Cast in Stone

with Oblique–Postscript. Zwischen. Past & Present
an artwork by Abrie Fourie

Climbing the spiral path to the top of Birkenkopf, I pass through the stench of rotting fruit, over bloody plums, along a parapet of stone. Are they plums? Perhaps damsons, a European fruit. The trees are birch, fir and oak, and the forest floor is leafy with plants whose names I do not know, they could be ferns or sedges. Then fragments of stone appear beside the pathway, chiselled white edges thrusting up through leaves and needles. As I reach the summit and the horizon flattens, I pass through a cutting, and now there is obvious rubble on either side, blocks of stone and shattered columns. On the right, a chunk of reddish brick and mortar, which looks as if it was broken off the end of a house; on the left, a commemorative plaque, guarded by what might once have been an eagle, very weathered or more likely vandalised for mementos, debeaked.

DIESER BERG
NACH DEM ZWEITEN WELTKRIEG
AUFGETÜRMT AUS DEM
TRÜMMERN DER STADT
STEHT
DEN OPFERN ZUM GEDÄCHTNIS
DEN LEBENDEN ZUR MAHNUNG

Here, on the outskirts of Stuttgart, I am standing on its ruined heart. In the Second World War, Allied bombers reduced half of Stuttgart to ruins. When rebuilding began, it was decided to dump the rubble on top of Birkenkopf. Between 1953 and 1957, 1.5 million cubic metres of rubble were moved to the hill, raising it by 40 metres. Over the decades since, vegetation has been allowed to cover part of the mound, but by design the alteration of the natural landscape is still apparent. Exposed stones, columns and pediments are piled around. A broad clearing contains a simple wooden cross in memory of the 4,500 people who died in the city during the War. Clambering about to look at a rosette carved in stone, I see strategic iron bars, rusted now, cemented to hold in place some fragments that may one day topple over. Swabian foresight. I put my hand down on the same spot as thousands before me and notice that the carving has nearly been effaced. It is vanishing like the relief on a much-used coin. This is one form of attrition the makers of the memorial could not have foreseen: a horde of tourists in trainers and hiking boots, all seeking the best vantage point for a photograph. The clash between past and present strikes me often in Germany, but it has never been starker: here on the hill, a crumbling monument to waste and defeat, and spread out in the valley below, the moneyed, modern city. The roar of traffic is constant, steadier than an ocean.

A thought on the way up: surely the workmen came to bodies in the rubble. Some remains may even have been excavated and transported here inadvertently. Elena Carmagnani’s essay on the history of Birkenkopf makes no mention of human remains, but it would be surprising if this graveyard contained no more than the bones of buildings.^[1]

Graffiti everywhere. Stuttgart’s youths having their say. Litter everywhere too, mainly party debris: cigarette butts, Red Bull tins and alcopop bottles, ring pulls, bottle tops, plastic straws, aluminium-foil lids from yoghurt tubs, tissues, condoms. And the overpowering, nauseating smell of rotten fruit.

While I’m picking around among the stones, a long screech of tyres and a distant bang. The roar goes on.

Nearly all the exposed rubble is stone—columns, pediments, large blocks, decorative panels, friezes. Presumably it came mainly from public buildings. This gives the ruins an imperial air, a Roman attitude, congruent with the Third Reich’s grandiose ambitions. Were these fragments left exposed because they would weather better and serve as a more enduring reminder? Or because they more closely captured the idea of diminished power?

I hunt in vain for inscriptions, for names or dates on broken cornerstones. Perhaps markers such as these were buried purposely.

There is a toposcope, but countless visitors have put a forefinger down on the names of the landmarks and worn them away. The map is unreadable. Without its help, I locate the Hauptbahnhof and Schlossplatz, my orientation points in the city centre.

Before I go down, I transcribe the inscription on the plaque.

This mountain
piled up out of
the ruins of the city
after the Second World War
stands
in memory of the victims
as a reminder to the living

The red-brick masonry catches my eye again. It is the only rubble that looks domestic to me, that evokes a dwelling, a home. However, observing the city streets more closely in the following weeks, I see much more stone than brick. The Birkenkopf memorial-makers had the measure of the place after all.

