Thanatographies, p.3
Thanatographies, page 3
The book began, as so many of my books do, with the removal of my wisdom teeth. In the dentist’s waiting room six heads gazed at a muted screen. Images of bloody asphalt, a red train, police cars, and the wandering forehead of a politician flashed in a rotating sequence in front of our eyes. It was over one hundred degrees outside. The previous week named “worst week of the year.” Newspapers developed grounding messages for their headlines: “How to Make Sense in Senseless Times” or “What Remains Certain.” Is this war? an expert on violence seemed to mouth into a microphone.
After my visit to the dentist to have all my wisdom teeth taken out, I did not speak for several days and read Else Lasker-Schüler in bed. The outbreak of WW1 had coincided with the publication of her book of stories Der Prinz of Theben, a fantastical biography of Prince Jussuf and a fictionalized portrait of herself. The stories, accompanied by illustrations from Franz Marc, take place in a fairy-tale time frame, one that is clearly in the past but not easily identifiable as any particular period. It could be biblical times, Moorish Spain, the Ottoman Empire, or some amalgamation of these ages. Jews and Muslims occupy the space together, and Prinz Jussuf claims a sheik and a rabbi as his great-grandfathers and heritage. Erlangen, Egypt, and the cityscape of Berlin enmesh with descriptions of Jussuf’s court. The court itself is composed of literary epithets and remembrances of Schüler’s friends, her parents and ancestors, gossip, phantasies.
My swollen gums and inability to speak made me prefer to go out at night, and occasionally I walked to Nollendorfplatz, where I had spent the first years of my childhood, not far from Schüler’s residence towards the end of the war. At Hotel Koschel, she lived in an attic room, writing and singing her poems through the night:
A great star will fall into my lap . . .
We would hold vigil tonight,
Praying in languages
That are carven like harps.
My walks took me along Landwehrkanal, where I thought I saw Rosa Luxemburg float downstream. Not far from Berlin’s aquarium, its immortal jellyfish gliding in their basins.
I began to read Luxemburg’s letters, written during her many stays in prison. In her letters, she urged friends to shift away from personal depression and political despair to the intermittent moments of beauty that exist beyond all self-indulgence. A demand in the face of brutal oppression. At the women’s prison on Barnimstrasse, she recited Goethe and Morike until falling asleep, which may have been rare, and was known to feed the prison’s mice. The flowers she received, she pressed and collected in a small journal titled “Barnimstr 10, cell 219.”
The most important thing first: The flowers! The big yellow ones, which resemble sunflowers are called sunroot (Helianthis tuberosus). The beautiful red ones are mountain ash, the blood-red twig is a Prunus or Turkish Cherry. The branch, silvery and thin with dark green leaves, belongs to a sea buckthorn. The colors of asters are impossibly beautiful.
After Luxemburg was murdered, it was her close friend, Mathilde Jacob, who demanded an autopsy. Upon seeing Luxemburg’s swollen water corpse, she immediately recognized the familiar objects: gloves, fragments of a velvet dress, and a golden amulet. She drove with the corpse through Berlin, the fields and forests of Lichtenrade, past the headquarters of the Red Flag to the morgue. She went there daily to make sure the body had not disappeared. At Luxemburg’s funeral a large mass of people, sailors and gray soldiers, walked silently through Friedrichshain. The sketches show hunched and haggard looking men, their hands either folded or covering their faces. Mathilde Jacob recalled that toward the end of Luxemburg’s life, in those last weeks in which she could only cross Berlin with accompaniment, she had turned to her once and exclaimed: “I would like to paint and live on a piece of earth where I can feed animals and love them.”
I felt affinity with Chekhov’s seagull, her constant drift across the water, crying out or gliding with determination but no aim. I wandered across Potsdamerplatz and tried to locate the former Sturm gallery, now a shopping mall. At the center of the entrance, a station showed an architectural model of Potsdamer Platz before and during the Weimar Republic. Known as the heart of the metropolis in the 1920s, it lay deserted after 1945, except for black-market activities flourishing at this rare intersection of the three occupation zones. Later, stage to the famous uprising of East Berliners and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a backdrop to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, it was also where the indestructible Mauer magically opened again in the fall of 1989, continuing its presence as an awkward turning table of periphery and center.
