I wrote the above in autumn last year, but 2008 was not 1988. The torrent and the momentum of those days have given way to the gentle flow of democracy, to the blank pages that Hegel wanted to tear from the book of history. Of course, history continues to be made here, but suddenly I realize that I am an outsider, much more so than I was back then. The unification of Germany, like the long-ago war and the occupation of my country, was part of my own history. The dramatic events of 1989, so much more recent, also had a significant emotional impact on anyone who experienced them, as did the struggle of the years immediately afterwards, and the mutual attraction and repulsion that the two Germanies continue to show. However, the practice of democracy, with its ritual mating dances, the courtship behavior of the politicians, the masquerades of giving and taking, the posturing of talk shows and parliamentary debates, that was something you could watch with fascination, but always from the outside. You have your own country, your own home, in those distant lowlands, your own government and your own parliament that people here know little about and understand even less. Your interest is that of a stranger. And indeed, it is as a stranger that I have watched that chorus of the goddesses of fate who control much of public debate in Germany. Their television news representative is Marietta Slomka, who, with her Snow Queen demeanour, really knows how to get a minister hot and bothered. Eyes like icicles, set with frightening symmetry in that deep-freeze face, a face clasped within a helmet of blonde hair. Her diction is gentle, but extremely effective, and she dissects politicians’ answers with the precision of a surgical instrument. It is a pleasure to watch, especially when she brings her conversation to an end and turns to her more masculine counterpart, looking like an Egyptian hieroglyph, a cross-section of a woman who now consists of one single dimension, a Wayang shadow puppet. The other three are mistresses of the talk show, who gather the mighty of the republic around them in order to play them off against one another. Left and right, union and employer, banker and minister: these are almost always high-quality debates to which the Volk also contributes, in the form of articulate, carefully selected victims or other interested parties, reminding the politicians of their promises or confronting them with their dilemmas. Anne Will, Maybrit Illner, Sandra Maischberger—sometimes they have to swish the cane to keep order in their lively class of the high and mighty, all of whom are aiming to break the world record for talking, backed up by their own conviction that they are in the right. What I am watching is the parlour game of the polis, a game that people long to play when playing it is forbidden. This is the luxury of freedom. Politics as entertainment. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben speaks somewhat enigmatically in his Kindheit und Geschichte about the poverty of experience, distinguishing between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the two words that capture different concepts of “experience” in German: “The modern individual returns home in the evening, completely exhausted by a jumble of Erlebnisse—entertaining or boring, unusual or everyday, terrible or pleasant—without a single one of these events becoming an Erfahrung.” The talk show is simply an extension of such a day, a drama that takes the form of a battle, and therefore an event, even though, fundamentally, it is not one. Is that bad? Is Heidegger’s banality of the everyday a disaster or a formula to live by? If peace is boredom, why do we yearn for it when it is absent? Is true experience something that can only come from outside? I live here now in the settings of my earlier excitement and, together with the city, I become normalized, an urban nomad, a passer-by, a consumer. I find a sentence related to this experience in Agamben too: “They are like those characters in the comic strips of our childhood who can continue running in mid-air until they become aware of it: when they notice, when they experience it, they tumble helplessly into the abyss.”
Weidendammer Brücke, Berlin Mitte
Demolition of Palast der Republik, Berlin Mitte, October 2008
In the café on Stuttgarter Platz where I go in the morning for my coffee and newspapers, I watch my contemporaries doing the same thing. They read the reports from places where there is no avoiding fate and history: Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, Darfur, Kosovo. I cannot work out what they are thinking. When we go back outside into the gloomy autumn weather, we are not thinking about bombs and attacks. The abyss into which we have helplessly tumbled cannot be read on our faces. Or have we discovered the secret of being spared from banality by suffering it? Agamben is referring to Walter Benjamin when he states that what we experience are only Erlebnisse, experiences in the sense of brief events and sensations, rather than accumulated wisdom. Benjamin’s example involves the “Armut der Erfahrung,” the poverty of experience—and specifically deals with soldiers returning home after the First World War: “A generation that had travelled to school on horse-drawn trams stood under an open sky in a landscape where nothing had remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath them, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.” One might think that these were in fact existential experiences, and as I read I feel myself becoming entangled in a semantic game, as the philosopher puts forward as evidence the fact that this era is unable to come up with any new proverbs, because they have been replaced by slogans. But how long does it take for a proverb to become a proverb?
I have barely got here before I have to return, and it is for the sake of a paradox, as where I am heading is all about the place where I am. The Cobra Museum in Amstelveen is staging an exhibition of work by the Leipziger Schule, which it has invited me to open. So I shall travel to Amsterdam in order to go to Leipzig. And of course my speech in Amsterdam begins with a memory:
It was back in the days of the D.D.R. I was living in Berlin and I went with the Dutch ambassador on a short trip to Leipzig, in what we called East Germany back then. Our aim was to meet up with some students of Dutch. Before I was about to speak to them, the female professor, who committed suicide after the Wende, told me not to expect any questions from them, because, as she put it, the students were not used to asking questions. Twenty years later, that seems like a strange thing to have said, but it is exactly what happened. Even so, we still ended up having a chat in a lovely old pub afterwards. The students had read a great deal, were rather well informed about our literature, and when, after the Wende, I returned to the same place, the climate had already changed.
