Travel and Art

Travel and Art, 2012

24^th – 25^th July – I am not as well prepared and rested for this trip as I had hoped to be since I have been working against bad luck (gremlin interference) to finish an article. Kordula who takes me to the airport tries to drum into me that: There are no gremlins!!! At the airport she then manages to help me fix a debacle with my credit card. The flight to Hong Kong is pleasant, a little rough towards the end. Once we have landed, it seems to take for ever to reach the terminal. We taxi through the night and the rain past hundreds of parked planes. The pilot tells us he has never encountered the like. When we get there, the enormous terminal building is full of people, whole families stretched out on shawls and sarongs in the carpeted areas. There are no announcements but eventually news filters through that Typhoon Vicence is raging outside, has been for some time; someone says it is a category nine. I walk around for exercise; it was always going to be a four hour wait. Eventually we are allocated a gate and then the crew arrives. People line up to demonstrate their eagerness. I join them. The captain and the crew stand there and drink their coffee very slowly. Those in the queue begin to sit down. An elderly lady in front of me drops asleep and falls off her bag. More people lie down in the queue and I eventually do too. I don’t intend to fall asleep but then suddenly startle to find myself all alone in middle of the concourse. Where have they all gone? Has the plane left? I find another passenger who tells me there has been an incident. An angry man tried to force his way onto a plane that was open for boarding and now there is a general security shut-down. After an unsuccessful attempt at ringing Paris myself, I ring Kordula to see whether she can rearrange my paid pick-up in Paris. But it is of course night over there. She will try later. I start walking again. Several kilometers on I find a spot near our gate where a group is camping and lie down near them for a while. After ten hours our plane is suddenly ready for boarding. It makes a flamboyant take-off in the gale and driving rain; then things settle. In Paris it turns out that most people’s baggage was left behind, mine too. My pick-up, who did eventually get Kordula’s message, has to wait till all this lost baggage is registered and he is grumpy. But we get to Hotel Cadran safely.

     At dinner time my cousin’s daughter Charlotte comes to say hullo and share her Paris know-how. We have goat’s cheese salad together next door to the hotel, then walk to Champ du Mars and the Eiffel Tower. Charlotte has just completed an economics degree and is still finishing a work experience job in her chosen field: recruiting.

26^th  July – It is my first day in Paris. Except for a weekend thirty-nine years ago when we had four children with us, I have never been to this city. I am still jet-lagged. Exercise will do me good, so I walk along the Seine to the Île de la Cité. It is heralded by the beautiful Pont-Neuf Bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris, built by Henri Quatre in the early 17^th century. The well tended waterside park on the point commemorates the king, whose equestrian statue is high above us,as le Vert Galant, a ladies’ man; it is a good place to sit for a while. There are young men, mostly African, asleep on most of the benches. Higher up, in front of Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle great swarms of tourists are forming queues. But I’m not in the mood today.

     Hidden away at the other end of the island, unobtrusive and easy to miss, is the deportation monument that commemorates the Paris Jews surrendered to Hitler. A young man stands guard by the steep stairs; I am allowed to take photos but no videos, he tells me, his first visitor for some time, it seems. It is a beautiful spot up where he is. Down below, once I have descended the stairs, there is a bare empty yard surrounded by massive stone walls. A grill blocks the small opening towards the river; above it, like the gate of a draw-bridge, is a sculpture that suggests lances, fences and barbed wire. Behind me a long dark corridor with a screen blocking a light at the end has walls that mimic the memorializing walls on war cemeteries. But there are no names here. A sculpture on the central stone bench looks like a human figure melted down. Another wall-opening with just a faint light at its threshold is almost closed by a trapdoor-like block of stone. That has a regimented pattern of darts or stylized flames. Somewhere else the names of camps – Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Struthof, Maidanek, Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Flossenburg – have been scratched into white stone, hard to discern. A bronze plaque like a sundial with its arm broken off is let into the floor. My photo has recorded part of the inscription:  ‘... de la terre et ils ne sont pas revenues’: these deportees have been taken off the face of the earth and will never return. Yet nowhere is there an attempt made to remember the people themselves and their stories. I think back to the painted autobiography of Charlotte Salomon that I recently took a day to look at and read; she was one of those betrayed by the French. In her last months she worked frenetically, sketching every detail she could remember of her life; surely not just for her own amusement but so her life would be remembered. This is a cold and ugly spot in the heart of the city, a place one would ignore by preference. It is a site not of memory but of forgetting. Why did the young man forbid the taking of films or videos while allowing photos? So that the visit would begin with a senseless prohibition? Or was it a symbolic restriction? Must visitors take from here nothing moving, nothing to suggest life?

     I cross the bridge to the adjacent island of St Louis. A young woman with a clip-board, well dressed, attractive, blocks my way. She gestures that she is dumb, collecting for a charity for the dumb. I give her some money. My purse is in my hand. Immediately another woman emerges from seemingly nowhere: the minimum is twice that amount, she demands. They are both close to me and hassle. I say: okay then give me back my money. I push them away and go. A little further down two young Parisian women have been watching. They come up to me: don’t give them anything, they’re women thieves, they tell me in awkward English. There is a big police presence on this island, any number of vans and cars parked around police headquarters, but they are obviously not doing anything about these scams. Both Charlotte and the receptionist at the hotel had warned me earlier; I’m still very naive and with my little backpack I am easily identified as a tourist.

     My path takes me past the book vendors whose stalls are mostly closed. But there is one whose display shows some fairly obscure German philosophy and social theory that I feel tempted to look at. The book seller is an elderly French man; his collection is interesting and shows no bias towards Germany as the enemy. But I won’t weigh down my luggage with books. A mere week in Paris will inevitably make it a superficial visit.

     I walk back along the Seine, through parks with their heroic memorials and equestrian statues. Many have been erected by once oppressed nations celebrating their mentor and inspiration, revolutionary France, a heroic people. I too had this story drummed into me by many teachers. It was sacrilege even to think of the Revolution as a people’s tantrum that sent the negligent parents packing but then continued for far too long: till a new strong man, Napoleon, turned up. After the twentieth century with its revolutions, the traditional story has lost some of its interest; but it is the only story being told here.

     When I arrived yesterday the hotel staff told me delightedly that this was the day the weather had turned good, meaning hot: too hot to be out walking for long. It’s nice to rest for a while in the middle of the day. In the afternoon I then set out again.    

     The Rodin Museum is within walking distance, past the École Militaire and past Les Invalides with the tomb of Napoleon, tourist destinations I will postpone till later. In the museum signs offer apologies; renovations are under way and this museum is not publicly funded. There are a limited number of sculptures crowded together in one gallery space. The beautiful ‘Kiss’ is on display: an ideal of human perfection centering on love. I notice human figures emerging from rock and subsiding into rock: as we all emerge from lifelessness and return to it, as sculptures emerge from the mind of their creator to be executed in stone.  Then there are the statues of writers: Balzac, Hugo, men of vision and inspiration. Surprisingly, there is no artist among them. In this epoch visual art was still oriented towards story. But the sculptor Rodin is not interested in the tales of immortal nymphs and fauns and satyrs like his predecessors; he is interested in real moving, changing, passing life: in emotions.

