threat of rain. I pick up a big tanned leaf that would like to tell me something about the autumn; it is as purple as a bishop, lined with a system of golden veins. Why is the decay of plants beautiful while the decay of humans usually is not? Everywhere, the green is starting to assume the colors of death. Lonely leaves fall in slow, floating circles like suicide parachutists, as though they still have one last secret mission to perform on the way down. I marvel at a tree fern that has not yet decided what it would rather be: a fern-like tree or a tree-like fern, poet or novelist. Soon I am standing before the powerful leaves of the Peltiphyllum peltatum, which hang contemplatively over shining, black water. Their silence is breathtaking, and yet if I stand still for long enough I can hear what they are saying: it comes down to the fact that they know they are there; it is a thought about presence in the here and now. Paths, tracks, the occasional illusion of wilderness, then the first drops that force me into the big glasshouses where the exiles from the tropics reside. If they are feeling homesick for the savannah or the rainforest, they do not show it. I write down their precious names, which I will soon forget, and think how strange it is that they themselves do not know what they are called, even though some of these plants are such good matches for their wild names: hairy festoons, rolled-up leather sheets for which a new variation on green has been invented, twelve curved daggers poised around a blood-red heart, cacti in all the forms of the Euclidean catalogue. How amazing to be a cactus, if only for a night and a day, a silent and meditative creature covered with all those needles that send out only one message: I Am Thinking. Do Not Disturb. Leave Me In Peace.
I read in the newspapers that Tempelhof is being closed down. Images of the Airlift1 and the associated stories come to mind. I once wrote a story2 featuring a short scene that takes place at that airport, and I can still picture the long hall, the neon strips high up around the edges of the ceiling, the glider hanging beneath them. It is a day of final flights, imminent dismantling. A man is holding a placard: “Wir dürfen uns das nicht gefallen lassen, es gibt hier nichts zu feiern”: We should not stand for this—there is nothing to celebrate. His expression says he knows he has already lost. The flights on which I departed from or arrived at Tempelhof always involved small aeroplanes, which, along with the peculiar design of that long hall, which I had not seen at any other airport, made the experience of flying feel rather old-fashioned, as though you were playing a part in some 1950s spy movie. But there was something else about that airport, something that has to do with a deeper layer of my past. Whenever I see and hear an aeroplane taking off on television, the noise takes me back to the first day of the war. On the tenth of May, 1940, I was woken by the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns, by planes diving and then accelerating away. It was daybreak and the planes were bombing the military airfield at Ypenburg, not far from our home in The Hague. I do not remember now whether they were Heinkels or Junkers, but the noise I can hear now is unmistakably the same as back then, the sound of the pre-jet era. For me, it is associated with the red sky over Rotterdam in the distance, with parachutists slowly floating down to the green meadows below. Now I would like to hear that sound once again for real. I read something about the Rosinenbomber and a Zeitreise, a journey in time—apparently they are planning one last flight in the old planes that were used in the Airlift—but that is no good to me. The past I am in search of is even older. On the square in front of the entrance to Tempelhof is the head of an enormous eagle, black and gleaming, its beak pointing downwards like a sharpened dagger, but when I go inside everything appears deceptively normal. There are still people at the check-in desks; the floors are polished to a gleam; an aeroplane engine is displayed like a monument or a stray work of art by Beuys, sparkplugs and electrical wiring sticking out in every direction like a Gorgon’s hair; stewardesses stand at the Air Service Berlin desk in their cappuccino-colored uniforms; and the light-blue hands of the clock on the big dark wall indicate the time, time that is connected to scenes of arrival and farewell, and which therefore always has a different significance at airports than on a church clock.
