Saturday, February 24, 2024

On a Haunted Resort north of Brainerd

 




During the week of Valentine’s Day, my wife and I spent three days at a lake-shore cabin north of Brainerd. The weather was unseasonably warm, about 35 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.  At night, it was colder, but still without any discernible wind.  The lake beneath the steep hill on which the cabin was located didn’t seem to be reliably frozen: the ice was glazed with fallen snow, but there were polished blue-grey patches, brushed smooth by the winds, that looked fragile.  Networks of fissures spread over parts over lake like the craquelure on an Old Master painting and far across the frozen water where normally there would be small shack villages of ice-fishermen, I saw only a single black hut, abandoned, perhaps, due to dangerously thin ice. 


The country in this part of the State is more water than land.  Squid-shaped lakes cast tendrils out amidst the evergreen forests.  Dry land consists of narrow ridges between bodies of water, slim promontories and sandy points and this isthmus-terrain dissected by channels lined with brown reeds pushed up through the spongy ice at the margins of the swamps.  Islands clog the narrow passages of these lakes and, if nature were allowed to prevail here, all of the bays and inlets would be connected by marshes pierced here and there by aisles of open water.  To make railroad easements and, later, highways, the corridors of dry land between the lakes have been rationalized, some of the estuaries filled up with gravel and packed earth embankments on which to build train tracks and roads.  Villages are squeezed between big lakes, frozen white as marble at this time of year.  


The resort where we were staying consisted of an event center for weddings, six post-modern cabins, modular cubes with glass walls fronting the lake (or “forest-view” across the clearing), the sort of architecture you see in Iceland or along the fjords of Norway or among the Finnish lakes.  The event center consisted of some austere trapezoids stacked like sea-going storage containers on top of one another.  Bulldozers had been remodeling the land when the Winter stopped work and some shallow pits full of frozen mud were clogged with debris – knocked-over trees, abandoned tires and shattered utility poles, shards of plywood.  Around the edges of the compound, old summer houses built with decaying clapboard and wrap-around porches, screened against warm weather’s mosquitos, occupied high points overlooking the lake.  Some of these structures were small, dour-looking summer cabins but several of the buildings were bigger and had once been impressive although they were now in a state of partial ruin, windows hanging loose from their frames, doors askew, shingles abraded by storms and pierced by sharp, fallen branches.  The post-modern Ikea-style cabins inserted into the landscape were ribbed with aluminum fins and the color of autumnal woods, built to conceal themselves in the forest.  They were screened to hide the light that they emitted at night so that the sky would be dark and laden with wet-looking stars.  The wooden houses and cabins were points of darkness, relics spilling shadow out from their wrecked thresholds.


Although the resort, marked with signs of its lavish restoration, was supposed to be in the midst of unspoiled nature – in fact, the place was called Nature Link – it would be a stretch of the imagination to characterize the area as wilderness or uninhabited.  To the contrary, these lakes are only 150 miles from the Twin Cities and the area has been exploited for summer cabins and fishing bivouacs, bible and scout camps as well as resorts of all kinds, some of them grandiose and expensive others more rustic, for many generations.  The place where we were staying was a resort as early as 1898 with an austere, but large lodge (still visible but now abandoned) above the sandy point of land, an island, channel, and two big bays, each about a half-mile wide. This resort called Minnewawa, undoubtedly replacing a more primitive fishing camp, that was, itself, likely established on this isthmus frequented by woodland Indians since time immemorial.  A station on the rail-line about three-quarters of a mile from Minnewawa provided ready access to the resort.  (The train tracks are gone now, but the open-air stop with a row of benches under a wooden shelter – it looks a pleine-aire  chapel with pews – still stands on fill hauled in to make a earthen dam between lakes and a road-bed for the trains.)  A tourist town with motels and boutiques is located a mile to the east of the resort where several winding forests roads intersect.  Beginning around 1980, the resort was converted into a summer hockey camp.  Boys (and later girls as well) trained in meadows cut into the statuesque fir and pine woods.  Of course, there was no ice on which to skate and, so, the kids, apparently, played hockey with brooms and balls, out-of-bounds represented by the pine forest, mostly clear of underbrush due to the dense evergreen canopy overhead.  White-tailed deer flickered through the woods; the animals always seem to soar and leap as they run.  After drills in the mornings, led by down-on-their-luck, hockey pros, the kids adjourned to the lake to swim or row boats out to the island where fumbling love affairs took place and where there were caches of booze and marijuana stashed among the trees.  Bonfires flared on the point of land.  The professional hockey players stayed in the white frame cottages overlooking the lake, getting drunk and disorderly themselves at night.  The main lodge was already boarded-up, prey to marauding racoons.  Then, the hockey camp failed and the place was left to decay for a few years before being sold to Minneapolis investors and, first, rebuilt as a wedding event center and, then, a sort of woodlands motel for wedding guests and, at last, as the Nature-Link resort.  


On the first evening that we were at Nature-Link, as the sun was setting under a ribbon of salmon-pink light, I walked down to the point.  It was only a few hundred feet, navigating an asphalt trail laid on a diagonal down the hillside to a barrel sauna erected on the sandy spit next to a wooden shack used, I supposed, to store kayaks during the summer months.  Fairy lights hung in delicate curves overhead, strung between the tall, ramrod-straight pines.  A boy and girl had been sitting next to a smoky fire in a pit by the barrel-sauna but they had departed.  Flame still sputtered and hissed in the pit.  The barrel-sauna was convex on its side facing the lake, a big bubble of transparent plexi-glass.  On the hill overhead, the ruinous lodge and cottages glared down at me with windows like eye-sockets in a skull.  The island thirty yards across the frozen water was still, not even the reeds poking through the ice moving, not a breeze stirring and no birds seemed to be about.  Far out on the level plain of lake ice, veined with obscure corridors and frozen lagoons, I saw the single ice-fishing shack, a black, featureless monad against white that was now turning blue and grey as it became dark.  Something shuddered in the underbrush on the island.  It was the sort of place where you might panic, sense menace in a shadow or the flutter of a branch like an eyelid, and, then, run wildly to flee some imagined danger lurking in the darkness.


The next morning, the sun clawed its way through low-hanging slate-grey clouds and, then, the landscape was flooded with light.  The pines on the steep descent to the frozen lake stood at dignified intervals and we could look down between their scaly rust-colored trunks to the ice.  Near the shore, a line of footprints, each cupping blue shadow, marched out toward the island and some slicks of smooth, wind-polished ice too hard to imprint.  Two parallel lines marked the snow drifted up against the edge of the lake, apparently, left by sled-runners.  I didn’t recall seeing the tracks or the sled-marks the previous afternoon.  Was it possible that someone, pulling a sled had walked out over the frozen lake after dark?  And, if so, why?  The prints in the snow were aimed in the direction of the island although the marks ceased to be visible where ice blistered the lake surface in squashed blue-green domes.  At the edge of the island, indentations in the ice formed a shadowy grey hollow.  An upright boulder, thumb-shaped and crested with snow, jutted up over the crater at the edge of the ice.  The preceding night had been solemn, dark, still – we hadn’t heard voices.  The path of prints in the snow were thirty feet below the level of our cabin, and began at the crumpled shoreline directly under the glass facade facing the lake.  The most likely explanation for the tracks sudden visibility, I thought, was the oblique rays of sunlight raking across the frozen lake.


I put on my coat and hat and walked from the cabin to the entrance of the resort.  Loops of pale, yellow lights were strung like pearls between trees and outlined the name of the resort hanging over the gate entry.  Among the pines, it was always gloomy and the lights shone against the darkness falling from the evergreens.  The clouds had returned and the day was dark again.  The drive-way into the resort joined with other lanes accessing lake cabins along the shoreline.  At the county highway, a third of a mile from the cabin, the two-lane blacktop ran parallel to a snowmobile and bike trail.  The unseasonably warm weather had left most of the asphalt trail bare.  Between the road and trail, stands of fir were interspersed among hay-colored reeds.  I walked for a mile or so and, then, turned around and went back in the direction that I had come.  A couple of crows derided me and my feet were cold.  On the driveway back to the resort, beyond the amber Christmas lights dangling from the gate, I saw a peculiar building or, rather, several buildings.  Two long rectangular houses were linked by an enclosed corridor and a smaller structure between them.  The smaller building seemed to once have been one of the cabins at resort – it had screen windows and the vestiges of a porch.  This squat little building was locked between the much larger and taller sheds, barren utilitarian structures with walls pierced by a few windows asymmetrically (and haphazardly) placed.  The siding on the big rectangular houses was faded blue and water pitching off the overhanging eaves had cut foot-deep trenches in the forest mulch on all sides of the buildings.  I had seen pictures of Shaker dormitories, or cult buildings in Guyana or  Nevada, and this complex of abandoned structures, set back from the access road, intrigued me.  I walked across the field and, then, walked around the dormitories.  They were large, austere, obviously abandoned – when I pressed my face to the cold window-glass, I could see bare joists and damp-looking studs in the shadows inside.  The interior surfaces of the walls were either stripped away or, perhaps, had never existed.  A stench pushed me back from the buildings.  Something was dead here and rotting.   


The night was dark and moonless.  Most of lake cabin were empty this time of the year and the curving shores of lake beyond the long reach of the ice were dark.  Fairy-lights, also yellow and faint, festooned the barrel-sauna.  There was no bonfire on the point of land.  The hillside below our cabin was studded with small lamps, probably solar-powered, and they emitted a faint luminescence in the darkness.  How anyone could use those ghostly lights to illumine their way was mysterious to me.  Sometimes, an unseen dog barked.


Two black-and-white pictures adorned the walls of the cabin, blow-ups, apparently, of old snapshots.  In one picture, a timid-looking girl stood on a dock in the lake.  The shoreline behind her was murky, with stands of trees and dark undergrowth.  The girl wore a one-piece bathing suit and was unwilling to enter the water.  Below her feet, in the lake, some heads bobbed above the white, rumpled surface of the water.  On the wall above the bed, another picture showed a ramshackle bridge crossing to the island from the point of land where the barrel-sauna and the fire-pit were now located.  The bridge looked like something from a wood cut by Hokusai – it appeared to be improvised, low arches of plywood spanning a half-dozen piers lined up in the channel.  The footbridge was already in disrepair when the photograph was taken and it seemed fragile, something that a strong wind or a blizzard or, even, a heavy snowfall might topple into the water.  The island was a black mass of trees and brush, a destination that wasn’t worth crossing the water for – the thumb-shaped rock on the margin of island glowed like a tombstone in the gloom.  


In the morning light, more tracks had appeared on the snow drifts under the shore-line.  Two more sled marks incised the snow and three or more sets of tracks were pressed into the snow, the path lost where the bare ice on the lake was exposed.  The trails pointed in the direction of the boulder and the concave hollow at the edge of the island.  


