by Whitney Otto
Marcelle Blum, Charlotte’s mother, was a designer of glass tiles, vases, smaller decorative windows, transoms, and light fixtures for a dedicated department of Blum GlasWerks. Mirrors. Floor screens. A collection of breakable animals that pleased adults as much as they did children. The waiting list for her chandeliers and floor lamps alone was impressive.
Rainier Ermler, the photographer, had been a friend of Bruno Blum since Charlotte was very young. He specialized in architectural and landscape photography. Not surprisingly, the several portraits he made were so saturated with light that the faces resembled the facades of buildings.
Mr. Blum and Rainier Ermler were involved with the architects at the Bauhaus in Dessau, who taught progressive ideas of form and function, looking at the construction of a thing as well the “nature” of an object. And the idea of beauty “doing something” and not just “being something” was meant to affect the lives of the common man too. The school held classes in painting and color theory and textiles, pottery, and wall coverings; typography and advertising and architecture, while photography came and went until Rainier Ermler and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy made it a more permanent fixture in 1929, around the time that Rainier was shooting Bruno Blum’s Rainbow on the Rhine, an apartment complex meant to mimic the Royal Crescent in Bath while allowing maximum light to the interior. Its arc shape and pastel coloring had earned it the descriptive nickname. Mr. Blum didn’t care what it was called as long as there were those who called it “home.”
• • •
It could be said that Rainier Ermler cared more about painting with light than he did about psychological insight, or placing his unseen self in the photograph. Exercises in abstraction didn’t interest him; his pictures always looked like what they were: a cup, a rose, a hand. A house of glass, an arc-shaped apartment complex of many hues. A face flooded with light. He wanted the building (the interior, the portrait, the cup, the rose, the hand) to be exactly what it was, yet presented in a new way.
He would say to Charlotte, “If I photograph you in the shadows, you become mysterious, perhaps unknowable. If I light you from above, so your eyelashes throw shadows on your cheeks, you could be a Hollywood film star. And if I fill the room with light, to an almost unforgiving degree, it will flatten your features, as if I am a public servant taking a passport photo.”
“I like the idea of the passport photo,” said Charlotte.
Rainier said, “That’s because, in trying to hide nothing, it prompts the imagination. We ask, ‘Where is this person going? Where is she from?’ ”
“But you said you wanted the thing to be ‘what it is.’ ”
“Yes. And it is. It is a face, a portrait. We can all agree. Whereas we may not all agree when looking at an abstract picture—‘oh,’ we say, ‘That’s a mountain. No, it’s a teapot.’ But by not disguising the thing in the picture—in this case, the face—we are freed to move beyond what we see. We are past What is it? and on to What does it mean? What’s the story?”
“All right then,” asked Charlotte, “what is the difference between your passport picture and my snapshot? Is my snapshot as interesting?”
“Sometimes. The difference—and this is what I will teach you, okay? The difference is that if your interesting snapshot is an accident, you aren’t controlling the outcome as much as something simply caught your eye and, snap, snap, there you are. This is why people are bored with most snapshots of someone’s vacation to the spa or the seashore.
“But, when you learn about light, you learn that light is everything. Contrasts of white and gray and black. We photographers are lashed to light and time, and we must make the most of both. If I’m good, I can get a picture that looks like a snapshot but feels like mystery. Maybe even a masterpiece—a Vermeer!” He stopped, sighed. “The most important thing I can say is that you must be precise. You must be particular.”
