by Wendy Lesser
I could see for myself that the daily German papers contained long, erudite articles on politics and the arts, but I couldn't actually read any of them, because my German was almost non-existent. This, at the beginning, posed less of a problem than you might imagine. To an English speaker, German is an inherently welcoming language. It's partly that so many of the words sound the same, and it's also a matter of grammatical resemblance. When I asked my German teacher, for instance, how to say “Can I sit here?” (useful for those moments on the train when a package was taking up a seat), she gave me “Kann ich hier sitzen?” while also alerting me to the fact that—just as in English—a stickler might quibble with the substitution of “can” for “may.” This superficial similarity between the languages gave me the illusion, at first, that I was picking up German very rapidly. And the Germans colluded in this self-deception of mine. At ticket offices or local shops, in cafés or museums, the Berliners I dealt with were always happy to act as if my bits and pieces of the language were functional markers; they would accept them as good currency and reply in kind. It was only when I ran out of my meager supply and had to resort to the inevitable “Wie sagt man in Deutsch…?” (How do you say in German…?) that the whole artificiality of the game would be revealed. For their English was always so much richer than my German that they could invariably supply the missing word, gracefully translating the English one I had given them into the language we then continued to pretend to speak.
Thinking back on it now, I realize that I had one earlier exposure to the German language which foreshadowed my sudden enthusiasm in Berlin. Sometime in the early years of The Threepenny Review—which means more than fifteen or twenty years ago, now—the magazine acquired a German-language essay about the musician Tom Waits. A fluent German speaker produced a first-round translation for me; then I took home both versions, the English and the German, and began to tinker. With nothing but a German-English dictionary and a native sense of English idiom to guide me, I worked late into the night at my glass-topped dining room table. It is a table I still own (though it now occupies the dining room of a different house): its rectangle of extra-strength glass originally belonged to a friend, who had had it cut for an office doorway that it then failed to fit; my friend, knowing I wanted a glass-topped table, gave me the orphaned piece and referred me to an architect, who worked for weeks at this brain-teaser of a project, constructing panels and plugs to fit the pre-cut holes in the door. Finally he presented me with a unique and beautiful object. “How much do I owe you?” I asked. “You can't pay me what you owe me,” the architect answered, “but I'm going to charge you the six hundred dollars we agreed on.”
I don't know why I tell this story now, except that the expenditure of the architect's time on the table and mine on the German essay seemed to bear some relation to each other. What I mainly remember is how immensely satisfying the work was, how much pleasure I got from coming up with exactly the right corresponding terms for the German words I did not know but faintly apprehended. I felt—as I have never felt with Spanish, a language I know much better—that for once I understood the allure of translation. But I now think it was German rather than translation that appealed to me, because I felt the same thing again when I began to try to unpack the cunningly nested syllables I found all over Berlin.
This interpretive zeal, however, only took me a certain distance. Well before the end of my several months’ stay, I had run up against the obdurate difficulty of the language: its irregular verbs, its masculine, feminine, and neuter articles, and above all its cases. I couldn't even understand when to use the genitive or the accusative, much less remember what forms they took. Nor could I read the simplest newspaper article (unless it was on a subject with which I was already familiar) or understand the most casual cocktail-party conversation. Forget Goethe and Kafka; I was halted at the language's outermost gates.
The fact that I was excluded from its linguistic recesses did not make me love Berlin any the less. On the contrary, my ignorance may well have shielded me and made me even more fondly doting. In England, I could almost always tell what was going on, and this had made me wary of the culture as well as attached to it. (The ads that lined the escalators in the Underground were always a particular object of my ire: even when I most loved London, my reaction to those ads hinted to me that I could also come to hate it.) Whereas, in Berlin, I could pretty much perceive only what I wanted to perceive. Other people would tell me about the outbreaks of anti-Semitic rage in the hinterlands or the mistreatment of Turks in the cities, but I couldn't read about these things for myself, so my experience of them was always attenuated, indirect, known but not fully felt.
At the same time, my sense of helplessness about the German language brought me weirdly closer to the German character, because it lent my time in Berlin an air of melancholy that is otherwise foreign to my nature. I became, in that sense, more German, less American. I do not think of myself, normally, as being very American, but I have in my make-up certain qualities that are frequently associated with my native place—a vast fund of energy, for one thing, and a correspondingly deep well of optimism and self-confidence. I am not used to thinking that there are things beyond my powers. But Berlin made me aware of my shortcomings: not only my inability to speak German, but also my ignorance about music, my insufficient grasp of history, my careless approach to scholarship, my amateurish way of looking at paintings…
Yet it would be wrong to suggest that these discoveries of my own inadequacies only disheartened me. They also freed me, in some way, to be something other than I had always been. Berlin—and the American Academy in particular, where I was cosseted, cared for, given no responsibilities and no onerous tasks—created the equivalent of an asylum room or a mother's lap, a place where I was protected enough to risk feeling loss and sorrow. So when I stood outside the Wannsee Conference House and imagined I was sensing Hitler's evil, that may not have been at all what I was really apprehending. Perhaps what I felt then was only my own stored-up melancholy, the suppressed sadnesses of a lifelong optimist, which Berlin seemed strangely and uniquely designed to release.
