Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  The rest of the museum commemorates the war, which was a war between the Russian people and the fascists. The signs are usually in Russian, occasionally in German. This is a strange panopticon. Aluminium-colored statues of heroes, a display cabinet featuring artificial snow around dented and perforated German helmets, with more than thirty Iron Crosses scattered around those five or six helmets, rusting away in the snow of crumbled plaster. Residents of Moscow listening to the radio on the day war breaks out, photos of German brutality, mass executions, mass graves, a girl hanged, with snapped neck and blonde hair, and beside her a young partisan, neck already in the noose, cap still on his head, face as though his hands are still tucked into his pockets, an actor from a play by Brecht.

  Other staircases, other floors. Weapons, medals, certificates. A female soldier who “downed” thirty “fascists” single-handedly. A jar of ashes from Buchenwald. An ampoule of poison. The topographic map that Hitler used to follow the movements of his troops. Another map showing how the Russian units closed the ring around Berlin. In a corridor downstairs, the hangings in Nuremberg: Göring, who escaped that particular death, one eye obscenely half-open; Keitel, the man with the field marshal’s baton, his face covered in blood; and beside it the charred corpse of a sinister, roasted grasshopper, the scorched, blackened head raised in a scream, the moustache and hair singed away. I cannot read the caption. I have never seen the photograph before and yet I know that it is Hitler.

  Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburger Tor, unknown artist, Museum der beding-ungslosen Kapitulation

  Twenty million Russians died in that war, civilians and soldiers, 102,000 soldiers during the battle for Berlin alone. The building designed to commemorate the war lies at the heart of the former Germany, but for whom was it intended? Can it remain here? Like this? With all that it reveals and all that it conceals? Without Katyn and Molotov–Ribbentrop? Designed for only one German state at a time when there were two? On October 10, 1949, the head of the Russian military administration handed over the management of the museum to the first prime minister of the German Democratic Republic, Otto Grotewohl, but what is going to happen to it now that republic no longer exists and history is being rewritten in Moscow, too? Perhaps, as the Tageszeitung columnist believes, it should stay just as it is, to commemorate the real dead and the sacrifices, to reveal the real crime, and forever freeze the unreal ideological lie as evidence that good can be used in the service of evil.

  In the hallway, Gorbachev and Bush shake unreal hands on a boat, while in another photograph the Wall opens up forever—random postscripts following a grim hiatus. Outside, I find the German spring, people walking by, the world slowed down to a present tense. If you do not agree with the tempo, you can shoot dead the chairman of the Treuhand.2 Or throw a tomato at the chancellor—that is pretty harmless. The chancellor stands in the midst of “Wir sind das Volk”—and das Volk throws an egg at his glasses. So now the chancellor has it in for das Volk. The waiting room is packed. The clock will not tick any faster, but the people who are waiting are in such a hurry.

  May 1991

  1 East and West Germans referred to each other as Ossis and Wessis. See p.221.

  2 At the time of reunification in 1990, the Treuhandanstalt oversaw the privatisation of formerly state-owned property.

  DEAD AEROPLANES AND EAGLES EVERYWHERE

  First image. I walk into a large room. In the room is an aeroplane that will never fly again. I peer in through the windows. Inside, there is an empty snakeskin, dead twigs. Aeroplanes cannot live and therefore they cannot die. So what is it about this plane that makes me think it has lived, died, been buried and dug up again? It is slightly decayed, in the way that living matter rots. Sometimes you see a photograph of an exhumed soldier, a tattered piece of uniform, still a little hair on the eyeless skull. It is a little like that. The dead aeroplane is twisted in a way that contradicts the technical perfection of a real plane, but also that of a real plane wreck: this is not how planes meet their end. I look at the twisted lead, the softness, flexibility, vulnerability of that material. Then I notice another aeroplane. This has only one window, a square hole around where the cockpit must have been. The nose is pointed, like a supersonic jet, but the scratches and dents make the front resemble an animal’s head, transforming that square, glassless window into a mournful eye. The head belongs to an extinct species of bird. More dead twigs where the turbines should be, rust-brown, withered blossoms. Nature, but desiccated, dead. Books on the wings, with weeds growing out of them. Those weeds are dead too: twigs of yellowish brown.

