Ma . . . ma fantazie . . . est . . .
Est tant . . . troublée
De quoy faictes si long séjour
Sans venir . . . sans venir vers moy . . .
De retour . . .
J’ay paour que ne soyez changée . . .
After only a few bars, the conductor stops, the singer’s voice trails off, and then the process of dismantling begins. He shows how the layers of music are constructed by peeling them away. There is something fiendish about the whole process, as though I am being made to feel stupid and clever at the same time, stupid because of what I did not hear before, clever because of what I now know I am hearing. What was previously just a fine, complex sound is now lying on the analyst’s couch. The alto flute . . . (“ein schwebender, irisierender Klang,” a floating, iridescent sound—the flautist plays and the lonely notes shiver through the room) . . . now he adds the horn over the top . . . (“klingt unheimlich sinnlich,” sounds incredibly sensual) . . . and then the piccolo . . . (“klingt nicht ganz so sinnlich,” does not sound quite so sensual) . . . then the “ragged” playing of the cellos . . . “und jetzt lege ich das noch einmal zusammen”—and indeed, he does put it all back together again and you can hear it, “eine ganz kleine Geste” (a very small gesture, which soon vanishes, as in Puccini)—does Herr Kagel agree? Yes, Herr Kagel agrees: important things should be brief, as they should in literature, too. He once wanted to be a writer himself, when he was still young, in Argentina. Jorge Luis Borges was once his English literature tutor—that should be enough to keep him going for a lifetime.
Now another deconstruction, two-four time on top of three-four time, an extremely short passage lasting only two bars, brass and piano as the Zweier, overlaid with the Dreier of the horns, and over that the Schlagzeug und die Klarinetten, forever drumming into me what I do not hear in everything I hear and, worse than that, everything other people hear and I do not. This is a gap in my education, but it is too late for me now. Kagel talks about his teaching methods: how he forces his students to describe the plot of an opera chosen at random, even though they might find it absurd: “The absurdity of opera is a given; the composer must be his own dramatist. They need to learn that.” He also gives them four hours to extend three bars of Haydn to eight, which teaches them to “discover” rhythms.
We return to the music: an erotic passage for the singer, ranging from sexy mewling to a short, insane section involving sustained orgiastic notes, is now reduced from “vaginal to virginal.” The same passages, with the same notes, are sung again, but this time in the style of an eight-year-old. Which, in my opinion, does not work as the previous version lends this childish voice perverted connotations, if only because the molto vibrato of the deeper woodwinds and the tuba are accompanying the virginal shrieking, and the innocence jars against that background of masculine panting.
So how does Kagel like being in Germany? Kagel likes being in Germany, but even so he quotes a letter from Max Ernst to Tristan Tzara: “German intellectuals can’t even shit or piss (faire caca et pipi) without ideology.” The audience laughs politely, even when he adds that Adorno said that Germans confuse ponderousness with profundity, “Schwerfälligkeit mit Tiefsinn verwechseln”—and why shouldn’t they laugh? It is always about other Germans; personally, they have no problems going to the loo without ideology. The music begins again, and the entire piece is played once more, sparkling, moving, stirring, and suddenly I wish it was a century later, two centuries, and that I could hear with the ears of the future, but that thought is too farfetched. Countless people would have to procreate to produce the future trumpet players who would place their inconceivable lips on their trumpets and play those same notes, and anyway, why those nonsensical two centuries? I am hearing it now, I have heard it, dined on it, eaten it all up: a long time ago in Spain the quodlibet was known as an ensalada, while in France it was sometimes called a fricassée. These culinary metaphors are not wasted on me as I drift, full of music, out into the wintery night in Berlin, on my way to find sausages and bacon.