*

Piranesi’s world is grand, labyrinthine, vast, but also ruined and cluttered. The people in the streets, among the monumental buildings, are small and tattered. Their coats are ragged, in ruins, like everything else. Many of them carry staffs. These are very long and thin, not walking sticks but needles, taller than themselves. They lean on these poles tiredly. Occasionally, in works like Veduta di Campo Vaccino (1772), one of the little people uses their pole to point to some monument or architectural detail. Their tricornes are also triangular pointers, little arrowheads. That’s what many of the people in the pictures are doing—looking at the world, pointing at it. Their function in the landscape is to direct attention towards it, to show that it is there, and to suggest by their scale how hugely the landscape overshadows them. They are tour guides. Those who are not pointing seem lost, slumped wearily at the wayside, as if they have given up in the middle of a journey, or the ruin around them has rendered all journeying to a destination pointless. Just as the endlessly receding stairways and echoing archways render striving futile. The grandeur is always in the buildings, even those in ruins. It leaves no trace on the people. You have no sense that they had a hand in the creation of these structures. They might as well have been raised by a race of gods.

In Piranesi’s Italy, ruins are still ruins. They are still undergoing ruination. Scrawny bushes and trees sprout from the pediments of temples and the curves of arches. These growing things, reaching out of the stone, represent decay itself. Nature is reducing these final remnants to rubble; roots are driving down into cracks, causing another fragment to crumble and fall. The terrain around the ruins is eroded and rough. The Colosseum is surrounded by a dusty road, a wasteland of stones and gnarled trees. In our Italy, the contemporary one, ruins are tended as if they were newly built and had to be kept in perfect condition. The process of ruination, which is what gives a ruin its poignancy, has been arrested. In preserved and cultivated ruins, time has been stopped; they have ceased to age and can no longer be trusted as evidence of the past.

*

In April 1999, a NATO jet fired a rocket into a convoy of Albanian refugees near the village of Meja and killed 60 civilians. At first, NATO tried to shift the blame to the Serbs, but after a few days they admitted responsibility. One of their jet pilots, ordered to fly at high altitude to avoid enemy fire, had mistakenly identified the convoy as a military one and attacked it. A fortnight later, Serb militias would massacre more than 300 people in Meja.

Goran Tomasević’s photograph of the shattered convoy was published in the Independent on 15 April. It was in colour and covered nearly half the front page.

A red tractor and flatbed trailer slant across the background. The tractor looks well used, its tyres are worn; the trailer is piled with goods under tarpaulins, blankets, perhaps a mattress. A twisted piece of metal is lodged behind the steering wheel and buckled over the engine cowling. The silence in the picture comes from that stalled engine. Life has stopped dead here. Nothing will ever go forward again.

On the road, in front of the tractor, lie two bloodied bodies. I think they are both women, although blood and printer’s ink have blurred their features. One of them wears a red shawl sodden with gore and her left arm is twisted across her body. The face of the other is a smear of blood. Her mouth is open and her eyes are closed. All around them: stones. Near the rear wheel of the tractor: a shoe. There is always an empty shoe in a scene like this.

The living creature in the photograph is a boy, an “ethnic Albanian boy” according to the caption. He takes up the foreground, with the sole of his dusty shoe touching the frame at the bottom, the top of his blond head nearly touching the frame at the top, and his body dividing the photo in two. He is wearing creased brown pants and a green sweater with long sleeves. He comes from a poor home; the bottoms of the pants are rolled three or four times, the cuffs of the sweater cover his hands.

In his right hand he is holding a black object. At first, I thought it might be a Bible with a bookmark dangling from it, but perhaps it is a leather pouch with a zipper tab, something like a shaving kit. What would a child want with a shaving kit? Perhaps it belonged to his father. He has something in his raised left hand too, a white plastic bag from a supermarket, nearly transparent. He grips the bag in the middle and the tattered loops of the handles flop down. Is it food? The dark stains on his fingers and the plastic may be blood or only ink.

The collar of the boy’s sweater is pulled to one side and his skinny neck sticks out of it naked and exposed. He looks to the right, in the same direction as the round headlight of the tractor, the way the convoy was going. I wonder what he sees there in the future. He is flinching, fending something off with his left arm, holding out the packet as if he does not want it to touch his body. There are lines around his mouth and under his eyes that do not belong on the face of a child. His boyish blond fringe has become an anachronism.

When I bought this newspaper at the foreign press stand in Stuttgart’s Hauptbahnhof, after seeing the Piranesi exhibition at the Staatsgalerie, I noticed that some of the other papers carried enlargements of the bodies and other aspects of the photo. Those details would answer some of my questions about these people. But would it bring them any closer to me?

