This room, so efficient and so uninspired, is not only part of a former nunnery, it’s also part of a new atelier – this is actually a building where artists are ‘in residence,’ where they use the studios on the ground floor to make art, or perform. So it’s meant to be a Machine for Living – but not just for any old kind of living, this is meant to be the plain but supportive background for getting some good, hard work done. Which is good since that’s what I’m here to do – like Gerhard himself, who cheerfully and without question (or depression) bangs out a huge variety of musical and conceptual projects and collaborations, day after day, year after year. This room is clearly supposed to put me in that frame of cultural expectation, that frame, of mind – this is a room designed for one who is going to be productive, who is going to Produce.
Anything so utterly opposed to my more self-indulgent but also more commercialized way of living is hard to imagine: this is a room for the artist who is also a worker, in fact for a Worker-Artist. This doesn’t displease me, but – it is so strongly stated in every detail of the décor and architecture that the pressure makes me slightly uncomfortable; as though the ghost of Brecht is leaning over my shoulder to see whether I’m toiling away in a properly meaningful and determined manner, as though Grass and Enzensberger will come inspect my work every morning at 8:45 to make sure I am not falling into some kind of false consciousness.
The bathroom is efficient and well-made, of course, with far better water pressure than I’ll ever have in England, but on the other hand more severe, less indulgent furnishings than I would have in America (right down to the seriously recycled, dark brown, distinctly scratchy toilet paper). Which brings me to that last seriocomic detail of German furnishings, one that I found so utterly peculiar when I lived in Kiel, Darmstadt, Berlin for a year, and incidentally one that the tacky but famous Erica Jong also found bizarrely fascinating when she visited Germany in the 1970s. It’s those toilets: they are designed such that most of the bowl, the entire back in fact, is essentially a shelf – water, rather than sloping down into a drain, washes across a carefully designed flat space where shit (well, what do you want me to call it?) sits, neat and presented, as though it were itself a piece of art. (As maybe it is.)
Jong was both amused and offended by the German toilet; so was I, when I lived here – shit does not vanish quietly away, it is shown to you, as though you would want to examine it for signs of poor digestion or liver problems. Most unexpected is the smell: on a German toilet, the smell of your own shit hits you like a ton of bricks, right on cue – it doesn’t vanish self-effacingly into the water at the bottom of the toilet, it asserts itself. This is most disconcerting when you haven’t, uh, had such an experience for a while.
I have always been certain that this basic, daily repeated, experience of the senses, which is so bound up with postwar Western Germany, reflects so many deeply Freudian aspects of its culture – but before reaching too far or digging too deep, let’s just note two obvious ones: a peculiar sense of a formal, rationalized hypochondria, of treating the body’s processes as designed engineering systems that require constant quality control; and, at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, that annoying tendency of too many kinky Germans to be way too fascinated with shit, as well as with urine. You learn, living in Berlin, to stay far, far away from anybody who claims to be kinky: because in Berlin, even more than London, and almost more than New York or Amsterdam, kinky is really kinky – it all reflects those you-don’t-want-to-know-about-it aspects of modern urban culture.
… So, okay: how do you define German-ness? These are my pictures of the West (to be precise, the most bourgeois portions of the north-west; for me this includes Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Köln; even Hamburg and Stuttgart are a little different from this portrait, turned away from this ‘essence’, but in opposite directions). Then there’s the East, which I just experienced as it was disintegrating in the blender of post-Wall Berlin. But I’m always struck by nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century images of being German, especially, for instance, Katherine Mansfield’s short stories: they seem to be about a way of being German that has vanished from the earth – the sentimental self-indulgence, the Romantic German.
I never really saw any of that Romantic quality. So, the question is – did it vanish, in two huge wars, in decades of vast destruction and rebuilding and Vergangenheitsbewältigung? Or is it still here, somewhere – but – you have to sit quietly, without moving, until it appears – in the corner of your eye?....
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