Sunday here starts on Saturday. Everything is closed, the streets are empty; on the day of rest itself the bells ring out as though all the dead from Charlemagne onwards need to be summoned. No one responds. An awful silence fills the wide streets; the hours stretch out, following some mysterious law: it is time to think about time. There are plenty of opportunities for meditation and reflection, including three photographic exhibitions extracting their black honey from the past. Revolution und Fotografie, Berlin 1918–19 is the first one I visit. During the week, I go everywhere on public transport, but now, because the city is so empty, I take the car. Other people probably do the opposite, or maybe they just stay at home and ponder. Berlin 1919, seventy years ago; seventy years from now, the photographs of 1989 will wear the same masks, the masks of distance, of past time, of hindsight. Power and impotence: we have power over the dead people in photographs because we know what happened. Language does not permit us to have “impotence over” something, and yet it happens. We are powerless; even with our superior knowledge we have no way to get inside those photographs. They are closed and the people inside them cannot hear us. A group of men stands on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. “Stands” is not the right word, though. Two of them definitely are not standing; they are kneeling beside a machine gun. One of them is in civvies. He is wearing a hat, his shoes are polished and gleaming; he could be kneeling beside anything, anything but a machine gun. But there it is, black, gleaming, antiquated, menacing. Most of the other men are in uniform. They are looking at the photographer and pointing; one of them is about to run over to him. They are shouting something, but I cannot hear them. What I hear is the empty street, the bare wintery trees, the big Berlin houses, the same houses I always see. Not everything is gone. Of course, there is no prescribed clothing for revolutions, or for workers, but it is still strange, those men in their ties and hats, guns clutched under their arms, vulnerable figures at empty street crossings, silhouettes against the stark light, the grim sheen of the pavement. The past inevitably assumes the appearance of the available technology. No one can imagine the First World War in color, and it is inconceivable that the people we cannot see in color were in fact able to see colors themselves. The alchemy of inadequacy: the black patch beside that body was red.
The exhibition is at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst. The visitors are young, quiet, serious; they wear the uniforms of the newly disinherited, the student proletariat of the extravagant West. It is the stillness here that really strikes me, as it reflects the stillness suffusing the photographs. No colors, no sounds, only past time, which since the time portrayed in the photographs has traveled on in a straight line and into these young people’s lives. If there is one place in the world where the past feels at home, it must be Berlin. What these visitors read in the photographs and accompanying captions is a boisterous “what if?”
What if the bankrupt empire of Wilhelm II had collapsed more definitively? What if so many of the old economic and hierarchical remnants had not remained intact? What if Social Democrats like Noske had not betrayed the revolution, had not allowed the army to shoot at their own people, not allowed the murderers of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg to go free? The “what if?” of history is closed, sealed with the photographs hanging here, but at the same time it embarks upon another life: what has not happened becomes the cause of what did in fact come to pass—a failed democracy, a dictatorship, genocide, a new war, another peace—until we finally reach the point where we are now. Then history is suddenly called politics and that, in turn, is no more than future history.
The display cases contain the silent witnesses: reports of post-mortem examinations; a hospital bill for a murdered revolutionary; the large, old-fashioned cameras that captured all of these pictures; the technical equipment used to develop the photographs, neutral, impartial machines, mindless hulks, serving the newspapers of Left and Right; then the newspapers themselves, full of
hope and rhetoric, full of unimaginable anti-Semitism (Zwei Rassenfremde: Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg hetzen zum Brudermord—Two Racial Aliens: Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg agitate for fratricide) and revolutionary pathos (Bewaffnete Arbeiter und Soldaten hinter Barrikaden aus Zeitungspapierrollen—Armed workers and soldiers barricaded behind rolls of newspaper). Starting as an uprising of mutinous sailors and widespread strikes at Siemens and Daimler, with vast crowds and speakers without microphones, this should have been the first revolution in a highly developed industrial society. The Kaiser abdicated and disappeared; the power was on the streets. The Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German republic; two hours later, Liebknecht did the same for the socialist republic. A day later (10 November), a joint meeting of the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils authorized a provisional government combining both movements. Friedrich Ebert, another Social Democrat, did a deal with the army commanders, and, four days later, “das Kapital” (which is what it was called back then—that sounds a little more magical than “employers”) recognized the unions as negotiation partners. There followed a putsch by the right-wing military, which was foiled by the people’s navy, which viewed itself as the protector of the revolution. Then everything went wrong. The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands,1 led by Noske, governed alone from then on and, with the help of the former government troops and a newly formed Freikorps paramilitary organization, occupied parts of the city and carried out raids. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered (photographs of Liebknecht’s corpse, of the murderers celebrating at Hotel Eden, an account of Luxemburg’s murder: “. . . die alte Sau schwimmtschon,” the old sow is already swimming), and the S.P.D. won the elections on 19 January. Das Theater des Westens staged a production of Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe. On 3 March, a major strike broke out. The strikers called for political prisoners to be released and the Freikorps to be disbanded. The socialist government declared a state of emergency; the fighting continued for five days. Noske imposed martial law. The result: 1,200 deaths, 113 of them on the government side. The revolution was over. Germany was on its way to Weimar and what was to follow.
