Construction of the new Reichstag dome, 1997
Again I shivered, but this time it was the cold. In the distance I saw the wooden frame of the new dome of the Reichstag, a Renaissance theater model, and suddenly there it was, the dwarfed Hotel Esplanade, looking a little foolish among all that violence, and at the same instant the memory within me also shrank. What did it look like here back then? How could the hotel suddenly be so small? There it stood, strangely boxed in, surrounded by the oval, gleaming, rising force of Sony. I tried to imagine future Mercedes and B.M.W.s slinking into the car parks, nouveaux riches from Warsaw to Novosibirsk entertaining themselves behind the windows of new apartments, following the rituals of the new age, pampered by Filipino maids and with the gentle buzz of Dow Jones, D.A.X. and Nikkei in the background. It was just as difficult as picturing my own bygone reality, in which, for several winters, I had spent days on end in that building with a long-gone lover. She was a singer and her recordings had been made there, in that empty, hollowed-out building. Her producer came from Cologne and had been in the Luftwaffe. In a way, he is back in the air now, because his feet no longer walk this earth. From the hotel windows, there was a view in every direction, and the producer had once pointed in one of those directions, towards the Führerhauptquartier, where he had had to deliver a message as a courier from Bordeaux. As he was about to slip the sealed envelope into the letterbox, he had felt a hand on his shoulder and, turning, he found himself face to face with Hitler. “Diese Augen, nein, das kannst du dir nicht vorstellen.” No, I could not imagine those eyes; I was too occupied with what was happening in the empty, snow-covered square below, the mobile etching of men and dogs among those strange, angular pieces of metal that were reminiscent of an early Mondrian, the beach at Domburg.
But it was also exciting inside the building. I spent hours with its only resident, Otto Redlin. This was in the early 1970s, and Otto was already seventy-six, so I suppose he too is no longer around. The hotel had 418 rooms, but now it looks so small that I cannot imagine how that was ever possible. “Ich bin der älteste Bundesangestellte,” he always used to say: I am the oldest federal employee. His wife was dead and he lived, as I can still remember, in Room 31. I have a photograph of him sitting at one of the empty tables, which were neatly laid with tablecloths, in an empty salon. Sofas, lots of chairs and barstools that no one sat on anymore. We had lit the chandeliers for the photograph, and they reflected back at us, multiplied in a huge mirror in which I am just about visible behind what looks like a monstrous Chinese vase. Downstairs somewhere, there was a wooden platform that tourists could stand on and see all the way to Vladivostok. Not far away was the ruin of the Bayerischer Hof which had recently been demolished. I made a note in my diary back then: “. . . a few laborers are working on the demolition, golden Germanic mosaics thunder down into the mud. I wipe one of them clean with a little rainwater and read: Deutsche Frauen, Deutsche Treue, Deutscher Wein, Deutscher Sang Sollen In Der Welt Behalten Ihren Alten Schönen Klang.1 Not in this place, not anymore, I think. The things on the ground were once attached to something, but now are attached to nothing. Lonely toilet bowls, baths without taps, taps without baths, glasses from which no Breslauer, Nordhäuser or Cottbuser will ever flow again, everything, boots, dirndls, waiters, menus, ashtrays, trumpets, all crushed, pulverized and taken up into Heaven, gone forever. The small and rather modest café next door has two menus in the window, perhaps in remembrance. ‘1940’ is written at the top, followed by a list of what some Messerschmitt pilot or holder of the Knight’s Cross, killed in action long ago, might have eaten on that day: Geschmortes Kalbsherz, Westmoreland, mit Spinat und Schwenkkartoffeln (100 Gramm Fleischmarke und 10 Gramm Fettmarke, 1 Mark 65). Did he drink the 1938 Niersteiner Spiegelberg with his meal, as suggested? The café itself is closed, the chairs are covered with dust and arranged as though the last customers have just left for the front, but maybe,” I wrote at the time, “they will return and everything will begin all over again.”
Now, thirty years later, I no longer think that. I have been here too often and for too long, and know that whatever might begin anew in this place, it can never be the same. And yet, even now, the date on that menu, the unfortunate year of 1940, is forcing me back to my own past. I do not want to linger on this for too long, but even though my life began seven years before that date, I am unable to explain myself to myself without thinking of 1940, if only because the start of the war—which will be over and done with only when everyone who remembers something about it is dead—seems to have erased the first seven years of my life, aided by something I discovered only recently.