Tempelhof airport, October 2008
Poster: Journey through time with the Rosinenbomber, October 2008
I walk around the building, along an extremely bare and simple gallery that once looked so modern that totalitarian ideologies found it easy to appropriate its sober, geometric forms, which were inspired, I feel, not only by Adolf Loos, but also by Cistercian architecture. Outside, I walk towards Tempelhofer Damm in the hope that I will be able to stand behind the fence and watch the aeroplane of my childhood taking off. As I walk, I realize how large Tempelhof actually was, a huge space carved out of the center of a metropolis. I find some stairs that bring me closer to the metal fences. I am not the only one there; a group of plane spotters stands beside me, glued to the iron net. Together, we watch the prehistoric machine speed past us and into the air, with that little jump that always comes as a surprise, as though it is briefly mocking gravity. When I look around, I realize that I cannot share the memory of that sound, which I am hearing again after almost seventy years, with anyone here, simply because the people around me are too young. When you listen with the ear of memory, what you hear is the same, yet different; that is what it comes down to. A historical event needs only to have occurred sufficiently long ago to become deformed. Then it assumes the characteristics of the mythical, the legend, or the fairy tale. One day, someone in this world, or another, will read about a city which, during some distant, misty prehistoric era, unthinkably long ago, was once saved by birds.
October 2008
Ein Punkt ist, was keine Teile hat. Een punt is wat geen deel heeft. Why do I find this sentence easier to understand in English? “A point is that which has no part.” Perhaps there is some interference from the Dutch: deel hebben aan. But would it not be better to say that a point consists entirely of itself? I am on dangerous ground here, having ventured out to an exhibition about math, a failed student, perversely drawn to the traps and snares of his earlier defeat. If there is anything I regret, it is missing out on the mysteries of mathematics. I was, to stick with the terminology, a zero, and to hide from that unavoidable truth I took refuge in my imagination. During tests that cannot really have been all that difficult, I invented theorems that I thought were perfectly plausible myself, but which actually made no sense at all. I would arrive at sound results, but they were valid only for me, within some made-up system of mathematics where everyone was drunk or belonged in an institution. My teachers had given up on me. I did not really mind at the time, but I do now. Between my chaos and the order of mathematics, there was a barrier of unwillingness that the teachers could not break through. I do not want to apportion blame, but sometimes I think that if someone had taken the trouble to come and find me within the maze of my adolescent stupidity and lead me out into the big, bright garden of figures, formulae and logic, I would not be seized by the unholy terror that seizes me even now when I am reading certain books, ones that I understand until the author suddenly starts spouting magic formulae that everyone can read except me. This is part of the reason why I never took my final school examinations. My past, short though it was at the time, consisted of chaos, and I was on the run.
For
years, my greatest nightmare was having to do a math exam and failing hopelessly. In 1998, when I received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Brussels, I said that I viewed that day as my last day at school, and I hoped my nightmare would never return. And that is what happened; the illusions disappeared. This is in itself a miracle of autosuggestion, but my regret remains. And so it is with a certain hesitation that I enter the Deutsches Technikmuseum, the museum of technology, where they are putting on an exhibition called “Mathema.” My old desire to share in that world of transparent mysteries, from which I cut myself off so long ago, is apparently still there. There is a plane hanging on the front of the building that will never fly anywhere again, and as I enter the museum I fall straight into the arms of a quote from Einstein: Das, wobei unsere Berechnungen versagen, nennen wir Zufall.3 Einstein is soon demanding attention again: someone has written on the wall that, in light of his special theory of relativity, we should imagine the world in four dimensions, with the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time forming an indivisible whole. The underlying principle is the notion that there is no absolute time, which is a pleasant thought. Dalí must have been thinking something along those lines when he melted his watch, and anyone who spends a lot time travelling the world will often have seen time condensing, racing backwards, and acting as though it does not exist, which may in fact be true. That notion gives me a strange sense of freedom: time as a fluid element in which you can swim around, even against the current if necessary. I once wrote that time is the system that ensures everything does not happen simultaneously, and even though there is an odd tautological kink in that thought, I am comfortable with it.
Roads to Berlin Page 30