Charlotte was Rainier Ermler’s sole pupil at the Berlin studio. No longer working at Wertheim, she would ride in on the train from the exclusive southwestern district of the city where her family’s glass house was located near woods and lakes. It wasn’t a long ride—no more than half an hour—yet it was a world apart from the crush of the city. Every day, without exception, Charlotte felt a rush of excitement when the train pulled into the station, as she exited the doors into the crazy, kinetic intersection of five boulevards at Potsdamer Platz. It was the surge of the crowd, and the streetcars, bicycles, buses, automobiles that sped about the crisscrossing streets, avoiding each other as if the traffic were choreographed. There were newsboys and flower sellers and the occasional horse-drawn cart. Tram bells and car horns. There were couples of every class and gender combination strolling arm in arm. It was a jolt: the noise, the smells, the buying and selling and rushing and strolling and conversing and meeting and parting amid all the enormous buildings housing offices, stores and shops, cafés, theaters, and packed restaurants, spilling people into the streets. It was the thrill of being in the congested center of such a metropolitan city, populated by shopgirls, workmen, noblemen with their formal manners and air of entitlement; students, local and foreign. Scientists, artists, musicians. Poets. Factory owners, department store owners, bankers, and purveyors of fine goods. People passing through; people without the means to move on.
There were artists, painters, street vendors, wives of the rich, mistresses of the same rich; businessmen everywhere. Professors, politicians, brownshirts, Nazis, communists, and those who hovered politically more to the center.
Everywhere were ads for goods, medicines, and party candidates.
One painter portrayed Berlin as a vortex of three groups: the veterans of the Great War, with their missing limbs and less visible war wounds, parked on the already crowded sidewalks; the capitalists, somehow surviving the cataclysmic cost of the war and the consequent reparations; and the prostitutes, whom one could spend the better part of an afternoon categorizing before even addressing all the sexual appetites they satisfied.
Among the women were Boot Girls, Fresh-Air Women, and T-Girls, who worked in pairs, sometimes as mother and daughter. Kontroll-Girls were registered with the government, Nuttes were teenage girls who looked like boys. Munzis were pregnant women. Young “medicines” came with “doctors.” Minettes, racehorses, and dominas. Five O’Clock Ladies, shopgirls, and secretaries worked the trade part-time, and their counterparts, Mannequins, were from good families and worked in the best brothels.
There was something for everyone: lesbian, gay, transvestite, transsexual, with every category of “characters” and amusements. Charlotte was reminded each morning as she observed people in late-night finery on their way home, looking a little worse for wear, that the current sex industry (both its economics and its scope) was a marker of a hollowed-out nation, something that seemed to move beyond human nature.
Berlin was the picture of a large metropolis on the losing end of a world war. The handfuls of marks to buy a loaf of bread, the wounded, the war debts, the people with money, the New Women with jobs, the modern buildings, the sexual commerce, the clubs and cafés, the ever-changing political dance in the wake of the deposition of the Kaiser.
The city never brought Charlotte down because every day was new. Even though Berlin itself was not as picturesque as London or Paris, and even though charming could never really be an appropriate adjective, Berlin was charismatic in the roguish way of a lover who, even as he (or she) is wooing you with kisses and whispered promises, and making you laugh, you know won’t call in the morning. It was a lover who was a little dangerous in ways that didn’t always show, keeping her a bit on edge, a bit in love and endlessly forgiving because it made her feel that she was exactly where she was meant to be.
That’s what it was to be young and in Berlin in those years between the wars: Berlin made you like who you were when you were there, as if everything worth being a part of in the world—all those modern ideas about sex and art and women; all that possibility—was right there, in its dark, beating
heart.
• • •
Charlotte had had eight months of Rainier’s undivided attention. She had listened as he explained the relationship he made between photography and mathematics and philosophy. He was serious and exact, thought not completely without a sense of humor, as she soon discovered. The trouble was that their personalities were radically out of sync when it came to light social interaction, even as they meshed perfectly as teacher and pupil.
One day Charlotte entered the studio to see Rainier composing a still life of a rose on tiers of glass, with a piece of tin arranged behind and below the little glass shelves. There were three pale pink pearls near the white rose. A bit of silk ran through the arrangement. He was bent to his work, using tweezers to perfect the placement of the rose, the pearls, and the silk. He would make a minuscule adjustment, then step back and slightly redirect the lights. Then back at the still life, using the tweezers, then back at the lights. The window shades refused to be adjusted in such subtle ways, a fact that clearly frustrated him.
