Whenever Alois Erhart needed a powerful, objective reason to explain his pain and submit himself defencelessly to it, he would think in such grand political, historical and philosophical terms. For this pain was world weariness, and for that no remedy existed.
Pragmatists like his father knew about remedies. In 1942, Erhart’s father received a call-up to the OrPo – Ordnungspolizei, batallion 326 – which was being transferred to Posen to carry out the shooting of Jews under the heading: “Combatting partisans”. To carry out the shooting of Jews. Alois Erhart found this drafting order in a folder in the drawer of his father’s desk after he died. His father had already joined the Nazi Party before the annexation of Austria, after which he became the outfitter of sports and field equipment for the Vienna division of the League of German Girls, the Hitler Youth and the Gymnastics Association. Deemed essential to the war effort, this was how he was able to avoid being conscripted for so long. When he had to close the shop, his call-up became inevitable. Thanks to his good contacts and the services he had rendered, however, he was not sent to the front, but joined a police battalion behind the lines.
His father was in Posen / Poznań during the war? Was he, Alois Erhart, born in the shop storeroom while his father, a “policeman” in Poland, was executing Jews? Why had he never talked about it afterwards? For a long time Erhart had studied these documents in disbelief and eventually he questioned his mother. She was already suffering from dementia when his father died, and she followed him to the grave a few months afterwards. At that point, however, she was still alive and Erhart tried to stir her memory, but she just stared at him and laughed abruptly. Poland? she said, and began to sing. Sto lat, sto lat, she sang emphatically and joyfully. Alois didn’t understand a word, he shook her by the shoulders and shouted, Mother! Mother! What are you singing? Erhart tried to memorise the words even though he couldn’t understand them, but he remembered Sto lat and Jeszcze raz because his mother sang them over and over again. He ran to the lavatory and wrote them down, phonetically, roughly how they sounded. Then he went back to his mother, who was sitting there still, staring dreamily and saying nothing.
The following day Erhart asked one of his colleagues in the department of Slavonic languages. She said that the words he’d jotted down meant “one hundred years” and “again”. And she thought Erhart’s mother might have been singing an old Polish folk song. At any rate, Sto lat was a drinking toast too. Was this of any help?
No.
How did his mother know a Polish folk song? What had his father done in Poznań? And why was his mother, whose memory was shot, singing “Again! Again! Again!”?
Alois Erhart packed his suitcase, lost in thought and memories. He paused. Why was he packing? He wasn’t flying back until the day after tomorrow, the room in Hotel Atlas was booked for another two nights and already paid for. The “New Pact” think tank was due to meet again tomorrow. Just because he no longer wanted to be a part of it, didn’t want to show his face again, he didn’t have to leave straight away. In any case he couldn’t change his flight. Another day in Brussels, then.
He sat at the desk and opened his laptop with the intention of making some notes of the session from memory, summarising the reactions of the group’s members. One by one, according to the categories he had sorted them into. He began with his Estonian colleague and typed “Eliste”, but before he could write another word he saw that the autocorrect function had improved this to “Elites”.
Oh well, he thought, shutting his laptop.
Matek took the 11.04 intercity from Kraków Główny to Poznań Główny, a journey that should have taken just under five hours and twenty minutes. It was over for him in less than three. Soon after Łódź the driver put on the emergency brake, hurling Matek, who had just got up to go to the loo, down the aisle of the carriage, against the back of a seat and then into the door, where he crashed to the ground. He tried to get to his feet but couldn’t support himself, his right arm was at an unnatural angle, his legs wouldn’t obey him, he couldn’t draw them up and get onto his knees, there was a problem with his stomach, as if something had burst behind his navel, as if a powerful energy had been released that was now flowing red-hot through his guts, he heard whimpering, there must be other people injured, he tried to stand but could only raise his head slightly before letting it drop again. Somebody bent over him, said something, it was a woman’s voice that inspired confidence in Matek, gave him a sense of security, he closed his eyes. He saw a small boy running across a field, flying a kite. Other children were running behind the boy, they wanted to snatch the kite from him, but the boy was quicker, and the quicker he ran the higher the kite rose, the line unravelling so fast from the reel that it tore and cut into his palms, now men with pistols and rifles appeared, they shot at the kite, but the large cross covered with red-and-white fabric flew so high that the bullets couldn’t reach it, his hands bled, the blood dripped onto the field, the kite flew ever higher into the sky, he saw his mother standing to one side, laughing and clapping, and the boy let go, the kite flew up into the sun, to where the sun no longer dazzled, but turned deep red and finally black.
The following day newspapers across Europe carried reports of the rail accident. A man had committed suicide by throwing himself onto the tracks between Łódź and Zgierz, in front of the intercity train to Poznań. Rail traffic was blocked on this stretch for more than three hours.
It was an unusual report. This was a relatively minor, local accident, and there was a consensus in the media to keep such incidents out of the news, to deter copycats. But there was a simple reason why this one got coverage, even outside Poland: the victim, given that he was dead, was of general interest. The man who had thrown himself in front of the train was eighty-year-old Adam Goldfarb.