I had specific things to be sad about in that fall of 2003. My old friend Lenny had died the previous May, and my only son had gone away to college in August. I don't know how I would have handled these losses in the course of my regular life, if I had not gone to Berlin—no doubt by tamping them down, ignoring them as much as possible, keeping a stiff upper lip. (It was not for nothing, that affinity I had felt with England in my youth.) I do not mean to suggest that my sorrows were huge or unbearable: they were normal human sorrows, and tiny relative to many others. But that comparative, ameliorating mode, which is so easy for an American to fall into, is not always the best approach even to normal-sized sorrows. It is possible, I now realize, to face sadness without falling into self-pity or depression, and it is possible to submit to melancholy without becoming completely incapacitated. This is something I did not know before I went to Berlin.
The self that I took with me to Berlin was both continuous with and slightly altered from the self I had lived with for my previous fifty-one years. Montaigne would say this was true of any self, at any age, but I felt it particularly strongly at that point. I was at a juncture of some sort. I wanted to leave things behind, my own personality included—and yet, since I clearly could not do that (and just as clearly did not wish to, at least on some level), I also wanted to take a long, intense, self-possessed but not possessive look at my life, and the world, and my history in relation to the world's history. For reasons only partially connected with my age, the idea of death, and particularly my own death, had recently become far less abstract to me, and I wanted the time to think about that. Germany was a good place to have such thoughts, or at any rate a better place for them than I'd ever encountered before. Perhaps there is indeed something behind these spurious notions of a national character— notions that at their worst produce a Hitler, and at their best produce most of th
e novels I've ever cared for.
In February of 2003, seven months before I set off for Berlin, I saw an exhibition of photographs by a German photographer, Thomas Struth, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I had never heard of him before, but the best of his pictures—huge color photos that showed artworks in museums, with people standing in front of them and looking at them—moved me as few photographs ever have. Partly this was because Struth's choice of artworks (Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day, Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People, a Vermeer from the National Gallery in London, and so forth) included a number of paintings that have been unusually important to me. But it was also due to the fact that he had captured something alive about the paintings, something that I would have called unreproducible if he had not, indeed, managed to reproduce it. What I saw, when he pointed it out to me, was the way people in an art museum could mirror—in their posture, in the color and cut of their clothing, in their physical relation to each other (even, in the case of the Vermeer, in their apparent absence from the room)— something essential in each painting, so that the artwork in front of them actually seemed to extend off the wall into their viewing space, and thence into ours. This feeling of the continuity between art and lived experience so permeated these photographs (I want to say “these paintings,” for this is how the photos struck me, as paintings themselves) that it seemed useless to buy postcards or catalogues of Struth's work, and so I didn't. The only way to see them was as one sees a painting: life-sized on a wall.
A couple of days after seeing the photographs I saw Struth himself. He was appearing on a panel at the Goethe Institute, directly across the street from the exhibition of his photos. In a way that I did not then recognize but have since come to see as Berlin-like, the lecture room was filled with sloppily dressed, eager young people as well as the more sedate art-museum types one would expect on that stretch of Fifth Avenue. Struth himself, dressed in black and with close-cropped gray hair, was an engaging figure in early middle age who spoke excellent if accented English. Everything he said confirmed the sense I had of him from his photos, but what I remember best is the word he used to describe his relationship to the material. “I want to use the word ‘submit,’” he said, “but without any sense of forced obedience or something like that. I want it to include free choice, and will, but also a sense of giving myself over to something, allowing myself to be taken over. But perhaps I have chosen the wrong word since my English is not so good.”
Later, someone in the audience asked him if there was anything particularly German about his work. Struth was clearly uncomfortable with the question, and yet he wanted to give it an answer that justified its having been asked. “I don't usually think of myself as particularly German,” he said. “It's a hard question to answer. But I guess I would say—yes, well, I love the music of Bach. And so I hope there is something in my photographs that is like Bach.”
At the time I thought these were good answers, but now I feel they're even better. Because now that I have observed German culture in action, I understand something about the way it draws together seeming opposites. To submit oneself completely—to a moment of photographic time, to the feeling generated by a landscape or a city or a work of art—and yet to have the clarity, the precision, the control evident in a Bach composition: these are not only instructive endpoints in a possible spectrum, but actual and simultaneous options. I have heard them both at once in a Beethoven or Schubert piece at the Berliner Philharmoniker; I have seen them both in Caspar David Friedrich or Adolph Menzel paintings at the Alte Nationalgalerie. Before I went to Berlin, if I had thought about it at all, I would have thought about these two strands of German culture as entirely separate and opposed: there was the “feeling” strand expressed in German Romanticism, which risked sickly sweetness at its most extreme, and there was the “structure” strand expressed in Bach or the Bauhaus, which risked coldness at its extreme. But of course Bach's music contains tremendous feeling—the form, the clarity, are themselves expressive, just as they are in Struth's most formally satisfying photos and Friedrich's most formally perfect paintings. The sweetness in each is mediated by the coldness, and vice versa. The risks are thus disarmed, but only because they have both been submitted to.
