by Hari Kunzru
Dr. Weber occupied what must have once been a reception room on the house’s second floor, a high-ceilinged space with French doors that led out onto an expansive balcony with a view over the lake. We found him reading the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung behind a large and meticulously tidy desk, dramatically framed against an antique Chinese screen with pictures of ladies crossing a bridge. He stood up to greet me and said several effusive things about honor and pleasure and I managed to stumble through a sentence about the Center’s scenic location and my gratitude at being chosen as a fellow. As we executed our conversational duties, my attention was drawn to a gnarled hunk of stone about the size of an upended shoebox, sitting on an ornate rosewood plinth on the mantel. Dr. Weber followed my eyeline, and informed me, with a collector’s relish, that it was a “scholar’s rock,” a piece of limestone from Guangdong, naturally sculpted by erosion. For centuries, he said, such rocks had been prized as objects of contemplation. Aficionados cultivated the ability to perform a sort of mental or spiritual wandering, imagining the complex surfaces as fully realized landscapes that they could pass through and explore.
“Of course I am too old to travel now.”
I was surprised by this melancholy remark, for Dr. Weber was lean and tan and exuded the offensive good health of a competitive cyclist. I didn’t know how best to respond. Ought I to assure him that, really, he was a man in peak condition, or instead nod sympathetically?
“They say it looks like a certain mountain shrouded in mist. I’m afraid I can never remember which mountain.”
I still had no response. Finding himself at a social impasse, the old diplomat deftly retraced his steps and drew my attention to a little brush painting, placed on an easel by his desk. I had the feeling that, if he thought he could get away with it, he would show me his entire collection, piece by piece. There were a number of figurines and small jade pieces on a coffee table near the window. A tall vase guarded the door. Directing the Deuter Center was, I imagined, a prestigious but untaxing job, a reward for something or other, maintaining or defending some part of the establishment. What did Dr. Weber do, now he’d finished doing whatever it was he’d done before? Maybe he just spent his days at his desk, wandering through imaginary landscapes.
I had lived much of my life in London, was that correct? Yes I had.
“But your parents were from India.”
“My father’s Indian. My mother’s English. I moved to New York to do a doctorate at Columbia.”
“What in?”
“Comp. Lit.—comparative literature.”
“You didn’t mention this on your application.”
“Well, I didn’t actually complete it. I kind of went off on my own.”
“I see, but you are going back now. I’m surprised you aren’t writing about Indian poetry.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s your culture.”
His face was completely bland. I didn’t think he meant it as an insult, or a way to question my credentials. It was impossible to tell. I said something about not believing in the idea of national literature. He nodded.
“I understand, and personally I am a great supporter of German poetry. But, well, we have so many scholars of German poetry.”
“I wanted to talk about the, uh, Workspace.”
“Yes, Frau Janowitz mentioned this. However I am unable to help you. The terms of the fellowship are strict. We cannot deviate from our founder’s instructions.”
After that our meeting petered out. He told me that he hoped I’d be comfortable for the rest of my stay, and would make full use of the facilities, perceptibly weighting the phrase “full use,” so it sounded like a reprimand, a reminder of a standard that I had not met.
I spent the rest of the morning in my room, arranging books and papers and answering email, preparing myself to go down to the Communal Workspace. After a while, I realized I was staring at a table that was bare but for an open laptop, a small pile of books and a fresh cup of coffee. Everything was in order. I had made it ready for writing, but I wasn’t supposed to write there, on that perfectly good pine table, sitting on that perfectly comfortable chair. I was not supposed to drink that coffee. It seemed like a waste.
I decided to go for a walk.
