Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  It is quiet inside the exhibition and I walk undisturbed around the wondrous world of hyperbolic geometry. I feel myself curving along with this space; I tick inaudibly somewhere in the world as a watch and, when no one is watching, I allow myself to be enticed into flying through a virtual city with a pair of wings on my shoulders. In short, I join in with the game the exhibition has devised for me; I surrender to it. I learn that the interwoven ornamentation of the Alhambra, just like the patterns on a Gucci bag, falls under the heading of “Patterns with Translational Symmetry” and that Gerhard Richter used a random generator to determine the colors for his big new window in Cologne Cathedral.

  How different my Berlin days now are from that chaotic time when I saw Modrow racing down the corridors of Schloss Bellevue and Krenz at the Dom, desperately and against his own better judgment, attempting to turn the tide of the Weltgeist. Order and calm reign here. Instead of the chaos and turbulence of everyday history, this is Pythagoras’ theory of harmony, the golden mean, the story about the butterfly that causes a hurricane with its fluttering. That is, of course, also agitation, but it is logically explicable, which helps. Kant said that mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge, but elsewhere I have read that it is sometimes better to allow oneself to be guided by chance when working on certain scientific problems if you cannot solve them by other means. My life was not a scientific problem, and so did not need to be solved, but when I look back, I see that it depended on variable series of random events, each of which may have had a certain inescapable logic of its own—you are, after all, born at the moment and in the place where your mother happens to be—but which was still dependent on the fact that my father once happened to see my mother walking past and found her attractive. And that made me a Dutchman from the twentieth century, but probably has nothing to do with my not becoming a mathematician.

  Frankfurt. Anselm Kiefer is receiving an award, the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. The Paulskirche is full of familiar faces. People know one another; the public face of Germany is sitting here. It is a church without a church, a pulpit now standing where once the altar was. I know that spot; I once stood there myself. You have to climb some steps to get there, and then you feel strange, as though it is not entirely right to be standing there. If that sounds dramatic, it is not intended to, but still there is that brief, peculiar sensation of loneliness; no one is standing beside you. No matter how often you do such things, that feeling never entirely goes away. The gentle murmuring of voices, then the usual speeches, the praise, and finally the prize-winner himself. When he starts to speak, the room falls silent. He is in black, an ascetic figure, and perhaps it is because of the church-like atmosphere, but what he most closely resembles is a Benedictine monk.

  The award is not without controversy; Kiefer’s preoccupation with the German past, with its Teutonic aspects, has not been universally appreciated, particularly at first. Werner Spies addresses this in his eulogy, and says that he had his own doubts at the time, that what was in fact a quest was perceived as identification, at a time when no one wanted to hear about the past. The artist went in search of it, and what he brought back, accentuated, emphasized in his work was viewed as empathetic nostalgia, a longing for the wrong era. The man in the pulpit also refers to this issue. He starts talking about his own past, about his youth, and one word leaps out. When I read the speech later, it is printed separately, on a line of its own:

  Langeweile.

  Boredom. The source of so many things. A childhood without television, without the internet, without the cinema and without the theater. Emptiness, tedium. Then poetry. Poems as buoys in an ocean of emptiness: “I think in images. Poems help me to do so. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the next; between them, without them, I am lost.” As he speaks, I consider the peculiarity of the situation. I imagine what it would have been like to hear one of the great painters of the past give a speech: Zurbarán, Delacroix, de Chirico.

  More so than writers, painters have always disappeared behind their images, and suddenly that becomes a puzzling notion. I can picture one of Kiefer’s monumental paintings behind him as he stands there, assuming the pose of a speaker and resembling other speakers in such situations, speakers who do not have an image of lead and straw behind them, of a rust-colored landscape of sand and clay and dried paint, lead-blue, ash-grey, coal-black, accompanied by words that refer to history, and I do not know why it should be that particular painting, but it is a seascape that I see there. The slender figure in the pulpit is dwarfed by the width of the painting that my imagination is projecting behind him, white foaming waves of cracked paint, great sweeps of movement and, within them, the sinister forms of submarines, orange, and in the ominous sky above them, words over the horizon, like a natural phenomenon, as though there are always words floating in the sky, words that only the artist sees: “Seeschlachten alle 317 Jahren oder deren Vielfachen”: Sea battles every 317 years or multiples thereof.