The report accompanying the picture says: “The Reuters photographer filmed bloodstained bodies lying on a road near abandoned tractors. Pillows and blankets were scattered around as well as human remains.” I understand why people fleeing their homes reach for blankets and pillows. But they have no need for them now, laid out on the front page of my newspaper with their heads on the stony ground.

*

At St Michael’s Church in Hamburg, a stony image of the saint is helpfully slaying the dragon, who would be at home in a Marvel comic. At the Bismarck Monument, somewhat less helpfully, the Iron Chancellor has his sword, which is three times longer than his arm, plunged into the rock at his feet. Two sneaky-looking angels keep watch at each calf. The graffiti in black spray paint reads: SERBIA IST STÄRKSTE. And more frankly: FICKE NATO.

Eight naked warriors lounge around the pedestal as if they’re in a bathhouse. Most are coyly pressing their genitals into the stone from which they emerge or hiding them behind shields. Only one fellow, with the most bashful expression of all, is facing the world with the merest bump of a penis visible. Bismarck seems to have no balls at all, just a space beneath his tunic where they should be. From behind, his cloak is also pure Marvel, a fall of rigid, stylised folds. Cover the stone with soot, splash it with neon, and we’re in Gotham City. “In memory of the first Chancellor of the German Reich, Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), erected in 1903–1906 by a committee of Hamburg citizens, sponsored by the Senate and the State Parliament, executed by the architect Emil Schaudt and the sculptor Hugo Lederer. The colossal figure is reminiscent of medieval Roland statues and thus symbolizes the empire’s protection of Hamburg’s seafaring and trade, while also documenting Hamburg’s imperial claim as the ‘Gateway to the World’.” The plaque has white lettering on blue, covered with a chatter of graffiti and torn stickers advertising shows on the Reeperbahn.

A party of schoolchildren is going around the monument counting the knights. One of the boys keeps getting nine, one of the girls eight. The boy asks me to adjudicate. I have been around twice myself and counted eight, so I’m with her. He looks disappointed. Now he asks me another question that’s on the schoolteacher’s list: Why is Bismarck standing with his back to the city? I have the answer—surely he’s the protector of the Reich, facing out with a world-consuming imperial gaze—but how can I convey this in my schoolboy German that a German schoolboy would find komisch? So I say I don’t know—Weiss nicht is well within my powers—and he goes off looking sceptical about my arithmetic too. He’s going to put “9” on the form and get it wrong.

…

Near the St Pauli-Fischmarkt on Grosse Elbstrasse stands a memorial to the city’s seamen—die Seemannsgedenkstätte. On a roughly hewn rock sits a woman, or perhaps a child, clasping her knees with her right arm, holding her left hand to her left ear, as if listening to the roar of the sea or the cries of the drowning.

There is a quote from Conrad, which surprises me. Surely the Germans have their own poets of the waters? “‘Der unvergänglichen See, den Schiffen die nicht mehr sind und den Schlichten Männern deren Tage nicht wieder kehren.’ Errichtet von dem Verein Platz der Seefahrt und den Cap Horniers, 1985.”

The Deutsche Sektion of the Cap Horniers have left an indestructible wreath of bronze-brown leaves with a tatty blue-satin sash that reads: “Zum Gedenken an die auf See gebliebenen Seeleute.” In memory of the sailors left at sea.

I head across the road to the Euro Fischimbiss. Create order in my notes until the greasy basket of fish arrives.

Later I find the Conrad quote in his Author’s Note on The Mirror of the Sea (1906). This is a book that pays tribute, he writes, “to the ultimate shapers of my character, convictions, and, in a sense, destiny—to the imperishable sea, to the ships that are no more, and to the simple men who have had their day.”

…

On the gangway that runs down from the S-Bahn to the ferry-landing at Landungsbrücke, a scruffy-looking man is selling wire bicycles. They are rickety racing bikes, very small and fragile, made of cotton-thin wire. Different as they are to the South African variety, they remind me of home. He has them displayed in a pushchair. I circle a few times, pretend to read the train schedules, sneaking glances. With a pair of pliers, probably the ones he uses to twist the delicate-looking bicycles, he is dismantling a hard-shelled squash with vividly orange flesh. Cracking off chunks, with a terrible crunch that reminds me of the boneyard, scattering them to one side. Is it food for the gulls?

