you never know

As I was delivering my good-byes at the museum today, thanks all around for help and Großzügigkeit, my capacity to speak German utterly failed me. Reading too many letters by Kurt Schwitters in a sitting can have that effect. In one letter, the man can wander from German to Norwegian to his idiosyncratic English to Dutch to French, flexing his mastery of now-forgotten nineteenth-century shorthand scripts, a kind of cursive Fraktur (so-called gothic writing), even trying his hand at cuneiform writing (though fortunately admitting defeat pretty quickly)! To be fair, the bulk of the letters are in German, are legible to the modern eye, or are in a whacky English that is remarkably fluent and unbelievably mangled at the same time. I like to imagine that’s how his German reads to someone who knows better: I for one have never read the language used in a way quite like his.

H. asked if I had been out to “Waldhausen” yet and I had no idea what he was talking about. Which must have shocked him at first, because it was the street on which Schwitters lived in Hannover, where the fabled Merzbau once stood, and whose name marked the top of every one of his thousands of missives on his specially-designed letterheads prior to his flight from the Gestapo. My incomprehension had just as much to do with the unexpected nature of the question as it had my rapidly disintegrating grasp of the native tongue. On the other hand, it was also the most natural question in the world to ask and I was taken aback by the idea that it hadn’t even occurred to me to find out where Waldhausen Strasse was, let alone see the spot where the house (destroyed in an air raid) once stood.

H. however jumped at the opportunity to enlighten me: the house next door had survived and furthermore it is an architectural Spiegelbild – a mirror reflection – of the Schwitters home. If I went on the pilgrimage, I’d at least be rewarded with a semblance of what it must have looked like on the outside in nearly the same spot. What’s more, the graveyard where Schwitters is buried is right across the street and H. told me vaguely where I could find it – “somewhere behind the chapel.”

Ironically, my patient attention to all this information – the directions to the house, the right tram to take – caused me to just miss the earlier train to Basel, the second to last that day, which also happened to be the very last day my BahnCard was valid. So, with two hours to spare before the very last train I would take in Germany for the foreseeable future, I decided, what the hell, I’d go and do a little dissertation tourism after all. When I thought about it, barely a week went by this year when I was not in Hannover for at least two days, and it was a bit absurd that I hadn’t had the slightest curiosity about the street where the man whose mail I had been sifting through (drowning in) had lived or even a wee bit of interest in visiting his remains. Then again, I also take it as a healthy sign that I didn’t want to indulge in what could easily be a melancholic wallow in the life of a person who exists more as a concept or idea for me. Albeit a very funny and brilliant one.

Save for my camera and umbrella, I left my baggage in a two-hour locker for a euro – and two hours was exactly what I had. I ordered a gelato, crossed the Bahnhofplatz to the tourist office, got a free map, and set out with the tram to the edge of the city. When I emerged at Waldhausen Strasse, I immediately saw the Döhrener Turm, which I had seen just minutes before in a sketch Schwitters had sent in a letter in 1935. As absolutely nothing around it looked the same, the vision of the medieval tower had the effect of a dream displacement.

It started to rain lightly when I got to Number 5, which, true to form, was a nondescript bit of postwar West German construction. Pretty much every other house on the block, however, was a splendidly renovated, glistening specimen of fin-de-siècle building. Just our luck, I thought, the one building to be hit had to be the Merzbau. I took a photograph of the Spiegelbild and its blank left side, which must have cleanly abutted Number 5 but now visibly cleared the significantly shorter replacement.

This blank wall clearly betrays, as do so many similar walls in Germany, the wounds of the war despite all attempts at Sanierung and Verschönung these decades later. (These words mean “renovation” and “improvement” respectively, but in the echo of “sanitation” in the former and Versöhnung, or “appeasement,” in the latter, the truth oozes out like pus.) Tear down every building with “bad memory” in Berlin, for instance; sublimate every bit of history into countless bronze plaques to trinket up the soulless, safe architecture of the Wende – these blank walls remain indelible. They’re the only thing around that allows me to actually see that any sort of catastrophe ever happened here.