  Second image. The sky is grey and northern; this is a northern city. I am in a park. Cars parked on the roads, on the pavements, anarchic, gluttonous, as though a large mass of people have upped and left their possessions behind. Clouds sail past, high overhead, threatening; a storm is coming. In the park, a hill with trees, gentle grassy slopes. I am in no hurry. I know where I am going: to a statue of an idol that stands high above everything else, with the face of a man I recognize. As the trees begin, gentle steps lead upwards. I climb and I watch the statue above me becoming increasingly vertical. Naturally, as it grows larger, I grow smaller. It stands on a circular base that is the size of a small village green. I climb other steps, up to the first gallery. Naked figures of men are carved from the granite. They stare and they think; you can see how hard they are thinking. “Ruminating” is perhaps a better word. A tautology in stone. In spite of the granite, their bodies are just like bodies: muscles, curves, strength. Their age is an average of all ages, they are not permitted to have names, they have removed their clothes to think. They are there to magnify the glory of the bald man above them, but they could never have been bald themselves. Not old, not bald, not fat; their masculine bodies are the distant German echoes of a Greek ideal. I climb higher, growing ever smaller, but I will never be able to reach the feet of that large statue. The man’s legs are supported by a peculiar bulwark of stone, as though he is wearing an anachronistic suit of armour. Of course he has a sword (which he never used), and two eagles perch close to his legs, their wings like protective shields, their heads twisted to look around, like those birds at the zoo that seem to have two heads: one at the front and one at the back. Their expressions are fierce, their beaks like hooks. Granite, but you can imagine the color of those harsh eyes. Primal anger: that is how a woman will describe it when she speaks to one of those eagles later, a different one, the same. I take another walk around the statue. Standing directly behind it, I see the stone mantle as a wall of scales; the back of the head looks as though it might belong to a statue of the Buddha. That is something no one has ever said about this man before. Back at the front of the statue, his cheeks are plump, but not with the fullness of the Enlightened One. Moustache, double chin, uniform collar, power. He stands beneath a leaden sky, looking out at the city that did not love him, but his gaze touches no one. In the distance, a sudden shriek like a tempest rising, the scream of a large crowd. Mass shiver, mass pleasure, a competition. The sound races around the treetops and then fades away.

  Third image. A woman, her face harsh, contorted. She is in an empty, white-lit space. I do not know what time of day it is; perhaps that kind of measure does not apply where she is. Dream time. Beside her, a cage with an eagle in it. This one has turned its head away from everything, a dead silhouette on a dead branch. But she is talking to the eagle. I can hear her clearly; her space is directly opposite mine. It would seem that she wishes to tempt the eagle, to seduce it, in a special German variation on Leda and the swan. She reminds the eagle of the look of love he gave her that morning with the primal anger of his eyes. She cuts open his cage with her wire cutters. She offers herself, not actually for mating, although that is what this most closely resembles, but for a much more intense form of communication: as human sacrifice, as prey. I know who she is (I have been in this space for some time): Anita von Schastorf, daughter of a Prussian Junker who supposedly participated in the assassination at
tempt on Hitler. A father she barely knew, but whom she idealizes, and whose diary she is publishing, having excised the more unsavoury confessions, as a young historian has just accused her of doing. He has a different, infinitely less flattering image of her father, and she berated him furiously, but now she is alone with her eagle, no longer screaming, but seductive. She says she is very naked under her clothes. A bird can have no idea, she says, of “how wretched it feels to be so naked and helpless, without one’s plumage,” and she repeats her offer: blood, intestines, sinews, fat, skin, glands. This most German of all creatures can have all that her feeble human body has to offer; it is all for his beak and for his claws. He does not move and then it goes dark and when the light returns he is sitting on her half-naked body, wings outspread, but she is not the one who is being eaten, because she is still sitting there after another spell of darkness, now covered in blood, hysterical, feathers and large bird bones around her, wailing, “Wald . . . Wald . . . Wald . . . Wald . . .” as though the whole thing were not already dark enough.