     In the large park people are trying to sun-bake sitting upright on the benches. A rebellious girl about to lie on the lawn is immediately alerted to the rules. No display of  bodies! Rodin’s famous Burghers of Calais stand at intervals, each left to cope with his immanent execution alone, each suffering in his own way, stories not told in the deportation memorial.

27^th July – I walk along the right bank of the Seine and then through the Tuileries gardens. There are hundreds of green chairs everywhere, nearly all empty. Few local people are about but there are scores of  young migrant men trying to sell the same spiky Eiffel Tower key rings to the tourists making their way towards the Louvre. The park is graced with statues of mythological figures, some at the centers of fountains, perfect young women’s bodies. I wonder whether the people strolling here still know their stories or can identify characters. A Greek imaginative world appropriated by the Romans as an aesthetic world and then by the new Romans of the French Revolution: Classicism as inspiration and fancy dress. I reach the Louvre but I am still too tired for this vast collection of the world’s art. What would I select to see?  My friend Anna had advised: ‘when we went to the Louvre we looked at only two things, the Venus of Milo and the Mona Lisa’ : the pinnacles of art? Is there a genuine consensus about the pinnacle of art or just an established tradition? I have seen so many images of these works; would the real thing make a difference? Instead I go to the shops in the arcades and buy scarves with art-works for my daughters, a Monet and something bright-colored and experimental, probably not a Picasso but considering his output who would know? Is this popularization irreverence? Why shouldn’t we recycle images, bring them, or aspects of them, into our lives in new ways?

     I walk back to the hotel. On the way I rest for a moment on a park bench. A well-dressed pretty young woman comes up to me and tells me she has just found a gold ring, is it mine? It is a large and lumpy ring, actually a brass nut. No, I say. Do I want to have a closer look at it? No thanks, I say again. She tries a little harder. What was that about?

     In the afternoon I go to the Musée de Quai Branly, Paris’ new museum of non-Western art which is only ten minutes walk from my hotel. My guide book is dismissive of this pet project of Jacques Chirac which has denuded other collections of their primitive art. Primitive, is there no better word? The museum is a long building in dusky red, the red that Norse people like to place in their wild landscapes. It ambles through and interacts with its gardens which are reminiscent of primeval woodland and swamp, mainly swamp with reeds and grasses and here and there a line of rusty wires, a little bent as in the wind, that suggest some early and unsophisticated attempt to reproduce nature. The architect Jean Nouvel is a famous name, yet it is hard to get a coherent impression of the changing shapes of the building through all this greenery. Inside there is a wide walkway that snakes up through the floors. At the moment it is washed over by Charles Sandison’s installation ‘The River’, a stream of jumbled and ever moving letters and words, made of light, like reflections on water, but never quite decipherable. As to be expected, there are marvelous ceremonial objects: masks, jewelry, clothing, weapons and the like.  But many of the displays are also of objects of everyday use from all the non-European continents, laboriously and triumphantly crafted from resisting natural materials. They are beautiful because they are appropriate but also because in many cases there is some extra decoration or an evocative shape, that gives a glimpse of the thoughts and beliefs of the makers and their people.  

     On the ground floor is the special exhibition ‘Maîtres du Désordre’. The flyer says: ‘To protect from the imperfection of the world appear the intercessors who negotiate with the ambivalent and dangerous powers’: shamans, holy fools, magicians, priests, trained to exorcise evil, to recruit the help of spirits, to undertake cosmic voyages or lead bacchanals that will shake up existence to form new patterns, allow a new start. Some modern artists have been included; as always, Picasso is there among them.

28^th July – Since Charlotte would like me to see her favorite gallery, the Musée Marmotton, I will go there today and use the excursion to try out the Metro which she has explained to me. I have to change trains three times and only go in the wrong direction once! The Musée Marmotton is an elegant villa by the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. On the ground floor are Monet’s garden paintings and the many well-known views of his lake with its water- lilies. My daughters had urged me to visit Giverny, the park Monet laid out and where he painted, which is a day excursion. I would mentally have compared Monet as a designer of gardens and Monet as a painter who almost certainly inspired countless new gardens, all somewhat different from his: he is the gardener’s muse and that of many of our photographers too. There can be no doubt that it was the  Impressionists who taught us to recognize the beauty in our familiar daily surroundings; they made it visible and our culture has gone a long way towards learning their lessons.              
     In the basement of the Marmotton, there is a special exhibition of the work of Berthe Morisot. Her paintings show gardens and the bourgeois Parisians flowering within them, fathers and mothers and children. I can see why Charlotte loved this exhibition; she and her three siblings grew up in a forester’s house in the woods, often, she remembers, a place of tension between siblings; but now they have all left home the beauty that was always there is the stronger memory. Monet and Morisot would have seen it immediately.

     In the afternoon I go to town. My intention is to visit the Jewish Museum – I am of German stock and must make this effort. I would now also like to compare its approach with the Deportation Memorial. But it is the Sabbath today; the doors are locked and chained and there are threats to loiterers. So I go on to the Pompidou. There is quite a crowd in the music bowl in front of it where tricksters and musicians are performing and people can soak up the sun after those weeks of bad summer weather; and there are no queues inside.

     But I have made the mistake of forgetting to have lunch and once inside you have no access to food without forfeiting your entrance fee. So I drag myself from gallery to gallery of modern experimental art. There are no easy stories for the viewer here; each painting and sculpture requires a new effort. What does one do with a canvas that is almost pure white? Look harder and you will see brush strokes. Why am I asked to take note of this shape? It is neither pleasing nor reminiscent of things I might care about. Is its merit that it is unusual? What is the significance of this collection of nondescript objects?  Perhaps they meant something to the artist but there is no hint as to why he placed them there. Maybe all this is viewer training to take note of everything in the world, no matter how seemingly insignificant. I breathe a sigh of relief for every familiar exhibit where some of the labor of acceptance has already been done. Has it always been so difficult to appreciate innovative art?  

     From the outside steps of the building there is a wide view over Paris; it is a stately, dignified city, built, decorated and preserved with loving care, a city of human proportions, held in the gentle curve of its river, the most beautiful city I have seen. It is clear that the Pompidou with its brash primary colors, its unashamed exhibition of plumbing, and its fire escape staircases is an almost sacrilegious provocation, just as its art is a provocation to our culture’s organic and narrative prejudices.

     I am feeling worse and worse. So I have a bite at the cafe, then hasten through long tunnels to catch the right train, and succumb to a bout of gastro the moment I reach my room.  There I spend the long evening reading Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, that beautiful satire of the French bourgeois’ pretence at heroic patriotism that calls into question the grand monuments by the Seine.

29^th July – My suitcase has arrived at last; I can dress with more dignity. It is Sunday today and I’ll take it easy. The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in the modernist Tokyo Palace is just across the river upon the elevated right bank. On the footbridge I am offered my third gold ring – they have all been identical – by a well dressed young man who also claims to have just picked it up. Unfortunately the riverside here looks like a rubbish dump today, a shock in this otherwise impeccable city. Who would have been partying there? Young people or is it debris from the homeless? There are surprisingly many here sleeping rough on park benches even during the day.

     The museum is free and almost empty on this sunny morning. Its paintings, mostly well known art-works of the post-Impressionist and Expressionist periods are widely spaced to allow for relaxed contemplation. There is quite a lot of Matisse, also Modigliani, Chagall, Sonia Delaunay; the Pierre Bonnard paintings stand out in their subtle but vibrant colors. Placed in between them are finely crafted pieces of Art Nouveau furniture. It is easy and enjoyable to go round a second time, be among old friends. Perhaps it is the furniture that makes it all feel so homely.

