Travel
and Art, 2012
24th – 25th 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.
26th
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 17th 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.
27th 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.
28th 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 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.
29th 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.
30th 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.
31st 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.
1st 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.
2nd 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.
3rd 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.
...................................................................................................................
23rd 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.
24th 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.
29th – 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.
30th 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.
2nd 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 15th 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.
3rd 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.
5th 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.
6th 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.
7th 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.
8th 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.
9th 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.
10th 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 28th 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.
11th 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.
12th 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.
13th 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 19th 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!
14th 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.
15th 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.
16th 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 18th and I find I don’t at all mind being
back home.
Silke
Hesse