In the afternoon, I drove into the resort town.  The place consisted of a single road and an intersection.  Most of the shops were seasonal and closed.  Places sold expensive women’s clothing and kitchen plaques with other knick-knacks for lake cabins.  A florist’s place was shut for the season – a sign said it would open in May.  Several realtors had offices on Main Street; there was probably a brisk business involving lake cabin transactions.  A low embankment marked the old railway right-of-way through town that was now a foot-trail and, near the promenade, there were several candy shops and ice-cream parlors, also shuttered for the Winter.  One place sold fashion accessories for Nordic skiiing – it was also closed, possibly due to the lack of any snow in the woods and along the lake shores.  The two businesses selling cabin decorations seemed to be adversaries.  On the door of one of those places, a sign said: We are a profanity-free store – we don’t sell merchandise with obscene writing on it.  The other store had a sign on its door: F-Bombs dropped here.  It amused me to think that both of the stores were, perhaps, owned by the same enterprising merchant.  In any event, neither was open.


I was intrigued by a shop that advertised that it sold fine olive oils and balsamic vinegars.  The shop’s storefront said that it was “tasting bar.”  Inside, a slender woman in her sixties was reading a paperback behind a granite counter-top.  She greeted me with a little skepticism.  Lining the walls were stainless steel canisters, all identical and about the size of a large coffee pot or samovar.  Identical bottles occupied the niches enclosing the canisters, flanking those containers.  I told the woman that I had never seen a place of this sort.  She raised her eyebrows: “Really?” she asked.  I wondered why she wasn’t down in La Jolla or Coral Gables.  She probably wondered the same thing since she looked a little morose.  No prices were listed anywhere – I suppose it would be gauche to a suggest that someone in the market for exotic olive oils or hand-made balsamic vinegars would care about the prices for these luxury products.  I selected a bottle of pomegranate balsamic vinegar.  The woman watched me closely and was concerned, I think, that I would drop the precious stuff and break the bottle on the floor.  


“Can I help you?” she asked.  


I said no.


She asked me if I would bring her the bottle so that I could shop “hands-free.”


I carried the bottle over to the counter and set it on the granite.  She reached out, fumbled the thing, and the glass clicked hard against the stone.  For a moment, I expected the bottle to break but it simply rolled on its side in her direction where she caught it before it toppled onto her lap.


“These counters are so wide,” she said.


I bought a couple more bottles.  The woman asked me if I wanted to taste the merchandise.  I told her that this was unnecessary.  I supposed the balsamic vinegar tasted like vinegar; I presumed that the olive oil tasted like olive oil.   


I drove back to the resort with my precious cargo.  On the way back, I stopped at grocery store on the edge of town.  The food prices at the grocery was shocking.  A can of tomato soup that would cost two dollars at Walmart was selling for $5.99.  Ramen noodles, normally 30 cents a bag, were selling for 80 cents apiece.  I entered the resort offices.  Not one but three desk clerks were crowding around the check-in computer terminal.  This seemed odd to me – there were only six cabins available for rent and only three of them seemed to be occupied.  I asked the clerks about the odd buildings with the faded blue siding across the empty lot from the office.  


“That’s a very sinister-looking building,” I said.


The girl nodded her head: “I agree.”


“What is it?”


She said that when the resort closed in 1980, the place was a Summer hockey camp for forty years.  The big rectangular structures had been a dormitory.


“That’s a scary building,” I said.  “I was wondering what kind of cult lived here.”


“Well, when you return next time, the buildings will be gone.  We’re going to have them demolished this Spring.”


I thanked the three clerks for the information and went to the cabin to show Julie my bottles of vinegar and olive oil.     


I suppose there are cults lurking in the North Woods.  Once, I visited my father-in-law’s cabin on a more remote lake northeast of Duluth.  If you’re not a “lake cabin” person, the pleasures of being “up north” as it is said pall quickly: after an obligatory tour of the shoreline in the row boat powered by an outboard Evinrude motor, you sit on a porch and watch water-skiiers; inside, people are napping or frying something or reading dog-eared mystery novels – flies slip through the screen door every time it is opened and kids amuse themselves swatting them.  Bored with these tepid amusements, I went for a drive.  The road running north toward the Canadian border was suspiciously smooth, well-maintained, and straight, grinding its way through tamarack swamps and endless forests in which pine and fir trees planted by logging companies stood in obedient, perfectly straight ranks lining the polished black top. After thirty miles, the highway came to a dead end.  At the turn-around, underbrush veiled a lake, a prism of water green with algae.  An extension of the asphalt curved through the trees to a stout gate that was padlocked.  Beyond the fence bearing a shrill spiral of razor wire at its top, I could see part of the lake on which a twin-float plane was bobbing off-shore.  Some aluminum docks slipped down into the water and I could see a compound of steel sheds near a nondescript house covered in blue siding with several clapboard cottages attached.  What kind of place was this? – at the end of the road with nothing between this compound and the north pole but several thousand miles of forests, one of two lonely roads and a vast, empty tundra stretching to the Arctic Sea.


I recall that once I attended a family re-union for which an out-of-use Girl Scout camp had been rented.  There was no electricity at the site, but the buildings were reasonably well-maintained and someone had cut the lawns in the clearings where there were flagpoles with cottages standing under the tall, straight columns of the pine trees.  During the day, the place was cheerful with curved trails leading down to a small oval lake on which a wooden dock floated on pontoons.  Picnic tables stood in the shade and there was a fire-pit on the bluff above the water where a shelter made from field stone and heavy timber with a shingled roof had been erected.  It was all pleasant and convivial and the sunset over the lake lingered for a long time as if the summer sky was unwilling to surrender it’s light and, then, when it was finally dark, a bonfire hissed and crackled and threw its orange light at the edges of the great forest.  Someone carrying a lantern led us to our cabin and there it was pitch-black and the inside of the sleeping area smelled of pine-resin expressed from the log walls by the heat of the day.  In the corners of the cabin, there were rustling noises and I supposed that the overhead beams and joists were swarming with spiders and centipedes and, perhaps, the sounds under the iron bedframes and springs were made by mice or bats or, even, marauding raccoons.  In the modern world, we are accustomed to electrically powered light and it was strange and disturbing to be in the middle of the vast forest without any light any where to be seen.  


I was grateful that we had missed the first day of the reunion and that we had to spend only one night in the girl scout camp cabin.  Early in the morning, when the first light of dawn drew me outside, I walked along the soft, pillowy trail covered in pine-needles up to the fire-pit where a wan, greyish swirl of smoke was rising.  My sister-in-law was sitting at the picnic table with a mug of coffee in front of her, the drink also emitting a little coil of steam.  It was chilly and my sister-in-law, who lives up north and likes to camp, was wearing a tattered sweater.  She told me that the night before we came to the reunion, the family’s sleep was disturbed by a pulsing sound, a sort of rhythmic humming from across the lake that some interpreted as chanting.  The next morning, a couple of the men took a canoe and paddled across the water to a landing flagged with “No Trespassing” signs.  They ignored the signs, beached their canoe and walked up into the woods.  In a small clearing, the men found some folding chairs arranged around a sooty fire-pit and a dead cat.  


“What do you think?” my sister-in-law asked.


“I didn’t hear anything last night,” I said.


“No, it was quiet last night,” my sister-in-law said.  “It’s a satanic cult,” she added.


“I’m glad I didn’t know about it,” I said.


We left the camp around noon, a little after lunch.  It was a long drive back to our home in the southern part of the State.


The next morning during our Valentine’s Day get-away, dawn lifted the darkness over the lake below our post-modern cabin and I saw that there were new sled marks in the snow drifted against the edge of the frozen lake.  More tracks had appeared below the hillside.  After I dressed, I gingerly walked the path leading down the steep slope to the ice.  There were patches of ice on the trail and I didn’t want to slip and fall and roll down onto the ice.  At the edge of the lakeshore, I saw that the ice was in disarray next to the bank, mottled with blue transparent windows showing through the veins of snow.  The marks made by sled-runners (at least, so I interpreted them) curved in parallel out across the ice, visible where there were patches of snow, but otherwise not discernible an the plates and shields of frozen lake.  All of the marks angled toward the island and the place where the thumb-shaped boulder stood like an apparition at the edge of the underbrush.  It was probably just a trick of the light slipping obliquely over the lake, but the tracks looked as if they had been made by bare feet.  Sole-marks sprouted little toe impressions.  It may have been that the sun from the previous day had somehow melted around the footprints and distorted them.  


On the night-stand next to the bed, a machine offered noise in different hues to assist guests in falling asleep.  The noise could be tuned to “white,” “brown” or “green.”  As Julie packed for out check-out, I tinkered with device.  The “white” noise was a faint sizzle, like rain falling on metal roof.  “Brown” was more granular, sandy, something like the feeling of a beach underfoot.  The “green” noise was the color of algae in a lake simmering under a hot sun, iridescent dragon-flies with great rainbow-colored wings hovering over the moss-colored glaze floating on the water.  I wondered if the noise machine had been placed to keep people from hearing the rhythmic chanting coming from across the lake.


When checking-out, I asked about the footprints in the snow covering the ice.  


“People see those all the time,” one of the clerks told me.  (Today two young women wearing ski-sweaters were manning the front desk.)


“I thought they were barefoot,” I said.


“Probably people using the barrel sauna and, then, cooling down with a trot over the lake,” the other clerk said.  But she looked a little disturbed and glanced to her colleague.


The other clerk asked me where the footprints led.


“Over to the island,” I said.


The young woman said that there was a natural spring at the edge of the island, near a big rock on the bank.  


“It doesn’t freeze in that place,” the young woman said.  “Many years ago, a couple of kids drowned next to the island.  They pulled them out of the water, but they were dead.  Then, they dragged them over the ice on sleds.”


“When was that?”


“No one knows, but a long time ago,” the young woman said.     


We checked-out and drove home.  We made good time from the pine forests to there corn and soy-bean fields, unplowed and lying Winter-fallow near our town.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Leipzig: Enchiridion and Scholia

 Leipzig: Enchiridion and scholia



1.

An enchiridion is a small volume printed so that it can be readily carried, or, even, concealed in one’s garments.  Generally, such books are spiritual manuals of some sort, hymnals or prayer books or collections of useful aphorisms.  But there are many examples of enchiridions (or plural enchiridia in some sources) that are not religious.  One of the most famous enchiridions from the ancient world is a handbook on Greek prosody.  


Think about why such a volume, properly described as a “handbook”, would need to be inconspicuous and readily hidden.


2.

The Leipzig museum of Phillip Reclam’s Universalbibliothek is not easy to find.  I don’t need to give you walking instructions as to how to reach that place.  I don’t expect you to seek out this collection of old books and so you won’t need directions. 


With Martin and Angelica, I walked from our Hotel, the Seaside, near the Leipzig Bahnhof to the Reclam Museum on Grimmischer Strasse.  The sun was setting and the chill of night well-advanced when we set off, crossing the big plazas near the train station, an arc of open squares left over from bombing and the removal of the city’s medieval walls.  We passed an opera house with white pillars and windows displaying lofty and grandiose stairways.  An obelisk in a shabby park celebrated the inauguration of the Dresden to Leipzig railroad in the 1840's and there was a canal in which a well-regulated river flowed under slightly hunchbacked bridges.  Then, the streets were uniform and barren, mostly empty between completely nondescript modern structures: research facilities (the Max Planck institute has laboratories here) and sterile-looking hotels.