     In the afternoon I go to the Cluny Museum of medieval art, a vast, ancient and unfathomable building, now a depository for fragments of a distant past which may or may not capture your imagination. The room that displays the tapestries known as ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ is an exception. Later, back in my room, I read a learned attempt at explaining the meaning of this strange and beautiful cycle. But as a viewer, I always thought I knew what it meant. To me this lady stands for the quintessential and ideal woman; she is not between heraldic animals but symbolic ones. The lion with its masculine strength and the unicorn with its masculine virility, animals both, neither threaten or intrude on her; she has achieved the perfect balance. She uses all her senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch represented in the first five tapestries in combination with, as the pamphlet also explains, a final sixth one, the heart. She keeps that balance which the symmetry of the tapestries reinforces, even though there are always also other symbolic animals scattered about irregularly in the background or foreground, monkeys, dogs and hares among them. It is because she is prepared to relinquish her jewelry, the symbol of earthly riches and superficial beauty, and rely on her heart, that the tent behind her opens up on the last tapestry to give her shelter and a home where she will always be safe and unassailable. She embodies the deeper meaning of chivalry which dominated the French imagination for so long: the woman who is exempt from the bestial world of action – she is the still and beautiful centre in each of these tapestries – and can thus be an example of true and fulfilled humanity to the men around her. Almost all the old churches around Paris – Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, Chartres to name just a few –  are dedicated to Mary the Virgin, a virgin who bore a child yet never became the slave of passion and thus never fell under the control of either masculine strength or masculine sexuality.  Beautiful, dignified virgin figures are wherever you look here, guarding the entrances of churches and representing their hallowed sanctuary. They are relics of a very different era.

30^th July – Today I decide to visit the place des Vosges, originally place Royale, built by Henri IV between 1605 and 1612; I have been told it is the most beautiful square in Europe and the first example of such town planning, not to be missed. It is a true square. The houses, all of red brick and white stone with grey roofs and white chimneys, similar but never identical, form the solid but gated four walls around the central park which is neat and plain green with lawns and trees. When the square was built, it would have housed a uniform high society, meeting and parading there. But on this lovely morning the park is almost deserted and I wonder what social contact, if any, the current occupants of these buildings would have with each other.

     I then cross the river and walk up towards the Luxembourg Gardens, stopping to notice the Pantheon which emulates a classical temple. But after glancing inside, I am unwilling to queue up and pay to see the graves of these once important men. I walk further, circle the gardens and then sit down in a restaurant pavilion. The waiter has seen me but refuses to come though the place is still almost empty. After twenty minutes I go and sit outside. When he still ignores me I go up to him with my order. A while later he drops what turns out to be a superb slice of apple tart on my table and without looking at me, takes my money and goes. How could I have offended him? He can’t know that I have a German background; perhaps he is fed up with tourists, though he was serving others politely. Perhaps he doesn’t like women, or elderly women?

     I take the train to Montmartre and get out at Abbesses, only noticing the sign that warns of the thousand steps to climb when I am in the one-way rush. At the top there are at least eight young girls with clipboards who want my money for fake charities, also market stalls selling any amount of junk. I walk up the steep hill to Sacré Coeur which is closed for some important occasion, there are black cars circling, and then descend the impressive stairway to gain the widest view across Paris: a beautiful view. Now I won’t need to jostle with the Eiffel Tower tourists. Half way down the hill I take a different train line to my hotel.

31^st July – Today I visit the Musée d’Orsay in the grand old railway station that once accommodated an upper storey hotel; it was built for the 1900 World Fair like a cathedral to progress. Its outside queue is three quarters of an hour long this morning. One tries to occupy one’s mind: the girl in front of me has kept a place for a very late friend who, once arrived, texts without taking further notice of her. The first girl twitches uncomfortably but tries not to show her irritation. I look away. –  Once past the ticket counter, I do as I have been advised and take the lift to the top floor. Up there, there is a special exhibition on Misia Sert, the muse of so many of France’s turn-of-the-century artists and writers (amongst others Renoir, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vallotton, Proust and de Cocteau) and bravely buy her biography in French. She is the contemporary and in many respects sister of a German writer and artist I have been working on, only that mine had the audacity to be creative herself and was looked down upon with suspicion and contempt by her contemporaries. Even today most men can’t stand her.

     Then I work my way through the building. The wealth of the holdings is overwhelming, so many van Goghs and Impressionists to be seen in the original, rooms full of superb Art Nouveau furniture, lower down bombastic historical and allegorical paintings that display the mentality of their epoch. The Symbolist gallery captures my attention; I once read a piece on Puvez de Chavanne’s ‘Hope’ –  he was new to me at the time – and now this painting is hanging here. More eerily, his women all look like Charlotte: innocent but dignified and real, alert, both shy and confident, a little smile just below the surface. It is not hard to see Charlotte as embodying hope, as a woman calm between lion and unicorn in the twentieth century. I wonder what Charlotte’s boyfriend, whom she has mentioned to me, is like?

     The visit to Les Invalides this afternoon feels like a chore. But I have decided to go to this military museum. My father fought in the First World War as a very young man and I should take an interest in the military hardware he might have handled and also any snippets of information that may be new to me. But the story of the two world wars told here is the conventional one that all boys enjoy and it is the French one. At the end of my visit I view the soldiers’ chapel and Napoleon’s grand mausoleum; I know of no church that insists on such exclusive reverence for its god. However, Napoleon did take care of the injured and maimed veterans that sacrificed themselves to his ideals and ambitions; would they have been happy with less showy quarters? I remember that my young father, a disciple of Nietzsche at the time, had great admiration for Napoleon. It was a different period.

     Tonight Charlotte has gastro and decides to go without a meal; I have my first taste of snails and love them. I tell her the story of her grandmother fleeing with young children at the end of World War II. She had noticed snails of an edible variety in the vineyards and asked a few little boys to collect some for an agreed price. They came back with wheelbarrows full. What my aunt didn’t realize was that the snails had to be de-slimed before cooking; you apparently let them crawl over salt crystals. Even for starving people her stew was inedible. Charlotte has not heard this story.

1^st August – My last day in Paris. Today I look at the Sainte Chapelle, even though it involves an hour of queuing in the full sun. It is an experience of overwhelming beauty, particularly the upper church, the reliquary for the holy relics of Christ’s passion that King Louis IX, better known as Saint Louis, had bought for an exorbitant price from Constantinople and transferred to France in 1239. France was to become, he hoped, the new centre of Christian Europe.

     It would take many weeks to appreciate every detail of this superb creation: the stained glass windows, the sculptures, the reliefs, the floor tiles, the paintings and the carvings in their strong but subtle colors. The nineteenth century renovations after two fires, a devastating flood and then the damage militantly atheistic revolutionaries inflicted make it again possible to appreciate the original conception. For the Sainte Chapelle presents an extraordinarily complete theology of medieval Catholic Christianity.