None of this obsessive activity caught Charlotte’s attention: Rainier was being Rainier.
What did catch her eye was the other person in the room, with her back to Charlotte as she seemed absorbed in Rainier’s activity.
Her sandy hair was a mass of loose curls cut in a bob, ending just below her ears. She wore a men’s-style sweater, too long for her slight frame, trousers, and boots, but it was the way she was standing, leaning a little to the side, her arms crossed in front of her, that seemed familiar.
The girl quickly glanced over her shoulder when Charlotte entered the studio (not wanting to miss the glacial progress of Rainier’s adjustments), then looked again, this time twisting her body to give her a small, waist-high wave and a smile before turning back to Rainier.
Charlotte would’ve known that smile anywhere.
It turned out that Rainier had taken Ines on as a student when she wrote him a letter about a picture she had seen in a magazine of an unmade bed, a pair of hairpins forgotten among the sheets, taken by a woman named Cymbeline Kelley.
“American,” said Ines, “and a woman.” She and Charlotte were sharing two pastries at Kuchenform café on Friedrichstrasse, the thousands of lights doubled in the slick, wet street. “I asked if he knew anything about her—he didn’t—and said that I preferred a picture like Kelley’s to those of someone like Morris Elliot, with all those vegetables that are cropped to look like something else. Same thing with Moholy-Nagy. I like things to look like what they are, I said, because then I can make up my own story. I don’t like being dictated to.”
“He must have loved to hear you say that,” said Charlotte.
“Apparently,” said Ines, her words a little sloppy from the bite of cake she’d just taken. She delicately wiped her mouth with her fingertips. “Sorry, my napkin’s on the floor and—”
Charlotte held out her own napkin. Ines used it, then handed it back.
“So, you’re not really Rainier’s only student, are you?” she said.
“For the last several months, yes. I mean, that I know of.”
“Hmmm.”
“He doesn’t really have time for students, and, well, I think he really took me on as a favor to my father.” And when Charlotte said her father’s name, Ines replied, “Rainbow on the Rhine! I know a family that lives in one of the flats. I love the meadow in the middle of the complex and, of course, all the light.” She took another bite of cake, with Charlotte giving her the napkin before she even asked. “Isn’t he also the glass architect?”
“You should see our house.”
“Invite me. Or, if you don’t want to be exclusive, invite everyone in our class.”
Charlotte laughed.
“Are you still dressing windows at Wertheim’s?”
“Fired. Mostly fired, I guess, since I went in to talk to them about my ideas with the intention of leaving if I had to keep doing what I was doing. Somehow the conversation never got around to what I wanted and more or less concentrated on what they wanted, which was ‘someone who absolutely understood their clientele’—and I pointed out that actually I understood perfectly, making my windows seem like ‘an act of rebellion’—”
“God, they think everyone is committing acts of rebellion these days. If you question the government, if you’re a girl and want to do something else with your life besides kitchen, kids, and church—”
“Did you go to Hannah Hoch’s lecture where—”
“I love her photomontages—”
“Me too! I love them so much!”
“Cut the Cake with a Knife? Brilliant. All those mannequins as brides? Fantastic. Just aces, you know? The whole idea that even as modern as we think we are, women are never seen as complete in themselves.”
“And marriage? Never mind marriage. She said that ‘mannish women were both celebrated and castigated for breaking down traditional gender roles.’ And what about when she talked about when working at magazines that catered to women and how the image and the reality are not even close to the being the same thing?”
“I liked when she read that list of images in her work: the ‘fabulous beasts; fantastic planets; pretty, alienated girls.’
“ ‘The machines and cats, and newborn babies in starlike arrangements. A train, a girl with faraway eyes. At the end she said, ‘my heart; your heart; my heart.’ Remember how she said that even though she was the only woman allowed to be a Dadaist, the men still ordered her around and made her make them lunch?” Charlotte sighed. “I want to do what she did.”