The Reclam Museum is inside a parking ramp.  You walk along a cold sidewalk next to the entrance ramp and, then, a sign directs you through some grim, concrete corridors, lodged between levels of parked cars, to the small museum.  On one side of the brightly lit room, an enormous bookshelf holds every Reclam edition published prior to 1945.  On the opposite side of the chamber, another equally enormous bookshelf lines a wall and contains Reclam editions, arranged in chronological order from World War Two to the present.  Glass cases contain rare editions and books noteworthy for one reason or another.  The small books are displayed next to typed labels on glass shelving, standing upright against frames of the sort you might find in someone’s bedroom enclosing pictures of family members, or a boyfriend, or a beloved pet.  Some vertical shelves that rotate on a central access are in the middle of the room where there are a couple chairs and an old, plush couch.  


The proprietor of this museum is Hans-Jochen Marquardt and, fortunately, he was present when we showed up at his door.  Marquardt is 70, a distinguished-looking man with a cheerful face in a halo of white hair and whiskers.  He seems a bit heavy-set, but isn’t fat – it’s just the shape of his body.  When we came to the museum, there were two other visitors, both of them sitting rather uncomfortably on the sofa.  These were also tourists, possibly from Scotland or Australia (I couldn’t figure this out), English-speaking like us, and, obviously, anxious to escape Marquardt’s hospitality to attend some other function, a place that they had to reach at a specific and imminent time as the woman, a lean girl with stringy blonde hair and woolen mittens tacked to her sleeves, kept reminding her boyfriend, using a loud enough voice to make sure the message was understood by our host.  The young man looked sullen and resentful as if he couldn’t believe that he had been dragged to a place like this and, then, lectured by the proprietor as to the history of the little books in glass cases – a lecture that seemed capable of telescoping itself through time to be an hour or ten hours long or, even, long enough to last your entire lifetime.  When we entered the room, Herr Marquardt brightened visibly, happy to have additional visitors to attend to his tour and, after a half hour, the Australians or Scottish students (whatever the case) exploited our interest in the lecture to slide out the door sideways, making faint protestations of regret.  


As I have remarked, the better a Germans English, the more apologetic the speaker.  Herr Marquardt disclaimed any real facility in English, making these disclaimers in elegant, grammatically precise words.  He told us that his wife is English-speaking, a native of South Africa (although he met her at the University of Wisconsin in Madison); however, he said he speaks only German at home and, as a consequence, his English had deteriorated somewhat.  Of course, Herr Marquardt was easily understood and faltered only with respect to esoteric English terms, words that I could readily supply him when he stuttered a bit and paused.  He was a charming and voluble fellow and not in any hurry to depart from his museum for other pursuits; it’s a place that is his labor of love.  


In Homer’s Odyssey, visitors (xenia – or strangers) are greeted with hospitality that includes slaves washing the guest’s feet and bathing his hands, roast meat on skewers, and “sweet, strong wine.”  After these amenities, your host asks: “What is your name?  How have you come to this place?  Who is your father?”  And, so, after an initial walk around the room, and after Herr Marquardt told us that he had collected every Reclam edition known to exist, a total exceeding 10,000 volumes, all displayed on the huge shelves bookending the room, he made polite inquiries as to our identities and why we had come to visit his museum.  


3.

I began acquiring Reclam editions myself in college, now 45 years ago.  Lower level German classes used readers with glosses (scholia) in the margins or footnotes.  These were books designed for elementary and mid-level instruction in German literature.  But more advanced classes invariably were assigned Reclam volumes.  The books were, then, and remain now, very affordable.  They are light, readily carried in a pocket, and well-edited – indeed, the Reclam textural and editorial apparatus is renowned; most German literature exists in definitive, carefully annotated Reclam editions.  For instance, if you want to read Gottfried Benn’s shorts stories published as Gehirne (“Brains”), you will likely encounter the work in a Reclam edition, with textural variants identified in the end-notes and a critical essay by a leading critic specializing in the work explaining the context and meaning of the writing.  These are not necessarily student editions, although they are often assigned in that setting, but rather full-fledged scholarly versions of the text under consideration.


As you progress through German studies, more and more of the required reading consists of studying Reclam volumes.  Students are poor and move a lot and most people studying German don’t keep their books.  As a result Reclam editions pile up in used bookstores near campuses and can be easily purchased for coins when I was younger, or a few dollars now.  I have a hundred or more of the little books, easily recognized by their size (they are about 3 x 5 inches) and color – the books are a bright vibrant yellow.  Often the used books that I have acquired show little sign of being read – generally, there is a name inscribed on the first page of the text, a few light underlinings in the afterword by the critic, but no trace otherwise that the writing so lovingly edited has been read by the former owner of the book.  When a friend of mine left the country in something of a hurry, she abandoned her Reclams to me, a stack of little volumes including poetry by Ludwig Uhland (a favorite book), essays on the “Aufklaerung” (“Enlightenment”) focusing primarily on a famous text by Kant, plays by Lessing and Schiller, collections of modern and baroque lyric poetry, several volumes of novella by Theodor Storm, Benn’s Gehirne, and so on.  Years ago I read Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissius Simplicimmus in a Reclam version.  The first book of this sort that I bought for a class was not even originally in German – it was a translation into German from the Latin, Tacitus’ Germania.  The course that I was taking involved medieval German literature and I also had to buy a copy of the Latin vita of Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne) once again translated into German as well as an abridged Parzival by Wolfram von Eschebach and a picaresque poem, written in doggerel (“Knittelvers”) called Meier Helmbrecht.  I continue to acquire these books even today.  During the Covid quarantine, I bought a copy of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and read a few pages each day until I had completed that long and maddening novel.  


To my eyes, Reclam Universal Bibliothek editions, the compact yellow volumes with tiny print, epitomize what books should be and, so, I understand the impulse to collect these things.  Despite their small size and the light paper on which they are printed, the volumes are surprisingly durable.  I own a copy of Theodor Storm’s novella Aquis Submersus that lost its cover due to being crushed in someone’s pocket.  The covers on these things, all alike in any event, are unnecessary.  The book held together fine even in mutilated form and I still have it on my shelf. (You can’t shelve the little Reclam editions with normal sized books – they get swallowed up and lost; instead, you pile up about a dozen of them and put the stack at the front of your bookcase.)  A much-thumbed version of Hamann’s Aesthetica in Nuce (or the Socratische Denkwuerdigkeiten) that I translated when I was about thirty – almost forty years have passed from that time – is still in good enough condition to be read and, sometimes, I peruse this old friend.  When I decided to read Eichendorrf’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts this last Spring, I used a Reclam edition, handy, easily carried, with small legible print, something I could take with me to the Nature Center and sit and read on a bench on a remote bench two miles by woodland trail from the parking lot.  Birds sang while I read and the trees rustled and a little box-elder bug explored my sleeve.  What could be more wonderful?


Although I treasure these books and like to handle them (if I’m sad or lonely I will deal the books out on a table like cards and, then, shuffle and re-shuffle them), I don’t have any illusions as to their fate after my death.  I presume someone will gather them up and toss them in a waste-bin and that will be that.   


4.

Herr Marquardt took my enthusiasm for Reclam editions for granted.  Needless to say, he shared my interest and his passion surpassed mine by many orders of magnitude.  He showed me his favorite books.  Of course, there is the first volume in the Reclam Universal-Bibliothek series, predictably Goethe’s Faust,  printed in 1867.  (For some obscure reason, the first actual text in the series, published a few months earlier, is Shakespeare’s Romeo und Juliet, demoted to number 5 to give Goethe’s classic pride of place.)  There are rare volumes, for instance, Heine banned and burned by the Nazis, also rare books in the series that were suppressed by the Communist authorities.  Reclam editions had such authority in Germany that during both world wars there were so-called “Tarn-Editions” (that is, counterfeits) printed by the Allies and dropped by the thousands onto the front lines.  One example is a slim book called Zwei Fragen (“Two Questions –that is “Why are you fighting?” and “What is your objective?”)  The notion was that soldiers would be demoralized to discover anti-war messages in their beloved field editions of the German (and world) classics.  Herr Marquardt pointed out several ammo boxes stuffed with Reclam editions, circulating libraries as it were to distribute books in the trenches.  The display cases are full of autographs on letters or signed galley proofs – you can see the signatures of Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rilke and others.  Black and white pictures show dignitaries greeting authors.  People wear tuxedos and stand with hand’s extended toward the writers in front of ranks of German academics, professorial types with medals on their chests and long white beards.


Anton Phillip Reclam (1807 - 1897) was a Leipzig bookseller.  At age 21, he acquired a press and issued small books and pamphlets of a Leftist revolutionary persuasion.  (In the political agitation preceding the uprisings of 1848, Reclam ran afoul of the authorities and was sent to prison for publishing a translation of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.)  When the revolutions were suppressed, Reclam focused on printing literary classics, primarily Shakespeare.  In 1837, the Austrian legislature, the body with authority over Leipzig, enacted a law allowing copyrights to pass into the public domain after the lapse of thirty years.  It’s for this reason that Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek was inaugurated in that year with the publication of Goethe’s Faust, a work then in the public domain.  Reclam, then, initiated a series of books making German classic literature, mostly Schiller, Lessing, and Goethe, available to the general public in very cheap “little yellow editions.”  By the time of his death in 1897, Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek boasted 3500 separate volumes.  By 1908, the Bibliothek had expanded to 5000 volumes.  By this point, the Leipzig publishing house was printing not only world classics but works by modern German authors such as Mann, Hesse, and Hoffmanstahl.  In 1927, Thomas Mann, then regarded as Germany’s greatest writer and a Nobel prize winner, delivered an address commemorating the hundred year centenary of the publishing house.  