     As to be expected in France, the church is dedicated to the Virgin, the model for all Christians, for it is in and through her that the Divine and the human have come together. She stands in the central column of the lower portal. This lower church, a parish church for the locals, is simple. It is the king by God’s grace who must understand the full complexity of the religion as the custodian of which he rules and the upper church is his. Of the 16 stained glass windows, averaging almost 100 scenes each, all but the foremost give their space to the Old Testament prophets, allowing them to illuminate this sacred Christian space. The central window of the apse, however, depicts Christ’s passion; the relics to be housed in this chapel were the instruments of Christ’s passion, the ‘true’ crown of thorns and a segment of the ‘true’ cross. Painted quadrifoils depict 39 martyrs, not all now identifiable, who followed the example of Christ and suffered torture and death for their faith. Their willingness to die was the most convincing argument there was for the truth of the promise of a life to come. The spaces around them are filled with angels. Statues of the twelve apostles, pillars of the church, are integrated into the twelve columns of the nave. The rose window at the back represents the apocalypse, the destructive disasters that will overtake the earth at the end of time.  Its swirling round shape suggests eternity. The entrance to the upper chapel through its porch depicts the Last Judgment, the gateway through which access to the heavenly beauty, embodied in this chapel, can be gained. Around this entrance at eye level stone reliefs remind us of the story of God’s creation of the world and of the ensuing original sin that resulted in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from their original earthly paradise; this was the sin, Christians are reminded, that made necessary Christ’s passion and death. The lowest level of this chapel, the floor, contains images of God’s pre-human creation: plants along with birds and other animals. The all-important sacred relics on their gilded platform, prominent at the front of the apse, are of course not a mere depiction, like everything else in this chapel but, as was believed, the place where the earthly and divine meet. In their sacred presence miracles could come to pass. Because the stories that provide the elements of the Christian message are here presented visually, they can interact with each other for a learned viewer like the king and thus deepen his understanding.

     The modern Christian might notice that in this chapel there is no depiction of, for example, the healing miracles of the New Testament; the story of Christ’s love is not told at all. This is still a militant church and the fleur-de-lis and the Castillian tower, symbols of the power and legitimacy of the King and Queen respectively, are very prominent in the redecorated lower chapel and probably were so in the original thirteenth century one, built between 1242 and 1248, as well.

     From the chapel my ticket takes me to the Conciergerie, the great and beautifully simple Gothic hall that was part of the original palace of the French kings on the Île de la Cité and later, particularly during the Revolution, a prison.

     I thought I might be frivolous during my last afternoon and inspect the Museum of Fashion but it is closed for renovations. So I visit the nearby Musée Guimet, the national museum of Asian arts, instead. It presents an extraordinary contrast to the chapel this morning. I come into rooms and rooms of Buddhas, all in the same position of rest, all with the same beautiful serenity of expression, all faces of an Eastern cast. What simplicity. There are great treasures in the Guimet collection but my knowledge is insufficient to appreciate the subtle differences between exhibits. So I just wander through the halls and marvel.

     In the evening Charlotte comes for the last time and we stroll over to the Eiffel Tower again. It is an impressive creation but I am glad I spent no time queuing for it.

2^nd August – My lift to the airport does not arrive (internet comments suggest that this has happened before) and the receptionist calls a taxi for me. It turns out to be quick and also cheaper. The airport counters for my flight are in total chaos, ridiculously long queues winding round corners, squeezing through narrow spaces, broken to allow others hastening towards other queues to pass through. And there are only two processing desks, one determined to handle only business class passengers. I am told to get into one queue and after three-quarters of an hour it turns out to be the wrong one. I dip under the rope to the adjacent correct one; I have waited just as long as they have. More honest people behind me, among them an exhausted elderly couple, are sent back to the end by the business class clerk. At the gate, the time for boarding has come and gone and though officials are rushing around nothing happens. Half an hour later the furious captain apologizes. The sub-contractors in charge of processing passengers will be sacked forthwith, he promises; he assures us he is as outraged as we must be. No one should have to put up with such cost-cutting incompetence.

     Michael and his family, whom I am meeting at Oslo and who were to arrive a little after me, have luckily not been at the airport for long. In Oslo the rain is pouring down, the trains are currently not working, and the bus stop is not close to our hotel. We try to make our way through shopping centers and covered walkways. When we get to our destination, our rooms in the huge hotel are delightfully spacious. We have dinner in an extremely noisy fast food bar, apparently the only affordable venue nearby. When the rain eases, we walk past the disreputable figures that hang around the railway station, allowing Harry a quick ride on the big bronze bear of the square, to the bayside and the massive stone fort where what was once Christiania originated. It is quaintly guarded by young soldiers in old fashioned uniforms, doing their circuits. Here there are canons for the three boys to climb and lawns to race across. On our way back we pass a games shop with, among other things, Lord of the Rings dress-ups and it takes a long time to persuade the boys to leave this virtual world.

3^rd August – It is still raining so we spend most of the day in the ‘Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst, Arkitektur og Design’. I make myself available to Harry, my youngest grandchild, who goes around choosing paintings to discover their stories. Eilif  Peterssen’s ‘Christian II signs the death warrant for Torben Oxe’ fascinates him most of all. He scrutinizes every detail for clues: the dramatically petitioning woman close to the king, three distressed women kneeling quietly but hopelessly behind that more elegant figure, the black courtier proffering the warrant, the king, thoughtful and dignified in the middle, in the background a man in red looking around startled. So what was going on here? With all our ingenuity we cannot piece the story together; those who went to Scandinavian schools would probably have spoken of the Danish king’s struggle for dominance over the powerful nobles of his realm. The painting is obviously a comment on a complex national story, keeping it alive for scrutiny. The gallery contains many Munch paintings and we talk about the Puritanical attitudes of rural Norway in those days, the distrust and fear of the body as the seat of evil, the terrible death-rate from tuberculosis, and the artist’s attempt to bring enlightenment to his people who knew nothing about changing moral attitudes in the more progressive states of Europe where he was studying. Harry asks for a postcard of the shy and shivering little naked girl called ‘Puberty’. He has grown up differently and these are all new things to consider. Dahl’s and Heyerdahl’s dramatic Romantic Norwegian landscapes, which we have above all come to Norway to see, are of no interest to him. Later that night Harry asks me: Omi why are you so wise? Even in this our modern world, the accumulated knowledge of the elderly can sometimes be of interest.

     We have found a book of ‘Norwegian Folktales’ in the gallery shop and read them at night. They are all about clever humans ingeniously outwitting the huge but stupid trolls who are out to destroy them. They leave Harry uneasy. I too wonder what these trolls once stood for: the forces of nature or other humans, perhaps an earlier heathen Finnish population that originally lived in these mountains or rival settlers also trying to survive? Can the same solutions be effective and ethical for all? The stories preach that the cleverest always wins, never the strongest. But there can be no doubt that the storytellers want the trolls dead.

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23^rd August – The magnificent tour of Norway and its fjords and the two weeks in Stockholm, where Michael and Karen, Jack, Oliver and Harry will now be staying for six months, is almost over. Today I walk along the shore of Kungsholmen where they live, then the city on Norrmalm, and to the museum island of Skeppsholmen; it has taken only an hour. The museum of architecture has an informative exhibition about Scandinavian building styles and techniques through the centuries.

