Yanara Friedland
Swamp City
Etymologically the name Berlin most likely comes from the Slavic berl—or birl, which means “swamp.” Sumpfstadt (Swamp city) proposed to go back to the time before language and, consequently, before history.
—Joanna Rajkowska
It begins in a dentist’s waiting room. It is July, an early morning in 2016. Six heads gaze at a screen that has been muted. Images of bloody asphalt, a regional train, police cars and the wandering forehead of a politician flash in a rotating sequence in front of our eyes. A boy is playing a game on his phone. No one speaks. It is about 90 degrees outside. It has been called the worst week of the year. Newspapers are developing grounding messages for their headlines: “How To Make Sense in Senseless Times” or “What Remains Certain.” Is this war? an expert on violence seems to mouth into a microphone.
A storm is coming. Not as in apocalypse, tornado, flood. Hear the wind playing with the burlap, the tacked nails. Sedentary wolves, can you hear the hammer blows? I think the world has begun to earth. The only measurement is what it feels like, the tingle on the left side of cranium, small bite marks, a star in a sea of stars. And a storm is coming to the big public squares, the harbors. A necessary boat knows how to be in rough waters outside of the hairlock, hemlock, heirloom. A boat that kindly knows and moans with the sea. A storm is coming over the Arctic, the balloon-sized huts, and dopey cities. Towards the ache of crocodiles, their wise blood, into the dregs of the Delta, the beak of the Chickadee. And in cold bathhouses women begin to shake the towels and then fold them over again. There is a sound conversing in the hollow. A fruit fly draws to the vinegar trap. Utterly waning imprints curdle the rain. The storm is blowing timelessly. I must stop. Listen.
We meet in front of the Canadian embassy at Potsdamer Platz. Later you suggest moving to Canada, the only country in which we may not deal with these levels of anxiety, you say. The sentence dissipates. We both know it is not true or rather irrelevant. We pass the Sony Center, the Ritz Carlton, the train station, looking for a building in the Alte Potsdamer Strasse, 134a. Some remainder of the wall is encircled by tourists. Marlene-Dietrich-Platz straight in front of us. I can’t seem to locate the layer I am looking for. You point to a plaque dedicated to Theodor Fontane, but I am not interested in the flaneur, known to ramble through the rural outskirts of Berlin and the city’s growing edges. I forge ahead through the glass doors of the Arkaden shopping mall, briefly look up at the large glass cupola before exiting through another set of doors. Several nondescript buildings and office spaces seam the alley. Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks. Is it possible that the center of the so-called avant-garde, one hundred years ago, was located right here in the throughway of a mall, some modern day Akkadia?
People trickle over the asphalt
nimble as lizards
Foreheads and hands flashing with thoughts
Swim like sunlight
The poet Paul Boldt wrote sonnets in Café Josty, a pastry shop and coffeehouse founded by the Josty brothers who had emigrated from Sils, Switzerland, to Berlin in the late 1700s. One of many popular spots of the square, it was particularly frequented by writers. At some point the Grimm brothers, Heinrich Heine, and Erich Kästner had all been regular visitors to the café located on Potsdamer Platz before it moved, in the 1930s, to Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse. Of course, it was ultimately destroyed in the war. The Arkaden shopping mall has a little station with an architectural model of Potsdamer Platz before and during the Weimar Republic. It also shows the Potsdam gate, a Berlin customs wall that separated Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz. The square was then known as Platz vor dem Potsdamer Thor. The gates and columns, though almost entirely destroyed during World War II, stood in the way of early construction plans of the Berlin Wall. The square, a heart of the metropolis in the 1920s, was deserted after 1945, except for the black market activities that flourished at this rare intersection of the three occupation zones. Later, stage to the famous uprising of East Berliners and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a backdrop to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, it was also where the indestructible Mauer magically opened again in the fall of 1989, continuing its presence as an awkward turning table of periphery and center.
Today I am searching for another sideline, one that I am not sure whether I will admire or come to detest. I am not sure what has compelled me to walk down a dark alley with no shoes or direction. Though the dark alley may be a well-lit shopping mall.
The Sturm Gallery, offices, art school and private residences moved from Villa Gilka to the Alte Potsdamer Strasse 134a in 1912, and remained there as the headquarters of the Sturm movement until Herwarth Walden’s departure to and eventual disappearance in Russia, some time in the 1930s.