Once the swelling of my mouth receded, I went to Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek to look at the Sturm archive. I was unsure how I felt about the art movement, though Herwarth Walden’s ferocity intrigued me, and even more did the women artists he exhibited. I procured a three-day pass. The library houses one of the oldest rare manuscript departments in Europe, including original fragments of Virgil, an illuminated manuscript of the Nibelungenlied, satirical broadsides from the March Revolution of 1848, and the personal papers of Hegel, Moses Mendelssohn, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among many others. I floated up the marbled stairs to the sound of turning pages echoing through a large domed reading room. The handwritten manuscript department was overseen by a staunch woman who did not respond to my smiles. She asked for an ID and the purpose of my visit in an irreverent Berliner tone. When I mumbled “Sturm Archiv” from my still weakened jaw, she stepped out from behind her desk and casually lifted her hand to show me several books on top of a shelf right behind me. “You cannot borrow these,” she emphasized. “And the originals you can’t access unless you have an annual membership.” I nodded and watched an elderly man open a book as large as the table on which it rested. The book was filled with life-size botanical illustrations.
After finding a table of my own, a lengthy correspondence between Alfred Döblin and Herwarth Walden held my attention. Döblin, in third person, expressed his anger about a theater performance, the fact that his name was mentioned. He apologized for not being able to speak freely in the porter’s lounge, thought highly of the Nietzsche presentation. Was working hard. Recommended Frau Walden—which in 1906 referred to Else Lasker-Schüler—should poem (using the verb form) Salome. Later, around 1915, letters from the front. Döblin is stuck in Lorraine. He is waiting, not sure for what. He sends his best wishes to Frau Nell Walden (referring to Herwarth’s second wife, whom he married after leaving Schüler).
Between letters and copies of pamphlets, I found the cover page of the Sturm journal, which cost around ten pfennigs. A diary entry of the year 1913, written by Nell Walden, details her first year of marriage to Herwarth Walden and their galloping travels across Europe. The purpose of utmost urgency: to meet artists and incendiaries, gather artworks and energies for the new movement. Amsterdam, Bruges, Paris, Spain, Venice, Munich, Copenhagen, Vienna, Budapest, Prague. They slept a few hours on the train, embraced their compatriots on the platform, and descended into sleepless nights, before rushing back to the station with canvasses and stacks of newspapers, always late and breathless, ignoring the landscapes flying by outside of the windows. Their first major impact came during fall of 1913, when the inaugural German Herbstsalon displayed over three hundred different works by seventy-five international artists and was condemned unilaterally by the press as an “absurd and hysterical spectacle.”
I was strangely moved by Herwarth’s opening speech at Sturm’s Herbstsalon and began to translate it into my notebook.
. . . I feel committed to this exhibition because I am convinced of the value of this art. These artists are my friends. I am sure that the critics will laugh about it and about me. These same critics laughed at Heinrich Mann, Alfred Mombert, Karl Kraus, and Else Lasker Schüler. When Oskar Kokoschka’s graphic works were printed in the first editions of the Sturm journal, art critics and art experts alike mocked him. Today, three years after their first publication, they are extremely sought after. But such voices and opinions do not influence nor obstruct my work . . . Today we live in a time in which art is the caretaker of life . . .
I knew I needed more time, days, months, perhaps an annual pass. The library was deeply affected by both world wars. Many collections entirely lost, though the Nazi book burning mostly destroyed materials from neighboring libraries. It occurred to me, as I crossed the large hall down the elegant balustrade and through the metal detectors, that historically libraries are one of the most vulnerable places during times of war. Sites to plunder, burnings, and destruction—librarians’ defiance suggests their awareness of the fragility of their guardianship.
