I was in Berlin on Saturday (22nd) to celebrate L _’s 50th birthday, her life and the excellence of her work, and the warmth she brings to this great city. Here are two pieces to accompany the celebrations of that day.
1. mit tram haften Aussichten
Blank vertical
sheathed in plastic
rises into the morning sky.
One rectangular sheet
flaps in the wind
as if left out by her.
2. Verrückheit ohne Traurigkeit
Between the lines
and simplified curves,
dead ends, and cold dark surfaces,
The disc grinder tune
plays into the greater day,
the hammer on metal hammering.
FOOT NOTES
1. mit tram haften Aussichten
Waking early that Saturday I looked at these words on a large sign on the opposite side of Alexanderplatz across an “empty landscape”, a huge rectangular pit the size of several football pitches (i) . Then that night I sat between two women who both live in Berlin, and we talked about the great city, and also about the writer Joseph Roth (ii) , and it triggered a memory of something Roth had written about another space he had once found in Berlin, one he called a place of ‘life-bringing warmth and benediction of movement’ (iii) .
(i) An “empty landscape” is one way I remember growing up in England after the war. Sometimes in the school playground we would call the very thin children ‘Belsen’, and I do not recall our teachers, parents, or other adults ever reprimanding us. Then before coming to Berlin, I reread the text of the Hannah Arendt Prize lecture given by Tony Judt in Bremen in 2007. It was called The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe, and Judt too, a Jew growing up in England after the war also remembers the absence of any discussion on the topic.
(ii) Actually, I made a muddle in what I said. I confused the name of Roth’s passionate translator into English, Michael Hofmann, with that other poet and great translator, Michael Hamburger, who died in 2007. But by good fortune, my mess-up helped our conversations interweave.
(iii) ‘Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction’, Frankfurter Zeitung, July 16, 1924
Joseph Roth, What I Saw , Reports from Berlin 1920-33, tr Michael Hofmann, Granta Books, London, 2003, Pp 105-8.
2. Verrückheit ohne Traurigkeit
During the day on Saturday, as many first-time visitors to Berlin do, I went to the Jüdische Museum (i) , and standing alone at the base of the Holocaust Tower, the click of the door shutting behind me filled me with fear and dread (ii) . A moment of madness, but I felt no sadness, it was another “empty landscape”, and only that night as an accordion was haltingly played did my un-warm memory recall the ‘disc grinder tune’ (iii) , which I had heard earlier in the day.
(i) Daniel Liebeskind monumental Holocaust construction for the museum continues to draw controversy and fuel debate. ‘Between the Lines’ was the name Liebeskind gave to the project and describes the way he intends the building to show the Shoah, the attempted genocide of the Jews of Europe.
(ii) I wonder if my experience in the Holocaust Tower was an instance of ‘saming’. My fear and dread was not the same as the experience of being in a gas chamber, of course it was not. One of the keenest theorist's of saming was the late Naomi Schaor. ‘If othering involves attributing to the objectified other a difference that serves to legitimate her oppression’, she observed in a feminist context, ‘ saming denies the objectified other the right to her difference’. In the museum’s effort to be universally translatable, some of those differences which we find unpleasant and especially disturbing may be being excluded.
(iii) The ‘disc grinder tune’ is the music of the building site, and that huge rectangular pit the size of several football pitches in Alexanderplatz, and I was reminded of the gypsy bands of eastern Europe, and the music of the Ostjüden, perhaps those from Galicia where Roth was born, or from further East. ‘The hammer on metal hammering’ is also the music of the building site, that hard, harsh beat akin to a porteño tango from the port area of Buenos Aires, or further West.
Into an “empty landscape” she brings life-bringing warmth and benediction of movement, and rays of colour into this great city.
mmj