     The ‘Moderna Museet’ is like another hall of the Pompidou; but I become interested in the work of Joko Ono whose art I had never seen. There was a film of one of her performances of  ‘Cut Piece’ which was made with several different participating audiences. Yoko sits relaxed and still in the Buddha pose while one after another her viewers come forward and cut away pieces of her clothing, some as though to redesign it, some to expose her uncomfortably, some to turn her into an object of art, some shyly, some aggressively, some randomly. It is amazingly fascinating to watch. This ‘art’ could interest Harry too. Her ‘conceptual’ piece ‘Grapefruit’ gives suggestions for strange behavior. ‘Hide until everybody goes home.’ ‘Hide until everybody forgets about you.’ ‘Hide until everybody dies’ will evoke childhood memories in many. Unfortunately, the exhibition in the basement entitled ‘Picasso or Duchamp?’ inspired by Picasso’s remark upon the death of his artist colleague that ‘he was wrong’, will not be open before I leave. Duchamp shocked the art world by signing found objects like a urinal, ‘readymades’, as his artwork. The exhibition has the potential to be interesting.

24^th August – Today I walk to the Nationalmuseum. Like the Oslo museum, it has some superb pieces of European art, often matched to relate the works of Scandinavian artists to the European trends that influenced them. But what I find most interesting is a special exhibition of ‘Slow Art’, pieces that have often taken countless laborious hours to create. Apart from being art that challenges contemporary consumer tastes and the widespread indifference to ancient craft skills, and art that has no fear of fragility or uselessness, it is often art that works with unlikely materials like flower petals or the raggedly broken egg shells of small birds. In the current display each such shell is enhanced with a tiny pearl and all are linked with delicate silver wire to make a necklace, one that no one will ever wear. Here a dress can become a sculpture. In one case ovals cut from the pages of an encyclopedia, part blank, part printed, and strung onto wire form two intertwining necklace-type snakes with shapes that bulge and decline almost imperceptibly and have the subtlest gradations of grey and cream. There is a bowl from very ancient wood; a complex, abstract cut-out from paper is reminiscent of older silhouette art; an embroidery is half painting, half a relief sculpture of a garden. The artistic process is often contemplative and not averse to randomness. I’ll have to tell Jack about this; he can sit for hours coloring tiny Lord of the Ring figures, each separately, with a carefully selected range of paints. The finished object is then almost too small for my eyes to appreciate. In the process, I think he creates for himself a meditative space.        

29^th – I have arrived at Gisela’s apartment in Wiesbaden. The walls of the three rooms are lined with the colorful backs of thousands of books, mostly literary fiction from around the world. She has read them all and can walk straight to any book that has come up for discussion. The furniture is Biedermeier. A simple round table of light pear wood with its delicate but durable elegance is eye-catching. At night we eat at it, carefully but without taking special precautions; people must have done so for almost two hundred years. The pictures on the walls are unobtrusive, waiting for you to come and examine them. Gisela’s earliest acquisitions could have been book illustrations; recent ones are more abstract; most are prints in the muted colors characteristic of lithographs or etchings in older books. One was done by the novelist Günter Grass with whom Gisela has worked. It is from his toadstool series. On a side table is a sculpture carved from an open book, a kind of ‘slow art’ sculpture, created by the art teacher of her former school. Hers is an apartment in which everything has its place and it is returned the moment it is no longer needed. You have to be neat to own so many books and yet retain a sense of spaciousness, an openness for all the new things that will be written in the years still ahead. (I think with shame of my own untidy reading habits.)

     In the morning we walk through the elegant spa town that grew into its glory days once the railway was built. My father and his sisters went to school here some time before World War I. The beautiful Art Nouveau building where they lived – it is directly opposite Gisela’s – has recently been renovated. Its high walls under their slate helmet are simple but beneath the eaves there is a painted strip of scattered flowers that makes this house unique. We walk past the Kurhaus and the well-kept ambulatory parks, call in at the late nineteenth century villa that is now the cultural centre, leave a book that is no longer needed on the covered exchange shelves outside and inside pick up one recently dropped off by a reader. In the bookshop, on her recommendation, I order yet another new documentary on Holocaust survivors for the plane trip back; the teacher in Gisela makes sure that all those she considers German read their share of such works. In the pharmacy my non-standard request is dealt with efficiently and warmly; at the station the lady in the travel office immediately comes up with the cheapest and most suitable offer and is pleased to have been so useful. These are the wine-growing Rhine lands where people are reputedly genial and welcoming. In the afternoon a friend of Gisela’s comes, a hymnologist and choir conductor, and we go to see a film. It is being shown in a restored Art Nouveau theatre: extraordinary the beauty of the curved balustrade, set off with a single delicate line of green; we admire quickly before the lights go off. This town represents a bourgeois culture that is prosperously harmonious and almost uniquely in Germany, it was not destroyed in the war. Its period buildings are genuine. When I return from my trip in ten days time it will be the night of open churches and Gisela has already planned our outing.

30^th August – I have bought a paper and read to my surprise that President Hollande has just confessed to the world that the Jews deported from France were actually identified and arrested by French people, not by the German Gestapo and SS.

     My train arrives in Braunschweig just after lunch; Ann’s daughter Natascha with her partner and baby are also expected and there is the seasonal plum cake awaiting us all. My cousin Friedrich is happy to drive me to nearby Wolfenbüttel and to borrow books for me at the archive; forty years ago I worked there for six sabbatical months and later again for three. We walk past the palace where Kordula and Alice went to school and through the medieval town. It is still made up entirely of beautifully preserved, colorful beam and daub houses lining cobbled streets. The house where I last lived, down by the river in a quarter known as Little Venice, has not changed, though sadly both my hosts have since died. This is another place bypassed by the war; and being so close to the East German border, it was also lucky to escape the neglectful GDR regime.  

     Friedrich and Ann’s house in Braunschweig, a narrow four storeyed family home with basement, was built in the thirties on the edge of town as part of a colony for garden lovers and amateur farmers. They themselves have had more than thirty years to perfect it all. I am assigned the wide, sunny attic with its slanting walls for my stay; the bright colors of its furnishings are distilled in a vase of swirling nasturtiums. Everything in this house seems casually placed but picture-perfect, be it the breakfast table or a scatter of cushions on the floor for the nursing mother and her baby. And every awkward space, as in the narrow kitchen, has been rethought and improved. The artworks are almost all by Australian Aboriginal painters. Over the years Ann’s other daughter, a pediatrician, has worked throughout Australia; she is now in Alice Springs where I recently visited them all. So there is a personal connection. But it is the fascination with nature that unites these cultures; Germans have always been nature lovers. In Ann’s case, it is a fascination with earth and stones and land formations, even though her latest acquisition, displayed in a window between books, shows instead a hillside of sparse trees. Ann used to spend long days each holiday picking up rounded pebbles and rocks from alpine streams. They now lie in an artfully natural brook that bubbles through part of her garden. She has collected wild flowers from everywhere, but she has room for the humbler of the more colorful cultivated flowers too. There are bowers and a swing for the children, berry bushes, and lately several clipped, straight or curved containing box-hedges much like the stone walls her favorite artist, Andi Goldsworthy, places in otherwise featureless forest. Ann once gave me a book on Goldsworthy’s work; I hadn’t known of him before. At a central point in the garden there is also a highlighting cluster of bright green topiary balls on the thin straight stems of similar box-trees. Even the vegetable patch which is unobtrusive at the distant end of their long strip of land is a delight. This house and garden are all of a piece and lucky for me, Friedrich and Ann like visitors who can animate it all and enjoy it with them.