Why am I telling this story? To give an impression of the atmosphere that existed at the time, an atmosphere we can scarcely imagine nowadays. It has already become history, you can read about it, but you can no longer feel it, just as you can no longer feel the sense of threat that hit you when you had to cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie or Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, or when you tried to imagine the lives of the people who lived there, and who were unable to leave, unless they happened to be, say, a writer or an artist and were on such good terms with the regime that they were trusted to return.
History, past, twenty years ago, the age of an adult who never experienced any of that. I actually find it a little embarrassing that I am still talking about it.
The people who taught the painters and photographers whose works are exhibited here lived inside that system; some of them were even ideologically entwined with it. I remember seeing large scenes of the peasants’ revolt by Werner Tübke, who, along with Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, was one of the greats of those days. They are still the teachers of many of the younger people whose paintings hang on these walls, who have themselves become the teachers of younger artists. I found Tübke’s enormous frescos strange, yet impressive. They had no connection to what was happening on our side of the curtain, but they were certainly big, so much larger than life, with an incredible amount to see, and all of it was most definitely painted. This was art created to serve a view of history and so, by definition, art that shielded itself from art that served another ideology or even no ideology at all.
And what do we see in this exhibition? Painters, first and foremost. What they have in common is their connection to Leipzig. Sometimes they
had the same teachers at the famous institution where they trained or, like Neo Rauch himself, still work as tutors.
What they do not share is a style. So I would not go so far as to use the term “school.” The word “school” refers instead to their common origin; the style and subject matter of the work exhibited here is so heterogeneous that it seems as though the Leipziger Hochschule must have had twenty different exits, and the students, painters and photographers all found their own way out. That does not bother me, because it means that there is plenty to look at. Subdued contemplation, exuberance and expressive pleasure in painting, realistic documentary-style photography, alongside extravagant, staged photography and, as in the case of the stylistically very different Neo Rauch and Matthias Weischer, an almost wanton love of the preposterous, which strays far from Socialist Realism without ever renouncing the lessons of painting as a craft—on the contrary. It is remarkable that the work varies considerably even within the oeuvres of individual artists. At first sight, Weischer’s insanely crowded Innenräume, with their absurd logic and surreal notions, appear to have little to do with his gouaches of cars, which, with their photographic precision, look more like advertising brochures. Rauch’s paintings from 1993 might, as far as I am concerned, be by an entirely different artist from the painter of the 2005 work Kommen wir zum Nächsten, that very same Rauch. This piece is a painting by one single artist, but the dreams of several different people seem to be depicted on the canvas and, as is always the case with dreams, these images present us with puzzles. What is that young man, dressed in the classic costume of German Romanticism, downcast eyes, sad expression, doing in what appears to be a contemporary setting? He is sitting, anachronistically, on a plastic garden chair, and, at the point where his knee-breeches and silk stockings should meet, some kind of unpleasant black stream or slick of oil is swirling out. The young man’s right hand is tucked into a large, modern-looking briefcase beside him on the ground, while his left hand is resting on some papers that are lying beside a thick, unlit candle on the tomato-colored, slightly shiny tablecloth, which might be made of plastic or linoleum. A woman is leaning forward, with both fists on the table, and looking at the young man, who has not noticed her. Behind them is some kind of craftsman in a stained apron and with a rope binding his wrists. Two other craftsmen are holding large beams of wood and standing on a sort of scaffold that is decorated with green garlands, beside a device that could be a guillotine, but probably is not. Is that everything? No, far from it. Two houses, with trees behind, a blue sky with a few light clouds and perhaps a flock of birds, all lined up and ready to serve, but there is also something that is far more difficult to describe: glistening, fatty growths or clots that have no name and possibly no function, but which exude a threat of the unknown simply because of their presence, so detached and autonomous among these absurd, but familiar images. A peculiar, broken sea-green object in the foreground on the left plays the same role. Its function is unclear, as is that of the oily, bilious green blob of unknown origin that is lying on the table.
If I have gone into too much detail here—and yet at the same time nothing like enough detail—it is because this painting expresses something of the long way these artists have come, as do a number of other paintings in this exhibition, even though, once again, their styles are so different. While their masters were bound to an ideology that would have viewed opacity as a personal luxury, here doctrine has given way to ecstasy, chaos and the problematic issue of freedom, which everyone solves in a different way. And so a bunker can be photographed in an unnatural, apocalyptic light, as in Erasmus Schröter’s mannerist photography, which appears to be as far removed from Rauch as Henriette Grahnert’s subtle Netzwerkprobleme, or Christian Brandl’s delicate, traditionally painted symbolism. As an outsider, one can only guess at the ideological battles and disputes that have been fought in Leipzig over the past thirty years; I have only been able to touch upon the range and variety of the art that has been made there.