“Make lunch for a bunch of lazy Dadaists?”
“Photomontages.” Charlotte laughed with Ines. “That’s the main reason I’m learning from Rainer, you know; his whole approach is so disciplined and traditional, even though I think the result is almost surreal.”
“What do you think about advertisting?”
Charlotte smiled an enormous smile. “Are you kidding?”
“You know,” said Ines, handing Charlotte’s napkin back to her, “I think it’s good we found each other.”
The first time they decided to meet to take pictures, Ines traveled out to Zehlendorf to the Blums’ glass house. When she took in the sense of play, the nothingness of the glass against the straight lines of the steel beams, and all surrounded by that uncontrolled garden of roses, Ines whispered, “I’m going to have to think about this.” Not because it was the only contemporary house in the district, or because it looked like money, but because being in it was like stumbling into a story, as if it were less surrounded by the newly mechanized world and more like a place of enchantment. “The roses,” said Ines as she stood before one of the walls of glass, “they seem almost sentimental.”
After the girls left the house, Ines said, “I remember going to a place near here once when my family was visiting Berlin—some sort of island of peacocks?”
“Pfaueninsel,” said Charlotte. “Peacock Island. My parents used to take us there because, in 1685, Frederick William I of Brandenburg gave a chemist, Johann Kunckel, the money to build a glass factory on the island, which was then destroyed in a fire.”
“You know, my parents sometimes made me recite poems,” teased Ines.
Charlotte laughed. “I know, but my father has this passion for glass. Anything to do with glass, and my family has a glass foundry.”
“So even though the glass factory wasn’t on the island anymore, you still had to make the Glass Pilgrimage?”
“Parents.”
“Mine live in Heidelberg. Professors,” said Ines.
“You grew up in Heidelberg?”
“We lived in France, Italy, and New York, so I really didn’t grow up anywhere. You don’t think the peacocks are still there, do you?”
This is how the girls found themselves on the ferry that traveled to and from the island, thinking that the gardens, the fake ruins, and the storybook castle would provide some photographic opportunities. But more than that was the unexpressed sense of wan
ting to revisit the place of their childhood as a way of deepening their connection; maybe they had toured the little island during the same summer, or even the same day, without knowing it? It would be as if they had been there together, establishing a makeshift shared history without either of them thinking through why the idea of already having a past with each other was so appealing.
They arrived at Pfaueninsel and weren’t disappointed: It was as ghostly and strange as it was in their memories. The inauthentic ruins came straight from a tale with jinn and magic carpets, with the palms, and the castle. The day was overcast, providing nicely diffused photographic light, though neither girl reached for her camera.
As they stood, side by side, looking at the castle, peacocks strutting around them amid the rustle of leaves, punctuated by the occasional far-off peacock cry, Charlotte said, “Let’s get out of here.”
The following Tuesday, the girls stood at the edge of a small lake not far from Pfaueninsel.
“That’s not someone’s house, is it?” asked Charlotte of a large, plain structure situated on the far end of the field. It was almost like a meadow, except the grass and weeds were cut very close to the ground and there was no sign of a crop of any sort. Charlotte wandered a little, only to notice another, almost identical building behind the first.
Before Ines could answer, the noise of a plane engine filled the space between them as a biplane landed nearby and rolled to a stop. Ines smiled, walking toward it. “Marlene,” she said softly.
The pilot, whose attire was quickly revealed as she lifted herself out of the cockpit with practiced precision, wore, in this order: a shiny chocolate leather helmet with goggles (being torn from her face), a long matching leather jacket that ended at the hips, where Charlotte could now see a pair of what looked like knee-length shorts that were rolled once. Her legs below the shorts were bare, until the ankles, where her laced-up boots began. The pilot and Ines embraced.