When I exited the library, walking back to Potsdamerplatz, the headlines at the newspaper stand caught my attention: “A New Epoch,” “Hot Times,” “Courage On The Loose.” One cover page showed a chart of so-called “hot” and “cold” periods:
1789–1871: hot
1871–1914: cold
1914–1924: hot
1924–1933: some cold spells
1933–1953: hot
1953–1989: cold (with interruptions)
1989–now: hot
I bought the paper and strolled toward Tiergarten, the green heart of Berlin, to which Luxemburg retreated for her daily walks and where Herwarth and Nell Walden met coincidentally again after their first encounter in Sweden. Its lush canopy offered some respite from the heat. I found a large oak tree and opened the paper. A journalist warned readers not to become infected by aggressions and provocations from Moscow, Pyongyang, or Ankara. To not fall prey to end-of-the-world myths or hysteria. No, everything has occurred before, he affirmed. I stretched out on the grass and closed my eyes, gums throbbing.
THE SHADOWS HAVE GROWN IN DENSITY. My overriding sense is that we will be kicked off this planet soon. The night chews on eternal superstitions. I light a candle, which illumines the portrait of Nell Walden on my desk. Her body has almost completely dissolved into circular and square brush strokes, which move like curtains of an open window, swayed by winds, by this great argument touring across the sky. “The argument is in part a result of the restlessness of heavenly bodies,” I can hear Nell say. “The burdens of an axis, cyclical existence. Nothing can stay firm here.”
There are also two photographs of her, which I had found that first summer in Berlin, crawling through the Sturm archive. One, from 1916, shows her wearing all white. She smiles coyly. On her fingers are several rings. She holds her left hand in her right, only a few streaks of hair touch her eyebrows. The other, taken circa 1938, is a side profile. She sits slumped with a cigarette clutched between index and middle finger. A stony expression. Hair pulled together carelessly; she looks away from the camera. Lost in thought or grief or fatigue. Again, her hands are oddly holding on to each other. Hands which have their own esoteric life, the soul’s equator. As I look at these photographs, first plums are ripening. Everything is enshrined in smoke from a fire farther north. The right hand picks at the left palm, which barely holds the cigarette. Nell has lost two countries and two husbands at this point. The photograph, I imagine, was taken in Switzerland, where she lived through the second war of her life. Herwarth Walden had transferred his entire collection to her before they divorced. Before he left for Russia, dying there. In the photograph she sits hunched, her back bent, perhaps from smuggling hundreds of paintings across borders.
But before any of this, in January of 1917, in their apartment at Sturm’s headquarters at Potsdamerstrasse 134a, Nell Walden has a dream. Franz Marc’s painting Tierschicksale (Fate of the Animals) burns to the ground. Marc had died in March of 1916 from shell splinters, close to Verdun, and his work is, at that moment, exhibited across Germany. The dream happens shortly after the retrospective at the Sturm gallery in Berlin concludes. Marc’s paintings wait in storage at the Berlin Paketfahrt Society. When Nell wakes from her nightmare and inquires about the paintings the next day, the storage facility confirms that all paintings have been sent on to Wiesbaden. The Art Society of Wiesbaden issues a telegram that reads: “Marc paintings arrived!” And yet she feels restless, asks their exhibition manager to see for himself if everything has been shipped. He returns that same evening with good news; everything is in order at the storage facility. The following day, at around seven in the morning, the phone rings. It is the shipping firm, mystified at a fire that ripped through the storage facility the previous night. Even more implausible, the large painting by Franz Marc, Tierschicksale, was never sent to Wiesbaden and as a result of the fire has suffered damage.
The painting shows animals fleeing a forest blaze. Franz Marc inscribed the back of the apocalyptic painting: and all being is flaming sorrow.
Nell called these clairvoyant dreams “truth dreams.” A message that is received in the dream state, before it takes place. I hold the photograph close to my face. Let me ask you, Nell, about your truth dreams. Did the animals on the painting escape the fire, the storage unit? Did they run sideways below the canopy of the Tiergarten, away from nuclear light, through bulky time? Did they swim across the ocean, the Straits of Gibraltar, past melting glaciers? I think there were foxes, wolves, little antler types, a cow with a bundle of grass in her mouth.
The photograph breathes in silence.