After 1942, next to the Łódź ghetto there was also a young person’s concentration camp where Jewish children were incarcerated from the age of two. And Adam Goldfarb was the last survivor of this children’s concentration camp in Łódź. Had been the last survivor. The motive of this “warning voice”, as the paper said, was unknown.
Eleven
Something cannot fall apart
without there having been connections.
THE FIRST MEETING of the Council working group on the European Commission’s Jubilee Project took place on the very day the Belgian newspapers, as well as some French and German ones, wrote about the scandal caused by the new exhibition in the Musées royaux de Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Like so many major scandals, this one had started small. Following the opening of the exhibition “Art in the sidings – forgotten works of modernism”, a trickle of short, rather conventional and uninspired reports had initially appeared in the local media. When a collective exhibition displays works by forgotten artists, even the normally ambitious critic finds it hard to criticise the selection and complain that one or other artist who ought to have been included in this exhibition has been forgotten. For the exhibition is about forgotten artists only, and any critic claiming that a name or two is missing from amongst these forgotten individuals, also forgotten by the exhibition curator, would fall into a trap: they would be recalling a forgotten artist only to add them to the list of the forgotten. This gave rise to an art-history conundrum of infinite complexity: is there art that is significant in a particular era, but which is then rightly forgotten? Evidently. But why? We do not forget the era, so why do we forget examples of its art? Is there textbook forgotten art, does a prototypical forgotten artist exist? To what extent does a forgotten artist deserve the verdict “forgotten” if a critic remembers them, and to what extent are they then not forgotten or all the more forgotten if the critic merely criticises the fact that they have been forgotten from the list of forgotten artists?
For this reason the exhibition was not a great success amongst the critics – the general thrust of opinion was that these were works of art that ultimately hadn’t penetrated the market. But they weren’t failures, for all the exhibited artwor
ks had at some point after 1945 been purchased by the royal museums, which meant that at a particular time they must have been judged differently, as outstanding within the context of their peers, or at least as the works of promising young artists. Some critics, therefore, explored with greater or lesser originality the following question: How can something be regarded as important only to be forgotten so soon afterwards?
Thomas Hebbelinck, the exhibition’s curator, revealed in an interview with De Standaard the puzzlingly banal reason for this exhibition: The royal museums were preparing a major Francis Bacon exhibition. The sums demanded by other institutions as insurance for their loans devoured such a large proportion of the budget that to plug the gap it had been necessary to stage an exhibition which cost nothing, i.e. featuring artworks from their own depository. This had given rise to the idea of displaying purchases by artists who were forgotten, an idea which he himself found exciting and worthy of discussion. For the question of what we forget and why we forget, and whether exhibited works perhaps show a collective desire for suppression, was of fundamental importance.
And that was that as far as the exhibition and the media were concerned . . . or so it seemed.
But then a long and razor-sharp essay appeared in De Morgen by Geert van Istendael, the renowned Brussels intellectual whose most recent mention in the media was as a member of the “Brussels seeks a name for its pig” jury. He opened a completely new front in the debate, which was half-heartedly defended for a day and then no more. He didn’t discuss the forgotten art itself, but Hebbelinck’s curation. The exhibition was entitled “Art in the sidings”. Railway tracks had been laid out through the large exhibition hall, and at the end of them stood a buffer which, as van Istendael wrote, was probably intended to signify “the end of the line”. Visitors were led down the left-hand side of the tracks, while the artworks – sculptures, paintings and drawings – were on the right.
Geert van Istendael began his essay with the words: “Although this exhibition provides much food for thought, there is one tiny but important detail missing: above the entrance to the exhibition the phrase ‘Art sets you free’.”
And he posited the question of whether the museum, or the curator of this exhibition, believed that the relationship between successful and failed art could be compared to the selection on the ramp at Auschwitz. To the left, life; to the right, death. Presenting art that had failed to penetrate the art market as a mass of works being sent to their death at the end of a railway line – for how else were the tracks and buffer to be interpreted? – while visitors to the left were being told that they were classed as survivors, wasn’t only making light of Auschwitz, it also emphasised the stupidity and inappropriateness of the idea that there always had to be a reference to Auschwitz. Moreover, van Istendael continued, the question arose as to “What is more outrageous? Equating Jews to bad art, or regarding the art market as a sort of Josef Mengele? Either way, this exhibition is an outrage and hopefully the last of its kind. For from now on the cudgel of fascism is a papier-mâché prop, crafted from the sodden catalogue of a poorly curated exhibition of cardboard cut-outs that call themselves artists.”
That hit home. All of a sudden the exhibition, which newspaper arts pages had covered only half-heartedly, became a scandal that was flogged to death in comment pieces and editorials.
Even the grand old man of the bourgeois Belgian press, Tom Koorman, former editor-in-chief of De Financieel-Economische Tijd and now retired for more than ten years, made a return to his old paper with a comment piece: this exhibition was a crime, because it equated no crime with the greatest crime of all. The free world had the freedom to forget too, and the free market, including the art market, did not define itself by the worship of ashes.