During the Nazi era, the regime forbade the publication of Jewish writer such as Heine and suppressed works by Mann, Franz Werfel, and other emigre authors.  On December 4, 1943, Allied bombers destroyed Leipzig and with it the Reclam publishing enterprise and warehouses – reportedly 450 tons of books were incinerated.  After the War, Reclam’s headquarters were moved to Stuttgart in West Germany to avoid the restrictions and censorship imposed by the Soviet-backed East German government that controlled the Leipzig facility.  The East German branch of Reclam was nationalized by the government and continued as an influential publishing house based in Leipzig.  Meanwhile, the Stuttgart (West German) division also continued printing books in the Universal Bibliothek series in the West.  Hans Marquardt, an influential broadcaster in the Eastern zone, was appointed the chief executive officer and director of Phillip Jr. Reclam Verlag (as the Leipzig operation was known).  Marquardt, the father of our tour guide, operated the enterprise for 26 years, specializing in the Universal Bibliothek’s publication of Russian avant-garde writers and contemporary DDR authors.  (He also supervised the printing of coffee-table books on the arts, the so-named “schoene Buecher”, and, a literary scholar himself, edited no fewer than 100 volumes for publication.)  Hans Marquardt was awarded every literary prize available in the East and was a famous man in Leipzig and the DDR.  He was considered a liberal and sufficiently powerful (and courageous) to periodically oppose the regime’s efforts to suppress books in the DDR.  His son, Hans-Jochen Marquardt, showed me an edition of Jerome Salinger’s Fanger in der Roggen (J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), a novel detested by the East German Communist authorities but championed by his father.  The last volume published by Herr Marquardt’s father was a book printed by the Verlag about the time of the October 1989 rebellion in Leipzig against the Communist regime.  The book is on display in the museum and is called Der Uebergangs Gesellschaft (“The Transition Society”).  On the cover of the book a woodcut in the style of Barlach or Kaethe Kollwitz shows a burly giant on the threshold of a burning house.  The giant, Herr Marquardt told me, is Prometheus, the divine figure who taught the first men how to use fire.  There was a polemical battle over the volume’s cover.  Is Prometheus running into the burning house to extinquish the flames?  This was the interpretation preferred by the Communist authorities – the house was on fire but the flames could be extinguished and the structure saved.  Or was Prometheus fleeing the fire that he had set himself to free the inhabitants of a building that was doomed to burn to the ground.  This meaning could also be read from the cover of the book which is, in fact, ambiguous.  Herr Marquardt assured me that his father intended the latter interpretation – the house was on fire, the blaze had been set by the God to liberate men, and the structure would burn to the ground.  For a year after the destruction of the Wall in Berlin, there was a uncertainty as to whether the political and social institutions in East Germany would be preserved in a State within the State or as a federation of some kind.  But this uncertainty was resolved in favor of the complete elimination of East Germany – the Communist State and its structures were wholly dissolved.  


Hans Marquardt died at his estate on the island of Ruegen northwest of Hamburg, on November 11, 2004.  Part of his wealth was used to found an institute for the preservation of culture and the arts on Ruegen.  


Hans-Jochen Marquardt told me that he wasn’t close to his father.  His mother and father divorced when he was 14.  Nonetheless, he attended many of the gala functions associated with first editions printed by Reclam and met most of Germany’s leading writers.  A photograph in one of the display cases shows a group of young people bowing slightly to the famous anti-Fascist novelist Anna Seghers.  Seghers was Jewish and fled Germany for Mexico in 1937 – there she wrote the novel The Seventh Cross (1939) adapted into a Hollywood movie promoting American intervention in the European war.  (The movie was released in 1944 and stars Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy, and Agnes Moorhead).  Seghers returned to Berlin in 1947 and, a Communist supporter, voluntarily moved to the Eastern sector of the city.  She was one of Hans Marquardt’s leading writers and, in the picture, the grand dowager holds a book and a pen.  The young Hans-Jochen Marquardt is reaching forward to shake her hand – “they made me wear a tuxedo to meet her,” Marquardt recalled to us.  Marquardt said that Seghers was a terrible reader of her own work; she spoke in a hurried, soft monotone and made no attempt to dramatize the text.  By contrasts, Marquardt said, Guenter Grass was a fantastically effective reader, theatrically highlighting his work and employing various accents and dialects to establish differences between characters.  Marquardt told me that he heard Grass read several times and that the writer was always fantastic.  


My readers can interpret Marquardt’s obsessive project, acquiring every single volume of the ten-thousand published by Reclam as a reflection of his vexed relationship with his father.  It seems no accident that Marquardt’s collecting activities commenced when he was 14, the year that his father divorced his mother.  A larger divorce loomed over the collection.  The division of Reclam into two competing entities, one East and one West, required Hans-Jochen to acquire not only the books released by the Leipzig operation, helmed by his father, but also the editions printed in Stuttgart in the Bundesrepublik.  Herr Marquardt resents the implication that his father assisted him in acquiring the books that comprise the collection – to the contrary, Hans-Jochen told me, his father didn’t help him at all with regard to locating and purchasing rare examples in the library of the Reclam Universal Bibliothek.  When Hans-Jochen told his formidable father that he was collecting Reclam editions, the older man sniffed at him and said: “I prefer to collect fine art, not cheaply printed mass-market books.”  Our interlocutor was a good East German, a supporter of the regime, and, presumably, rewarded for this loyalty.  He told me that he was elected to city council and provincial parliament seats on several occasions and that he traveled widely as a young man, attending literary conferences frequently in Moscow.  (In school, of course, he was taught Russian not English, hence, his anxiety about the quality of his spoken words to us.)  Hans-Jochen is seventy.  He looks like a German version of me.  He is my brother. 


5.

During our conversation, I told Hans-Jochen Marquardt that we went to see the Stasi museum at the Runde Ecke, that is, the Staatssicherheit or “state security (secret police) headquarters.  He seemed a bit discomfited by that information and looked away from us, glancing out from his bunker under the cement parking lot, to the facades of the houses across the street.


The Stasi Museum in Leipzig is a place that is alternatively horrible, comical, and inspiring.  The museum documents the intrusive and surreal surveillance of East German citizens and the Staatsicherheit’s repressive measures – this is the horrible aspect of the exhibition.  The comedy lies in the Stasi’s bumbling efforts to conceal their activities, their ridiculously obsessive repressive measures, and their bizarre overreach – Hitler had something like 50,000 Gestapo; the DDR had over 200,000 agents to scrutinize a much smaller population and, ultimately, more than half the population was informing on the other half, measures that were documented with thorough, and inadvertently hilarious, Teutonic efficiency.  The inspirational aspect of the museum is its documentation of resistance to the Communist regime, the fearlessness of some of the Lutheran pastors and students who opposed the authorities, and, ultimately, the mass demonstrations that brought down the government.  I toured the museum when I was in Leipzig a few years ago and found the experience intensely interesting but, also, emotionally disturbing and, so, I vowed not to go to the Runde Ecke again.  But, on this visit, Martin was with me and I thought that he should see the museum and so we spent an hour-and-a-half there.  


People who worked in this office building, returning twenty years after the regime collapsed, report that the place preserves its characteristic odor – it smells, it is said, like it did in the seventies and former employees (or prisoners) are immediately transported back to the DDR by the scent in the air in the building.  There’s an odor of steam heat volatilizing dust on radiators, the faint smell of cigarettes imbuing the drywall and doors (everyone chain-smoked here), an odor of sweat and fear, the smell of carbon-paper and typewriter ink combined with the stench of mildew – the place feels damp and noisome.  (In a recent essay, Timothy Garton Ash recalled the perfume of the old DDR, a combination of diesel exhaust from inefficient Trabant vehicles, the stink of cheap Chinese-made cigarettes, disinfectant, and body odor – he notes that this was the aroma that met him when he first crossed the Berlin Wall into the rubble-strewn lanes and empty lots of old East Berlin.  The smell is gone now, but older people, Ash observes, recall it with a certain bitter nostalgia or “Ostalgia” as it is sometimes called.)


If you disregard the horror, the Runde Ecke has a clownish, Monty Pythonesque aspect.  The small rooms are full of displays cluttered with bombastic medals and ribbons, banners of all sorts, plaques embossed with Marxist-Leninist slogans, an entire surreal world now cast aside and rotting in the dust-bin of history.  Stasi operatives once flounced about in unconvincing wigs and moustaches.  Leipzig’s streets were full of weird-looking figures wearing leisure suits and jackets padded with cameras and recording devices; these apparitions looked like they had stumbled out of a High School theatrical production, faces made-up and sporting improbable wigs and whiskers.  Briefcases and brassieres were fitted out with tiny cameras.  People suspected of subversion had their body odor captured and stored in zip-lock bags.  Archives of underwear and sweat-stained tee-shirts were on file so that savage dogs could be pressed into service literally sniffing-out subversives.  Every letter received from outside the DDR, and, ultimately, it seems every piece of intra-state correspondence as well was laboriously steamed-open and inspected by secret police goons.  (Equipment for this purpose is on display in the museum – it looks like the gear in some infernal laundry.)  This practice led to an entire genre of gallows humor: one young man sent a letter to a friend remarking that he had concealed a gun in the garden behind his house; predictably, Stasi agents appeared and dug up the entire garden, leaving the lawn ripped apart and gouged full of holes – the kid is, then, said to have written to his grandmother to tell her that she should send the tulip bulbs previously ordered for planting since the garden “has now been tilled and carefully dug up and is ready for cultivation.”  Apparently, everyone kept pictures of Marx and Lenin on their walls as insurance against persecution.  Armies of finks, rats, stool-pigeons and informers (Mitarbeiter) were recruited to file reports on their neighbors – as the regime collapsed into rampant paranoia more than 300,000 informers were busily spying on each other: of course, with this number of rats in the population, the informers spent most of their time informing on the suspicious conduct of other informers. Spies spied on spies who spied back on them, creating weird and paranoiac Moebius loops of clandestine data.  Registries were created to document sexual encounters of people under surveillance.  The polity was so intensely involved in gathering information on its own citizens that it really didn’t have resources to do anything else.  


Things in the DDR changed after Helsinki Human Rights Accords, 1975 conventions to which the East German government was signatory.  The old mobster paradigm of beating people to death in basements yielded to something more sanitary, if equally, brutal.  This was the policy of “Zersetzung” – a word that means something like “ripping apart.”  To avoid accusations of hypocrisy after the Human Rights Accords were inked, principles devised largely to decry repressive practices in the Capitalist West, DDR’s Stasi had to refrain from direct blood-letting.  Instead, they conspired to damage their victims by a death of a thousand cuts.  A salary man, ostensibly on the way up, when under state suspicion would find that he was suddenly excluded from important business conferences, that his girlfriend had inexplicably lost interest in him, that government papers required for licenses or travel had gone missing, that tax filings had been misplaced while anonymous memoranda suddenly appeared at work accusing him of deviation from party principles.  A loan necessary for the purchase of a new home might be denied without explanation and the victim’s children found themselves receiving failing grades and were excluded from all the better schools notwithstanding their diligence and best efforts.  Invitations to birthday parties and other celebrations dried-up.  Bills for purchases never made appeared in the mail and phones rang at all hours although there was never anyone on the other end of the line.  “Zersetzung” consisted of a million minor dirty tricks and its objective was to harass and exhaust the victim and, if possible, drive him or her mad.  People can be destroyed without spilling their blood or busting apart their skulls, particularly when half the population had been enlisted to participate in this harassment of other half.  Promising academic careers simply evaporated into thin air.  Successful businessmen found themselves filing bankruptcy.  Your wife was cold and quarrelsome and, soon enough, she was filing for divorce and your children watched you suspiciously as if awaiting your lapse into some terrible crime.  The larger apartment for which you had yearned for years was no longer available.  The summer cabin at the lake was sold to someone for far less than you would have offered for the property.  


