On Sundays, there are discussions at the Münchner Kammerspiele: two men and a moderator. They are German–German conversations, and this time it is Wolfgang Harich, Marxist philosopher, with, or rather against, Christoph Stölzl, founding director of the controversial Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Harich’s outspoken opinions led to him being imprisoned under Ulbricht for seven years, and anyone who briefly thinks back to the Stalinist policy at the time will understand why: there was no place at the court of Walter Ulbricht for a man who argued for profit-sharing in socialist companies, for the development of healthy small-scale and medium-scale agrarian classes, for reestablishment of the S.P.D. in the D.D.R. and for joint German elections (at that time!), and who also deserted in ’44, becoming a member of a resistance group (anyone born in ’23 has lived several different lives in this century). A hero, you might think, and what you see on the stage is an old satyr with a viciously high voice, somewhat authoritarian, the advocate of an eco-dictatorship, still a Communist, against travelling and tourism and Western consumer society, and actually, you imagine, still in favour of the old D.D.R., if they had not handled things so foolishly. His opponent behaves like a Dutchman, by which I mean, in this case, someone who does not get excited, does not participate in his interlocutor’s ideological capers, occasionally says something calm about free elections and democracy, and whose worst accusation is that the other man has aristocratic tendencies. I cannot help it, but I find it hilarious. There he sits, a representative of a country that threw him in jail for seven years and which is one of the most polluted places in Europe, and he is speaking out, like some kind of Marie Antoinette, against the restive people who have been locked up for forty years, saying that they would be better off just staying indoors in the future too. You need to have smelled the coal in Weimar to savour such chutzpah. And yet, then I look at him again, old and fragile, his eyes angry and his head full of Marx and Lukács. He is arguing against the rampant growth of capitalism, but without the patience to combat it by taking the tedious route of the steady drip, a hasty dreamer with delusions, who wants a peace conference (which should last two years) including all the countries occupied by Germany, along with Israel and the Arab states. It would be a most delightful conference, in which the D.D.R. would be spoken of in the past tense, a perverted reunion of old and new friends and foes who are permitted to assemble a catalogue of faits accomplis.
Socrates, Glyptothek, Munich
Two years! Goodness knows what the map of Europe will look like by then. I do not wait to find out, but decide to head off to Weimar instead.
February 17, 1990
INTERMEZZO IN THE THIRD PERSON: VESTIGIA PEDIS
I still intended to go to Weimar, but I put the trip off for a while. Instead, I took a step back in time, transforming myself into a third person: the traveler I once had been, a visitor to Munich, a foreigner attempting to contemplate the history of the city around him.
It was autumn. It is autumn. The traveler, someone, he, I, stepped through the glass door of his hotel on the River Isar. No doubt about it; it had to be morning. But he had not showered yet, probably, he thought, because he did not wish to wash away the night, the province of dreams. Women had appeared in those dreams and he would encounter those women again this morning, but some of them would be without faces. Someone should write a study of the relationship between bedding and national character. Plump pillows, Teutonic titillation.
The clouds are high, but the sky is grey. Later he cannot remember which of the two moving phenomena first attracted his attention: the orange Schienenräumwagen 303 or the wide triangular formation of migratory geese flying past high overhead. Both represented an element of motion. As a traveler, he was sensitive to movement: like a cat or a child, he was quick to spot moving things. The Euclidean pattern in the sky interested him, because it told him which way was south. If the triangle up there had been the tip of an arrow, and if it had been at the height of his chest, it would have gone straight through his heart. So now he knew that Maximilianstraße, the street in front of him, which the Schienenräumwagen was screeching its way along as it cleared the tram tracks, crossed the trail of the geese from east to west. He looked up at the neat, serious flight of the birds as they headed for their goal, and wondered what the seers of antiquity would have read in that flight. At the same time, he felt a desire, as he did sometimes in his dreams, to take off and fly. With slow strokes, like a racing cyclist in a gear that was too low, he would skim over the swirling Isar behind the hotel, setting his course without performing any calculations: a straight line that would take him to his position at the back of the formation in the shortest possible time. None of the other geese would be surprised, the swishing of his large wings would join theirs, and his long, outstretched neck and his flat beak would follow the lonely leader at the front, the one who knew. Did geese see the landscape? Beacons? Hills, curves in rivers, church towers, roads they recognized? The strict order of their flight made him feel sad somehow, with the treacherous longing that military formations can provoke in a man even when he despises them because he himself belongs to the chaos.