2^nd September – I am in Berlin. Yesterday I was picked up by a welcoming committee consisting of my godson Dirk with Joshi, and also Dirk’s new friend Anett with her son Leo; to top it off an orchestra was playing on the floor of the central station. Dirk’s apartment is a bachelor’s flat, spacious rooms furnished from the left-overs of a marriage. A grand piano is prominent in the living-room; there is also an unsightly private cubby-house Joshi has built for himself where some household implements are annoyingly sequestered. While the boys played last night, we adults talked non-stop as we prepared the meal. We were very aware we needed to make the best of what little time we had. This morning I first listen to Dirk and Joshi singing in the choir of the local Catholic church and then we take off to hire a boat. We want to explore the Havel waterways. Joshi insists we must have a motor boat and he eventually and not quite properly gets his way.

     But first we spend an hour looking at the ancient red brick Brandenburg Cathedral here on the town’s central island. A thousand years ago it was at the crossing of important trade routes, also on the contested border between heathen and Christian, Slav and German realms. The final handover in 1150 was, however, peaceful. The first cathedral was destroyed in 983 in the border wars, the current one was then begun in 1165. Till 1507 the church was run by a community of priests living as monks for whom the front part of the church, closed to the laity, was reserved and whose task it was to sing the hours seven times each day. But a few years before Luther’s Reformation erupted they suddenly gave up monastic life and became worldly priests. Some of their buildings later became a knight’s academy for the sons of noblemen. The church today is a venerable space, its early Gothic arches beautifully outlined as red brick ribs, but it is full of peculiarities. The Romanesque crypt is not really underground but dips down to be an awkward part of the main church. The choir is over-dimensional to house all those singers. The outside gable wall contains a large hexagram; no one knows whether it represented a Jewish star or a magical symbol. In a back area a 1240 column is topped with an anti-Semitic capital depicting a sow with a Jewish hat suckling seven piglets and one human. On either side of the front portal there are friezes from the early 15^th century; the right one illustrates the fable of the fox and the geese with the fox irreverently dressed as a cleric deceiving his parishioners; the left one has not yet been explained.  The Baroque pulpit, from early Protestant times, rests heavily on the head of poor St Peter, the cathedral’s patron. In the museum at the back a so-called ‘hunger-cloth’ can be viewed with hand-held torches; it is a linen sheet with white on white embroidery depicting sacred topics. The clothes of each of its figures have a different weaving pattern mimicked by the stitching, a surprisingly effective way to create identity with such heavily restricted means. The cloth used to be drawn across the altar area during Lenten time when more colorful representations could not be displayed. The church has fine old altars and artifacts too, but it is the quirkiness of religious practice, the strong critical and polemic voices obviously given a hearing, that are fascinating here. Among the gravestones and coats of arms I discover the names of Junker families that intermarried with my mother’s people: von der Gröben, von der Schulenburg.

     We really did need a motor boat to appreciate the vastness of this system of lakes and waterways, the largest in Europe Dirk tells me. Ancient untouched forest stands on the mostly inaccessible banks, flawlessly reflected today though only until another long freight barge passes. At some stage Anett and Leo join us and we change direction to go through a lock that opens our way to a big and shallow lake. Unfortunately no fish bite. It is then a race to return the boat in time.

3^rd September – Dirk and I spend an hour or two walking through the centre of Berlin today only to discover that even the private galleries are closed on Mondays here.

5^th September – Rainer and I have been talking since my arrival in Munich yesterday, but this evening he is suddenly seized by a pang of conscience and we decide to go to the only cultural event on offer in this holiday period. It is an organ concert in the city’s cathedral, the rebuilt Frauenkirche, now a space of great simplicity and beauty. As in Brandenburg, the Gothic arches are outlined in red brick against white walls. The concert featuring Bach, Franz Schmidt, Max Reger, and Akira Nishimara whose music commemorates Hiroshima is the most subtly moving I have listened to. The organist is Martin Schmeding.

6^th September – Today Rainer has arranged for us to meet his old friends Toni and Renate in the Bavarian countryside. Renate’s husband comes too. We have lunch in the village of Wessobrunn that has given its name to one of the earliest Old-High-German texts and admire its ancient linden trees. Then we drive to Rottenbuch, a small village that was once the site of a large and important early monastery, founded in 1074 by the new Bavarian monarch, Welf IV. Its church, burned down more than once, was rebuilt once or twice and eventually ended up as a simple single nave Gothic-style basilica with eight side altars. From the outside it is a plain white and red roofed building with a free-standing bell tower, so that what awaits you inside is quite unexpected.

    The monastery had twice been ravaged during the terrible Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants to which a third of the German population fell prey. Fifty years after the Peace of Westphalia, the Rottenbuch monks decided in an extraordinary act of what was known at the time as ‘generosity’ to finance the complete refurbishment of their church in the current Baroque style, now fast transforming into Rococo. They would make use of the prodigious local talent available. When one enters, the first impression is of a creation completely of one piece. It is executed in gentle pastels combined with gold on white, colors characteristic of the Rococo. There are nine large ceiling frescoes, ten wall frescoes, no end of delicate stucco work covering almost every surface, and gilded carvings on altars and pulpit. This church draws the viewer into its paean of joy, no longer the ecstatic and worryingly otherworldly emotionality of the Baroque visionary and martyr, rather a calm and serene delight. What is most extraordinary is the theological conception of this total work of art, conceived to banish the trauma of war and on the threshold of a new scientific age. There is no crucifix in the whole church. This was presumably permissible because the church was dedicated to the birth of Mary which predated all the events of the Christian calendar and certainly the Passion. The church’s one Madonna with Child is the only remnant from Gothic times. But the central figure in this church is without any doubt the founder of the Rottenbuch order, Saint Augustus. The frescoes are all devoted to his life, his visions, and his monastic heritage and celebrate the theology and experience of a surprisingly modern man. Clearly what these monks were looking for was a new Christianity without crucifixion and martyred saints and it appears, even without a virgin birth, for the central altar shows Anna and Zacharias delighted with their naturally conceived and born baby, Mary. The booklet on this church, on which I have had to fall back after our brief visit, is of course wise enough to downplay the theological innovation. Nevertheless, all this now strikes us as a little ‘over the top’, too intent on blocking out other voices, too reliant on decorative detail rather than content. Our party too could spare only a few minutes for this gem of a church.

     We have to drop our passengers off at Renate’s place. Her husband is the Indian painter Mahirwan Mamtani. Mahirwan’s work can be studied on all the walls of their house but he then also invites me into his studio where a large series of paintings is displayed on the floor. These are all of faces. But whether Mamtani does full figures or not, his beautifully and variously colored canvasses invariably arrange their subjects’ faces within a four-leafed-clover mandala shape. Humans, however, do not have quadrifoil faces. This gives his people a mask-like, almost grotesque appearance. Mamtani, as I read him, paints the faces of modern people with modern pursuits but they have had to accommodate themselves to an age-old and inflexible religious shape into which not one of them fits comfortably. In consequence they have become caricatures of themselves. It might be hard for most Europeans, Mamtani’s potential buyers, who are now often overawed by eastern religion, to recognize this. Or would they understand such figures as new manifestations of Hindu gods like Ganesh, democratic and modern versions perhaps of the comically and grotesquely divine? Could both views be valid? I would find it hard to live with such a face on my wall. In contrast, the book of Mamtani’s paintings, now available on the internet, would be something I might go back to occasionally, if only for the beauty of his colors and the profusion of his characters.