I have a reading tonight at Werkstatt 3, I should be heading back to my hotel to change my shirt and gather my thoughts, but I cannot ignore the bicycle man. Eventually I go closer. He has only one eye, gleaming beneath a bushy eyebrow. Where the other should be is a puckered, rheumy hole. This absent eye transfixes me. He starts his spiel. Do I have a child? A son? How old? I start lying—just like the narrator in one of the “Street addresses” texts I’ve been working on—while he explains the difference between girls’ bikes and boys’ bikes. He tinkers with the sticky pliers, holds out an example of each bike. At last I get it: he wants me to buy two, at a discount. I insist on one at the advertised price. In the end, he gives it to me, but he keeps speaking, trying to twist my arm, and I have to abandon him in mid-sentence. He calls after me: “Put that straight in your pocket! Don’t bend it now!”

*

In The Castle (1926), space oppresses people. They cannot breathe freely, they cannot move comfortably in and out of rooms blocked by furniture, they cannot stand up straight. The ceilings press down on them and make them stoop. In K’s first interrogation, the roof above the gallery is so low that “the people were able to stand only in a bent posture with their heads and backs knocking against the ceiling”. Later K hears sighing in the lumber room and opens the door: “But in the room itself stood three men, stooping because of the low ceiling …” And this is how K describes the second pulpit in the cathedral: “The vaulting of the stone canopy, too, began very low down and curved forward, although without ornamentation, in such a way that a medium-sized man could not stand upright beneath it but would have to keep leaning over the balustrade. The whole structure was designed to harass the preacher.” A persecutory architecture.

Rereading Kafka’s novel for the first time in a decade, I find that it is the cathedral that has stayed with me most vividly. The cold, shadowy air of certain Catholic churches still lingers from my childhood.

People oppress K as heavily as stony space. When he is trapped at his desk by the Manufacturer and the Deputy Manager, he wants to leave but he cannot because they are looming over him, talking business, “bargaining above his head for himself”. K’s response, the only one he can muster, is remarkable—he “picked one of the documents from the desk at random, laid it flat on his open palm, and gradually raised it, raising himself with it, to their level.” It is as if the paper raises him. He has become an adjunct to “behaviour” that is somehow outside of himself, independent of him. He raises the paper—and then himself, like an addendum, a secondary document.

Chapter 10: “The End.” The “emissaries” who are sent to fetch K. The way they fasten onto him, holding him in a “methodical, practised, irresistible grip” so that “the three of them were interlocked in a unity”, is the end point of this growing, encroaching oppressiveness of others. Here their control over him becomes totally physical—they enclose him like a machinery of “lifeless elements”.

Oddly, I had forgotten the chilling, macabre scene at the end, where the emissaries, arguing courteously about who should do the honours, slaughter K with a butcher’s knife. His final denunciation—“Like a dog!”—reads not just as a cry against the injustice of the law, but against the shame of mortality itself.

*

Jens, my host for the reading in Osnabrück, walks me around the town. In the beautiful gardens behind the Schloss, lucky students are lounging amid fountains and poppy-beds. Last year, Jens tells me, was the 350^th anniversary of the signing of the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War, and here in town the parks were full of floral extravaganzas. Now it’s back to poppies.

Along the main shopping street, we walk across several cobbled strips made of stones of different sizes and colours laid out in different patterns. Beside each strip is a numbered board describing its composition. The city authorities plan to upgrade the shopping district and these swatches are aimed at giving people a say in what they will be walking on in future. It’s a weighty decision, Jens says, pedestrians will have to live with this for the next few centuries—all going well.

…

The Felix Nussbaum Haus does not look like much from the street. It appears to be little more than a wall. Behind this façade you can only imagine a confined space, a narrow corridor or some tiny rooms. Steep stairs visible through a crooked window support this impression.

The doors are heavy and unwelcoming. Should I go in or not? I seize the handle and pull. The door half opens. Just when I think it has jammed, a quiet mechanism takes over and eases it effortlessly back.

Felix Nussbaum (1904–1944) was a German Jewish painter born in Osnabrück. Arrested by the Nazis, he managed to escape and go into hiding in Brussels with his wife Felka. He carried on working until his final arrest and deportation to Auschwitz, where he was murdered on 9 August 1944. The Felix Nussbaum Museum, opened in 1998, was the first completed building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It preserves about 160 of the painter’s works.