Nell Walden later admitted that only one of her diaries from her Sturm period survived. A record of the year 1913, Herwarth and Nell’s first year of marriage, detailing their constant travels across Europe. Their purpose of the utmost urgency: to meet the artists and incendiaries, encounter the artworks, amulets, energies of the new movement. Amsterdam, Bruges, Paris, Spain, Venice, Munich, Copenhagen, Vienna, Budapest, Prague. They slept a few hours on the train, embraced their compatriots on the platform, and descended into the necks of bohemian Europe for twelve hours at a time, before rushing back to the station with stacks of newspapers, always late and breathless, ignoring the landscapes between stops. Their first major impact came in the infamous fall of 1913, when the inaugural German Herbstsalon displayed over 400 different works by 75 international artists and was condemned unilaterally by the press as an “absurd and hysterical spectacle.” The exhibit remained open for three months, and the public, for the first time, cast its eye on works by Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, the Cubists, the Futurists, all together in one hall, located on the fourth floor of a corner building slightly tucked away from the Potsdamer Platz.
Herwarth Walden’s opening speech was long and sounded somewhat like this:
“With this inaugural German Autumn Salon an impression of the new art movement is put on display for the first time. An overview that will expand our generation’s perspective. To be an artist means to have your own impressions and to reveal these fully illuminated. The giant innovators of the 19th century have left behind a double inheritance: a material one that their descendants are frightfully holding on to, and an intellectual one that is being reconfigured in this exhibit. . . . Art can never be replication. One talks of failure in form but instead one should talk about the failure of the uniform. We are all humans and yet no body compares with another. Sameness is only achieved through the uniform. The painter paints what he sees with his innermost senses, the expression of his being, everything mortal and passing. The painter plays life, every external impression becomes an expression from the inside. He is the carrier, the carried of his visions, of his inner faces. I feel committed to this exhibition because I am convinced of the value of this art. These artists are my friends. I am sure that the critics will laugh about this exhibit and about me. These same critics laughed at Heinrich Mann, Alfred Mombert, Karl Kraus, and Else Lasker Schüler. When Oskar Kokoschka’s graphic works were printed in the first editions of the Sturm journal, art critics and art experts alike mocked him. Today, three years after their first publication, they are extremely sought after. But such voices and opinions do not influence or obstruct my work. Today we live in a time in which art is the caretaker of life.”
I think of Nell Walden finding the diary of her first year of marriage after everything else had to be burnt, fleeing with what she could carry to Switzerland in 1933. After Herwarth Walden was lost somewhere in Russia, and her second husband had been apprehended and killed by the Gestapo at the border, she remained the custodian of legacies, paintings, letters, and archives.
It turns out that many letters and documents have survived the war years due to Nell Walden’s diligent watchkeeping over the Sturm legacy. But as so often with this kind of investigation, the remains begin to come alive, multiply, to change around and dictate, in odd moments, their lost halves, or those parts that were never known in the first place.
I am tempted to tell you her whole story in one gulp, in a biographical sketch, or even in short stanzas with indicative titles. But this is the year of upside downness. I cannot type a word without misspellings. My fingers just fall plumply onto the keyboard. It ofte looks likethis. Sturm’s incessant speed and sleepless years in passionate dedication to their vision I cannot emulate. The meandering mistake strolls through the streets with me, long rest periods and imposing dreams slow down my telling and the eyes of my time.
The headlines read: “A New Epoch,” “Hot Times,” “Courage On The Loose.”
Stop shaking your head, a journalist warns. Begin to accept the most dangerous situation in life. Going to bed with the coup in Turkey, waking up Saturday to the counter coup by Erdogan. An axe attack in a train in southern Germany follows the next day. The same journalist casually drops the names Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, and says we have become rote in our responses, calls Europe “the new Israel,” this summer “the Summer of Hate,” and refugees a symptom of the globalized world returning to where it began.
Another journalist draws a chart of so-called “hot” and “cold” periods:
1789-1871: hot
1871-1914: cold
1914-1924: hot
1924-1933: some cold spells
1933-1953: hot
1953-1989: cold (with interruptions)
1989-now: hot
He warns readers not to become infected by aggressions and provocations from Moscow, Pyongyang or Ankara. To not fall prey to end-of-the-world myths or hysteria. No, everything has occurred before, he affirms.
One hundred years ago there raged a war, ominous, full of trenches and poet soldiers. My brain is inflamed by time or osmosis. You see, I am not that well. The streets are full of masked animation. To seek the coffeehouses and garbed parks is to negotiate for a space double-toothed, fledging. The language is not quite arriving here. There is something in the centennial that makes one gasp, even though these numbers don’t mean anything, specifically. Sometimes there is refuge, nonetheless, in a past world ending, in those who foretold, subverted, and survived such a time. I do not wish to make this an argument for the connective tissues of unending war, the avant-garde (which means nothing now but meant something then), and their saplings.