Just before the DDR collapsed, a 14 year old boy with good grades, some athletic ability, and promising prospects wrote a brief essay about passion for cars.  The boy imprudently suggested that the best cars were made in Italy or America and showed some disdain for the badly engineered and noisome Trabants that working class people (if they could afford a car) drove.  The boy’s teacher was a Mitarbeiter, a stool-pigeon, and he photocopied the short essay, obligingly sending his student’s text to some harried bureaucrat at the Runde Ecke, that is, the Stasi building now occupied by the museum.  The bureaucrat faithfully read the essay, wrote some marginal comments on the photocopy as to the boy’s politically incorrect opinions, and, then, typed a short apercu indicating that the young man would be barred from admission to any type of higher education and, even, prohibited from vocational school or working on automobiles – denying the kid access to cars was a sadistic frisson to the plan to thwart the young man at every turn in his future life.  One week after the secret policeman wrote the memo intended to destroy the student’s future, the Berlin Wall collapsed, the East German regime imploded, and, no doubt, the young man, who is now almost fifty lives in Dresden or Prenzlau or, perhaps, Hamburg even, where I hope that he owns his own car dealership or, at least, service station.   


6. 

Hans-Jochun Marquardt, proprietor of the Reclam museum, told me that he had written his doctoral dissertation on Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kolhaas.  In the opening sentence of the novella, Kleist tells his readers that the title character was einer rechstschaffendesten zugleich und erschrecklichsten Menschen seiner of Zeit – that is, “one of the most honest and, at the same time, most terrible men of his time...”


Beginning in 1912, Reclam placed book-vending machines in train stations and hospitals.  These machines were designed by the great architect and industrial engineer Peter Behrens, famous for the massive AEG Turbine-House in Moabit (Berlin) and other iconic structures.  Behrens’ book-vending machine is about 15 inches wide a three feet tall.  Behind a glass pane, Reclam editions are available for purchase, displayed three books across and in four registers (a total of 12 titles available in the device).  The machine is labeled RECLAM in an oval cartouche above the books on display.  The purchaser puts a coin or coins in the side of the automat and, then, punches in the number of the selection shown under each book available for purchase.  At Herr Marquardt’s urging, we put a half-euro coin in the device, typed in our selection, and the machine (dating back to1912), wheezed a little, a screw turning somewhere behind the slender volumes to push a book to the fore where it dropped into a tray at the bottom of the display.  The machine, now 112 years old, was a little cranky but it delivered the goods.  Out of respect for the old DDR, I bought Heiner Mueller’s Revolutionaerstuecke (“Revolutionary Theater Pieces).  Mueller was a renowned avant-garde East German playwright, a generation younger than Bertolt Brecht and completely uncompromising – his proletarian works involve recondite references to Greek mythology and lots of copulation, vomiting, and shit.  (Mueller, who seems to have been a disagreeable person, flourished in parallel with the East German regime that he served; when the DDR collapsed, Stasi files made open to the public showed that the man had been a nasty collaborator with the communist thugs and, of course, an informer; the volume of Mueller’s Revolutionary Theater Pieces includes an afterword, written after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, conscientiously denouncing the author, after praising him fulsomely for ten pages, for his complicity with regime.  The first ten pages were written before the DDR collapsed; the last four paragraphs were composed in 1991.)  Hans-Jochun Marquardt looked at me a bit suspiciously when I bought the Reclam book collecting Mueller’s writings.  Was I making fun of him or his museum or the late lamented DDR?


Herr Marquardt told me that I could use the vending machine to buy a copy of Goethe’s Faust, of course, Reclam’s most popular title, for 1 ½ euros.  


“If you buy the same exact book at Auerbach’s Keller,” Herr Marquardt told me, “it will cost you six euros.”  Auerbach’s Keller is a very old restaurant in the center of Leipzig, a place where student’s gathered in the late medieval period – it’s near Leipzig University – and Goethe frequented the place.  A rambunctious comic episode in Faust is set in the tavern: Mephisto gets everyone drunk on beer and, then, one of the student’s flies around town riding bareback on a big cask or tun of booze that the devil’s emissary has animated.  


Herr Marquardt is the author of a scholarly book called Reclams Universal-Bibliothek: Vollstaendiges Verzeichnis nach Bandnummern 1867 bis 1945 – that is, Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek: Complete index of all volumes from 1867 to 1945.  The publisher of this book?  It’s a handsome bright yellow Reclam edition. 


7.

At the Stasi museum at the Runde Ecke, the entrance to the building (the structure is modeled on an Italian renaissance palazzo) opens into a loggia with a fan-shaped grand stairway leading to a landing.  Panels of text on the walls memorialize victims of Stasi violence and repression and there are some displays about the demonstrations that toppled the regime in the Fall of 1989.  As you climb the marble steps, the entrance divides: the museum is to the right with its information desk and ticket sales behind a double glass door; on the left, a single glass door opens into a reading room where visitors can access files from the Communist era.   A middle-aged woman sits at a reception desk studiously viewing her computer screen.  At cubicle stations behind her, some shadowy figures were stooped over files spread out on their tables.


In the eastern territory of Germany, you might wonder what came between you and your wife, or why your children suddenly became distant and remote.  You might wonder about meetings with your boss at which you were denied promotion or not given the raise that everyone else in the bureau enjoyed.  You might have questions about why your car was unreliable and about bill collectors dunning you for obligations that you didn’t recall having incurred.  Maybe, the answers are in your Stasi file, although, of course, it is sometimes good counsel to not look too closely into events in the past.  Perhaps, you were betrayed by your parents or the woman you loved or your best friend.


After the fall of the DDR, of course, it was revealed that the editor-in-chief of the Reclam Verlag, Hans Marquardt, a man universally respected and, indeed, feared, had been an enthusiastic informal Mitarbeiter with state security police.  The files were open and available at the Runde Ecke for everyone to see.  Marquardt reported to authorities under the title “Hans,” not a particularly inventive official pseudonym, and we should not be surprised that he was entrusted with surveillance of East German literary figures.  His role was to attend gatherings of writers and authors and report on their allegiance to the Communist state.  When German writers in the Bundesrepublik visited the East, Hans was supposed to spy on them and record their contacts with DDR intelligentsia.  For instance, he made memo reports on each occasion that Guenter Grass, reputed to be Germany’s greatest writer in the sixties and seventies, came to the DDR.  No doubt, he made inventories of the people who spoke with Grass after public readings from his books that Hans’ son, Hans-Jochun remembered as being so impressive and memorable.  


Although the comparison is unfair and inexact, it’s pertinent: when the DDR collapsed, its leading writers and artists were profoundly compromised and had a status similar to that of leading Nazi poets and novelists and painters after World War Two.  No one was “de-nazified” as it were after the DDR’s absorption into the German federation, but the darlings of the discredited Communist regime were regarded with suspicion and some degree of contempt.  (The same phenomena vexed Heiner Mueller and the DDR’s greatest painter, Werner Tuebke – both of whom were exposed to some level of derision, despite their accomplishments, based on their association with fallen regime.)  Hans Marquardt had been the chairman of PEN in the DDR, an affiliate branch of the international organization that advocates for free expression and political autonomy for writers.  Of course, Marquardt’s membership in this enterprise in the context of the profoundly repressive and censorious East German regime was more than a little problematic.  Nonetheless, after the DDR collapsed, Marquardt applied to membership in the united Germany PEN organization.  Initially, he was denied membership on the basis of his previous activities involving the DDR Stasi.  It’s possible to construct several narratives about Marquardt.  One might accuse him of complicity with a regime that censored literature and conspired to ruin writers who opposed the Communist government.  But, one might also argue that Marquardt used his prominence in East German literary circles to ameliorate and mitigate harms that might otherwise have been worse if he had not softened government response to writing that the Stasi and its apparatchiks deemed subversive.  This issue of Hans Marquardt’s application to the PEN club for the united German was briefly a cause celebre.  In the end, Marquardt was admitted, primarily on the basis of advocacy by Guenter Grass.  


8.

St. Augustine in his Confessions tells the story of his conversion.  For eight years, he had studied Manicheanism.  During this time, he was intellectually troubled and slid into sexual licentiousness.  Weeping over his transgressions one afternoon, the young Augustine heard voices, “like little children, either boys or girls” reciting again and again the phrase Tolle lege – that is, “Take up and read.”  Augustine had Christian scripture at hand and, commanded by the sing-song voices, opened the book at random.  On the page, he saw verses admonishing the followers of Christ to “walk in the daylight and renounce orgies and drunkenness.”  Augustine construed the text as selected for him by the Holy Spirit and this incident, as he recalls in his memoir, was instrumental in his conversion to Christianity.  


While writing about my recent trip to Germany, I had occasion to recall my German teacher in college, Wolfgang Taraba.  I remembered a party that he had hosted at his home near the University and how he had encouraged my study of German lyric poetry.  I visited him once after graduating from the University after I had been practicing law for a couple of years.  Professor Taraba expressed interest in my career and said that he had been engaged by a downtown Minneapolis law firm to translate internal messages produced by Volkswagen in the context of product liability litigation.  (This was a lawsuit prosecuted by the lawyer David Fitzgerald and Rider & Bennett, a now defunct firm; I had been in the margins of several cases involving Fitzgerald and knew him slightly).  Later, I wrote a letter to Professor Taraba thanking him for his influence.  The letter was ultimately returned to me unopened.  As I recall, Taraba had gone to Germany to visit places in Poland where he had grown up when that territory was part of the Reich.  (“Taraba,” of course, is not German name, but Polish or, indeed, Sarmatian – Professor Taraba’s favorite poet was Johannes Bobrowski, an East German writer, whose first volume of lyrics was called Sarmatische Zeit (“Sarmatian Time”.)  Somewhere in Germany, Professor Taraba died from heart failure.  I don’t know if these facts are literally true, but I believe in them.


I found on my bookshelf a bright yellow Reclam volume containing poems by the German romantic writer Eduard Moerike.  The book was in mint condition, never opened, it seemed, and I had no idea how I acquired the volume or when.  In fact, I was surprised to find this book among the hundred or so Reclam editions that I own.  About four days ago, I opened the book at random and this is what I read:  


(Commenting on the meaning of Moericke’s poem Um Mitternacht (“Around Midnight”), the author’s exegesis of the lyric states – ) “It has always and repeatedly been observed that an opposition between night and the springs (or fountains - Quelle) is embodied in the poem.  Whether this opposition, however, expresses a rigid polarity or signals a conflict between the terms or whether this can be even be decided in favor of one side or the other remains controversial.  (See, for example, Pracht-Fitzell at page 215 contra. Taraba, footnote at page 48.).  


The citation directs the reader to Taraba’s dissertation on file with the University of Muenster (1953), a paper entitled “Past and Present in Eduard Moerike”. 


9.

We left Hans-Jochun Marquardt’s museum, walked to the street corner nearest the parking ramp in which the place was embedded, and, then, went in the exactly wrong direction.  Martin had misread the map on his cell-phone.


We walked for a half-hour along spacious avenues lined by large marble buildings that might have been palaces or the homes of the very wealthy or, perhaps, business enterprises and research institutes too secretive to publish their names street-side.  The villas stood in gardens that would have been fragrant but for the sleet and mist in the air.  At a public park, grassy mounds sloped down to a canal and statues on chest-high plinths gestured to us.  We retraced our steps and reached the Seaside Hotel about forty-five minutes later.


10.

The original meaning for the word “enchiridion” is “small, concealed dagger.”  Greeks and Romans carried enchirdions in their chitons and togas.  The blades were like small hidden books.  Julius Caesar, I think, fell under the thrusts of enchiridions wielded by his fellow Romans, including his friend, Brutus.  