And what is still to follow. My mother always used to quote an old Dutch expression that says when the sun is shining and it is raining at the same time, it means there is a funfair on in hell. That is the state of the weather when I step back outside, out of the past. Fat drops of rain beat away at the leaden water of the Spree, and the fake, brassy sunlight lends a strange glow to the bewitched buildings. Nonsense. Nothing is bewitched here; I am in a major European city. I get into my car and drive past the places I just saw in black and white, allowing them to fill with color and the absent dead. The rain stops. My car can choose where it wants to go, and it wants to go to the East, to neighborhoods I have never visited before. I drive down a side street, a dead end that finishes at a wall. But it is not the Wall, because there is a hole in it. I park the car beside a couple of Turkish men who are washing their own vehicles, and I walk over to the hole. Trompe l’œil? No, because I can see the river through the hole, an East German patrol boat, the opposite bank with the actual Wall and barbed wire, two guards walking along and having a chat. Boat, Wall, guards. No other signs of life. I know very well that there is life over there because I have been there, but there is no life to be seen right now. The city of silence, empty and mythical. Like a painting by de Chirico: an open space, large buildings, a tower, shadows that have suddenly fallen and are pinned to the ground. There is something very still about those paintings. Sometimes they have a horse in them, which has wandered in from some myth or other, large and white. Or a man like a marionette with no face, just a wooden oval with no mouth or eyes.
The banks of the Spree near Oberbaumbrücke, West Berlin, March 1989
Life imitates art, and it is not long before I see that man for real. I drive back out of my cul-de-sac (Brommystraße), and head down Köpenicker Straße to Oberbaumbrücke. Signs in German and Turkish advise me that the riverbank is dangerous. It may be dangerous in duplicate, but people are still fishing there. I walk to the bridge and climb up to the viewing platform. Everything here is dilapidated; this is a world of demolition. Still the same riverbank opposite, but people are walking across the bridge. An old woman with a cane moves very slowly; she has a view of two countries. On my side of the bridge, an old Mercedes stops and a man with a bag gets out, followed by a young man and woman. They talk, walk down the left side of the bridge, disappear from sight. The woman says something about an Ausweis, but no one stops them to ask for I.D. They return a few minutes later, but without the older man. They look back one more time, without waving, and then drive away. I suddenly notice a movement in that dead hut directly opposite: a faceless man behind narrow bars. He is looking in my direction, towards what we call the West. Even though he is facing me, I cannot see his features. I can see his epaulettes, however, and I remember how I once started a story about two epaulettes that did not have a body to go with them. The body did not come along until later. That is not the case now, though: I can see the light falling through the bars onto the two epaulettes and I spot occasional movement. Then I see some other men, in a tower further along. I cannot make out their faces either; they are too far away. One of them is looking through binoculars. A few black Americans have come to stand beside me. They wave at the man with the binoculars; he does not wave back. In the distance, two more men stand on the roof of a tall building. They have shotguns. They are talking to each other. What about? Girls? What is the man with the binoculars looking at? Is he bored? What sort of conclusions should I draw? None at all; I am not the judge of the world. People are simply walking across this bridge, even though one of them was shot dead this week. Simone returns to the bridge the next day, hoping for better light. There were lots more people walking across the bridge, she said, and no guards in sight, not a single one.