What does the first page of her diary say?
Dear Nell, a woman is here, knocking at the door . . .
We have lunch in a small Turkish corner store, drink iced tea and eat cabbage salad. There is the flatness of the city, humidity. One of the brakes on the bike is broken. You order lunch in your best German, and then we head to the Staatsbibliothek, which houses one of the oldest rare manuscript departments of Europe, including original fragments of Virgil, an illuminated manuscript of the Nibelungenlied, satirical broadsides from the March Revolution of 1848, and the personal papers of Hegel, Moses Mendelssohn, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among many others. The department was deeply affected by both world wars. The Lessing collection entirely lost, though the Nazi book burning mostly destroyed materials from neighboring libraries. The Staatsbibliothek’s major acquisitions were made right before the outbreak of World War I, endeavoring to make Berlin a cultural capital again.
We procure a free three-day pass (the monthly membership of 12 Euros seems high), deposit our bags, and move through the metal detectors. We ascend the broad staircase, past rows of silent heads bent over papers. The library is one large open hall, housing over 11 million books. More books than people in Berlin. More books than humans on Earth. We cross the department of maps with its large globes on exhibit. The handwritten manuscript department is overseen by a staunch woman, who never responds to my smiles. She asks for our IDs in that irreverent Berliner tone, and the purpose of our visit. When I mumble “Sturm Archiv” she steps out from behind her desk and casually lifts her hand to show me several books on top of a shelf right behind me. “You cannot borrow these,” she emphasizes. “And the originals you can’t access unless you have a full membership.” I nod and watch an elderly man open a book as large as the table on which it rests. The book is filled with life-size botanical illustrations. Another man, next to him, is carefully turning over translucent, handwritten pages.
The blue-colored edition is almost entirely comprised of letters written to Herwarth Walden. Ivan Goll demands that Walden define the difference between “expressionism” and “Expressionism,” and whether there is such a thing at all. The often one-line telegraphic messages are all in third person. A lengthy correspondence between Alfred Döblin and Walden holds my attention. Döblin, in third person, expresses his anger about a theater performance, the fact that his name was mentioned. He apologizes for not being able to speak freely in the porter’s lounge. Thinks highly of the Nietzsche presentation. Is working hard. Recommends Frau Walden—which in 1906 referred to Else Lasker-Schüler—should poem (using the verb form) Salome. Later on, it is 1915: letters from the front. Döblin is stuck in Lorraine. He is waiting, not sure for what. He sends his best wishes to Frau Nell Walden.
Between the letters are copies of pamphlets, the cover page of the Sturm journal, which cost around five pfennigs, a three-month subscription around one mark fifty, an annual subscription six marks. You are lost in thoughts. “Why?” I ask. “Just the news of the day,” you respond and touch my arm. The library feels safe, almost otherworldly, as if its books and shelves and employees have successfully preserved fallen worlds, are equipped to preserve many more to come.
The manifesto of the Futurists is printed several times in the second book I heave from the shelf. It reads like a masturbatory monologue on the advances of technology, the automobile, and it echoes current political slogans that now crossfire through time. Electricity was a drug that promised health, youth, energy. And these Futurists were addicted to the bright lights, cheap food, and globalization fantasies of their not so Belle Epoque. I know I will need more time, days, months, perhaps an annual pass. It also occurs to me, as I traverse the large hall down the elegant balustrade and through the metal detectors, that historically libraries are one of the most vulnerable places during times of war. Sites to plunder, sites of burnings and destruction—librarians’ defiance suggests their awareness of the fragility of their guardianship.
We part ways and I ride to Moabit to find an antiquarian bookstore. I pass the Siegessäule, then the rebuilt Reichstag. Children are running in their bathing suits through fountains. “Dem Deutschen Volke” (To the German People) was carved into the parliament’s stone in 1916 to the great dismay of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who understood its democratic connotations as a literal writing on the wall, predicting his fall two years later. I glide below the thick canopy of the Tiergarten, a park that even during the hottest weather remains a cooling oasis, a green life with old oaks and beech trees, a womb, evoking earliest times. A place that also bore me, in its soil and worms and wild woods.
It was outside the gates of this park that Nell and Herwarth met again, after their first encounter in Sweden, at his sister’s house in the winter of 1911. Nell, who was young and a complete Germanophone, had focused her studies exclusively on German culture alongside music. She admired the country’s art and writers, its cities and countryside, and passed on the opportunity to travel through France for a stay in Lübeck. During a winter trip to Berlin, she visited her sister and taught Swedish to two young expatriate girls with the intention of becoming fluent in German. She had one girl on each hand as she strolled down Kurfürstendamm, the city’s fashionable center at the time. On the other side of the street, she saw his flying blonde hair, his large overcoat also in motion, documents clamped beneath his arm, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. How could this happen, in a city of millions of people (even then), she wondered many decades later.