Passers-by are all alike: every passer-by is the passer-by of everyone else. At this moment, he is not particularly interested in himself, and so he does not look at them. You can see it in photographs: a group of people waiting for a tram. He is in one of those photographs now, somebody, or nobody, who has taken the ten steps from the pavement to the tram stop. “Fahrer Wegner, kommen Sie bitte zurück zur Station,” says the small loudspeaker at the stop, but something else beckons. He can always become “Fahrer Wegner” another time. First for the monument.
Max II Monument, Munich
Opposite his tram stop is another one, the mirror image of his own. The monument stands at the end of the tram stops. The rails sweep in a gentle curve to encircle the monument. The passers-by, the people waiting at the stop, mirroring him and the people waiting at his own stop, are smaller than they should be. This is the fault of the monument, because everyone on it is far too big. First he sees the woman. Whatever it was that he dreamed last night, here it is in physical form. Arousal at the sight of an oversized bronze statue of a woman—there is no denying it. It is all, he thinks, because of her foot. Travel guides are the antidote for feelings that stray too far from the norm, so he does not look at his guide yet. Instead, he embarks upon a relationship with the statue. The woman has a face that might be called Greek, with no further explanation needed. We all know what is meant by that description: stern forms that retain a sense of mystery. Her headscarf, her shawl, intensifies the effect. Her immense limbs perch on the narrow bench that wraps around the polygon and she has to lean forward a little. Her robe ripples over her implacable thigh in folds that are fluid, yet bronze, and her left wrist rests on a book perched at the point where the thigh comes so close to the stomach (her thigh, her stomach). A statue is not worthy of contemplation if it does not, at least once, prompt someone to think that beneath that bronze, which depicts fabric, there is a body—genitals, intestines, liver, heart—that can smell and silently respire with an almost imperceptible breath of bronze. And of course this statue is capable of looking back.
But that foot. To start with, it is naked. And so he must assume that the woman’s foot may be cold; otherwise there is something not quite right about her. This has nothing to do with sentimentality. He is now standing directly beneath the foot, which is the size of his lower arm including the hand. He cannot touch the foot from where he is standing. To do so, he would have to climb onto one of the steps of the monument, and he is not quite that far gone yet. The grey has disappeared from the sky, as though it was not meant to be there. The sun illuminates the bronze. The big toe shines more brightly than the rest of the foot. He has seen the same effect before, in the Vatican, in Santiago de Compostela. It is from the touch of so many hands, idolatry, paganism. So it would seem that others share his fascination. The steps of the monument have been patched up, li
ke an old pair of jeans—he sees that without seeing it, just as he sees the upturned half-moon in the suddenly blue sky. What is it doing there? He sits down on the ice-cold stone, flesh on marble, and does not allow himself to be distracted. Her stiff thighs are loosely crossed, as only a huge bronze figure can do. Her left foot is to the right of her right foot. The left foot is the one that matters. It is higher. On both feet, the big toe stands out from the other toes, but only the big toe of the left foot is shining. So other people also thought the left foot was the one that mattered. He thinks it is because that foot is in the air. The right foot is resting on a step. Both are half-covered by the hem of her robe. The bronze has turned green, a scaly bronze mould, green with poisonous grey, even white, the rot of excavated copper, oxidation. But that is not the issue now. The issue is what would happen if she were to stand up.