7^th September – Today is not a good day to travel back north. Lufthansa flight attendants are on strike and since yesterday the airline has cancelled thousands of regional flights. Halfway to Frankfurt our extended train, now too long for this station platform, fills with a never-ending procession of people with large suitcases who all have to file through our carriage to find their seats. It seems, they eventually do. I have arranged to meet my godson Martin, a finance journalist, in Frankfurt during his lunch break. There is an electricity outage when I arrive. The trains are all halted, the lifts don’t work and we can’t get food or drink except eventually warm Coca Cola in a club room to which Martin has access. I give him my unattractive second sandwich and we talk a little about Europe’s worrying economy. When he has to leave, the lifts come back on. Gremlins!

     I take, as it turns out, a particularly slow train to Wiesbaden and feel bad that Gisela has had to wait. In the evening we go out to a refurbished Romanesque church in what is now the suburb of Bierstadt. There a new-fangled instrument, the Cristal Baschet that looks as though it had been designed for some Hollywood space odyssey and which must be played with wet hands is being demonstrated. We are given piece after piece of soft and shapeless meditative music. Gisela, all her life a singer of Lutheran chorales, cannot leave the venue quickly enough.

8^th September – The Frankfurt airport, which I reach early, is calm and almost empty. A bored police official is suspicious about my passport which his negligent French colleague forgot to stamp; am I hiding another one? In London the security screening for the USA takes almost the one and three quarter hours I have, so my plane is boarding when I finally get there. I sit next to a lovely young woman from Ireland who turns out to be a Parisian. I ask her about unemployment; not if you have languages, she says. She works for the internet company Paypal. In New York my suitcase is for once the first to appear; the security officer takes my photo and fingerprints but thankfully does not find me suspicious, and when I come out of Customs Sam, who had been told we were delayed, has walked in only that minute. Keren had not even had time to make my bed when we arrived at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

9^th September – It is a calm and sunny Sunday morning and after a walk around the streets Keren takes me to their church where Sam meets us. Yesterday there was a widely visible hurricane over Brooklyn, and people are still talking about it incredulously; but it apparently did no damage. The Murumbas tell me that when they first arrived in New York from Melbourne where we had become friends, they spent a long time looking for a church that suited them and this one, they say, felt right from the start. Around half the congregation are black but that is only one reason this law professor and his teacher wife, who had fled Uganda to escape the terror of Idi Amin, feel at home there. In its caption the church identifies itself as ‘First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, founded in 1822, an intentionally multicultural congregation’. Since in Uganda all Protestant denominations had to work under the banner of Anglicanism, the Presbyterian label meant little to Sam and Keren. And it seems to mean just as little to the other parishioners; this is not a Calvinist congregation. The church is a fine old red sandstone building surrounded by greenery; inside the Pre-Raphaelite windows exude a dusky loveliness but the tone is set by the energetic and musically brilliant mixed race gospel choir with its accompanists which is active right through the service. The sermon given by a white lay woman is committed, accessible and sophisticated; as a first time visitor, publicly introduced and welcomed by Sam, I am given a CD of it to take home. The CD was recorded by Jeremy who is Jewish; we have lunch at an eatery with him and his psychoanalyst wife Ellen, the Murumbas’ close friends. The couple have been through tough times since he lost his stock-broking job in the crash three years ago; now their bright student daughter is also unwell. Later on a walk she tells of the day the Twin Towers fell when they were all inexplicably held in class while one student after the other was called out and left; the father of one of the girls was a victim that day. Ellen, in turn, describes how she was called onto the street but then stood about wondering what the fuss was about; suddenly she saw the first tower collapsing. Sam was at a human rights meeting in town and then changed from one train to the other trying to get back for his lecture. Eventually he gave up and just wandered through the city along with the many others. The wide view of Manhattan and its skyscrapers from the Brooklyn Heights foreshore where we are walking is particularly beautiful today.

     That night Sam and Keren then tell me of the battle their church  has been fighting for the past year and a half to get rid of a new minister, a black woman and a university professor, who had come to them determined to create a fundamentalist, homophobic church here, against the wishes and long term traditions of the congregation. She had finally left last week and now the lengthy process of finding a new minister will have to begin all over again, this time with even more advice from the congregation. It all puts a heavy strain on the elders. Sam and Keren are both elders; Keren is kept busy as the welfare coordinator, for their church is an extended family and those who join are looked after conscientiously.

10^th September – This morning Sam walks across the beautiful Brooklyn Bridge with me. I take some photos. We continue on to City Hall and the site of the Towers where there will be a memorial celebration tomorrow, catch the train to Grand Central and do a quick detour to Times Square and back. Then I make my own way up Fifth Avenue, take a look at the impressive Guggenheim that I know from photos, decide to go there tomorrow and then walk for a while through Central Park. Eventually I choose the recently founded Neue Galerie for German Expressionist art which is close by as my destination. But unfortunately it is currently preparing a Hodler exhibition which will open after I leave and is closed except for the bookshop. There, however, I find a little paperback that completely delights me. It is a translation of ‘The Novices of Sais’, a disquisition by the German Romantic poet-philosopher Novalis and a text that had a certain influence on modern art. It is accompanied rather than illustrated by 55 little pen drawings, doodles might be a better description, by Paul Klee. I find it hard to explain my absolute delight with everything I have ever seen by Klee. He seems to have been the inspirer and germinator of countless quite different works of modern abstraction; there is hardly an exhibition I have been to over the last years where his patronage could not be felt. I sit down on a bench in Central Park and leaf through this book and as I check the names of the drawings –  they are illegible in Klee’s tiny handwriting – I begin to understand why he holds me captive to this extent. For these semi-abstract doodles, flowing out of the unconscious but carefully executed by a consummate craftsman, are all the matrix of stories, teeming with narrative possibilities. They open the viewer’s mind to his own creativity and the unexplored novelty of the world. Some have names like: ‘The little one must harvest’, or ‘Jeweled in spite of it’, or ‘Rough wind on the 28^th of May’, or ‘Landscape with the saint’, or ‘Prickly current. First stage’, or ‘Scene with the running woman’, or ‘The way from Unklaich to China’; these all read like titles for stories that still need to be discovered. Klee encourages us to explore what we ourselves might have to say.

11^th September – Today is the anniversary of the fateful attacks on America’s pride.

As I walk through the living-room, the TV is on for this year’s simple 9/11 ceremony in which relatives or friends of victims read a list of names and add a comment regarding their loved one. I become fascinated by these messages; quite a few treat the occasion as though it were one of those radio shows where birthday greetings are transmitted from uncles and grandmas and nieces before some favorite song is played. Do these people believe that a special channel has opened to reach the victims on this day or do they simply want publicity as a reward for their pain? A nervous black woman tells us several times that her husband used to make breakfast for her on Sundays, clearly her most important or most symbolic memory. Several young people are the descendents of one of the brave firemen who went into the doomed building; they now have a hero in their lives. Only a handful find it necessary to thank the brave troops protecting America from terrorists.