(And here I am suddenly reminded of the news I received at the start of this journey that Raul Hilberg, a pioneer of Holocaust studies, had recently died in Vermont. In Lanzman’s Shoah he goes into excruciating detail about how the Reich nearly bankrupted itself with the Deutsche Bahn as it coordinated shipping Europe’s Jews to all the concentration camps. Sifting through receipts and order slips for ever more train cars before our eyes, reading them out one by one, your mind is supposed to glaze over with tedium – until that moment when Hilberg says that in his hands are the documents that set in motion the Holocaust and the largest planned and organized migration in history. And that the bureaucracy of it all makes this fact invisible, makes you struggle to remember – even as you are watching a 9 hour Holocaust documentary – that each car actually reified so many dozens of people.)

Standing under my umbrella across the street, under the suspicious eyes of a woman living in the Spiegelbild house that I had just photographed (I was about to write “captured on film”!), I thought how depressing it was that there wasn’t a Merzbau behind its walls, even as the view I had wouldn’t be essentially any different if it had indeed survived the war. I thought that behind a very similar façade (just mirror reversed) once was the Merzbau, and it would have been very easy for one of the neighbors to have walked their dog every day by Number 5 and never have had the slightest idea. It sent a shiver down my spine. What was more bizarre was there wasn’t even a plaque mentioning that Kurt Schwitters had once lived in the now-vanished neighboring house. (Having just spent the last four days living in Göttingen, where every single house bears a plaque saying which seventeenth-century chemist or novelist or anthropologist once lived there, it was shocking that Schwitters didn’t get the same quintessentially German memorial honor.) Needless to say, I kept my eyes firmly focused on that blank face of brick wall.

The paranoid tenant was now out on her balcony trying to lure me into a staring contest, and not having the desire to stick around to see if she had called the local police, I trotted off to the cemetery. I misread the map and entered in at completely the opposite end where H. had said Schwitters’ grave was. I wandered about for a quarter of an hour, searching and marveling at the pristine grounds and the gorgeously integrated (new and old), at-attention headstones. This was probably the polar opposite of the Jewish cemetery in Prague, I thought. I remember that mess of stone and tree roots from a photograph my parents gave me from their first trip out of the States.

When I realized my mistake, I noticed I was running short on time, so I walked briskly to the other end of the cemetery and hoped that with any luck, where the grave was would be immediately obvious. I needed a famous-grave/interesting-headstone map, like the one they have in the sprawling Milan cemetery (its centerpiece being the most moving Holocaust memorial to my knowledge). Schwitters’ plot fulfilled both those criteria – fame and an arty stone – and was probably the only one in the whole place that did. I had read all the correspondence by his son about moving the grave from England, where he was originally buried, as the little church in the Lake District disapproved of having a stone replica of Schwitters’ abstract sculpture Die Herbstzeitlose [The Late-Bloomer] on the headstone. Apparently, it was his father’s wish, and off the body went, to where they would let them erect the sculpture – back to Germany of all places.

Of course, when I got to the chapel H. had mentioned, it was distinctly not self-evident where Schwitters was buried and I wandered aimlessly, checking my watch at every other headstone. I absolutely could not miss this last train. But now that I was here I wanted to see the grave. More than anything. It started to thunder. Then lightning. Perhaps the Spirit of Schwitters would guide me. After all, I felt like I knew that spirit pretty well by now, if not the man himself exactly. It started to rain harder. I tried to be “open to his vibes,” be sort of mystic and Californian and receptive to forces at work beyond this world, etc. But I kept heading to inscriptions bearing stern Lutheran injunctions or grim, appropriately sober crucifixes. I looked at my watch one last time. I definitely had to go. Oh well, if anyone asks again, I’ll say I saw it, I thought. I did the next best thing: the best I could.

I wandered towards the chapel and to the gate that leads out to the tram tracks. I turned my head to look down the very last path that forked off to the right before reaching the gate. Staring me full in the face was Die Herbstzeitlose. It wasn’t lining the side of the path like all the other graves did on all the other paths; it was standing at the other end of the axis, my Spiegelbild, a vanishing point. I laughed out loud – not a very dignified thing to do in a cemetery, to be sure, but appropriate. It would seem that the Spirit of Schwitters had guided me in the end, and, true to form, at the midnight hour. Late bloomer, indeed! I risked a few minutes to look at the sculpture and read the inscription – Man kann ja nie wissen [you never know]. I looked around for a rock to put on the headstone, and in the manicured lawns of this decidedly un-Jewish cemetery, the best I could find was the lone pebble the caretakers seemed to have overlooked. A more perfect stone I could not imagine.