  Anselm Kiefer, Mohn und Gedächtnis, 1989, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

  Fourth image. I have returned to the northern city on the water. It is lighter this time, another day, and the storm clouds have passed. A rectangular monument stands on a broad street, with soldiers depicted on it. “Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen,” say the words: “Germany must live, though we must die.” That strange formulation means that the survival of Germany is worth the death of those stone men who are marching, rigid and motionless, in a con-tinuous line around their rectangle. This procession can never arrive, can never stop walking, has no beginning and no end. The carving is in relief; their right sides exist only as an idea, buried in the stone, the familiar form of the helmet overlapping the next man’s helmeted head, over and over again. As there is no beginning and no end and every man has a man in front and a man behind, they must all continue walking like this forever, on their way to death.

  Fifth image. Now I am back where I began. I walk past the dead aeroplanes to a library made of lead. The books on the shelves are so big that I would never be able to pick them up. What could be written inside them? They are old, sagging, falling apart; they lean against one another for support. Obligatory thoughts of the library of Alexandria and of Borges, but books from the former once served as fuel for the city’s hammams for six months, while the second brings to mind something that is definitely not made of lead, an internal, mental library where the books are always available to read, but which itself remains invisible. The books here seem more like the volumes in a land registry office, catalogues of the living and the dead, something along those lines. I once visited the Spanish national archive at the castle of Simancas; it was a chilling experience. A few scholars in deathly silence, among kilometers of folios, parchments, a never-ending battalion of leather-bound spines. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I took down a volume: the seventeenth-century land register of the city of Cuenca. My next thought was inevitable: that all of Spain was described in that archive, every centimeter of land, every event, every missive, as though the country and its history were reproduced there, but in paper. I suspect something similar is happening here, but without a method. There must be leaden names inside those books, but they are the names of chance, just as the long ribbons of film stills dangling from the warped leaden video recorders on the top shelves show only random people, strangers, contemporaries, people who were or who are, and whose names will slumber on in these leaden colossi, unseen, because no one can read them. “Euphrates and Tigris” is written on those bookcases, and it seems as though the books want more from me than I can see, as if my fleeting presence must be held up to the light of world history, but anyone who claims that has forgotten that my own origins are in that land between two rivers and that, no matter how anonymous I am, the history of my world lives inside me more vividly than in those closed leaden books.

  Sixth image. The room with the woman and the eagle, but two hours earlier. Someone just shouted “DEUTSCHLAND,” and it reminded me of another sound, the sound of the crowd in the northern city. This one voice shouts like an entire crowd. It is a little frightening, and the word it shouts only increases that effect. This is not a crowd, and yet those fifteen people, standing at different heights, but close together and with their faces turned in the same direction, have the effect of a tribe, a small Volk. “Wir sind der Chor,” they chorus. They are speaking to the photographer, but I and the people around me hear it too, and of course what we are meant to hear in those words is: “Wir sind das Volk.” Volk? What does that mean? This collection of bickering, backbiting, spying, infighting chorus members, at the moment, that one moment, when they are all photographed together? Is that a Volk? A random group of people who have arrived together at a certain point in time must be das Volk, that one ineluctable Volk with the capital letter, the group that everyone (a photographer is, after all, everyone) looks at, that we, those who do not belong to that Volk, look at? The photographer, a lightning-fast historian, does his best, and so he should, because they are keeping him under constant surveillance. He has to take them at that one, unrepeatable moment, catch them exactly as they look right then, capture (that is what photographers call it) the group before it breaks apart into separate individuals. But the photographer does something wrong; a hat is blocking a face, someone is missing, the whole Volk is not included, and so it takes revenge on the photographer by devouring him. His clothes remain there on the floor, neatly folded, his trainers on top of the pile. The female photographer who comes after him will not fare any better; this crowd is dangerous.