Hans-Werner Schmidt, director of the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, writes about this subject in his introduction to a book I read about the Essl Collection. One day in 2000, he received an invitation to view an exhibition by a group that called itself LIGA. He explains that he went to see the exhibition without any real expectations, just to get out of the house for a while. But he goes on to say that he will not forget that afternoon any time soon.
What he encountered were canvases painted with enormous self-confidence, works of an entirely different calibre than he had expected. What really struck him was the difference between this art and the art of the period immediately following the fall of the Wall. There were still late echoes of Cobra and Joseph Beuys, but also, as he phrases it, memories of “the art of verismo and late Expressionism,” somber in nature, dark in palette. LIGA was light, fabricated, focused on the city and its architecture, and had in a sense bid farewell to the teachers at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Three years later, Schmidt organized a new exhibition at his own museum, “sieben mal malerei.” The rest is history: that evening, gallery owners from all over the world came in droves, the phenomenon of the Leipziger Schule was born and, to cut the story short, because otherwise it will become far too long for this occasion, a new School needs a mastermind to collect its output and the new artists found this person in Karlheinz Essl. Essl’s background is in construction, but he is also a passionate collector, who attempted to interest a Viennese museum in his collection before the painters had achieved the fame that they now enjoy, or suffer—both enjoyment and suffering being possible. Vienna refused—not everyone sees the light—and so Essl built his own museum in Klosterneuburg, ten kilometers or so from the capital. The Cobra Museum was able to draw on this collection and those of Leipzig galleries to create this exhibition, providing a glimpse into a world that, not so long ago, was closed to us, and which has produced new names that will soon become well known here too, if they are not already, names such as Tim Eitel, Tobias Lehner, wild Wunderkind Sebastian Gögel and photographer Matthias Hoch, who has two superb architectural photos of Amsterdam in this exhibition, which form a wonderful counterpart to Ulf Puder’s paintings of architecture, which are also full of light and free of people. The perfect hanging of these works in the bright, open spaces of the Cobra Museum succeeds in uniting pieces that perhaps do not in essence belong together, and the effect is as it should be: a wonderful surprise from Leipzig.
October 2008
Post. A strong, ornate Baroque hand that I recognize. Prof. em. Franz Rudolf Knubel has sent me some kind of exhibition catalogue. The narrow, elongated book does not have a title so much as a note written in small letters, preceded by dots “. . . zur kleinsten Schar / . . . with a chosen few,” followed by the words “In memoriam Mildred Harnack-Fish.” At the front of the book is a portrait of a woman with strong features, looking out at the viewer. Her hair, carefully combed close to her head, gleams; her eyes are watchful; this is a woman who exudes seriousness. Inside the catalogue, I find poems, photographs. It was published by the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, the German Resistance Memorial Center, and when I start reading I understand why.
This woman whose face I have just seen for the first time was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1902. She studied literature at the University of Wisconsin, where she met Arvid Harnack, whom she married in the summer of 1926. After moving to Germany with him, she taught at the University of Berlin until she was dismissed from her teaching position in 1932. She then taught evening classes and, together with a number of her students, participated in a discussion group led by her husband, which focused on social and political issues. Until 1942, she still had contact with the American embassy, which gave her access to speeches by Roosevelt, news of the Spanish Civil War and also commentaries on Hitler’s policies, which were not available in Germany. She passed this material on to a small group of people who were critical of the Nazi regime, so supporting her husband’s underground movement. Th
ere is a photograph of the two of them sitting together in the peaceful countryside: a smiling Mildred wearing a fur collar, Arvid with a pipe in his mouth, more thoughtful, a flash of sunshine among the dark pines. I never read far enough in Agamben’s book to understand exactly what he means by experience and the absence of experience, but I feel myself drawn into these two lives in a way that appears to contradict his words: “No one would recognize an authority whose only legitimization was founded on Erfahrung . . . This does not mean that Erfahrungen no longer exist nowadays. However, they occur outside of the human being.”
Mildred Harnack, ca. 1930
I must be on the wrong track somehow. When is an experience something that takes place without a person? At the end of 1941, Mildred Harnack was awarded her doctorate by the University of Giessen. On September 7, 1942, she was arrested with her husband in Preila on the Kurische Nehrung, the Curonian Spit, a mysterious name for a place. The Reichskriegsgericht sentenced her to six years in prison on 19 December, but Hitler did not accept that sentence. He wanted a new trial, which duly occurred, culminating on January 16, 1943, in a death sentence. A month passed before Mildred Harnack was beheaded at Berlin-Plötzensee. During that month, she worked on her translation of Goethe’s poem “Vermächtnis,” and she continued to do so until the final hours before her execution. Her last words were: “. . . und ich habe Deutschland so geliebt”: and I loved Germany so very much.
Roads to Berlin Page 29