And more than that, what if the ground were soft mud? Clay, loam, mire? The impression made by her feet would reflect her weight, her size. Her marks, her traces. Vestigia pedis, the tracks that hunters follow. Size, traces. The Buddha measured out existence by taking seven steps in each direction. Vishnu did the same in three steps: one for the earth, one for the in-between world, one for heaven. Or one for the rising sun, one for the sun at its zenith, one for the setting sun. The hunt for the divine. You can follow the footprints to the Gate of the Sun, and then they become invisible: the Godhead has no feet. But the traveler does not want to travel that distance: it is not his world. He is not hunting, she is not a goddess. Her foot is here. The traveler is interested in movement; he moves through the world. That movement starts and ends with one foot. Not two. One. One foot always gets there first, one is always last, and that is how a step is taken.
Max II Monument, Munich, detail
And, he believes that this is why, of all that he can see of her, he has chosen her foot. That is where their relationship begins. The dream he dreamed last night, when everything was black and she was hiding in that blackness, continues. She stands up, with a great clashing of bronze. She puts down her book and it sounds like a bell ringing out at one in the morning. No bed he knows would be large enough to accommodate her; with the sound of thunder she would drop her robe, her veil, her sword onto the marble floor beside that nonexistent bed, the Neoclassical severity sliding from her face, her mask of justice disappearing, but her lust would be terrifying; she would crush him with her touch, shatter him with her caresses; she would cross her right foot and her left foot above him and the left one would be on top and the gleaming toe would catch the sunlight. Nothing would remain of him but a handful of scrap metal, iron, bronze, which would look like ashes, a powder, a memory.
Now, on every roof, he sees witnesses, figures, statues. They argue, wave, sway, demonstrate, perform. When did statues first stand alone? They inherited their independence from the Renaissance, the Baroque. The light is in his eyes, so he cannot see their faces, high up above on the edge of the roof, but they are not up there because of their faces. They are empty expressions of ostentation, armed with their attributes, their swords, staffs, laurel wreaths, horns of plenty, palm branches, books, scales, torches, lances—a nation of stone ciphers, symbolising nothing but abstractions, virtues, superhuman qualities, attitudes.
They are a regiment of slaves, platonic servants of ideas, each of them a specified number of meters from the next, actors that may never move from their spot. They nest up above, in a higher realm, the realm that the people waiting at the tram stop must long for, reach out for. This stone tribe occupies bridges, parks, the roofs of palaces and churches in their tens of thousands. Woe betide the world if they ever revolt, if they ever leave their balconies, obelisks, columns, parapets, triumphal arches, belvederes, graveyards, basilicas, parliaments, temples, monuments, a whole nation of Stone Guests out for revenge. The only appropriate musical accompaniment would be the last trump of Judgment Day. The sound of their terrible steps could not be endured.
Liebestraum, apocalypse. Everything is happening too quickly. The traveler steps back to take in the whole monument. His travel guide, a German who is as dry as paper, has made his own opinions very clear. Monuments should not be viewed hysterically. The traveler does not agree. Only the hysterical gaze can perceive the hidden meaning, the origin, what cannot be seen and yet is there. But the traveler is polite, always has been. He listens. “The monument,” his guide says, “was built to honour Maximilian the Second, who also ordered this wide, magnificent avenue to be constructed, as well as the Maximilianeum, with its wonderful elevated position on the opposite riverbank.” The four seated figures, including the traveler’s bronze fantasy, depict the virtues of the ruler. The guide does not say which virtues; he assumes the traveler already knows. What are the virtues of a ruler? Wisdom, prudence, justice, strength? So which one is she? Justice, the guide thinks, but the traveler does not like that idea. Anyway, why does she have to represent something? Simply to honor that long-departed Bavarian king all the way up there on his pedestal?
First, the guide says, there are four putti, but they are a little on the large side for putti. A putto should have something of the suckling lamb about it, a suckling angel, one that has only just learned to fly, if it is even possible for them to fly, with those puny, usually rather idiotic wings on those chubby little babies’ bodies. These putti are more like yearlings, heifers—what would you call angels of that age? And then there is that excessively tall pedestal with the larger-than-life king up there, with his robes all the way down to his heels to make him look even larger. Those Wittelsbachs had a pretty high opinion of themselves. Dukes, Kurfürsten, kings, they wove themselves into the history of this city from 1180 to 1918—it is impossible to imagine this place without their names. That is the guide’s opinion. The traveler agrees. He sets a course for the river that was there even before the people and the dukes came along. He leans over the parapet and looks down into the rapidly flowing, clear water that comes from the Alps. The traveler always wants to find out how the past relates to his own present; he loves to know where he is, and without history we are nowhere. This applies not only to that list of royal names and their deeds but also to the ground he is walking on. Triassic, Tertiary, two hundred million years: he wants to know, needs to know. Otherwise he is not really there. We need a method for being somewhere we do not belong. A million years is one of the most outlandish measures that we apply to the empty contradiction of time, but still he uses that number in order to work out where he is.
