Then, once again, comes a moment of rhyme. The book you waited so long for is translated into German and published by Volk und Welt in Berlin. Together with two friends who were in Natzweiler and Buchenwald, you travel to this city, which knows more about the history of the twentieth century than any other and lives on the sharp dividing line between two mutually hostile systems. Your other, non-fictional self, is going to cover an S.E.D. conference, where Khrushchev will speak. The friends who have brought you with them to the land of their former fate take you to the most German of all restaurants, in an orgy of cathartic nostalgia. And they talk. You write your first notes on Berlin, which you will dedicate to one of these friends, notes that, although you do not realize it, are sketches for the novel that is already stirring deep within you, a novel in which they will play a part. A year later, you are living in Berlin. These are the years just before 1989. You are invited by the D.A.A.D. and it changes your life. You meet other people who become friends: a painter, a philosopher, a poet, all of whom will be woven into your web of appearance and reality without you or them being aware of it. You travel around their country, read their history, are there when another bronze page is turned as a wall falls with a crash that reverberates around the entire world. That was yesterday. The circle is full, or so it seems. In Tübingen, you meet an old man with white hair who once had to flee from Austria, where he studied philosophy and Germanistik, and who learned German poetry by heart on a tractor in New Zealand. In Hölderlin’s tower, he gathers young people around him and they read poems together.
He invites me to one of these legendary gatherings. When he dies a few years later, I write the poem that I would like to read now, in conclusion. It is called “De dichter van het lezen,” the poet of reading, a title that his widow had engraved on his tombstone in his beloved Latin: Poeta Legendi. His name was Paul Hoffmann.
De dichter van het lezen
In memoriam Paul Hoffman
Kwam mij tegemoet
in mijn verduisterde onschuld
een lichtspoor,
in een toren
van heilige waanzin,
deze ene,
hoorde wat ik zei
toen ik het niet hoorde,
hoorde mijn ander,
stemde mij,
met het fijnste oor voor verhulde gezangen,
stemde mij toe,
in verbanning had hij,
in een leeg land van anderen,
woorden herhaald en geslepen
tot ze zich werden.
Gewapend kwam hij terug
naar hun eerdere schande,
hun van leugens
geluidloos geworden,
hun bedorven taal
die hij opneemt en koestert,
geneest met gedichten,
teruggeeft aan zichzelf.
Licht groeit uit zijn ziel
sneeuwlaurier om zijn hoofd.
Schitterend ben jij het, de leraar,
de dichter van het lezen.
The Poet of Reading
In memoriam Paul Hoffman
Towards me
in my shuttered innocence,
came a trace of light,
in a tower
of holy madness,
this one man,
heard what I said
when I did not hear it,
heard the other me,
found my chord
with the keenest ear for hidden songs,
gave me his accord,
banished into exile
in an empty land of others,
he had repeated words, polished them
until they became themselves.
Armed, he came back
to their former disgrace,
to their language
silenced by lies,
their corrupted tongue
which he embraced, nourished,
healed with poems,
returned it to itself.
Light grows from his soul,
laurels of snow around his head.
You are dazzling, the teacher,
the poet of reading.
October 2008
It is almost time for my farewell. Yet again, I am leaving Berlin, and like every other time it will not be easy. I go through the enormous pile of newspaper cuttings once more, read about all the things I have not written about, look at a page of designs for the Schloss they are planning to build on the site of the old Volkspalast. In real life too, I visited the Kronprinzenpalais one cold winter’s day to look at the models based on those designs. On days like that, arctic winds blow over the wide open spaces and Berlin reminds you that it borders on Russia. The designs were hung on the walls, lots of losers alongside the one winner. There were so many of them. I tried to imagine what Unter den Linden would look like when the winning design was in place, but I could not picture it, perhaps because I did not really believe in it. Nostalgia in stone, an antiquated grammar of construction, a half-hearted attempt to bring something back to life that had disappeared for good: archaeology in reverse.
What does it mean when a city does not wish to make the leap into the modern day, but instead harks back to a vanished past, which is then masked with a little pseudo-modernity? Friends say that, one way or another, Berlin will be “beautiful” in fifty or a hundred years’ time, but I have learned to mistrust such predictions, and besides I do not have enough time to wait that long. I see tiny human figures populating the large courtyard of the Schloss in the designs, and I imagine that I am one of them. It is 2089 and the little man who is me has just taken out his notebook to write something about the great day that is being celebrated all around him. But no, I will not be there; it will be other people who are walking around in a festive mood to mark the passing of a hundred years, even though they were not around to see the first of those years, the year when everything changed, when a city and a country began to heal the wounds that had torn it in two.