Inside, the space is unexpectedly large, yet everywhere fractured, hemmed in, dead-ended. The building is designed to disrupt your sense of direction, of certainty, of ease. Sharp angles jut into the rooms. The window slots, no more than gashes, allow in a little light but offer no relief. You feel that you could be confined here always. Glancing down from one of these slots, I see a large stone X in the courtyard below. A negative, a cancellation, a wrong answer written in stone. At the end of a sloping concrete corridor, barred by shadows, that big negative repeats itself on a dead-end wall. Do not enter. Do not leave. The paintings loom in pools of light. They catch my eye for a moment but my attention keeps slipping. The building grows darker as you advance. It offers you glimpses of a way out, but always behind thick, impregnable glass and steel fencing. Bolts, grids. Enclosed possibilities, tantalisingly within reach, but untouchable. Up above, on a steel-mesh catwalk, a shadowy figure approaches, feet growing larger, darker, heavier. Then a voice sifts down: a tour guide doing her walkabout. Her party applauds politely. The spaces tilt and shift. There are no square rooms, no reliable angles or obvious routes. The rooms narrow down to sharp corners. Purposeless structures cut into them like axe blades or the bows of destroyers. Finally, deep in the dark heart of the museum, you reach The End. Nussbaum’s last grim paintings, The Damned and The Triumph of Death. The floor, sloping downwards, keeps me off balance, steers me gently but insistently into the terminal statement. Ruined spaces, intricate and illogical as Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, occupied by exulting skeletons. The museum as trap.

I find a way out onto a gangway shaped like an X. The escape route proves illusory. One branch of the cross leads to a stone wall, the other to a watchtower with a deckchair in its base. I sit there (as I am meant to) looking up at the high ceiling, where an image is revolving: a fist, very still, half enclosed by a trembling open hand. At intervals there is a boom, a resounding thump, and a flash of light on the screen overhead, as if the fist has struck something.

If not for this noise, I would fall fast asleep in the chair. I did not sleep well last night and the train from Hamburg was exhausting. The third time I jolt awake, I notice the couple at the door, looking in with pleasant, expectant expressions, and the short queue of people behind them, all patiently awaiting their turn in the chair.

…

The artworks make less of an impression on me than the building. But Nussbaum is ever present. “If I must die,” he said (or words to that effect), “let my works not be forgotten.” He paints himself as a clown, a fool, a madman, with a silly cap on his head and a long tail dangling over his shoulder. The self-portrait with a yellow star (which in reality he never wore) is haunting.

After he went into hiding, he stopped painting and turned to drawing, so that he would not have to use turpentine, which might have attracted attention. The drawings he made as plans or sketches for future paintings are beautiful, very fine and delicate. You cannot believe a pencil could make such a light mark on a page. As if he was worried the sound of the lead on the paper would bring a Nazi running.

After he went into hiding, he began dating his pictures precisely: day, month, year. Storing up his numbered days.

The face that looks out from the paintings reminds me of Bruno Schulz.

The Museum reminds me of Kafka. Everywhere, on the ceilings, walls and floors, there are crosses, joints and forks. You feel lost in the interstices of a larger structure, one that would become explicable if you could only see it whole. But you cannot. You are compelled to move in the uncomfortable in-between. The metal grids and glass panels offer glimpses of other spaces that might be more comprehensible, that might provide a whole view, if only you could get into them. The building dramatises the impossibility of seeing your way clear or finding a way out. It is a built entrapment. Museum sonder Ausgang, Libeskind called his design. Museum without Exit.

As in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, in the Felix Nussbaum Museum Libeskind proposes a different way of dealing with the Holocaust. The buildings carry as much meaning as the objects they display and convey this meaning through visual and sonic effects. These museums offer an “experience” in much the same way as the well-known, more commercial city museums, along the lines of, say, the “Edinburgh Experience”. The Felix Nussbaum Haus is attached as an “affront” or challenge to the existing city art museum, which it stands beside and into which it provides an occasional escape hatch. My guide Jens says that many of Osnabrück’s citizens opposed the project, but it was argued that it would “bring tourists” to the city, an argument that is often persuasive. Jens himself thinks the money might have been better spent on other things.

*

On 10 May 1933, the day of the book-burning in Berlin, it poured with rain. It is tempting to read this chance event as divine disapproval, but worse conflagrations have passed without the heavens shedding a tear. In any event, the wood that stood ready to fuel the fire on Opernplatz was damp and had to be doused with petrol before it would catch.