I set off down the villa’s long driveway and out into the street, crunching along an icy path past iron gates and high fences, behind which I caught glimpses of imposing houses in various styles: a white modernist villa, a fantastical gothic castle, just as tasteless as it must have been when it was built, the pride of some Wilhelmine brewer or mill owner. Security cameras poked over hedges, watching me as I loitered. Many of these old family summer houses were now institutions (a security consultancy, a think tank) or belonged to diplomatic missions. Here were the Saudis, there the Colombians. On the side of the street facing the water, the buildings were immense. On the other, denied the lake view, they were more modest. In some cases, you could tell that grounds and gardens had been sold to developers, so that low-rise apartment blocks adjoined older, larger structures. This denser housing seemed like a relic of a vanishing democratic era, litters of suburban middle-class piglets importunately nuzzling oligarchic sows. Two decades into the twenty-first century and we were back in the time of the big houses. Soon the apartment blocks would be bought up and scraped away, the popular incursion brought to an end.
The border of the old summer colony was marked by a wide road, running parallel to a railway: weathered brick walls and wire fencing. The station platforms, visible through the chain link, were marked by signs lettered in Gothic Fraktur. A café was the only unshuttered shop in a dismal parade. Berlin-Wannsee, on the main line heading east, towards Poland. A characterless bust of Bismarck, many times life-size, was planted on a plinth behind the bus stop. Executed in some kind of pale friable stone, the old chancellor’s worn face was now completely without expression, hanging above the commuters like a blank Prussian moon. Slippery steps led down beside him to a wide concrete promenade that faced commercial piers with barred gates. Ferries hibernated alongside them, waiting for the season to start in May. Large boards advertised summer routes round the lake and through various waterways into the city center. It was hard to imagine that pleasure trips could ever start from such a bleak place. The devastation of winter was absolute, as if the lake were enchanted. The ticket office was shuttered, the water half-frozen, a gray jelly lapping trash at the jetties.
I walked down a path by a neck of water that led me into the relative warmth of a space under a road bridge. On the far side were several crude shelters, presumably built by homeless people. As I watched, a figure crawled out of a tent and squatted to empty a plastic bottle of liquid into the water. The figure—a man, I was fairly certain—stood up, as if watching me. It was too far away to see a face, but I felt the force of the attention directed towards me, the uncomfortable sensation of contact with a stranger.
My face was beginning to feel numb, and though my feet were dry, they were uncomfortably cold. I thought about turning back, but I have an aversion to reversing direction on a walk. When you’re going back somewhere, it is hard to think of anything but the destination. You fall out of the present, into a strange state that is a blend of anticipation and recollection, a blend of the future and the past. You see for a second time the landmarks on the route you’re retracing, and drift to thinking of the routine you’ll follow when you get back home. Onwards is always better. And so I went on, emerging from under the bridge, passing a boatyard and another bus stop into a little interstitial space on the far side of the road, a not-quite park that contained a few trees and some municipally tamed brambles. On the other side I found a cobbled street running next to the railway. I followed it and found myself in another part of the old summer colony, passing again through its distinctive streetscape of villas, bathed in the stealthy aura of money.
Kleistgrab, said a sign. The Kleist grave. The site was a wedge of land between an ugly white stucco mansion and a rowing club’s boathouse. From the street you could see an undulating path, and a sort of hump or small hill topped by a stone marker. It seemed like good fortune to stumble upon a famous writer, so close to where I’d come to work, but I couldn’t help wishing it were someone else. I didn’t care for the work of Heinrich von Kleist, and what I knew about his life didn’t inspire sympathy. If the shade of a writer was going to hang over my time in Berlin, it ought to have been one of the great calming Germans: Rilke, walking inside his own vast solitude and meeting no one for hours; Hölderlin, whose very madness was stately and canonical, the gold standard of Romantic insanity. Goethe would have been ideal. Kleist, on the other hand, was a hysteric, a writer of jarring plays and fragmented stories full of hectic action, battles and earthquakes and psychic shocks. And now I had run into him, only a short walk away from my desk. When it comes to my work, I have certain—what to call them? Not quite superstitions, something more than habits. I cannot, for example, ignore chance encounters. It is a sort of method. It is the way my mind has always worked.
I walked down towards the grave. Somehow, it came as no surprise to find that the inscription on the stone ended in an exclamation mark:
Nun o Unsterblichkeit bist du ganz mein!