Tuesday, January 30, 2024

On a Bus-Stop

 



As I walked to work, I passed the house where a Hispanic family lives with a big black dog.  The dog is a pit bull mix with a head like a tomahawk and, so, I am always a bit skittish when I approach this place.  At this hour, a few minutes before eight a.m., trains on the edge of town hoot mournfully and yellow school buses prowl the residential streets picking up children. 


The door at the home with the pit bull opened partially.  I expected the dog to emerge.  But, instead, a little boy with back pack strapped to his shoulders came out.  He hurried down the steps to the sidewalk and, then, ran ahead of me.  The child was tiny with short legs but he ran quickly toward the bus-stop at the next intersection.  I expected him to tire after a few hundred feet, but he didn’t slow down.  If anything, he ran even more quickly, darting forward to the corner.  There he paused, looking both right and left as he had been taught, and, upon confirming that the intersection was clear, scurried across the street, the first in his race to the bus stop.  The train circling the town whistled again.  In cold weather, parents bring their kids to this bus stop and, then, wait in idling cars nearby, but it was unseasonably warm and no one else was about.  


I crossed the street to where the child was standing.  He had bright eyes and didn’t seem winded at all.


“You are a very good runner,” I told the little boy.


He answered but I didn’t understand what he said.


“You are fleet of foot,” I said to the boy.


“I run fast at school,” the child said proudly.


I turned and walked two blocks in another direction.  A bus was approaching the intersection ahead of me. It stopped and children boarded and their parents who had been standing at the curb, turned to go home.  One of the fathers lit a cigarette.


A woman hurried toward the bus holding the hand of a little girl in a blue-green snow-suit.  The little girl was whining.  It was a protest of some sort.  The woman gestured at the bus a hundred yards away.  The bus driver wasn’t about to wait for late-comers.  Discipline had to be enforced.  Nearing a rail crossing out in the country, tracks parallel to a battered shelter-belt, the train hooted again.


The bus lurched forward, turning at the corner to drive toward the stop where the fast runner was waiting.  The woman turned around with the child, muttering something under her breath.  The little girl began to wail.


I understood that she had not wanted to get up, not wanted to leave the comfort of her warm bed, and had resisted her mother in every way.  But, now, she saw that she was late to the bus and, probably, would be late to school as well and, although, she didn’t want to go, she didn’t want to not go either and would be ashamed to be tardy.  You don’t want to go and, yet, you don’t want to be left behind.  It is a common dilemma.  Many share it.   

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Hamburg: Hagenbeck Tierpark

 





1.

Why would you go to a zoo in a foreign country?  An animal is an animal.  A German lion confined in Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Tierpark is no different from a lion on display in Minneapolis or San Diego or, for that matter, Lima or Beijing.  You don’t need to travel to view exotic animals.  They are exhibited at the Minnesota Zoo in Eagan.  


But a month in Hamburg is a long time, enough days and weeks to see just about everything in that city, and, so, Angelica and I took the red line subway (U-Bahn) to Hagenbeck Tierpark, a famous zoo located about seven stops north of Dammtor Station.  


The zoo occupies a large, more or less, level park with its main gate accessed across an open plaza near the train-stop.  An elaborate Japanese pavilion constructed on pads of concrete islands in a koi pond is near the entry kiosk.  A huge shrouded gate, wrapped like a Christo installation, marks the zoo’s historic entrance.  This structure was being renovated when Angelica and I visited and, therefore, was hidden under suspended, drooping acres of canvas drapery.  Postcards show the gates to be thirty feet high, a complicated superstructure built from brown and white terracotta, highlighted with Pompeiian red.  The gate is a rococo fantasy with ornate columns and curved pediments, echoing the shapely s-curves of the trunks of bronze elephants embedded above the entry.  Atop the high towers supporting the wrought iron entrance gates, a bronze polar bear faces its counterpart, a huge lion, on the opposing red-capped pillar.  Outlying domed pavilions adjacent to the central gated entrance support an American Indian, one-and-a half times life-size with war bonnet and tomahawk and a bellicose-looking Mongolian warrior.  (These bronze figures refer, circumspectly, to the zoo’s somewhat sinister history with respect to human exhibits.)  None of this was visible to Angelica and I; we passed between great, slumping cascades of tarpaulin, water cupped overhead in the folds of the construction shrouds.


In the distance, a range of crags towered over a knoll, a skyline of manufactured mountains, also grey and brown about the height of a grain elevator in a lonely one-street village somewhere out on the prairie.  The concrete and plaster crags form the backdrop to one of Hagenbeck’s “panorama” exhibits, that is, his innovative habitats for whole ecosystems of exotic animals – in this case, flamingos, hippos, lions, and wildebeeste in the Serengeti exhibit.  The crags have a theatrical aspect, a sawtooth range of rocky heights, and they can be accessed (I discovered) from the rear via a scary set of winding steps inset in the concrete that leads in a fissure up to an overlook across the lagoon and the habitat.  This habitat with its artificial spires and pinnacles is the zoo’s trademark.  Of course, the ostentatious gate and the Serengeti cliffs were all bombed to rubble in World War Two and had to be rebuilt from the ground up.  


The park is overrun with some kind of rodent that is about the size of a poodle, an animal that looks like a cross between a deer and a guinea big.  These creatures range along the paths nibbling on the shrubbery or browsing the dry leaves.  (I wrote down the name of the species in my notebook but can’t read my handwriting to report to you on that animal.)  The most impressive part of the zoo is the large and complex habitat called “Eismeer” (the sea of ice – a title that invokes the famous Friedrich picture of polar ice entrapping a sailing vessel).  The exhibit is glacial white and blue, another range of fissured concrete and fiber-glass cliffs that abuts a huge lagoon.  You enter the exhibit on a ramp that slopes imperceptibly downward until you find that you under the water in concrete tunnels, facing beluga whales, porpoises, seals, and enormous walruses swimming in the depths of man-made lake.  Blue light suffuses the walkways and the huge animals sweep majestically along the glass walls.  The walruses are particularly remarkable, pink as boiled shrimp and with shaggy, raw-looking faces of whisker and tendril above their large, radiant eyes.  The animals are superb swimmers and they burst through the water like torpedos, moving effortlessly among the blue shadows.  Penguins dive beside the walruses and seals, lithe projectiles piercing the gloom.  At the lowest point in the exhibit, seemingly forty feet below water, a glass wall the size of old-time movie palace screen shimmers with dim blue radiance – sharks are cutting through the cold water among banner-like pennants of colorful fish and huge ominous rays that carry shadow and darkness in their wake.  At one point, I looked up to a skylight and saw tons of walrus hovering overhead, a strange marble cylinder with flippers hanging in the water.


In black rooms simulating caverns swarms of bats clamber over bananas pinned on spikes.  The air stinks of pneumonia.  In an elephant house, the big animals stand in showers gushing down from the trunks of terracotta elephants – the air in that building is also suffocating with the rank, intense odor of the pachyderms.  Tiles porticos display Ganesha above their arches, openings by which the animals access their exterior pens – it’s too cold for them to be outside today.  In the orangutan environment, a vertical maze of tree-trunks the size of pipe organ cylinders, the beasts are hanging like huge, hairy bait from slack-looking tires and overhead cables.  The orangutans all have names and displays characterize their personalities: for instance, the female Salmi is described as “dreamy, solitary, and likes to sit alone or build elaborate nests.”  The mandrill baboons have neon-red rumps, great spongy excrescences on the back side of their bodies.  The males strut around and, sometimes, try to mount the females who push them away in a desultory way.  The baboons are like sit-com characters: the young bucks posture and the old males brood in out-of-the way niches and the young mothers, with their rabble of babies, clutch nervous-looking infants to their breasts.  A dominant male with a grizzle of grey around his mouth defends his territory, bellowing and chasing away rivals but he seems on the brink of a nervous break-down, twitching with a harried expression.  


Of course, feeding the animals is strictly forbidden (“streng verboten”) but there is moat near an exterior pen for the elephants and a half-dozen of the big animals have come to edge of trench, extending their trunks over the ditch so that visitors can feed them dry leaves.  The elephants have sensitive moist tips to their trunks, fist-sized that are like pale pink hands.  Angelica wants to extend a bouquet of dry leaves in the direction of the elephants but I don’t think she should disobey the big signs prominently displayed and warning against exactly what everyone else is doing.  A slight drizzle is clouding the air.  The elephants are strangely expressive.  You have the illusion, even more than in the case of the rather cartoonish baboons, that you can read their minds and, even, somehow communicate with them.      


2.

Klaus Hagenbeck, the father of Carl, the man who founded the zoo, was a fishmonger.  He kept a half-dozen trained seals and fed them herring down at the fish market in Altona to advertise the freshness of his wares.  Exotic animals were often on show in Hamburg.  The city was once full of sailors who had sailed around the world and, often, they brought back chimpanzees and marmosets and, even, tigers and lions with them from their travels.  Klaus Hagenbeck acquired a small polar bear.  Polar bears also like fish and he fed the animal with herring and cod caught in the North Sea and its estuaries.


Carl inherited the family fish business around 1870 and he quickly discovered that his exotic animals were more valuable as zoological specimens then as props to advertise fresh fish.  Accordingly, he expanded his menagerie and began showing the animals in the zoo that he built in north Hamburg.  


During the 19th century, panoramas were popular forms of entertainment.  A large canvas surface, forming a house-high circular scroll, was painted with elaborately detailed images, often battle scenes or cityscapes.  In order to enhance, the illusion presented by the 360 degree panorama, the foreground to the picture, occupied by the viewers on a sort of panopticon platform (similar to surveillance towers in prisons) was embedded in an artificial landscape consistent with the painted image; for instance, if the battle portrayed took place in a desert, sand and barren stone and a few cactus might be arranged between the panopticon and the enormous canvas; similarly, a painting of the Arctic might feature a white-flocked landscape simulating snow between the viewer and the panorama.  Hagenbeck, who was attuned to all forms of spectacle, operated a few panoramas and he transferred that technique to his animal park, creating “panorama-like” displays in which the terrain around the animal habitats was transformed into a simulacrum of the creature’s natural environment.  This innovation initiated the so-called “Hagenbeck Revolution” – that is, the concept of showing exotic animals in landscapes separated from the public by embankments or moats; this approach to zoological gardens persists until the present day.  


A shrewd publicist (he was friends with P.T. Barnum) Hagenbeck realized that the authenticity of his animal exhibits would be enhanced by installing similarly exotic human beings in his displays.  To that end, Hagenbeck recruited Saimi (Lapplanders) to appear alongside reindeers and polar bears in his Arctic exhibits.  He acquired groups of Nubians to live alongside lions and wildebeest in his African landscapes.  A South Pacific exhibit featured a fully equipped and functioning Samoan village.  These features were popular elements of his animal exhibits.  But, of course, the result wasn’t so propitious, at least, for some of the inhabitants of his human zoos.  For instance, a group of eight Inuits imported from Labrador toured Europe with an exhibit of caribou and polar bears; unfortunately, all of the so-called Eskimos died of small-pox shortly after they were put on display.  


