I.
Yesterday morning, I walked down Ku'damm in the direction of ringing churchbells, towards Breitscheidplatz. At the Gedächtniskirche, I found layered memories of violence; against the brutal grid wall of the new church were laid hundreds of red votive candles, flags, bouquets of limp tulips, photos of the victims, one sign with one word: WARUM?
Inside, Easter service was just starting. Above the congregation loomed glass walls of royal blue with abstract dabs of red, green, and yellow. I had the strange sensation of sitting underwater, under the sea, peering through the dim at schools of fish. Above the altar, a golden Jesus, arms outstretched, seemed to launch himself in perpetuity off a diving board for our sins.
I surfaced to find the Easter market stirring and probably little different from the Christmas market it had replaced. Large wooden eggs and larger concrete barricades had been placed at intervals. Four sad-eyed, drooping ponies plodded round and round an excruciatingly small track. Again and again, always the same, for them and for us.
II.
"Berlin's always been good for me," I thought before I left; and yet I hardly feel like the same person that I was when I was last here. In the summer of 2012, I pedaled across the city every morning as though moving with each rotation towards more than my office. I then set goals in terms of what I had to prove to one person in particular. It's been a long time now since I've realized the uselessness of that particular exercise - it was more like shoveling sand into a sinkhole - and, more to the point, how narrowly I'd defined my terms. (The world is full of people to be proved wrong.)
III.
I am staying in a lovely old house built by Albert Gessner in the Jugendstil, a sort of German Art Nouveau, built just after the turn of the last century. One walks through cursive gates under a vaulted passage to an interior courtyard, which is protected by the state and periodically visited by troops of architecture students. Yellow stucco walls are hung with green vines, and I can hear the plash of the fountain from my room. Here and in buildings nearby, Gessner intended to show that city living could be both sophisticated and salutary, and the garden was an integral part of the romance of the place.
This apartment has high ceilings, well-proportioned rooms, and the throwaway sophistication of the successful creative professional: never trying too hard, walls of books and movies and records, neither the uptight modernism nor the gilded surfaces of the rich. (As someone who will never travel by public bus in India, let alone by motorbike across Afghanistan, I'm always admiring the sorts of people who do, or who decorate like they might have done.) In the impoverished lexicon of modern journalism, we'd probably call it #apartmentgoals.
I write at a desk in front of a double-paned arched window. Outside, the leaves of an immense chestnut tree periodically shudder in the hail. The clouds clear and return again.
IV.
Seven former residents (Margarete Bayer, Abraham and Anna Fanny Isaacsohn, Clara Lehman, Sally Putschinski, and Berthold Magner) are memorialized by stolpersteine just outside the entrance. One of the oldest, Abraham, would have been about my age (37) when this building was finished, and apparently had lived here for over a decade. Berthold, the youngest by far, killed himself at age 30 rather than be deported, just a little over 76 years ago (April 12, 1941). (The German phrasing for suicide is light and lyrical and melancholy as the flight of a bird: flucht in den tod.) Of Margarete the stone shows only the date of her deportation (1941) and the fact that she wound up in Minsk, probably the so-called Ghetto Hamburg for Jews deported from Germany. (Again and again, and always the sour falsity of the word: "emigration.") Online information suggests that she was either a sub-tenant or a servant of Abraham and Anna. I always wonder about these people in particular, the people living alone without families, and whether the experience of deportation was even more frightening, more disorienting. It is perhaps better to resist the trend to personalize history; but then I sometimes wish that we might personalize it even more, might extend our empathy a little farther, might imagine the names on the stones, the figures in the old photos, and the faces we now see in the news, as people no less than us - as inhabiters of apartments, once.
Yesterday morning, I walked down Ku'damm in the direction of ringing churchbells, towards Breitscheidplatz. At the Gedächtniskirche, I found layered memories of violence; against the brutal grid wall of the new church were laid hundreds of red votive candles, flags, bouquets of limp tulips, photos of the victims, one sign with one word: WARUM?
Inside, Easter service was just starting. Above the congregation loomed glass walls of royal blue with abstract dabs of red, green, and yellow. I had the strange sensation of sitting underwater, under the sea, peering through the dim at schools of fish. Above the altar, a golden Jesus, arms outstretched, seemed to launch himself in perpetuity off a diving board for our sins.
I surfaced to find the Easter market stirring and probably little different from the Christmas market it had replaced. Large wooden eggs and larger concrete barricades had been placed at intervals. Four sad-eyed, drooping ponies plodded round and round an excruciatingly small track. Again and again, always the same, for them and for us.
II.
"Berlin's always been good for me," I thought before I left; and yet I hardly feel like the same person that I was when I was last here. In the summer of 2012, I pedaled across the city every morning as though moving with each rotation towards more than my office. I then set goals in terms of what I had to prove to one person in particular. It's been a long time now since I've realized the uselessness of that particular exercise - it was more like shoveling sand into a sinkhole - and, more to the point, how narrowly I'd defined my terms. (The world is full of people to be proved wrong.)
III.
I am staying in a lovely old house built by Albert Gessner in the Jugendstil, a sort of German Art Nouveau, built just after the turn of the last century. One walks through cursive gates under a vaulted passage to an interior courtyard, which is protected by the state and periodically visited by troops of architecture students. Yellow stucco walls are hung with green vines, and I can hear the plash of the fountain from my room. Here and in buildings nearby, Gessner intended to show that city living could be both sophisticated and salutary, and the garden was an integral part of the romance of the place.
This apartment has high ceilings, well-proportioned rooms, and the throwaway sophistication of the successful creative professional: never trying too hard, walls of books and movies and records, neither the uptight modernism nor the gilded surfaces of the rich. (As someone who will never travel by public bus in India, let alone by motorbike across Afghanistan, I'm always admiring the sorts of people who do, or who decorate like they might have done.) In the impoverished lexicon of modern journalism, we'd probably call it #apartmentgoals.
I write at a desk in front of a double-paned arched window. Outside, the leaves of an immense chestnut tree periodically shudder in the hail. The clouds clear and return again.
IV.
Seven former residents (Margarete Bayer, Abraham and Anna Fanny Isaacsohn, Clara Lehman, Sally Putschinski, and Berthold Magner) are memorialized by stolpersteine just outside the entrance. One of the oldest, Abraham, would have been about my age (37) when this building was finished, and apparently had lived here for over a decade. Berthold, the youngest by far, killed himself at age 30 rather than be deported, just a little over 76 years ago (April 12, 1941). (The German phrasing for suicide is light and lyrical and melancholy as the flight of a bird: flucht in den tod.) Of Margarete the stone shows only the date of her deportation (1941) and the fact that she wound up in Minsk, probably the so-called Ghetto Hamburg for Jews deported from Germany. (Again and again, and always the sour falsity of the word: "emigration.") Online information suggests that she was either a sub-tenant or a servant of Abraham and Anna. I always wonder about these people in particular, the people living alone without families, and whether the experience of deportation was even more frightening, more disorienting. It is perhaps better to resist the trend to personalize history; but then I sometimes wish that we might personalize it even more, might extend our empathy a little farther, might imagine the names on the stones, the figures in the old photos, and the faces we now see in the news, as people no less than us - as inhabiters of apartments, once.
No comments:
Post a Comment