     I go to the Guggenheim and start by ascending the spiral walkway to the top. The paintings currently being displayed are exhibited individually and spaciously in the galleries on either side. I suddenly realize that many of the selected artists like Vasarelli, Nay, Appel, Mondrian, also Max Ernst, Dali, Nolde and others, are those that were represented in the collection of my uncle. I often used to stay with him when I came to Germany and there developed a deeply personal relationship to art-works which I may well have considered tedious in a gallery space such as this. In my uncle’s house these paintings were among furnishings and people and pets and flower-vases and conversations, patiently presenting themselves till something would open them up and make them the highlight of your day. Because of their abstraction they were capable of receiving and embodying quite different experiences and insights; they could become something to focus, collect or even erase your thoughts, a little perhaps like a Jungian mandala. I now walk through the Guggenheim imagining its works in a live setting amongst people and colors and that is very helpful.

     There is also a contrasting exhibition on at the moment which I hear some of the visitors talking about disparagingly: Rineke Dijkstra’s large, calm and revealing photographs of people, often young people, impresses me.

     When I get home Sam is in front of the TV; American embassies have been bombed in Cairo and Libya on this symbolic day and in Libya the ambassador and two others appear to have been killed.

12^th September – It’s MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art today. This is, from the start, a good experience, perhaps due to the way exhibits are grouped in rooms. But I think it is mainly because each of the many rebellious art movements of the second half of the twentieth century is explained in terms of its reaction to the times and the contribution it tried to make. For me these are fascinating stories and perhaps my talents and interests are just not visual enough to cope without stories. I meet old friends like Joseph Beuys who was the talk of the town with his fat and felt when I was young. A lady whose villa we once visited had an installation of his, a pile of coal that took up a small room at the top of the stairs, stairs newly graced with a hand-knotted runner, the work of some other artist. Our hostess had bought it with money that her many friends and neighbors would otherwise have spent on birthday flowers for her. Beuys’ fat and felt made no sense to me until I heard the story of his plane crash and how he was rescued by nomads who treated his burns with just such fat and felt. MoMA has a heavy felt suit he made hanging on the wall, also a vitrine with another felt suit, wooden crutches, an enamel ewer cum washing bowl, and a lump, presumably of fat. I am delighted to find several Kandinsky paintings that I know only from bad reproductions in this museum. In the late fifties in post-war Germany Kandinsky-style patterns were all over the curtains and cushions and for a time I developed a real aversion to his work. Now their extraordinary beauty strikes me.   

     When I get back to Brooklyn, the news is on again. Romney has ignorantly misused yesterday’s incident to gain electoral advantage and the more plausible Republican journalists invited onto the Rachel Madow show are also outraged. In contrast, the responses to the crisis by Hillary Clinton and Obama have been intelligent and appropriate. Sitting here together we feel we are on the better side, in spite of our many reservations.

13^th September – I do the beautiful walk across Brooklyn Bridge once more, go past City Hall, climb up to Trinity Church with its old churchyard, linger there for a moment and then, avoiding the tour groups assembling near the site of the Twin towers, walk on to Battery Park and the bank of the Hudson. The damaged Fritz Koenig sculpture ‘The Sphere’ displayed here on the lawn will do me as a memorial for the 9/11 victims. I haven’t made a proper plan today and when I see a signpost to the Museum of Jewish Heritage I walk over. I seem to be the only visitor about and the airport-style security set up at the entrance almost makes me change my mind. But then I am glad I am here; this is a museum of voices and they are warm human voices, telling first of life in the Jewish villages of Poland and eastern Europe, then of the heartbreak of persecution and finally, on the third floor, discussing post-war experiences, among other things, the deeply dividing conundrum of Israel: ‘We would like to shape it in our image’ one Rabbi says, ‘but we do not live there.’ I ignore much of the statistical and photographic material which I have seen many times but try not to miss any of these voices. Here I also become acquainted with the life, writings and welfare work of Emma Lazarus, a fifth generation Jewish poet from New York who took on the victims of the Russian pogroms of the 19^th century; she later redefined the Statue of Liberty for Americans as the Mother of Refugees. I buy her biography.

     While I have my lunch at the cafeteria, I notice the Goldsworthy garden it looks out on. Here huge granite glacial balls have been hollowed out to receive dwarf oaks, hardy little trees that are all green and thriving. Though the structure of the garden is repetitive, each item, being natural, is quite individual. I am glad that the symbolic significance of it all is not too obviously to the fore; to me it is simply a beautiful garden.   

     I decide to finish my day with a trip on the Staten Island ferry past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. A coast-guard boat with a soldier at its helm senselessly pointing a gun at the world accompanies us all the way; America is once again under attack!

14^th September – I’ll always remember the fine architecture of Grand Central where I again leave the train. The foyer of the near-by Chrysler building that I inspect, its polished colored marbles resembling one of Munich’s superb Baroque churches, is impressive in its opulence, and a clever celebration of the industrial world of the car. I then walk to the Empire State Building but decide not to go up. At the Rockefeller Centre I buy some presents in the Met Shop and eat a bit of lunch. The American Folk Art Museum is closed. I am wasting a day that I could be spending at the Metropolitan Museum of Art but instead I walk to the United Nations Building. Not surprisingly, it is heavily controlled and open only to those who take the tour. I don’t line up. I then do some more walking before I make my way home. As on most other nights, we all go to the organic restaurant nearby and boost our health with one of their tasty salads while we talk and talk.

15^th September – It is Saturday and Keren and I catch the train to Haarlem to buy some African cottons for Kordula. There are hundreds of prints in the little shop, stacked up to the ceiling and almost impossible to dislodge, but I manage to choose three that she may like.

     We proceed back to Chelsea, walk through the busy market, and then up to the High Line, formerly an overhead rail track for freight trains and now rescued by the locals and planted up with grasses and bushes to provide a sunny promenade high above the rather bleak streets of the area. The walk is crowded; toddlers allowed to venture off alone in this almost safe place get under foot. But it is all in good fun. I forget to notice the artworks. We then trudge through the city for far too long, eat poorly at an almost empty food outlet because the popular one nearby is overcrowded, and eventually get home. Keren’s knee has been playing up quite badly.

16^th September – Church in the morning. Sam has ordered a taxi to take me to the airport and because things got off to a slow start this morning, I have to walk out in the middle of the sermon. Had we known the road to JFK airport would be so empty, this would not have been necessary; the driver ranks this trip as a record. There’s no decent food at the airport; I should have accepted Keren’s offer and brought her jar of bean salad. On the flight I sit next to an off-duty airhostess who refuses to acknowledge my existence at all. But the view over much of America is good. At Los Angeles I have four hours of pacing before the flight to Melbourne.

     I get most of the rest of Ursula Krechel’s novel about the Jewish refugees in Shanghai read on this last long stretch. The people she writes about were refugees in fear of their lives, much like those whom Australia either rejects or sends to the hell of Nauru today. Quite specifically, Krechel’s refugees were some of the people whom Australia tried not to accept in those former days of crisis either; only the well-to-do or those with unusually generous friends were welcome. As to be expected, a few of these outcasts learned to survive better than the others.

     Our plane is a comfortable airbus, the staff are all anyone could wish for and I manage to sleep a fair bit of the night. At the last moment we are diverted to Sydney because of fog in Melbourne but the delay is not too long, Customs is quick and Kordula is there waiting for me when I arrive. Surprisingly, it is now the 18^th  and I find I don’t at all mind being back home.

   

Silke  Hesse