When I get home, I take another look at the photographs in the book. What was Noske’s motive for quelling an uprising of his own people? It did the Social Democrats in Germany no good at all; they had been used to exorcise the danger, to sanction the murder of the people who seemed most dangerous. Dangerous for whom? His motive was the fear of chaos, but what does that mean? Chaos is when one person can no longer see his place in the order of things, because another person wishes to abandon his own position. Whoever holds the power at that point is the winner. In this case, the new order looked so well ordered that no one could imagine the chaos it would bring. The consequences came in the form of death, war, defeat, occupation, division, and the orderly structure of a wall, that binary factotum designed to divide the visible world into two sides: front and back, right and wrong. One side is viewed from a platform, and the other through binoculars. Or the other way round. I have seen it for myself. The people who built that wall legitimized it with the fear of chaos. And what should the person behind the wall, the person who would like to tear it down, be most afraid of? The others: the people on his own side of the wall who are afraid of chaos or what looks like chaos.
In the Frankfurter Allgemeine, there is a photograph of Stephen Spender looking far too young. He is turning eighty, but in the picture he is no more than fifty. His hair, which I have known as white for years now, is still black. The first time I met him was in 1962, at a writers’ conference in Edinburgh, where Gerard Reve (or whatever he was calling himself at the time) described me as “N, the moribund little monkey.” He had a point: it was a perfect diagnosis of my state of mind at the time. Spender stood on a landing, talking to a few people, and I was fascinated by his tie, a long, silver-white goose quill on an ice-blue background. “What a beautiful tie,” I declared, with feeling. Without a word, he undid the tie and gave it to me: “If you like it, you can have it.” It was only then that I noticed the two letters at the bottom of the quill, a J and a C. Jean Cocteau had painted the tie. I still have it, and I wear it whenever I win a prize. That is why I never turn anything down.
The second time I saw Spender taking off a tie was in Paris, in ’68. He had just told me that Louis Aragon had told him he had dined with the Central Committee of the French Communist Party and had heard that the Communists would not support the student uprising, as it was too Trotskyite. Aragon had then passed on this news to Rothschild, for whom it was not without significance, and Rothschild had in turn told Spender, and so now I knew about it as well. A day later, de Gaulle flew to meet General Massu in Baden-Baden. The world as a conspiracy—that corresponded to my most childish fantasies. As Spender was telling me this story, a group of demonstrators with red flags walked past the Odéon. The poet, already white-haired, removed his tie, opened up his collar as Ben-Gurion and Begin always did, and posed with me for the photographer Eddy Posthuma de Boer. I look a little rotund and foolish in the picture, but already considerably less moribund than I had been.
The next time was also in Paris, many years later. Spender told me a story on that occasion, too. He had been sitting with W. H. Auden and Auden’s friend Chester Kallman at a table outside Caffè Florian in Venice when Kallman suddenly stood up and set off across Piazza San Marco, saying that he was going to pick up a sailor. Auden, said Spender, sat there in silence, large tears rolling down the many folds of his face. I thought this story was worse than the one about Aragon.
The last time was in New York, dining with a mutual friend, the poet William Jay Smith. “The poet nearing eighty,” but still smoking a strong cigarette and holding a vat of whisky. Big hands, thick wrists. He was on a tour of America (“the poet earns his money”) and told me he had just received a telegram from Beaumont College in Texas that said, “Dear Mr. Spender, May we remind you that the attention span of our students is about fifteen minutes.” “The last survivor,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine calls him, and that was exactly what he looked like as he walked away down York Avenue, a white-haired oak, on a journey with his poems. The newspaper also refers to him as the “last Statthalter,” assigning him “the role of the last steward (Statthalter) of the legend of the 1930s.” Some words never come alone; they always travel in packs. That same day I read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911 edition): “Goethe, Novalis declared, was the ‘Statthalter of poetry on earth.’” Poet, steward—both words sound better than emperor or prince.
Roads to Berlin Page 3