All those millions of years ago, the Alps were pushed together, crumpled like a ball of paper (“They came into being,” the guide says, preferring that formulation), the highest mountains consisting of hard limestone formations. History that no one was there to see, Tertiary sandstone, glacier walls, masses of rubble, scree. To the north of Munich, the stratum of stone becomes thinner; the groundwater penetrates the gravelly surface and forms bogs, which are called Moose. Das Erdinger Moos. Das Dachauer Moos. The language too, which came so much later, is all part of it. The river, which makes him slightly dizzy with its perpetual motion and constant murmur, dug, ground itself into the earth. It is continuing to do so even as he stands here watching; he can see it, the pebbles lying in its transparent bed. Later that day, in an antique shop, he stops to look at some maps, including the oldest street plan of the city, and he is surprised by the consistency of the rivers, by their strength. Everything changes: the settlement around the monastery (München, monks) becomes a village becomes a town becomes a city and blows up like a balloon, and the river continues to carve its way through the earth in the same place it always has and still makes the same sound it did when no one could hear it. How do you know that? That its sounds are the same when no one can hear them? He does not want to think too hard about that right now. He leans over the other parapet, and sees a modern, tarnished statue: a horse biting its rider, who is tumbling to his catastrophic fate with hands outspread.
The traveler can now choose between two directions. The r
iver is the border, the wall. When he walks towards the Maximilianeum, it feels like leaving the city, which remains behind him, growling. The greenery along the water on the other side gives him a sense of being outside-the-walls, extra muros, so that is where he heads.
High above everything, a golden angel waves, but, still on the bridge, a new female form inserts itself between him and the panoramic view, someone else forcing him to stop in his tracks: Athene. What is she doing here? What does she want to say to him? Whom is she guarding, protecting? “Dating from 1906,” the guide says, but that only makes it even more absurd. Someone dragged her out of her own time into this century, but what is the point of such brazen anachronism? What right does anyone have to bring an obsolete goddess into their city? Is it to prove that if she belongs with you, then you belong with her, that you are part of some everlasting antiquity, a new Athens? This statue too towers above him, full, Nibelung-like, luxuriant, a woman who might just burst into song. Just yesterday he saw a more relevant depiction of this goddess in the Antikensammlungen. In that version, her peplos hung straight, with vertical folds, and her face had a simple-minded, unworldly expression, a Buddha smile. There were two holes between her barely existent breasts (“her almost boy-like chest”) for the missing Gorgon’s head. The goddess on the bridge also wears a peplos with perfectly straight folds, but these are not hieratic; they flow over the voluptuous curve of a rounded stomach. It makes her less mysterious, more approachable. There is something about this Athene that he likes, and he is afraid that once again it is the superhuman size, the exaggeration in stone. Is it because endless sets of stairs and skyscrapers make you smaller, while statues make you bigger, because they represent the platonic possibility that you yourself might be that size? Her right knee is slightly forward, but there is no way to touch it. Even so, you can imagine the possibility and that is probably the secret. He decides to leave her where she is and to walk on to the angel, standing so high up there that he or she is part of the airspace. The statue shimmers above the trees like a golden flame. Everything is green where he is walking, although the first leaves are starting to change color. It is quiet too. Just an old lady with a long tuft of chamois hair in her green hunting hat, like a strange sort of Native American headdress. Dogs too, with their noses buried in the hidden scents of other dogs, zigzagging, sniffing out truffles of canine lust.
Roads to Berlin Page 11