The condemned books were brought to the Square in a pompous Nazi procession. It included a brass band and mounted policemen, torch-bearing students in Sturmabteilung uniform, and three trucks loaded with books purged from libraries and other institutions. When they reached the Square, the marchers tossed their torches onto the pyre, symbolically merging and intensifying the purifying flames of their judgement. To start the proceedings, selected books representing the various categories of literature deemed alien or against the German spirit were introduced by name over a PA system before being consigned to the flames. Then the crowd joined in, passing the rest of the books along a human chain from the trucks, or lobbing them into the bonfire from a distance. Bonfire: bone fire. For the burning of heretics. Goebbels made a speech in which he railed against the erroneous and the subhuman. The proceedings were broadcast on the radio.

When the spectacle was over, the flames were doused by the fire brigade. Some quick-witted wheeler-dealers raked a few charred books out of the ashes and in the following days sold them on the streets as souvenirs.^[2]

…

Micha Ullman’s memorial to the book-burning on Bebelplatz, as Opernplatz is now known, is called Bibliothek. It is a subterranean room that you can look into through a glazed hatch in the cobbles. The room is cold and white, and lined with empty shelves. You cannot see the whole of it through the hatch, and moving around from one vantage point to another, as many people feel compelled to do, merely brings more white shelving into view. At least this confirms an obvious fact: there are no books.

Look up from the edge of this dead space and you will see the façade of the law library at Humboldt University, and through its tall, arched windows, shelves filled with books of every size and colour. That human clutter, no less than the empty shelves, lets you feel the heat of the fire on your face. You scarcely need the quotation from Heine on the plaque nearby to remind you that where they burn books, in the end they burn people.

Bibliothek is luminous on a winter’s night. I was drawn to it by a column of light rising from the ground. Dirty snow on the edge of the hatch, tramped into icy typography by the soles of boots and trainers, made the white room underground seem even colder. While I stood there shivering, two women approached, a local acting as a tour guide and her visitor from out of town (or so I gathered). They peered down into the void.

“There’s nothing there,” said the visitor.

“It’s a monument,” her friend explained.

“It cost 500,000 Deutschmark?”

“Yes.”

“For nothing?”

“The shelves are empty,” the guide said impatiently, “use your imagination!”

There is room for 20,000 books, as many as the Nazis reduced to ashes.

I retreated to a coffee shop on Unter den Linden to warm my feet and look at my guidebook. I learned that more than 300 authors were blacklisted by the Nazis—Jews, socialists, pacifists, troublesome journalists, freethinking scientists. Some of the prohibitions were picky: for instance, in the case of Erich Kästner, Emil und die Detektive was expressly excluded. I had read this charming book in my German class at school; what came back to me now was the fact that its boy hero had painted a moustache on a statue.

Nearly a hundred book-burnings took place across Germany in 1933.

There were other sights to see, but Bibliothek gaped in my memory: I could not go home without seeing it again. I returned to the Square. Although it had begun to snow, the hatch was clear. Perhaps the heat from the lights had melted the snow or a previous visitor had wiped it away.

Once again, as I looked down at the empty shelves, I heard company approaching, a dozen sightseers stubbornly following their itinerary despite the bitter weather. Spaniards, I thought, or Spanish-speakers anyway, talking in loud, musical voices and jostling one another as they made their way over the slippery cobbles. The leader pretended that he was going to stand on the hatch—which he might have done quite safely—and then leapt over it like a mischievous schoolboy. His charges gathered around the square of light.

“What is it? What is it?”

“Is it a crypt?” This from a woman in a coat with a fur-lined hood that made me think of a capuchin monkey.

“Ah!” they exclaimed together. “It’s a tomb! A tomb!”

And while the guide was still explaining, they began drifting away towards the opera house, satisfied that the mystery had been resolved.

…

Ullman is an artist of the absent. His public sculptures—monuments is too grand a term—tend to be small, unobtrusive things, sometimes underfoot, often overlookable. His memorial to Graf von Stauffenberg, the man who led the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, is on a street corner in the middle of Stuttgart. It is no more than a little well carved into a flagstone, a hollow the size of a cup that is sometimes full of water, and many people step over it every day. A few strides away, a plaque bearing Von Stauffenberg’s name is attached to the wall of a building above the water mains and manholes, near a blue city signpost that says Wasser Nr 3065.