December 2008. The Frankfurter Rundschau has asked me to write a Christmas article for the space where the editorial usually goes, and because I am on a book tour of various German cities, I decide to collect things I encounter on that long journey and hang them on my Christmas tree. The resulting article was published on Christmas Eve, with the title of “Dunkle Tage,” Dark Days:
And so it came to pass in those days that a Dutch author went on a reading tour of Germany. He travelled from east to south and from west to north, visiting a different city every day and reading from his book Roter Regen, and yet again he realized how large Germany is, how varied the landscapes, and how different the people who live there, who are called Germans by foreigners, but who usually think of themselves as residents of Bavaria, Hessen, or Brandenburg, and who generally eat the food from their own part of the world. Night fell at half past four in the afternoon, but fortunately there was always room for him at the inn, in every town and village he passed through.
Berlin, Hauptbahnhof, detail
I am that Dutch author and my journey took place during what we in the Netherlands call the “dark days” before Christmas. Every one of the newspapers I read on my travels talked about the worst crisis since 1945, as though it had not been preceded by something far worse. The forecasts were gloomy and the weather outside the train windows was attempting to match the melancholy of the stock market and the money. And yet, at the market in Berlin where I buy my vegetables, everyone wished me a happy first day of Advent, a wish that is not common in the Netherlands, but which put me in a gently euphoric mood.
Everywhere I went, there were Christmas markets, with Glühwein and lots of light, as though everyone wanted to gather as much light as possible for the dark times that would soon be upon us, the Armageddon of the last days, the final catastrophe, which would wash over all five continents in a storm flood, with no lifeboats.
Maybe it was because everyone is so nice to you on reading tours, but I simply could not work myself into a gloomy frame of mind. I once watched a video of the Englis
h painter Francis Bacon. He was slightly tipsy, the interview took place in a gay bar in England, and the interviewer was trying hard to discover the life credo of this painter, who is known for the dark, sometimes almost cannibalistic themes of some of his paintings. As an admirer of his work, I too was waiting with bated breath for the magic words that would bring relief—you really want to know what kind of mentality it is that drives someone to produce works that are so extreme and brutal, yet also so fantastically well painted. The moment when, after much insistence, Bacon finally answered the increasingly desperate interviewer was an unforgettable one, or at least it was for me. Theatrically, he tilted back his head so the light caught his face—painters know about such things—and he crowed (there is no other word for it) into the camera, “I believe in nothing! I’m an optimist.”
Since then, this paradox has been my motto, one that serves me well in this dark season. Cold fog in Hamburg, the first flurries of snow in Berlin, melancholic forests around Frankfurt, frost on the fields of Idar-Oberstein, drizzle over the straw-colored landscape along the Elbe—I stored all of these images in my inner archive, but it seemed that I was determined to find everything magnificent. The Deutsche Bahn stole through forests and mountains; I read my work and signed books, sat in lonely hotel rooms watching Steinbrück and Merkel and the others who were weaving a huge safety net to catch all of Germany. They were greatly hindered by an impetuous French juggler and an English grocer who had managed the finances of his island kingdom for years and yet had not seen the crisis coming, a crisis that he himself had helped to create with his policies, while a banker from Bavaria, who had just narrowly avoided bankruptcy, thought he was the only one with better schemes for preventing the certain ruin of the entire country.
If you are constantly travelling, you cannot take a Christmas tree along with you. And so I decided to decorate my own virtual Christmas tree with the images I had gathered on my wintery tour, images that had given me cheer during those dark days. Firstly, there was the large black man in Idar-Oberstein, a figure from a book of fairy tales. It was raining in Idar-Oberstein. Writers on reading tours may be compared to souls in Purgatory. They are waiting for the rest of eternity to arrive, without knowing quite how to fill their days until that happy moment. By doing penance, of course, but provincial hotels are not really equipped for such purposes. Yesterday’s reading in Birkenfeld was over, the audience had been quiet and attentive, I had spoken without a microphone, no one had coughed, and now I was free to walk down the high street of this gemstone town and peruse the window displays of opals and sapphires as though all of these treasures belonged to me. Suddenly I heard loud voices speaking a language I did not recognize; it sounded like singing. I walked over and found that these voices belonged to three black kings who had arrived too early for their appointment, one of them wearing a long robe in the liturgical color of Advent, the superlative form of purple. It cast a blinding glow over the entire rainy street.
Schlossbrücke, Berlin Mitte
Maybe they had just sold a bag of precious stones from their bloody homelands, but they were in high spirits, their voices resounding in the cold winter air, and I decided to hang them on my Christmas tree as a point of light.
The next morning, still in Purgatory, I was walking along the Main in Frankfurt, on my way to the Städel to see the exhibition “Der Meister von Flémalle und Rogier van der Weyden.”