  Monument in Hamburg, detail, 1991

  Final image. Once again, I am back at the aeroplanes, at the leaden library. I walk down a staircase and enter a large room full of paintings. If I had to name one color first, it would be black, the scorched, singed black of things that have burned. Only later do I realize that many of the young women there are wearing the same black: black and the next color along, ash grey, the grey of crushed stones, the light brown of desert sand, the cold snake of dead wood, dried-up leaves, dirty snow. Lilith, Jerusalem, Entfaltung der Sefiroth, DieRheintöchter: weighty names have been assigned to these scenes. They are images of melancholy: the curled-up snake inside the aeroplane, a lonely ladder to an empty sky, two black angel wings without an angel, landscapes from which a dangerous kind of light has driven away the people, a saturnine world of dead matter, loss and absence, train tracks that end in destruction, like in Theresienstadt, stones whose written names conjure up the world of the Kabbalah, as though, at the end of our passage through all of those dead worlds, it might somehow be possible to escape the filth of history, a redemption. Azila, Jezira, Asijjah: as temptation, as hope, these words wander among the lead and the dead dresses with no people inside, dresses of women, children, maybe even dolls, stained, pressed between the twisted, wrinkled lead, like the fern that was once green, like the loose propeller, like the shocking mass of dead hair on the portrait of the woman, which already is almost invisible.

  “C’est la vie et la mort,” I hear someone say behind me, and of course I have to turn to look. The young man who just spoke those words is looking expectantly at the equally young woman to whom he addressed them. She cannot even turn her head to look back at him, as they are standing too close and the peak of her black cap is too big; she might even decapitate him. It is sticking out like some kind of weapon.

  “C’est ni la vie ni la mort,” she says, and I think she is right. It is neither life nor death. She stands there very still in her pointed silver shoes and looks for a while and then she says, “C’est la souffrance.” Again, I agree with her. It is the suffering that comes before cleansing, before catharsis, before the longing to be released from a contaminated era, from the blasphemous narrative of history. When I turn to walk out of the oppressive room, I see a guard stop her at the next door. He points at the duck’s bill of her cap, but she laug
hs and turns the thing around so that the huge peak now hangs down the back of her neck like a starched veil. Somehow or other that simple reversal lends a sense of liberation to the afternoon, and I feel lighter as I head outside, freed from those images.

  But where have I been, and when? Perhaps that is enough puzzles for now.

  Where do Prussian maidens devour German eagles? That would be in Botho Strauss’s Schlusschor, which I see at the Deutsches Theater, in what used to be called East Berlin. And that is also where the chorus that does not sing sings, and where someone shouts, “Deutschland,” just as Anselm Kiefer’s Die Rheintöchter at the Nationalgalerie immediately evokes thoughts of Germany, just as the soldiers in their eternal rectangle are wearing German helmets, just as the giant stone man in the northern city of Hamburg was the founder of the Germany of 1871, just as the eagles at his feet are the same eagles as the eagle on the naked woman’s shoulder, which is of course also the same eagle that I see later that same week (I saw all these images in one week) on a wall in Charlottenburg, the black filth of air pollution dripping like blood from its beak.

  But aren’t you mixing up your images? You talk about reality in one image and then move on to the next one and start talking about art that is a reflection, depiction, imagination, sublimation of reality. That is true, but I have seen these images—eagle, chorus, leaden books—with my actual eyes, in an actual space, as I have seen the soldiers of the 76th Hanseatic regiment on that rectangular monument in Hamburg, and the statue of Bismarck. Who determines the hierarchy of such images? The imaginary is just as much part of this world, even though I am well aware that the eagle was stuffed and that no one really ate it, just as I know that those books are made of solid lead and do not contain one single name, whatever I might claim, just as those aeroplanes are not decaying, but were simply made that way, just as the dead ferns have been glued into the lead, and the chorus removes its make-up after the performance. Art feeds on reality and, all being well, returns to reality. German art, German reality, you cannot escape it here. Heavy, charged, murky, romantic, sometimes taking a diversion through the slums of kitsch, but even then it is a reflection of reality: the kitsch of the Bismarck towers from the Gründerzeit, the kitsch of the cathedrals of light and torch processions of half a century later, the kitsch of the silver eagle that I found so terrifying as a child when I saw it dancing above the procession of grey men marching into The Hague.