I am going to have to take a couple of different detours at the same time now, which is impossible in real life, but possible on paper, which is probably the reason I became a writer.
The first of these detours has to do with being a writer. There is a famous controversy between the novelist Proust and the critic and essayist Sainte-Beuve, which boils down to the latter believing that we should know as much as possible about a writer’s life—his attitudes and opinions, his character, his relation to and relationships with women, money, politics—while Proust thought it should all be about the books, and only the books, and never about the biography. Proust also believed that writers and poets never truly express themselves in conversation, so that too is meaningless in comparison with what an author writes, because then he is drawing on a completely different, much deeper layer of his personality, one that is often hidden even from himself, through which he wanders like an explorer, returning with treasures that should not be wasted on a superficial conversation. This implies a degree of mystery and maybe also isolation, which Proust, who spent much of his life wearing the mask of the worldly sophisticate and who, judging by his magnificent dialogue, must in fact have been a masterful conversationalist, saw as a prerequisite for a life of writing. Now I cannot compare myself to Proust, but in this respect I am most definitely a Proustian: in the shameless showcase culture we live in—perhaps less so in Germany than in the Netherlands or in America—it seems that private life has to be played out in public. Writers become their own public performance and are required to remain in character. We know their personas better than their books, because their writing can never capture them as well as an interviewer does. The hidden core of their being is no longer mysteriously transformed into the wondrous and sacred lies of fiction, but flows unfermented from the glass screen into a thousand living rooms of people who would never, and will never, read their books. The point of this entire detour is to say that I think we can speak about ourselves only in moderation. And yet, in the more elevated form of conversation that is a speech, I cannot escape doing so.
And this brings me to the second detour, which is about my peculiar lack of memory. Nabokov was able to command his memory to speak—Speak, Memory is after all an imperative, or at least an entreaty expressed in the imperative form—but such a command has not the slightest effect on me: my memory simply will not respond. Augustine talked about memory palaces through which we might wander and find all sorts of treasures; for me, that palace remains closed. I cannot even enter the building. One of the key moments in Proust’s great novel occurs when he dips a certain cake in his tea. At that same moment, to remain with Augustine’s analogy, the door of a room in the palace flies open. Nabokov writes in his last great novel, Ada, that he is against the idea of the mémoire involontaire, the involuntary memory: the doors of the palace must be forced open; remembering is an act and we need to work to achieve it. But that suggestion does not work for me either: scraps, shadows, fragments are all that I can make out through the dirty and broken windows of my palazzo, which also appears to be situated in a part of the world where it is always twilight.
In my simplicity, I have always believed and maintained that this is a result of the thunderous clap of the first day of war, its deafening effect extending both forwards and backwards, creating a hole into which children’s books, friends, teachers
have been sucked, namelessly. However, I recently discovered that perhaps the Heinkels and the Stukas of those early days and the sight of Rotterdam burning on the distant horizon were not the only causes. At the end of October, an exhibition about my life and work opened in The Hague, the city where I was born. This also involved, much against my will, a search for my past, undertaken by a very thorough investigator, who soon discovered that during the years of crisis before the war—I was born in ’33—we moved within the city no fewer than seven times. My mother, who is still alive—she is eighty-seven—denied this vehemently, but she had to give in when she saw the copies of the official registration documents. This was followed by the war years, chaos, my parents’ divorce, evacuation, the winter of starvation, my father’s death in a British bombing raid: that, in short, is how to lock the doors of a palace. Later, when I gained a degree of control over my life, I added a new wing to which I have access—life, and therefore writing, would have been impossible otherwise—but the main building remains closed. I will never, like Borges, be able to say which books I read as a child in my father’s library or, like Proust, be able to write about my long conversations with my grandmother or, like Nabokov, hilariously reveal the eccentricities of my Swiss-French governess. This is not only because my father had no library, because both of my grandmothers died before I had a chance to know them, or because the woman who could have been described as a governess only if you were being exceptionally charitable had run off with my father in the middle of the war, but also, and primarily, because something had been wiped out, radically and permanently, by a destructive external force, leaving me with nothing.