The bookstore is actually an apartment in a sunless courtyard. The man pokes his head out of a small door, as if he’s emerging from a subterranean maze, and tells me to lock my bike. He leads me into a cramped space, filled with towers of books. He appears archetypal, with thick-rimmed glasses and a nervous cough, some grey streaks of hair crowning his large head. He has exceptionally well-formed ears, also quite large, and speaks in a low voice. There are three rooms with a narrow pathway he must have worked hard to create leading to a staircase. He dances on careful tiptoe steps ahead of me and asks about the book in question. A female voice responds and a hand lowers the object, before complaining about the impossible busyness of the past several days. “Patience, patience,” he coos. “We need to take one step at a time. No point in fatiguing yourself” (coughs). He hands me the book with a brown cover showing various women in artistic pursuits, then opens it and points to the inscription: Campendock. “So this comes from good stock,” he says, smiling. “You know him?” I shake my head. “He was an Expressionist himself, part of Die Brücke group, from the Netherlands,” he explains. I nod. “I don’t part easily with a book like this, you know. We just moved here and reduced ourselves from 170 to 120 square meters. That means I had to give away a lot of treasures.” He lets me peruse, answers the phone. There are no fans, no air conditioning. Only one of the figures I am looking for is mentioned in the index. I ask if he has any other work about or by Sturm artists. “Nothing original. They announced their struggle and printed on cheap newspapers. A lot does not exist anymore. The paper usually oxidizes over time. There used to be this little bookstore, Savignyplatz, I think. They carried some of their authors.” I ask him about the move. “Well, the rents down in Schöneberg were getting high, and all these people who are not clients of this kind of business moved in. So we came here.” He pauses, before adding: “It is what it is.” His hands feel their way along the book’s cover. “This little rip here, you may want to use Japanese sellotape or take the cover off entirely.” “Do you ship overseas, as well?” I ask. “Yes, primarily. You know they have better philosophy departments in South Korea than here. Horkheimer and Adorno scholarship is happening mostly in Asia now. German Studies are flourishing particularly outside of Germany” (coughs). “We are behind the moon here. It’s shameful.” He suddenly stops himself. “Anne does not like it when I talk like this, but it’s true.” Anne, whose pale hand I encountered earlier, has descended the staircase and is now standing in the small room with us. She seems to check on something, mentions an order, lingers. I buy the book for 30 Euros. I am not sure that I will actually use it, but I cannot leave the place empty-handed. The bookseller urges me to write to him, in case I need anything else. When I exit, their whispers disappear, their world closes, clack, is gone.
I read the book written circa 1928 alongside a contemporary tome on the pre-war years, called Der taumelnde Kontinent. In a thought experiment, the author, Philip Bom, asks his readers to imagine that the worlds’ archives and libraries have been stricken by a hungry, yet selective bookworm that has destroyed all photographs, books, documents, sound recordings, and newspaper articles produced between the years 1914 and 2000. He asks the reader to imagine that they knew nothing about the murder in Sarajevo, the battle of the Somme, the stock market crash, the Reichskristallnacht, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulags, Vietnam, the Berlin Wall. “Imagine,” he writes, “that you would not see the life stories, thoughts and actions of the people living before 1914 through the prism of a monstrous century (and also one of monumental achievements).”
“Imagine,” he continues, “you could see the years between 1900 and 1914 without the long shadow of their future, as living moments in all their complexity and contradiction, their still open future, the hope that is born out of it . . . a time’s most precious possession.”
My grandmother announces that this will be our last visit, then adds, “ in which we can be calm together.”
In 1942, at the age of 21, she moved to Berlin to begin her training at the well-known Lette School, which specialized in medical, chemical, and biology lab assistants, and was one of the first schools to train women in these fields. She was taught how to evaluate blood work using a mathematical formula, to prepare doctors’s workspaces, develop X-rays, and perform tests of all kinds. It was, as she explains, a pragmatic choice, saving her from some unwanted war machine necessities that a literature degree would have inevitably been reduced to. The Lette School, founded by Wilhelm Lette, was a progressive higher-learning institute intended to open up the work force for women. It was, and still is, located at the then lively Viktoria-Luise-Platz in the former West Berlin.