There is something peculiarly touching about those paintings. You look back over more than five centuries at people wearing the same bright colors as that man in Idar-Oberstein, telling a story that has occupied the world for some two thousand years. A man with wings and Flemish features, who probably, like all people from Flanders, speaks my language, has suddenly appeared in this small room and is delivering a message to a woman who has sat on the floor in shock or joy. The woman too has a Flemish face, full of radiant beauty. He is bowing reverently and delivering his mysterious message: she will be the mother of God.
We have heard this story so often that, whether we are religious or not, the immensity of what he is saying no longer hits us. The sound of those wings, the sudden physical presence of the bird-man in the snug, bright, Flemish interior. It is no wonder that the woman, confronted by the sight of so much heaven, has sought the proximity of the earth and fallen to the floor in her full, richly colored dress with its fantastically painted folds. I hang that angel and all those other colorful, magical creatures hanging on my Christmas tree.
That evening at the Literaturhaus in Frankfurt there is lots of rowdy coughing—perhaps Birkenfeld is a healthier place to live—but I travel on to Göttingen and read, in a large attic full of serious faces, about my first journeys and the Spanish island where I live in the summer and about my neighbors’ donkey. The following morning, I go to an exhibition about the brilliant scholar Albrecht von Haller, who once studied in the Netherlands, in Leiden, and looked more deeply into the human body than anyone before his time. I gaze at the flowers he mounted in his herbarium almost three hundred years ago, flowers that once bloomed in an age without cars, when the world was still quiet. I thank the old botanist, and add his flowers to my tree.
At the end of that week, my German tour is over. I read in Lüneburg, walk down the quayside at night, along the still, mysterious water. Someone comes to pick me up the next morning. Not far from Gorleben, I see motionless human figures standing in the fields and on the roadside. They are deceptively real, as though someone stopped the film when they were working in their fields. They are designed to express the local people’s fear of the radioactive waste that is going to be stored in the ground here and is now hanging as a threat over the daily lives of these people.
That same evening, I travel back to the Middle Ages. Some friends of mine live near the castle of the von Bernstorff family, and the count is going to dress up as Santa Claus and address the local children. Everything looks like a painting by Brueghel. Open fires are crackling, and festoons of lights lend luster to the dark night. Candles glow in the windows of the simple pink castle. The children push forward and the count speaks to them first from the balcony, flanked by two angels, figures of light from another world; it would not surprise me if they suddenly flew away over the market stalls and the expectant crowd, who have to step aside for a tractor pulling a trailer bringing another regiment of winged beings. At that moment, the music begins: a group of older men and boys with trombones and trumpets. I can see their faces in the light of the torches, red, with chilled, round cheeks from all that blowing, small puffs of white among the gleaming copper as they draw breath, and I hang that image too on my imaginary Christmas tree, which I now throw over my shoulder before heading off through the other Christmas trees to the stand where two men with faces by Rogier van der Weyden are serving up hot lemon punch with honey liqueur. My reading tour is at an end and, together with my invisible tree, I can disappear into the merry crowd, which, like me, has sought light in this darkness, and found it.
December 19, 2008
1 In response to the Berlin Blockade (June 24, 1948–May 12, 1949), during which the Soviet Union blocked the railway, road and canal routes into those areas of the city under Allied control, the Western Allies organized the Berlin Airlift, delivering necessities such as food and fuel in more than 200,000 flights over the course of eleven months.
2 Lost Paradise, translated by Susan Massotty (London: Harvill Secker; New York: Grove Press, 2007).
3 What our calculations fail to solve, we refer to as chance.
4 Self-portrait of an Other, translated by David Colmer, with drawings by Max Neumann (Chicago/London/Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012).
5 The Knight Has Died, translated by Adrienne Dixon (Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
PART IV
A VISIT TO THE CHANCELLOR
The rate of change is inconceivable. Il tempo invecchia in fretta (Time ages rapidly), the title of Antonio Tabucchi’s last book, best expresses what is happening around us, but p
erhaps that speed can also be measured by the change in the color of the jackets that the Bundes-kanzler wears at summit after summit, among the somber suits of her male colleagues. Carefully camouflaged turbulence is the political watchword, designed to allay the turmoil in markets, minds and parties. If, like me, you have kept clippings from European newspapers over the past year, you can attempt in retrospect to catch up with that velocity and turbulence, but it is sure to make you giddy. “Thinking through the unthinkable,” writes the clairvoyant Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, who predicted the extent of the current crisis some years ago. “Barroso openly fears end of the euro,” says De Volkskrant of November 17, 2011. “Mario Monti presents a cabinet of professors.” “Merkel and Sarkozy clash over treaty revisions.” And then the Financial Times again: “The steely headmistress with Europe in her thrall.” According to my dictionary, “thrall” means “bondage, servitude, captivity,” and this assessment of Merkel’s powers is polite in comparison with what you can sometimes hear in Greece, Spain or Italy. Such opinions are not without a certain malicious and theatrical charm.
Roads to Berlin Page 32