I am not saying this because I wish to elicit even an ounce of sympathy, as I have no need for sympathy. It gave me the opportunity to invent a life for myself by travelling and by thinking. More than that, it left me with a fascination with the past, with disappearance, with transience, with memories and ruins, with antiquity, with everything that can be summarized under the heading of “history.” And I have related this history—because even those personal stories that make up only a very small part of history are still entitled to be called history—in order to explain, not so much to you as to myself, why this city has fascinated me inordinately for such a long time. I feel that here, on an infinitely larger scale, and with horrifying consequences for the fates of so many people, somehow the same has happened as happened to me, that the ruins and the gaps I encountered here that first time had something to tell me that I did not yet truly understand. That something was, at first, nothing. All of those gaps, those lacunae, those absences wanted to speak to me about nothingness, about destruction, which in both German (Vernichtung) and Dutch (vernietiging) is founded on the notion of turning something into nothing, the negative, negation, nicht, niet, not, a city become nothing. This emptiness and absence resulted from the actions of a man who, back in the 1920s, wrote a book that loudly and clearly proclaimed a program: the Vernichtung of a Volk. Of all the Berliner Lektionen I have read—and this is not about aesthetics, but about historical essence—I found Daniel Libeskind’s the most effective and the most affecting, if I may use those two words, which do not always belong together. He constructed his thoughts and his museum around the site of that nothing, the something missing, the present absence. A place for building nothing is something that only art can create, but the power of the constructed nothing resides precisely in what is not there—and what is not there is what was there. What was once present is commemorated in the intangible absence. This is something we can speak of only hesitantly, because it is all so mysterious.
Frederick I of Prussia, Charlottenburger Tor, West Berlin
During my first visit to Berlin, I was not yet capable of thinking in this way. Reality had continued to write that man’s book, and it resembled an orgy of destruction, the morning after the dance of death. You could still taste the war and it seemed like a continuation of what I had seen and heard as a child. Yet at the same time a new element had been added, a crack that ran through the world and which was more visible here than anywhere else, like a heart attack turned to stone, as though once again Berlin had the task of demonstrating something to the world, the logical conclusion of Yalta, which was itself the logical conclusion of the desire for destruction that had begun in this place. I made my journey with two older friends who had both been in Dachau, which added to the apocalyptic effect of those first experiences, along with the nuclear threat—which now seems to have been so carelessly forgotten—that was hanging over our heads like a plague cloud.
No, the 1950s and early ’60s were perhaps not the best time to be young. I had seen Budapest in 1956, so I already knew what impotence and betrayal were. Now I was seeing, in its German form, the practice of that doctrine to which so many of my friends still clung, full of hope. So I was immersed in a chaos of emotions and experiences that was fortunately eased by hard-boiled concentration-camp humor, and the amazing ways my travelling companions had found to deal with their memories. Perhaps it will never again happen that two such different social and political philosophies are put into practice in one language, not merely in the forms they have always assumed—pamphlet, essay, newspaper article—but also in the wording of laws, regulations, verdicts, government policy statements, orders to shoot, warnings, editorials in the party newspaper, secret reports. The shared, inherited language became a divided language, another language developed out of the same language, the language became bilingual, exposing its fundamental ambiguity, a lesson for later ages. The philosophy that enabled people to resist one dictatorship, risking their lives, mercilessly steered them towards another dictatorship. The heroes of one age became the culprits of another, and in order to justify themselves they invented a plausibility that was valid nowhere else. Two countries that could not physically distance themselves from each other entrenched themselves, and it would later require huge mental exertion to recapture every intellectual millimeter they had ceded.