One afternoon, I was loitering on the corner, trying to understand why I found this small thing so compelling. The hollow was brimming with water and a shark’s fin of green bottle-glass glinted in the bottom. A man stopped to read the plaque. Afterwards, he turned and gazed at the chestnut avenue on Schlossplatz. Then he gave a scarcely perceptible shrug, a movement of the mind rather than the shoulders, and walked off along Stauffenbergstrasse.

…

How can absence be represented without lapsing into banality? Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin seeks to embody absence (a paradoxical task) in the empty spaces of the “Holocaust Tower” and the “Memory Void”. When I visited the museum, the Tower was truly empty, while the Void housed Menashe Kadishman’s installation Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), an immense drift of iron disks shaped like screaming faces. Some schoolchildren, relishing the invitation to walk on the leaves, stomped up and down and made an infernal racket, which suited this elaborate building better than reverent silence. The museum requires an apparatus of architectural models and floorplans to explain its workings. Consult the plan showing how the “Axis of Holocaust” intersects with the “Axis of Exile” and you will find a red dot: YOU ARE HERE.

Near the clattering Memory Void, I found Ullman’s minimalist works on paper Stuhl I–IV. The images were barely there on the surface: four shadowy impressions of chairs, absences registered by scatterings of red-brown sand, as if someone had carried the solid objects from a room that had not been dusted for years. This ghostly furniture made me homesick.

Not all of Ullman’s small memorials are sombre. When he was commissioned to make a public sculpture in Bad Oeynhausen, a spa town on the Weser renowned for its healing waters, he made a spoon and set it into a paving stone. Those of us who have read Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1983) know that a great deal of faith may be placed in the bowl of a spoon. But the town’s citizens were not all convinced: they mounted a campaign to have Löffel replaced with something more conspicuous and dignified. Enter the Friends of the Spoon—Die Freunde des Löffels—who sold soup to raise money for the sculpture’s preservation.

Ullman spoke about Löffel in a lecture he gave on his work. What I remember most from his talk, aside from the spoon, is how often he used the word vielleicht. Perhaps.

*

After Hitler came to power in 1933, he established a memorial in Munich to the casualties of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The site chosen was the Feldherrnhalle on Odeonsplatz, where some of the plotters had been shot dead by police ten years earlier. This arched gallery, modelled on the Loggia dei Lanzi which adjoins the Uffizi in Florence, was built in the 1840s by Ludwig I to honour the Bavarian Army. Hitler had the loggia tricked out with Nazi paraphernalia, including an altar-like memorial tablet surmounted by a swastika and eagle, rows of flags and wreaths, and a huge torch. A permanent guard of honour was mounted there and all who passed it were required to give the Nazi salute. A photograph from the period shows twenty or thirty citizens in hats and coats, dutifully saluting as they pass soldiers with shouldered rifles. Who knows what was in their heads, whether they were proud or ashamed or simply glad not to be arrested.

One way of avoiding the obligatory salute was to nip down Viscardigasse, which runs behind the Feldherrnhalle. The alley acquired the nickname Drückebergergasse—Shirkers’ Alley—which it retains today.

In 1995, Bruno Wank made an artwork in Viscardigasse in memory of those who shirked their duties to the Nazi state. It is called Arguments. He removed some of the cobbles and replaced them with bronze casts, tracing a tapering line along the alley, a path with a lazy swerve in it like an elongated S, never more than three or four cobblestones wide. This hint of divergence from the high road commemorates the small, oblique acts of resistance to power that people make in their everyday lives.

When I went down Viscardigasse on the advice of my friend Dominik, who is a neighbour of Bruno’s, when I turned into Shirkers’ Alley with the weight of my own history as a white South African on my shoulders, I found nothing to show the presence of an artwork. In relation to this work, Thomas Köllhofer writes, you are not a viewer but a pedestrian.^[3] As you pass down the alley, the bronze cobbles, buffed by thousands of footsteps like your own, exert a subtle force on your movement. You feel yourself tugged to one side, as if a ghost has taken your elbow and is steering you off course. Suddenly you are walking on the bias, whether you know it or not, remembering through the soles of your shoes.

Postscript

A writer’s residency took me to Germany in 1999. I spent much of the year in Stuttgart, a month in Berlin, and a few weeks travelling to readings in other cities and towns. Some of what I saw found its way into notebooks. These observations, returned to frequently over the years since then, have given that time a singular force in my memory.