Now, O immortality, you are all mine! The scream of someone who has grasped for something and achieved it, who has made a grand gesture—that being, in Kleist’s case, suicide, or more precisely a suicide pact with a woman named Henriette Vogel. Picking my way carefully over the icy path, I wandered back towards the road to read the text on a board placed at the site by the tourist authority. It seemed that Kleist chose as his death partner not a lover, as I’d always assumed, but someone described as “a social acquaintance,” and “the wife of a friend,” phrases that captured precisely nothing about what it takes for two people in their thirties to go to an inn by a lake, then walk out to the shore and shoot themselves dead.
Or rather he shot her, and then himself. Her name was on the grave, but it was the Kleistgrab. Her death was merely an ornament to his. Is that how the two of them understood it? The magician and his assistant? They did it in November. It must have been very cold. I certainly felt cold. An insidious mist rose up off the lake, seeping through my jacket into the fibers of my sweater. Enough of Kleist. I turned and walked back along the main road, gradually upping my pace. Fast, to get warm. Faster. Kleist! It would have to be Kleist. He’d proposed it to others, before Henriette. She was just the one who said yes.
That evening, after a long hot shower, I walked down to the water, crossing the wide sloping lawn and passing through a gate that led onto the dock. Next to the villa was a little boathouse, the property of a local boat club, and a slipway that led back up to the road. The vessels moored there were all small sailing yachts, most shrouded in canvas for the winter, the largest no longer than twenty feet or so. There wasn’t much to see. A few lights on the other side of the lake, near the Wannsee Conference house.
I ate another solitary dinner at the table by the window. The waiter greeted me cordially, and warned me that I should be careful on the dock, as it was icy and badly lit. I thanked him, slightly surprised that I’d been observed. As he served me soup, I stared absentmindedly around the room, thinking of nothing in particular but the food. I noticed a camera, mounted high on the wall near Herr Deuter’s portrait. There was also a motion sensor, which blinked red each time the waiter crossed the room back to the kitchen. Despite myself I became slightly self-conscious about the way I was eating. I dabbed at my lips with a napkin. I found myself sweeping away breadcrumbs from the table cloth, making sure my soup spoon was aligned correctly in the empty bowl.
Pleasantly tired, I climbed the stairs to my room. It was a relief to close the door behind me. The little garret felt welcoming, even cozy, and at last I managed to do some work. I’ve always liked to stay up late, writing by lamplight. It is good to be in a quiet place, to have a cone of illumination that I can fill with my thoughts. I could hear the usual small noises of a big house, and the tiny metallic clink of the boats at anchor, a ghostly rattle of chains that made the lake half-present in the room, its cold gray water lapping round the legs of my chair.
I wanted to start my book with an essay on the Goethe lyric known as “Wanderer’s Nightsong II.” Eight simple lines, some of the most celebrated and perfect in German, written by the poet on the wall of a mountain hut in Thuringia and copied down by his friends. There is a “you” in the poem, who feels a profound calm descend over the peaks. The birds fall silent in the trees. Everything is Ruh, a deep and ancient word, rooted in the Iron Age. It is the word for the absence of sound, but also for spiritual rest. The poem ends:
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
Just wait, soon you too will grow Ruh. And suddenly the poem is not about the weather, or the time of day, or some chance atmospheric phenomenon of the mountains, but about death.
There is a speaker in Goethe’s poem, someone who tells the reader about the mountains and the treetops and the birds. What interested me was the person the poem was talking to, the “you” who would soon be at peace. If I were a poet who went for a walk and was reminded of my mortality, the obvious thing would be to write “I.” “I heard the birds fall silent, it made me think of death…” But instead there was this “you.” Who was addressed? Was it Goethe talking to himself? To a lover? Some hill-walking poet friend? Eventually I stopped scratching at my pad, no longer thinking about “the turning away of lyric utterance from the world,” “the subject contemplating itself,” or any of the other important-sounding literary-critical phrases whose significance was just then escaping me. For the first time in however many readings of the poem, I understood it, or perhaps I should say I felt it, physically experienced its meaning as a small cold pebble in my stomach. The “you” was me. Me in particular. I too would fall into silence. I would die.