I could perhaps sense all of this back then, but not yet contemplate it; I was too busy thinking about the rest of the world. My first travels, when I was about eighteen, took me to the North, to countries of great brightness, but also of doubt and melancholy, that monstrous alliance of clarity and angst that dominates the films of Ingmar Bergman and which preoccupied me at the time. But my own terrain was the South, the Mediterranean, Provence, the theatricality of Italy, the dazzling radiance of the Spanish plateau, where the light conjures up fata morganas that allow the imagination to run riot, and which seemed capable of driving away the darkness of those post-war years. The Netherlands was then, like Germany, a place without color; I remember those years as predominantly grey. On my way back from that first hitchhiking trip to the far North, I had traveled through Germany for the first time. The scraps that my faulty memory throws me reveal broken roads, whole neighborhoods collapsed, the wanton, unimaginative uniformity of reconstruction, and when I focus more sharply I can see and hear shunting locomotives and a deserted railway yard at night, as I bid a dramatic farewell to someone, while a voice from a loudspeaker makes incomprehensible announcements in that language that I have not yet become accustomed to, a language that refuses to resemble itself, that does not want to be the same language as the language of the poems of Goethe and Rilke that I studied at school.
My first novel was published in the Netherlands not long after that, probably far too soon. Its illusionism was far removed from the razor-sharp realism that was the norm in those post-war years. But in that book I had said all that I had to say. I was suddenly a writer because I had had a book published, but I had become one in the same way as a swan is born, or a bat, without expressing any explicit desire. Swans and bats have an easier life in that respect—they already have the Kantian a priori in their wings—but I had no other option than to set off travelling again with the aim of gaining the knowledge required by this peculiar career that had chosen me, a career that I tried to shake off in my new novel by having the main ch
aracter, who was of course a writer, commit suicide, even if only, I think in retrospect, so that I would not have to do it myself. And so I travelled, the surviving doppelgänger of my own self, to Bolivia and Mali, to Colombia and Iran and all those countries in the so-called Third World, where I found a deformed mirror image of my own world, in military dictatorships and pseudo-democracies and all those other variants that, in one way or another, belonged to the same family as the vast schism that divided Europe and Germany. That schism found its perfect metaphorical expression in the fission of the atomic bomb, devised by the iconography of science to keep fear alive and so confirm the systems that made all of us, each with our own slogans and lies, our own scholastic rhetoric and exorcism, merely bit-part players in an absurdist theater, players who thought they were just actors, until the year when the violent fiction exploded and the cards of appearance and reality were reshuffled, and our maps changed along with them. Faites vos jeux! Rien ne va plus! One of the legs of the card table upon which the great game was played stood in Berlin, where I was living at the time, because the D.A.A.D. had invited me to spend a year there.
That year was 1989, and I experienced everything that happened that year not just as a casual visitor, but as a resident of Berlin. I may not have been a German, but I was certainly a European, and it was not just a country that was being welded back together again, but, all being well, an entire continent. Once, in 1962, when Germany was again responsible for 45% of Europe’s annual production, I had seen Adenauer and de Gaulle standing on a balcony in Stuttgart, a strange couple, older than the century itself. De Gaulle had raised those peculiar long arms in the air and cried out his heavily accented declaration of Franco–German friendship, “EZ LEBBE DOIZLANT! EZ LEBBE DIE DOITZFRANZÖZISCHE VROINDZAVT!” He had started work on that great construction from the Atlantic to the Urals—Willy Brandt would kneel in Warsaw on one of the stops on the journey, and later Mitterrand and Kohl would stand hand in hand on the battlefield of Verdun in an attempt to bury the war for good. But old fears are not so easily buried, not in Moscow, not in Paris, and not in London, let alone in those other, smaller countries that lie in the shadow of that one big empire in the middle. History may perform a few lightning-fast pirouettes and pull a fait accompli out of its hat, but the ancient specter of the Gleichgewicht continues to trouble the age-old family of Europe. The historical imperative is accepted as though by a class of obedient Marxists sitting at their school desks, but the old distrust shimmers in the memoirs of both Mitterrand and Thatcher. England, France, Germany and Russia sit in their theater boxes like jealous old actresses and keep an eye on one another: Who is flapping her fan too much? Who is spending too much time with whom? Who has been given the most flowers? Who is going to play the lead? Why is she being so nice to that insignificant supporting player? Why was I not invited? Intrigue and suspicion in Theatre Europa. Behind a semblance of absence, the memory of nations is an ancient, viscous mass, and one question was on everyone’s mind at the time, and by everyone I perhaps mean the Germans themselves most of all: What kind of country are we becoming? Students at my readings would ask, “Aren’t you frightened of us?” No, I wasn’t, but I was concerned that they thought I should be, as though they still did not trust their own country.
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