Among other things, my notebooks reveal familiar preoccupations with architecture and monuments. The year before, I had edited blank_Architecture, apartheid and after with Hilton Judin for the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and in Stuttgart I worked on two books that deal with change in South African cities, The Restless Supermarket and Portrait with Keys. City life was very much on my mind.

In the mid-2000s, back in Johannesburg, a journal approached me for a piece on architecture. I sketched out an essay on the memorialisation of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Germany, drawing on material in my notebooks, but the writing stalled. I felt that I knew too little about Germany and its history to write something worthwhile, that I needed to draw a productive contrast or parallel with how the apartheid past was being framed in South Africa, and I could not see how to do it. The outline, showily titled “Architecture | absence”, was left behind in a file.

The ideas stayed with me. A few years later, I put together a set of reflections on my unrealized writing projects called The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories (Seagull Books, 2012). One of these “case studies” of failure, titled “The Cold Storage Club”, incorporated material from my German notebooks on the memorial artworks of Micha Ullman and Bruno Wank, which had once been earmarked for the architecture and absence essay. This case study hinges on the writerly ethics of using stories told to you in confidence, but as I indicated above, the real obstacle to completing the essay was a crisis of authority.

“The Cold Storage Club” also appeared independently in Oblique, a photobook by Abrie Fourie, a South African artist who has lived in Germany for many years.^[4] Fourie’s eclectic sequence of images from both countries, including the dilapidated lobby of the Beverly Hills flats in Sunnyside, Pretoria, the empty corridors and stairways of the Corbusierhaus in Spandau, and the frigid marble interior of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, were well suited to a text about loss and remembrance.

When the possibility of contributing to the “Contamination and Conviviality” project arose, my thoughts circled to “The Cold Storage Club”. In my notebooks from twenty years ago, the component parts of “Architecture | absence”, the unrealised essay, were still marked with faded yellow Post-its. It was obvious that the published observations on artworks and the unpublished ones on monuments belonged together. Integrating them, allowing the disparate parts to come to a new arrangement, or, in the terms we are using, allowing for their mutual contamination, has issued in an essay that is not a world away from the original outline. In Oblique—Postscript, the artwork that accompanies this text, Fourie returns to his own images and presents them in a new way.

Questions of formal disruption and hybridity have long preoccupied me. My writing practice, which values the provisional and variable, is crucially reliant on note-making. Notebooks generally thrive on the productive energies of contamination. Alongside notes towards writing, travelogues, records of dreams and other obviously literary materials, my notebooks include instructions for cleaning tarnished silverware, a list of the Catherine Cookson novels missing from my late mother’s collection, a flu remedy passed on to me by a policeman, a perpetual calendar, diagrams for cabling various obsolete devices, directions to the long-term parking at the airport, and many other things. These concentrations of incongruity are the seedbeds of stories and essays. The essay form itself evokes the concerns of this project, being by its nature speculative, and trusting of the suggestive and oblique.

Other factors probably nudged the pieces of this essay into place. The prospect of revisiting Berlin, after an absence marked by personal bereavement and the global crisis of the pandemic, may have sharpened my memory. Russia’s assault on Ukraine certainly did: images of the destruction wreaked in this conflict are daily reminders of earlier European wars. When it all began, I turned for clarity to Hans Erich Nossack’s The End, about the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943.^[5] A long shelf of books have been written about these events, but Nossack’s view from the ridge of a hill south of the city remains compelling.

Since The Loss Library appeared, I have finished several texts that were presented there as unfinished. The “Dr T” case study, for example, describes an inherited archive that I intended to use as the basis for a biographical story, an idea abandoned when the sheer weight of research proved overwhelming. Yet a few years later, I was able to publish a much fuller account of this inheritance as “The Trunks: A Complete History” (in 101 Detectives).

Perhaps declaring a piece unfinished or unfinishable is an irresistible provocation to myself. Or perhaps accepting defeat neutralises my misgivings about the writing and sets it in motion again. Vielleicht, as Ullman would say. Nothing is cast in stone.

The keeper of notebooks, the young writer finding his way in Germany, is more difficult to manage than Dr T. He knows things I have forgotten. For instance, he claims to have walked up Birkenkopf, while I have no memory of doing so. But he writes about it with conviction and I take him at his word.