Hagenbeck supplied animals for many European and American circuses.  In fact, he was part-owner of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, an operation that competed with Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey in the early part of the 20th century.  (The show was beset by tragedies: a flood in 1913 destroyed many elephants, horses, and lions; in June 1918, the circus train wrecked near Hammond, Indiana resulting in a horrific kerosene-fired conflagration swept through the derailed cars and 86 people were killed with 126 injured.  In the spirit that “the show must go on,” the catastrophe resulted in only two cancellations and the circus was back on the road in Beloit,Wisconsin three days after the calamity.)  In 1910, Hagenbeck published his autobiography, Beasts and Men.  In the book, he revealed that inhabitants of Rhodesia had reported to his African agents the existence of enormous creatures “half dragon and half elephant.”  Hagenbeck interpreted these accounts as evidence for living dinosaurs in central Africa and he mounted several expeditions in the hope bringing back animals of this sort for his Hamburg zoo.  (Of course, he was successful and the iron-gated cryptosaurus display at the Tierpark remains one of its most popular exhibits; Angelica and I hoped to see the beasts but our timed-tickets had expired when we finally reached that exhibit.)


Appropriately enough, Hagenbeck died in 1913 when he was bitten by a poisonous snake.  



3. 

The curators of the Villa Borghese in Rome preserve in their museum a voluptuous sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon’s sister) made by Canova.  No doubt, the rule that visitors should not touch the creamy flanks and breasts of this statue are relaxed when the doors are closed.  Presumably, people caress the sculpture after-hours – indeed, for all I know, you can buy special all access ticket allowing you to touch the naked gods and goddesses in the collection.  There’s an account somewhere of Robert Hughes, the famous art critic, touring museum show and blithely reaching out to touch art on display to explore the texture of the artifact with his finger-tips.  My point is that if you own an object of art, no one can keep you from touching it or, even, playing with the object.


The same principle applied to Carl Hagenbeck.  There are many pictures showing him petting lions and tigers, for instance, hand-feeding polar bears, and, of course, his demise was related to his nonchalance about coming into close contact with dangerous animals.  In the photographs, Hagenbeck looks like a typical Hamburg merchant-prince – he could have strolled out of the pages of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.  The man had a narrow, handsome face (he looks a little like Max von Sydow) with neatly groomed whiskers on his chin and cheeks, but a bare-shaven upper lip and a clean space of an inch or so below his mouth as well.  Before I knew anything about him, several years ago, I was arrested by a remarkable painting in the Hamburg Kunsthalle (Art Museum).  The canvas is a portrait of Hagenbeck by the great Lovis Corinth and it’s, at once, beautiful and grotesque – you don’t know whether to laugh or gasp with admiration. In the large painting. Hagenbeck stands next to a massive walrus.  The animal collector is skinny and, even, looks a little emaciated.  He’s a skeleton draped in a dark suit wearing a natty fedora hat and holding a cane.  By contrast, the walrus is a mighty barrel of flesh, the focus of the painting.  The creature has a glittering oily surface that is brownish-olive colored with highlights of faint purple and red – the creature’s sides and flippers and gargantuan throat are a bravura exhibition of what oil paint can accomplish.  (Someone said that Rubens showed that oil paint was invented to depict human flesh; I would amend the statement in the presence of this Hamburg painting to say that oil paint was created to represent the slick, wet meaty surface of a walrus.)  The animal has little speck-like eyes and a great beard of tangled whiskers, also contrasting to the less prominent whiskers on Hagenbeck’s scrawny neck.  In the background, some seals sit on an artificial floe of ice and on a fake clifftop a group of reindeer are grazing.  Hagenbeck’s right hand rests familiarly on the walrus’ shoulder.

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Hamburg: A City of the Dead

 


1.

Before departing for Germany, I was anxious and endured sleepless nights of worry.  Premonitions of doom haunted me, but I was unable to imagine exactly what that doom would be like.  


Years ago, I sent a letter to a college professor whom I admired.  This was Wolfgang Taraba, the man who conducted a graduate seminar in German lyric poetry that I attended.  Professor Taraba was melancholy but charismatic with leonine head and a swarthy complexion.  In his study, he had Nietzsche’s ghostly death mask displayed on his wall.  At an end of the year party, he showed me pictures of his lost homeland, the flat plains of eastern Prussia now occupied by Poland or Russia.  The photographs were in black-and-white, images of places that no one (except I suppose Professor Taraba) could even imagine in color: dour Romanesque churches, polders, sea shores hedged with small, wind-tortured brush, a lake in a bowl of hills and prehistoric dolmen in a pine forest. (As we paged through the picture-book, the pale mask of the dead man flared over my shoulder in the gloom like a torch.) Professor Taraba’s potato salad was made with fifty ingredients.  He smoked a foul-smelling cigar in the seminar room, filling the place with blue haze.  After the collapse of the old DDR, he traveled to East Germany to visit some of his old haunts.  The letter I wrote to him was returned undeliverable.  On his visit to Germany, something terrible had happened and he died.  I don’t know if he is buried in Germany or Minnesota where he taught the poetry of Hoelderlin, Heine, and Gottfried Benn.  Professor Taraba’s death burdened me.  I supposed that I was now the age that he had been when he made his fatal trip to Germany.


The year before, when I traveled to Hamburg, I thought of going to see Ohlsdorf cemetery a few miles outside of the city center and harbor district.  But Angelica and I had other things to do and the cemetery was a low priority and, so, we didn’t make the trip.  On this visit to Hamburg, I would be in the city much longer and, so, I thought that I could make time to take the train to the outskirts to see the graveyard.  In fact, when I tried to imagine myself in Hamburg in the weeks before boarding our flight to Germany, the only picture that I could conjure was a winding pathway under trees drizzling dead leaves down on my shoulders.  Some graves the color of ground-mist stood among funereal pines.  I saw myself from the rear, a classical Rueckenfigur of the kind painted by Caspar David Friedrich, trudging along ahead of myself in a sere, autumnal landscape.   Every time I thought of Hamburg and my upcoming trip to that city, this image appeared in my minld’s eye.


2.

On the first full day that we were in Hamburg, Angelica and I walked across the park near our flat and, then, through the tumult in the Dammtor Bahnhof to the Stephansplatz subway station.  We bought city transport tickets good for a month (79 euros a piece) and, armed with those Fahrkarte,  took the blue line north to Ohlsdorf station.  It was an easy trip, a straight shot with no transfers, and a good way to get acclimated to the Hamburg mass transit system.  


The blue line runs through darkness underground for three or so stops.  Then, the train traverses a brick-walled trench, open overhead with its walls overgrown by ivy and coarse, raw-looking brush, the sort of rank, tough flora that grows in gravel, sending spiny tendrils upward toward the top of the pit.  This sort of landscape, tracks strewn with debris and broken glass, grimy weeds, and vines only partially veiling the colorful scrolls and swollen lettering of the graffiti on the walls, could be anywhere in the world – it’s the same vista in Philadelphia or near Newark or at the outskirts of Paris or Berlin.  


After awhile in the roaring passage between the cracked brick walls, the train-line ascended up into the full light of day and ran along an iron trestle over a canal.  The canal was one of the innumerable Fleet that crisscross watery Hamburg.  Big villas tapped into the ruler-straight canal with small docks or stone steps descending through neo-classical bowers and little punts were moored in the water.  Farther into the suburbs, the right-of-way was swarmed with tiny allotments where vegetable gardens were now overgrown or swamped in leaves, small sheds and huts with thatched roofs and a generally ruinous aspect huddled next to the protective dike of the train embankment.  


Ohlsdorf Station is bright, with some pastry and bread kiosks on the platform between the rail lines and better restaurants below in a small shopping center with newstands and ice-cream places.  It’s a busy station because trains running to the airport angle away from the superstructure built over the underground rail-line.  (It’s confusing if you notice that here the U-Bahn or subway runs on the embankment on the surface, three stories above the S-Bahn or surface-rail that is here accessed underground.)   A busy roadway runs parallel the train tracks, passing through a neighborhood where most of the shops have a mortuary theme: there are places where you can buy big wreathes, floral arrangements with bright red and yellow blossoms, caskets, and elaborate memorial stones inlaid with bronze or gilt letters.  The cemetery is on the other side of the road, built among some low, rolling hills that are heavily wooded, and enclosed by a high iron fence.  Among the trees, the steep gables of funeral chapels are visible at intervals hovering over the broad crowns of oaks and the spiked triangular spires of the evergreens and there is a strange, monumental building shaped like flattened pyramid at the edge of the park.     

  

3.

Ohlsdorf Cemetery is the largest graveyard in the world.  It encompasses more acreage than Central Park in New York City and, according to an informational sign, is nine times the size of Vatican City.  Unlike Central Park, this city of the dead is mostly empty.  When we walked its winding paths and looping ring roads, no one was there.  Sometimes, in the distance, I saw an elderly couple, obviously power-walking as exercise, a cardio work-out among the tombs, and, in clearings, here and there, a solitary figure contemplated grave-markers, or sat silently on a bench beside carefully landscaped ponds, everything designed to seem natural, but, in fact, engineered to create that effect.  The place wasn’t wild but mildly “wildish”; it wasn’t a wilderness or the forest primeval, although everything was contrived to present an effect of the studious, nonchalant disarray of unmanaged nature.  (Is there today such a thing as unmanaged nature?  Was there ever?  At Yosemite, for instance, the Native Americans carefully pruned and cropped trees to enhance their acorn harvests and, periodically, they burnt away the underbrush.)  


Near the entrance to the cemetery by the Ohlsdorf station – of course, there are other entrances by other train stops – a columbarium, chapel and crematorium are aligned along the roadway and fused together  into a sort of austere clinker-brick shopping mall for death and its appurtenances.  You can buy a ticket to watch a cremation – not every day but on some weekends, or tour an art exhibit, or buy burial plots in the adjacent forest.  A small museum of funerary art stands apart from the complex.  When I was at Ohsldorf, the museum was always shuttered, a couple of example of monuments showing different fashions in gravestones over the decades studded the lawn nearby.  Across the lane, there’s one of Hamburg’s ubiquitous monuments to the victims of fascism, a towering wall pierced with innumerable alcoves that hold small bell-shaped urns.  On the wall, these words are inscribed: Remember our Death / Remember our Suffering / Man is brother to Man / We died because of Injustice.  You, the Living, recognize your Duty.  The German word for “duty,” that is, Pflicht, is ominous.  All organized murder is carried out in the name of duty.  What would the world look like if people were taught to ignore duty or, even, to oppose its iron laws?


4.

At an information kiosk at Ohlsdorf station cemetery entrance, you can pick up a map of the park.  The map depicts the location of major trails linking the roads that intersect among the trees as elongated loops.  A dozen chapels are scattered across the grounds.  These are modestly proportioned, graceful buildings in which services can be conducted for interments on the grounds nearby.  The chapels have a rustic appearance, some of them with shingled sides, and, among the rhododendrons, they have a somewhat gloomy, dour aspect.  The first couple chapels near the entrance are a few hundred yards away from the perimeter of the Friedhof and are easily reached.  But, when I searched for more remote worship buildings, Angelic and I found ourselves confused by the curving trails that twist through the woods and, after a while, we just kept returning to same chapels that we had previously seen, hiking in circles without knowing it.