Mittelweg 36 is the name of the magazine my friend Martin edits. When he first gave me his business card, he explained that the publication was only called that because it was the street address at which the magazine's offices happened to be located. But later I started to think about this. How could a leftwing magazine innocently be called “middle way”? Didn't this hint at Clintonian or Blairish political compromise, with its craven attempt to reach the voters in the center? Wasn't it disingenuous to say that the title had no meaning?
When I confronted Martin with these thoughts, he said, “Ah, but in German the phrase has a different association. If you ask most German people what they think of when you say Mittelweg, they will quote you the proverb In Gefahr und grösster Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod.” I couldn't follow the spoken German, but Martin's wife Barbara, a professional translator, immediately rendered it into English for me: “In situations of danger and greatest distress, the middle course will bring death.” In other words, you must take sides, choose one thing or another, go for the extremes. If you are unable to choose—if you opt instead for the wishy-washy-ness of the middle—you will end up with nothing. There is a slightly scary willfulness to this attitude (especially given the extremities of Germany's recent history), but there is also something admirably dark and bravely hard-edged about it, and I found myself instantly attracted to the saying, not least because it seemed so deeply un-American. We, with our cautious “Look before you leap” and our nervous “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”— what do we know of the Mittelweg that is death? And how far can we ever expect to get without that knowledge?
Certain places are capable of becoming significant to us only at certain times—I mean not only at particular phases of their own history, but at particular moments in ours. I was ready for Berlin when I finally got to it. There are always dissatisfactions and longings that arise with middle age, feelings about roads not taken and opportunities missed. Berlin was both the spur and the antidote to these feelings in me. It made me want to become something other than what I had been before, but it also made me recognize the futility of that desire, and in the end it also made me able to live peaceably, if not happily, with that futility. Being in Berlin allowed me, possibly for the first time in my life, to experience regret.
It would be something of an understatement to say that regret has never been much of a factor in my psychological make-up. This is true on the daily level as well as over the long haul. I make decisions quickly and easily, and I rarely second-guess myself. If there is a possible mistake looming in the future, I anxiously do my best to avoid it, but if an unrectifiable mistake has already occurred, I can pretty quickly let it go. I do not, as a rule, look back on any moments of my past and say, “Here is where the determining choice was made, and here is where I went wrong.” I am deeply attached to novels that contain such moments, but I do not seem to find them echoed in my own life. For the most part, the path behind me looks like a straight, clear road from this end: things seem to have turned out, for me, the way I should have expected them to turn out, if I had ever bothered to imagine the future, which I pretty rigorously did not. I am not saying this hindsight is accurate. There were probably many alternative branches that have been lost in the mists of oblivion, if not obliviousness. But I have been protected from thinking about or even knowing about these alternatives by my tendency to keep my head down and just keep plowing forward. This behavior was not just a matter of smug self-satisfaction or crude lack of imagination; it was also the result, I now think, of fear. I suspect I was afraid that if regret once got a foot in the door, it might succeed in bringing down the whole structure.
Berlin somehow got round that fear, and in doing so it made me able to picture the
possibility of another life: not one I could have had if I had chosen differently but one that would have required me to be a completely different person. The Berlin I would have wanted to inhabit, when I was in my twenties or thirties, did not exist when I was in my twenties or thirties, and neither did the person who would have wanted to inhabit it. I have only reached that stage now. I am only now—through the collaboration of all the forces, both personal and historical, that made me what I became over the last fifty years— the kind of person who can appreciate Berlin for what it is now, in all its complicated self-dividedness. And yet I am too old to start over again. That, I imagine, is what all the middle-aged Jews said when they contemplated leaving Berlin for America in the 1930s, though in their case the consequences of the choice were far more dire. I do not have history breathing down my neck (except insofar as the America of the early twenty-first century is somewhere one might want to get away from). I can afford to say, “I am too old to learn a new language, I am too old to give up my house and my friends, I will stay where I am.” I can live with that decision, and live well.
But it is sad to feel that one is too old, even for things one doesn't really need. It is a feeling that middle-aged Americans don't easily embrace, especially this middle-aged American, who has spent a lifetime avoiding regrets. It seems that Berlin, in making me want something I cannot have—in making me want to be something I am not—has infected me with its own characteristic melancholy. I can struggle against the resignation. I can try to learn German, or take music lessons, or do any number of things to cement the connection between the person I briefly became in Berlin and the person I will be for the rest of my life. The struggle is no doubt salubrious, in that it is good to try new things, good to have doubts about the perfection of one's own existence. Still, it is hard for me to acknowledge the sad truth that I will never be a Berliner. Or, if I am a sort of Berliner, it is only in this way: that I have become permanently aware of a division in myself, between the person I might have become had I lived in Berlin, and the person I am instead.