AT BREAKFAST, I saw signs that other people had eaten before me. The empty cups and cereal bowls triggered all my most misanthropic impulses. Furtively, I looked around for a tray. When I couldn’t find one, I filled my pockets with fruit and bread rolls and carried a precariously piled plate and a mug of coffee out of the dining room. As I was climbing the stairs, the friendly porter, Otto or Ulli, emerged from his lodge. He frowned at the plate of food I was carrying, as if he wanted to say something.
“You are going back to your room to eat?”
“Yes. Why?”
“No reason. Please, go ahead.”
Upstairs I pushed back the books and papers on my desk to make room for my breakfast. As I ate, I looked at the notes I’d made on “Wanderer’s Nightsong II.” They did not seem useful. By day, the poem might as well have been a shopping list. I sat for a long time with my coffee, looking out of the window at the lake. Not sure how to proceed, I listened to an old radio play by the French writer Georges Perec, called The Machine. It had been broadcast in 1968, when the new discipline of cybernetics, which promised to regulate and mechanize all sorts of messy human activities, seemed to be ushering in a sinister and rather antiseptic future. The play imagined a computer that had been programmed to perform endless algorithmic operations on the words of “Wanderer’s Nightsong II.” Recorded in German, the actors enunciated with robotic formality. The machine’s “controller” had a female voice, and the three “processors” sounded male. They recited the poem at various speeds, omitting, shuffling, doubling and negating lines, adding and removing syllables and eventually rewriting the text in various styles (epic, comic) and adding extra material to explode it into “encyclopedic diversification.” Despite the computer’s fancy voice interface, it also seemed to be necessary to press buttons and feed punch cards into a slot, like operating a nineteen-sixties mainframe. As drama the play was a failure, but all the same I lis
tened intently. Perec’s wit disguised a deep anxiety. He was performing a sort of autopsy of the poem, hunting for something among its entrails. Logically, if you’re afraid of death, you must feel you have something to lose. Perec was frantically shuffling the words of the poem, looking for this special something. By night I thought I’d found it. Now I could have taken a scalpel to my deepest feelings, and cut and cut until I was left with nothing but scraps.
That night I went down to dinner and found that my table by the window had been pushed together with another table and covered in a white cloth. A candle had been lit. Four place settings were laid around a small floral arrangement. Staring at those four place settings, I felt a twinge of panic. I had, in some way, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Deuter Center. There would be no meditative solitude. If I wanted to eat, I would have regular and unavoidable company at the end of every day. I was, admittedly, “on a fellowship,” and there is no getting round the incontrovertibly social meaning of that word. I’d even been sent some kind of list, though of course I hadn’t read it. Suddenly, the thought of human interaction was horrifying.
As if summoned from the pit, my three companions entered the room. I had the completely unfounded suspicion that they’d been watching me from the library, an oak-paneled den on the other side of the hall. I backed towards the row of windows that looked out onto the lake, baring my teeth in a fake smile. It was a terrible, brittle situation. It was like a scene from a violent computer game.
We made introductions and sat down. Finlay, the young black American art critic, shot his cuffs and offered me his smooth dry hand. He was a formally dressed bird, pecking at the table, arranging his feathers and fixing his beady eye. He said almost nothing during the meal, surreptitiously checking his phone. He’d been at the Deuter Center for two months, and I formed the impression of a man in the trenches, a survivor of some heavy bombardment. He seemed on good terms with Laetitia, the elderly scholar of Chinese, who had the same shell-shocked fragility. A tiny Frenchwoman, possibly Eurasian, with an evident weakness for silver jewelry, she fussed agitatedly, almost knocking over a glass of water with a trembling bangled hand. The big guns belonged to Edgar the Neurophilosopher, an Endowed Chair in his sixties with the air of a prosperous pirate. He sported—that would be the word—a spade-like salt-and-pepper beard and had a physical bulk that somehow factored itself into the intellectual reckoning, as if his immense body were some kind of sign or metaphor for his mind. His every word and movement conveyed an overbearing practicality: a man like a hammer looking for a nail. He took an arch and combative tone with me, firing off questions, playfully letting on that he suspected there was more to me than met the eye.