In the oldest part of the graveyard, close to the station entrance, a heavy ashlar embedded in grass among flower beds marks the grave of Philip Otto Runge, the great early Romantic painter.  (His works occupy a room next to the Friedrich gallery at the Hamburg Kunsthalle.)  Runge’s grave stands along a grassy promenade flanked by flowers with big blossoms still drooping over the wet lawn.  On a low hillside, above the graves, a life-size Christ the Redeemer stands like a pillar of white smoke.  


I’m looking for the grave of Hans Albers, the movie actor, buried, according to the map near Gustaf Gruendgens, also a director and actor.  Someone named Jan Fedder is also interred in this general area, the grave marked prominently as an important attraction.  I find the traffic circle in the forest where these graves are supposed to be located, but cardinal directions are reversed, it seems, in this city of the dead, and, although I know I am close to my destination, the granite headstones are hidden in thickets with slender, overgrown paths between them.  In a clearing, a small classical temple with grey doric columns protects its cell of profound darkness.  The day is lightless but the little temple-mausoleum shimmers as if slick with olive oil.  We are disoriented and rambling here and there, among small burial tracts in the soaking forest where colonies of wet graves are located.  A German-speaking group of visitors, led by a tourguide, crosses and re-crosses the still and empty lane.  We hover nearby and, at last, find Albers’ grave, a big rough-hewn block of granite surrounded by bushes with surprisingly bright purple berries.  The berries seem improbably livid, as if plastic of some kind, but touching them, I feel that they are real, organic and soft to the touch.  Nearby, Fedder’s gravesite is baroque with a large granite cross with a full-size mourning figure cast in streaked dark bronze at its base.  (The tomb looks ancient, but Fedder died recently: 2019.)  The tour group pauses respectfully in front of Fedder’s pompous grave and people take pictures.  A cast iron fence protects the burial plot under the big stark cross and there is a post-office box near the gate so that visitors can leave messages for the film and TV star.  Fedder specialized in playing north German characters on the screen – he was in Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot and, later, became famous for playing a crude, gruff copper in the crimi, Grossstadtrevier.  He is one of those figures very much beloved among Germans in Hamburg but entirely unknown to the rest of the world.  (To some extent, the great actor Hans Albers shares a similar fate – Germans revere him for his work in The Blue Angel, Grosse Freiheit #7, and many other movies; he was also a singer, a bit like Frank Sinatra although, perhaps, with a more melancholy cast. He was renowned for his huge, shining eyes. But no one knows anything about him in the English-speaking world.)


I know that there is an impressive memorial to the victims of the aerial bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943, Operation Gomorrha.  (The firestorm which killed between 40,000 and 60,000 civilians disrupted the production of Grosse Freiheit #7, the Hans Albers’ melodrama directed by Helmut Kaeutner and the movie’s Hamburg locations had to be moved away from the ruined city to studios in Prague.)  Locating myself on the map at the Albers’ grave, Angelica and I set out along the road to find the air raid graves.  A light drizzle falls and its cool and I’m not really dressed well for the weather.  We reach the next chapel on the lane, pause there to rest on a bus-stop bench for a few minutes and I examine the map.  It seems that a trail leads beside a small chain of ponds in the direction of the bombing victims’ monument.  But I can’t determine the scale or distance.  The sculptor Gerhardt Marcks carved figures in a barrel-vault niche in a massive wall at the site.  Charon, the boatman in Hades, glowers at the living who have come to the monument – his face is fierce and rather disconcertingly looks like the visage of a great ape, a gorilla or King Kong; the dead stand in a row on his low-slung, toboggan-shaped boat – they are like sad people waiting for the saddest bus in the world: a naked man squats with his head in his hands, a woman and two children stand stoically in the center of gondola, and another naked man, corpulent with a bald head faces in the direction of the gloomy shore to which they are being transported.  (The name of the work is “The Crossing of the River Styx”.)  The work exudes despair and, probably, is not something worth seeing in person, but I make the monument my destination and we set off along a path lined with mournful willow trees.


5.

We walk for a long way, pausing at intersections to study the map.  A lagoon with stone crosses on its banks displays some big lily pads.  Small clearings are occupied by little stony colonies of the dead.  We take several turns in the path to approach the war victim’s monument.  Somewhere in these glades, the British War Graves commission manages an acre of uniform stone slabs marked the resting place of English soldiers who perished at a POW camp on the Frisian Islands during World War One.  Ahead of me, I see an old man with a white beard walking among the tombs.  I follow in his footsteps.  I can’t see his face, only his back and shoulders.  After a half-hour, we glimpse a chapel that looks a bit like a rustic hunting lodge.  Pushing through some shaggy shrubbery, we see that a lane runs along the front of the chapel and there is a bus stop.  This is the same place from which we embarked forty minutes ago; we have just made a round loop through the graves.  Then, it occurs to me that this place is truly huge and that we have explored only a tiny corner of the cemetery and that the war graves must be a mile away or more.  


We’re footsore and so we limp back to the train station for a cinnamon roll (“Franzbrot”).


6.

My son, Martin, traveled to Germany and remained for a couple weeks.  On one of the last days that he was in Hamburg, we took the blue line back to Ohlsdorf to see if we could locate the British Expeditionary Force cemetery and the monument to the air raid dead there.  It had been raining intermittently and the station at the city of the dead was slick with brownish slush on the concrete platform and floors below.  Trucks and cars churned through puddles of water at the intersections.  The wreaths and bouquets at the florist’s shop seemed faded.  More than two weeks had passed since my last visit to the cemetery, but it was not appreciably colder on this day, although the rain was more challenging.  The remnants of flowers blossoming among the topiary by Runge’s grave were greyer and gave the impression of being ancient like horticultural specimens preserved in formaldehyde.


The map of the cemetery became increasingly sodden in my pocket and, at the folds, was illegible.  We set off at a brisk pace, understanding that the park was immense and that it would take a long time to hike to those areas that interested us. For awhile, we walked along one of the lanes, but our destination was on the other side of the park and, so, we needed to follow paths through the woods to reach the other ring-road in the cemetery.  We passed several chapels and, then, followed a trail toward the loop across the forest.  A central roadway, bifurcating the cemetery, passed by a chapel surrounded by pines and shaped a bit like an oriental fantasy with a tile roof turned upward pagoda-style at the eaves below a faux-mosque  copper dome.  In a shell of reinforced and transparent plastic, a bench marked a bus-stop on a route that apparently looped around the cemetery.  No bus was in sight and so we continued on a curving path guarded by bronze angels melted into sagging postures of grief, sometimes dense encampments of graves clustered together around still, silent fountains scummy with entrapped rainwater, in other places no graves at all, just old trees and undergrowth and, at the end of a sidewalk buried in brown leaves, a stone mausoleum with brass door and stained glass clasped in a gothic lead frame.  Sometimes, I thought I saw an old man, ahead of us, shoulders hunched over a little as he paced through the forest.


Either the map was incorrect or I read it wrong.  The curving trail didn’t run straight to the north loop road but came to a tee, dividing right and left in the middle of a groove of dark, wet pines.  Some wood-framed bins of clippings and rotting flowers marked the place where the trail came to an end at this parting of the ways.  I was turned-around and couldn’t figure out directions because there were no landmarks that I could correlate to the map.  We turned right and walked in the drizzle for a half-hour before coming to a road.  Next to the lane there was a chapel with curled pagoda eaves and a copper mosque-like dome.  We sat at the bus-stop for a while.


In the distance, a bus approached.  The vehicle slowed when the driver saw us sitting on the bench.  I didn’t know where the bus was going and was afraid to venture onto it.  Behind greenish glass, the shadowy bus driver nodded to us.  A couple of shrouded figures with pale faces were sitting near the back of the bus.  I gestured that we were not going to board and Martin and I backed away from the busstop.  The vehicle slowed a little but, then, lumbered down the road.  


We decided that there was no hope of ever finding the places for which we were searching and, so, we set off in the opposite direction to where I thought the entry by the train station was located.  There seemed to be another U-Bahn stop on the other side of the cemetery.  We walked for another half-hour, came upon a gate and found that we had come to the park entrance across the busy road from the train station with the connections to the airport.  To get anywhere in this city of the dead, choose the direction that seems completely wrong and go that way – sooner or later, you will reach your goal since the only way to reach a place here seems to be go the way opposite to where you imagine that you should go.  


7. 

Near the Ohlsdorf station exit, the cemetery’s crematorium rears up over iron lances of perimeter fence and the busy road channeling traffic parallel to the park border.  The crematorium is a ziggurat of grey-brown brick, the wedge-shaped tower flanked by a low mathematically symmetrical arcade of dark shadowy recesses, each brick on the right equivalent to a brick on the left.  The structure seems Babylonian, neo-Assyrian, with some elongated grim-looking angels adorning the austere mass of brick wall below the pyramid of the tower.  The steeply sloping s sides of the ziggurat are lined with bronze grooved panels with a pale-green patina.  


The “New Ohlsdorf Crematorium” as it is known was designed by Hamburg’s leading architect, Fritz Schumacher.  Beginning in 1906, Schumache, then, about forty was appointed to serve as Hamburg’s city planner and architect in charge of public projects.  Born in Bogota, Columbia to parents of the mercantile class from Bremen, Schumacher was a leading exponent of what is called “Backsteinexpressionismus” – that is “brick expressionism” – and a number of his large, hulking buildings survive in Hamburg, particularly in the financial district by the harbor.  Schumacher’s last commission was the crematorium at Ohlsdorf and its an impressively majestic edifice, eschewing classicism for a more monumental archaic Mesopotamian style.  The structure is heavy, immobile, an expression of the enduring, humble, and, yet, formidable qualities of brick – you set one brick upon another and, then, another and you repeat the process until you have a mountain.  The artificial peak of the crematorium is built with a summit of hatched brick laid vertically as opposed to the horizontal courses comprising the body of the ziggurat.  These recessed box-like complications to the tower’s top cap the structure and give it’s surface an intricacy in which shadow and light might play to interesting effect if there were only any sunlight here.  But, on the day I saw the crematorium, the sky was overcast and rainy and so the inlay on top of the pyramid read as a dull sequence of shallow cubby-holes.


Schumacher readily assimilated himself to the Nazi regime and won many prizes for his work.  In 1944, the Nazis gave him the Goethe Prize for his distinguished work in architecture.  He lived long enough (dying in 1946) to see his city smashed like crockery by Allied bombing.  


Adjacent to the crematorium, another chapel-like space holds bronze urns, dark forms against an array of pale stained glass windows.  Wan yellow light streams into the columbarium and the floors and walls are white so that the place seems bright and open.  The cylinders full of ash and bone are curved like naked women.  The air is heavily perfumed with the scent of flowers.