  Puzzling: the word is no coincidence. The man in black who is standing up there conforms with the environment in which he now finds himself, but his art does not. That art derives from the knowledge that beneath the semblance of order that is civilization, an indomitable chaos always resides. In this of all places, within the civilized conformity of the world of editors-in-chief, ministers and ambassadors in this church-like space, that is an additional irony. I once wrote the following words: “When do paintings rid themselves of their painter? When does the same material become a different thought?” Does “Guernica” still belong to Picasso, and if so, for how long? When I look at Hieronymus Bosch’s “Haywain” in the Prado, does it still have anything to do with the painter who created that painting, or have later gazes, throughout the long centuries when that object of wood and paint remained its material self, transformed it into something completely different, as Borges essentially contends in his famous story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,” which is about a man who, centuries later, writes the same book as Cervantes, word for word, and yet still a book that was completely different? Will future eyes take Kiefer’s paintings from their creator and make them so autonomous that the painter himself would no longer recognize them? Only great art makes us contemplate such questions. The painter himself has only his circumscribed life, the concerns that have fuelled him, a fascination with the history of his country and the pits and precipices within it, and his own confrontation with this history, which people have not thanked him for because the “Unfähigkeit zum Trauern,” the inability to mourn, prompted the desire to cover up, hide, deny that shameful past. What remains is the whispering in his library, the poetry of Bachmann and Celan, the notion that a mythological image can be stronger than science, which is constantly changing, and that what is lacking in an artwork must seek an alliance with what is lacking in history and in nature, which are also incomplete. All of this has inevitably penetrated Kiefer’s paintings, his gigantic books of lead, his library without words, written by all of the words that he has ever read and recorded as he swam from buoy to buoy: words of poets, of the Sephiroth, the echoes of Chassidic legends, a legacy guarded against disappearance, visible and invisible, the painter as a scribe, who became what he read, and created what he was.

  As I leave the hall after the event, a friendly man offers me a pamphlet, a protest against this award ceremony. I take it and I thank him. Sometimes democracy makes it clear that there are things that remain invisible, even to the well-meaning.

  October 2008

  Berlin, an autumnal afternoon, a sudden urge. I want to go back to Falkplatz, to see what has become of the trees I once planted, along with some other people, twenty years ago. I still remember the peeling paint on the buildings, the expressions of the people on the balconies; they probably thought we were mad. I attempt to remember something of the atmosphere of that day, but with little success. The presence of the People’s Police created a strange sense of sudden goodwill on all sides. We were dr
eamers, but there is no shame in that. So what is it like now? There are plants, bushes. The ones that we planted? Some of the trees look too tall; they must have already been there. In the background, there is a sports center that I recognize. I had had a sort of vision too, that “in fifty or a hundred years’ time, I would like to shelter under the mighty crowns of this forest in waiting,” and had hoped the planters would not be disappointed. Have they been disappointed? I do not know. It has not turned into a forest, and maybe I am the only one who can still remember that day. But there are a few small trees. Maybe the same ones, maybe different. They are swaying gently in the wind, as trees do on an autumn day, and they are not revealing what they think.

  November 2008. The Freie Universität Berlin is awarding me an honorary doctorate in philosophy and the arts, and the war child of back then cannot ignore his memories because, along with everything that happened to him here later, they have defined his relationship with this country. I am honored, but I hesitate for a long time about what to say on the day and whether it is a good idea to start talking about the past again, as I have recently done in my story about Tempelhof, but I also know that ultimately I am that past, and so that can be the starting point of my story, which begins with the same abruptness as the event, which has always remained unforgettable for me. A war is only over when the last person who lived through it is no longer around. This is the story I tell:

  The first Germans I ever saw in my life came from the skies. The next ones came from the water, in the disarray that is typical of death. Only after that did they come over the land, in long, grey lines. I was six years old and standing beside my father, holding his hand, just as I had been sitting beside him on our balcony on that early May morning in 1940 when the parachutists fell from the sky. My father, who later died in that war during an English raid, had put an armchair on the balcony so that he could look out over the meadows behind our house. Am I telling you this so that I can start talking about the war again? To “rub it in,” as they say in English? No. I am telling you because it is an unavoidable part of my story, because stories have to have a beginning, and because my age will not allow me to forget the beginning. I did not suffer, I make no claims to suffering, I do not even know if I am right to say that my writing may have begun on that day, because if that were the case everyone would have become a writer that day. No, my only justification for telling this story again is because I think my life as a writer has been determined by the idea of memory, by that special form of memory that we call the past, or better still history, history that for me is not an abstraction, but a form of existence, a story written by the world and written by each of us at the same time, which often means that we are inventing our own history in the midst of the inevitable events that are presented to us by the world. I had not made up the war; my memories of it, and the way in which I tell them, repeat them, formulate them, invent them or maybe even lie, belong to me, a story that, as you grow from one age to the next, constantly requires new words.

  Reincarnation does not take place after our lives, but during, I once wrote in Zelfportret van een ander (Self-portrait of an Other),4 in one of those moments of possible clairvoyance when you already know something before you know it, one of the inalienable privileges of poetry.

  What kind of person would I have been if I had not remembered that first day? The Stukas and Heinkels, the incredible noise that I believe wiped from my memory everything that preceded that day, depriving me of that basic material that other writers, such as Proust and Nabokov, utilized to such great effect, with the result that I have no recollections of those first years to draw on—it is as though I was not born until that day, as a fully formed six-year-old, an impossibility and therefore a miracle, but I cannot shake the feeling associated with that miracle. I look in amazement at the photographs that prove I existed as a three-year-old and that I really did receive my first Holy Communion, but my inner archive refuses to confirm the truth, for that is what it must be. And it is that feeling that tempts me to think I may in fact have invented my life, complete with the actual fabrications that are part of that life and which we call novels and stories, a double layer of fiction that is inextricably entwined with the actual person of the Dutch citizen who is now standing before you. Does that citizen want something from that war? No. I was not a victim, not a perpetrator, I was a child. But the historical fact of that war wanted something from me.