I can smell the breezeway to the courtyard, the rotten wood, and cold tiles, and begin to imagine Nell’s hands on the typewriter, writing down Herwarth Walden’s dictations through the night. No sleep allowed. Nell wrote in her memoirs that Herwarth thought of women as more advanced, more capable, more artistically gifted than men. Also: soon after declaring her marriage vows, she took over bookkeeping and administrative tasks for the Sturm operation. It remains unknown how much Herwarth championed her work. In a thinly veiled satire called DerTaifun, published in 1919, she is the energetic, subservient, and adoring wife Hermione. Walden often called her “baby” or “bambina.” It remains unclear why the only memoirs she wrote focus on Herwarth Walden’s legacy, bearing only illegible footnotes to her own life. During the war, she acquired all the funds for Sturm by working tirelessly as a war correspondent and translator for Swedish dailies. She published an essay on “Wesen und Bedeutung der Astrologie und der Horoskopie” in the journal Omnibus in 1932. Sun in Capricorn. These are the bones of facts. The small blue tints on transparent paper.
The lit candle throws my own fragmented shapes toward the shadows on the wall. The same vacant stare I saw once on the canvas of a painter, a reflection of an unknown self. The painter had drawn me in explosive colors, and I gifted the portrait to my boyfriend at the time. He placed it admiringly on the dresser and then began to undress me. I felt a heat brush my face, and when I opened my eyes, I saw the painting in flames, its corners singed by fire caught from a lit candle on the dresser. Afterward, he put the charred remains in a closet for no one to see ever again. Portraits of women that are stored away will one day flood, or should I say “flower” the streets. The colors will wash down into gullies, where societies of rats have long since come up with a plan. Boisterous rats that are waiting for our descent since the writing of the plagues.
But let me return to Nell’s truth dream, which really was a message from dead Franz Marc beyond the grave. The message, like a warning, came to her before the fire, and yet she could not stop the event from happening. At night the dead, for once, trample on our heads. They must see the world from beyond time, where future, present, past are of the same flame, and its embers alight over and over again. When my own portrait caught fire on the dresser, Franz Marc’s animals most likely crawled past my rainy apartment window, feeding on the ashes.
I GET UP AND HURT MY FOOT AT THE BED’S CORNER, then lift the curtain. I see the light from the motion sensor of my neighbor’s backyard. My neighbor stands at her porch door, a disconcerted look on her face. Our eyes dart across the garden before diving back into our rooms. A woman’s lineage is about the ones that have been stalked toward extinction. Women stalk one another to find out how not to die.
When I passed my neighbor’s house a few days ago, I saw a large handwritten sign on the door that read: DO NOT KNOCK FOR ANY REASON.
A day later, the sign was replaced with a printed one that read: DO NOT KNOCK, DOG RECOVERING FROM SPINAL INJURY. THANK YOU.
The bells ring at midnight, like a first sound, and I long with the passing of time to return to night’s earliest image, before the paranoid barks of dogs can reach me. The nameless woman plays with the curtain, revealing a changing scene outside. The clouds are thickening as the roads are thinning. She wraps herself up in the curtain, a wordless mummy, and the window blows open with views to the shore. There, some women have gathered, wearing amulets with six stones, white sapphire, dark citrine, moonstone, ruby, blue sapphire, and black diamond. These amulets, carved into wax molds then transferred into plaster molds before the metal is poured, do not contain copper but are made of pure silver with several grams of gold. They are heavy and smack the collarbone when leaning forward. The amulet women live all over the world. They have never met. Some are lawyers, some are teachers, some mothers, some booksellers, some caregivers. Some have daughters, some sons in the army, some lived through wars, lost children in wars, some are living through storms, some buried their husbands, some buried their parents, some their lovers, some have art by Johanna Schütz-Wolff on their walls, some collect clay pots, some knit, some bake bread, some light candles, some open their bodies at midnight for a special séance, some practice root cuttings, some lay the cards, some swear by cults, some visit churches, some pray in mosques, some draw in ancient geometric shapes, some make daily collages, some sing, sit with the trees before sunrise, some are with wombs, some without.
The women do not think about death, but they know that they will be buried with their amulets. They will be placed on their sternums, wilting skin. Their bodies will be covered in gold and turning earth. And the earth itself waxes into an amulet, beset with stones, it turns chained around the neck of the night.