This vacuous and at the very least unfortunate phrase “worship of ashes” in relation to Auschwitz led to further ill-tempered responses, even though Koorman certainly hadn’t meant it in the way it was interpreted. But nor had Hebbelinck, the curator, intended any of the things he was accused of in the comment pieces and reviews. At any rate, on the day that the Council working group met, there wasn’t a newspaper in which the “misappropriation of Auschwitz” did not feature.
Right at the start of the meeting George Morland said, This is off the record, please, but if the exhibition, which undoubtedly has a certain affinity with COMM’s idea, were already part of the planned jubilee, I would not exactly call it a boost to the Commission’s image.
When Mrs Atkinson read the protocol of the meeting she knew that she could . . . well, forget the project in its current form. Now there were only two options. First, shift the project definitively onto the Ark and thus let it fail. This would create barely any rumblings within the Commission, because nobody ever expected anything illuminating from the Ark. What had her colleague, Jean-Philippe Dupont, recently said about it? “J’adore les lucioles, vraiment, elles sont magnifiques. Mais quand je veux travailler, elles ne me donnent simplement pas assez de lumière!”
Second, she could focus on the basic idea of the Jubilee Project as a way to improve the Commission’s image, but divorce herself from the content that had been dreamed up by the Ark. That, after all, had been one of the working group’s suggestions: “Why the Jews? Why not sport?”
Yes, she thought. Why not indeed? Sport, which brought nations together – they could work with that in accordance with article 165, paragraph 1, Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, as noted here in the protocol. Sport also fell under the Directorate-General of Education and Culture, so she could continue to work with Mrs Xenopoulou, and they could still count on the president’s inherent support for the Jubilee Project. This was in the protocol too. A solo effort by the Commission was firmly rejected, however, as it would invalidate the point of the project, which was to boost the image of the Commission. All they agreed was that the project should be financed exclusively from the Commission’s budget, although this would be hard to accept if the Council and Parliament were on the bandwagon and kept voicing all their objections during the planning. And could one expect Culture to discard its original idea, while being forced to implement a totally different one, but with no prospect of an exclusive image boost?
Grace Atkinson kneaded her fingers. She was doing well on Brussels cuisine; she had already put on eight pounds and was amazed that even the circulation in her hands and feet seemed to have improved. And no hint any longer of that pallor, of the face that used to be as white as paper. Now her cheeks were red like the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the queen’s favourite painter. This might also be a consequence of the odd little glass of champagne – or prosecco, she didn’t want to exaggerate – that she drank. In her experience a little glass, a tiny little one, two at most, stirred her imagination, made her more open-minded but also more resolute. It was merely out of habit that she still kneaded her fingers.
She kneaded and pondered. The first thing she had to do was to find out Fenia Xenopoulou’s reaction to the protocol of the working group meeting.
Ought she to write her an e-mail and suggest a meeting to discuss how they could adapt the objections expressed?
No, nonsense. There was nothing to adapt. And an e-mail like that would already be tantamount to distancing themselves conclusively from the idea the Ark had proposed.
Grace Atkinson felt bad. She was a loyal woman and had honestly appreciated the commitment shown by Fenia Xenopoulou. Loyalty and fairness – for these weren’t mere phrases, but principles anchored deep in her soul, human skills with which one went one’s way with dignity and a definite ambition for success. She had got caught up in something where professional and human survival were perhaps dependent on other parameters, and she didn’t know if this was connected to the fact that people with very different cultural backgrounds had to work together here, or if large bureaucratic systems fundamentally produced such contradictions. She had previously worked on committees at the University of London, then in the private office of the B
ritish foreign secretary. In both cases these had been slim, albeit not transparent structures. Essentially everything had happened behind closed doors – the famous padded doors were metaphor and reality in one. But here, here she was constantly under observation and all e-mails were saved and assigned to a folder, which after a certain time was sent to Florence, to the Archive of the European Union, where historians sat and poked about in them. If the foreign secretary’s private office in London had to reach a decision, the discussion lasted half an hour at most, including all the rituals and small talk at the beginning and end. People there had the same background, they were of comparable stock, which meant they had also been to the same schools, spoke the same language with the same accent by which they recognised each other, they all had spouses from the same social class, between 80 and 90 per cent of their biographical details were identical and on the whole they’d had exactly the same experiences. Was there a problem? Within twenty minutes these white, Anglican graduates of elite schools had reached an agreement. Outsiders speaking in this circle sounded as if they were having a conversation with themselves. But here in Brussels? Around the table there were always people with different languages and of different cultural backgrounds, many from working-class or artisan families too, especially from the eastern countries, with very different experiences, and everything that Grace Atkinson was used to resolving in twenty minutes here took hours, days, weeks.
She found it fascinating. She had to admit that the decisions which the elite coteries in the U.K. were able to reach so swiftly didn’t usually correspond to the interests of the majority of the British population, no matter who was in government. Here it was the other way around. There were so many endlessly painstaking compromises that nobody, no matter where, could understand that their interests were somehow represented in these compromises. It was more complicated, but more exciting too, although sometimes she thought there ought to be scope for a touch of authoritarian intervention, with the right to issue directives and intervene and . . .
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