My grandmother moved into a large apartment on Kaiserstrasse, now Bundesstrasse, a five-minute walk from Café Kranzler and the central station, then Bahnhof Zoo. Her room, a restructured salon space by the building’s front door, had its own toilet. The landlady occupied the remainder of the apartment with her three children and allowed no male visitors; baths not more than once a week. My grandmother did not cook there, but found lunch on the square and usually finished off her day with a portion of porridge and jam. Upstairs, on the fourth floor, lived a family of Jews, and it was only when she was standing in the elevator one day, holding the door open for an old man who tiredly waved before climbing the stairs, that she understood something of “the situation.” This was further clarified at the milk shop, next door, where she was served before a large family who waited patiently until everyone else filled their bottles. She admits she was naive and unaware. Now, of course, this sounds so common, almost glib, a scene often portrayed in films, and yet I see her, young and full of anticipation, alone in the city. All of it must have felt oddly nonsensical, without precedent or explanation. Even her best friend Maria, who also went to the Lette School and beside whose name my grandmother read the word “fremdblütig,” only covered her mouth with her hand in shock when my grandmother asked her what was strange in her blood. We mark the corner on the map where she lived and trace her footpaths through the city.
In September 1944, she traveled with Maria to Austria. They spent four weeks in a nearly empty inn. Unlike the familiar scenes of that last year of the war, she describes Vanille-Zupferl and their unending delight rowing on the Wörthersee with books and bikinis. No one else was there. Only the distant rumble of Tito’s bullets could be heard from the mountains, so they rarely hiked, even though the weather was fabulous and their legs were strong. It was fall, the war lost, and the worst winter lay ahead, but they did not know that yet and ate their hearts out. They met some men from Vienna, one of whom owned a nylon sock factory and provided my grandmother with a good pair of stockings before she and Maria made their way back to Berlin.
On her balcony, in late August, it occurs to me that she is the first world, the one that lived and experienced what arrives to me as second world, removed. And I come to her from the future, living what she can no longer touch. A world she looks upon from behind the walls of her apartment, her TV, the newspaper—in waiting. What distances she’s crossed to meet me here, as I keep storming ahead.
Berlin is so drunk right now. It is so frequented and washed over and rain filled. After my visit to the dentist to have all my wisdom teeth taken out, I didn’t speak for several days and read Lasker-Schüler poems instead. She remains the most famous female member of the Sturm troupe. Though it is the fairly-unknown and extremely-doomed mask dancer Lavinia Schulz who has followed me across the city all summer, and on whom I cannot find a word in print. She killed first her lover and then herself. That is all the archives will divulge.
When I mention this fleeting biographical fact to a friend, she says not much has changed. Cities, like Berlin, are still hard for love. What does a place have to do with love, I wonder. I think about how Paris is called “The City of Love,” an equally misconstrued idea, though I continue to be struck by the possibility of a place’s wounding, a place’s desire creating the conditions for our experience. Our sense of “life.”
Writing about her public project Sumpfstadt in her book Where the Beast Is Buried, artist Joanna Rajkowska imagines Schlossplatz, and the recently demolished Palast der Republik, through its transmutations from Berliner Stadtschloss—where Karl Liebknecht announced the formation of a Free Socialist Republic in 1918—to its restoration post-war as “The People’s Parliament”—filled with asbestos—to a potential innocence as an empty, grass-covered place.
The vision of a swamp was followed by the fantasy of a spontaneous mass exodus of the population of Berlin in the late 1940s. Just as it is necessary to desert a place contaminated by nuclear explosion, so one should leave behind a place stained with guilt, collaboration and indifference. Instead of building Truemmerberge and fastidiously restoring their houses and palaces, they had decided to leave their city to the forces of nature, the waters of the Spree and its tributaries, canals and underground channels. The waters slowly rose and flooded sewers, filled basements, burst through manholes and ran down streets. Berlin was once again what it had been before it became a city—a swamp, a marshland, a birl.
Whenever I look at the city or walk its pavement, I feel a sense of imbalance, the tectonic plates moving below my feet, or dead bodies slightly adjusting their position underground. It is the only place with which I truly sense a relation. Here I can visit the past. Here I can smell myself, even though nothing of the present landscape is recognizable to me. Perhaps a root lives in its swamps without a tree or visible expression of itself. Along the root the narrative never ruptured or ended. It is still there, both innocent and guilty, which leaves me with questions, the only possible form of existence in the afterlife.
My swampy women, hanging from carriages, meandering through the night across ruinous facades, who moved in and out of annihilating times, how did your love shatter and sing? How did you carry your parcels and trudge through deep water? What the libraries and archives cannot protect, or never remembered in the first place—what is out there in the wind and purple deaf sky of this city, storm women, that dares on?