  The soldiers who fell from the sky were parachutists. The ones from the water had driven into the water, car and all, and were dredged up later—a first sight of death. Water dripping from long grey leather uniform coats. The six-year-old will not forget that, or the apocalyptic noise of the V2s fired from a site near our house on their way to England, an early precursor of space travel.

  Rhyme is a concept from poetry, but it has, probably by analogy, another meaning for me: events that reflect other events, sometimes also forms of historical justice, confirmations of a prophetic inkling, an almost metaphysical relief that history is not only changing course, but making a radical about-face and seeking its opposite, while retaining all of the intervening time—because eliminating it is impossible; history is made up of time and of people—and yet making it apocryphal. In 1956, I stood in a smoldering Budapest and watched Russian tanks, and in 1989 I stood in Berlin and watched the Wall fall. That is what I mean by rhyme: when history finds a connection with itself, without the intervening period of crime and destruction, which is also history, itself being destroyed. Three old men in Yalta, splitting Europe in two with their wicked spell and then the moment when another spell cancels out the first spell, and the consequences that both of these spells have had for Germany and for Europe. That too is rhyme. There is an expression for this in English: full circle. If you live long enough to see it happen, there is a sense of satisfaction in knowing that evil often wins, but not always. In 1957, I was on a bus from Miami to New York. We were driving through the southern states, whites in the front, blacks in the back, separate restrooms and restaurants along the route. I remember a deep feeling of shame. As I write these words, it appears possible that a man who once would have had to sit at the back of the bus is going to be the next American president, and that too is rhyme. History, an amalgam of fate and chance, the story of everything that was the case.

  War is chaos that later looks deceptively like order. My youth was a chaos in search of the clarity that, for me, could be found only in writing. This is something that takes a long time to discover. Chaos creates outsiders. Outsiders have to invent their own worlds in order to survive, the chaos of the self among the ordered world of others. My intention here is not to paint a psychological portrait; it is to show how the work that you wish to honor today has come about. The invented world of my first novel and my first poetry was a non-existent world of romantic longing, an escape. No one has seen that more clearly than Rüdiger Safranski. It is a blessing to meet people who recognize in your work what you did not see yourself when you were writing it. You had already written it, but you did not yet know it. This is, for me, the paradox of my writing. It has happened to me twice, both times in Germany. And that brings me to the next rhyme. There is a kind of line running from that moment when the men fell from the sky to the present day. This too is perhaps a paradox. This line is made up of friends; first the friends from my own country who suffered because of this country, but wanted to share with me their relationship to that past and so brought me here, starting my fascination. They were later joined by other friends, people I met here and who have remained my friends to this day.

  After the war, Germany was not my country. It was destroyed, and somber, like my own country. Anyone who wants to know what the Netherlands was like after the war should read the two great novels by my fellow Dutchman Willem Frederik Hermans: De tranen der acacia’s (The Tears of the Acacias) and De donkere kamer van Damokles (The Darkroom of Damocles), dark masterpieces, magnificent literature, miles away from my own poetic debut, which di
d not describe the real and bitter world of post-war society, but rather a dreamer’s escape to an imaginary paradise, where the light of the south shone, a fantasy world that could not be sustained, but which I will never deny. Since that time, I have constantly lived in two worlds, the world of the north and the world of the south, of the visible reality of my travels and that other world, interwoven with it, the world of fantasy. You do not want your dream to fade, but the discrepancies between the fantasy and the world around you are too strong, and you reject the course of cynicism, sarcasm or other forms of self-delusion. Your only solution is to turn and face the world of chaos, with your imagination as your only weapon. So you sign up for duty on a ship and sail to the tropics, that other form of light, where it gets dark at the same time every day, a darkness in which a cruel chaos can strike. You attempt to escape from the dilemmas of writing or not writing by writing a book in which a writer comes to grief on that very dilemma. And as though it were you yourself who had committed suicide in that book, De ridder is gestorven (The Knight Has Died),5 you let fiction remain fiction and ceaselessly make your way through the epiphany of the world. What takes place in the hidden layers of your being can be said only in poems now, poems which, as Anselm Kiefer said this week in his acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis, are buoys, buoys that he swims to, from one to the next, because otherwise he is lost, a feeling I recognize. Poems, then. You still lack sufficient knowledge of the world for stories, and you know it, because even imagination requires a foundation and abhors the anemic vacuum. You have to wait and you do not know whether that waiting is a lazy lie or the acknowledgment of a destination. This uncertainty dominates your life for a long time. You take it with you to America and Australia, among Muslims and among Buddhists, when you attempt to describe the things you perceive, until the moment comes when you can let go of the world of appearances and write about all that it has left behind in you, and so create a story according to your own laws, a narrative that was visible only in your own imagination. Later, people will say that this world is “light,” and intend this as an accusation or a compliment, and only you will know that the lightness was wrested from a gravitational force originating in the darkness of the chaos that has surrounded you since the beginning, the Dionysian chaos that lies beneath the thin skin of civilization, waiting for us with unflagging desire.