ESSAIS

On a Receding Background

♠

My first flickers of interest in Germany, some fleeting specks of imagination regarding my background, began when I was a boy. They were kindled by the semi-annual visits we made to my grandmother in Connecticut, where she lived with her husband, my step-grandfather, in a refined home nestled on a sloping hill, amidst an atmosphere of calm that spread out from the house itself into the surrounding woods. That we called her Oma I accepted without question until I reached school age, when kids begin to compare themselves ceaselessly and in every capacity with their peers; then calling her this instead of Grandma struck me as something unique to my experience. During subsequent visits I started absorbing further details that seemed pertinent to this peculiarity, and soon I was assimilating these details and relating them to a common font that was something nebulous called Germany. In evidence about her home were the stately pieces of furniture, elegant and solid; the paintings of foreign woodland scenes and the old photos of people standing against dramatic mountain landscapes; the tiny silver jars and spoons for spices, and even the lemon-meringue cookies my grandmother made, little wisps of white like the flurry of her own white hair. Finally there were the stories that she told. For a time, and as a function of youth, I had reflexively treated them almost as fictions - after all, that she'd even existed prior to myself, let alone existed long ago and far away, was barely my concern. Now and then I would ride in her car, watching the blur of trees go past, and my mind would suddenly snag on a story she was in the middle of telling my mother up front: “… and Reiner, besides being wealthy, was such an intelligent man, so considerate - but Dora didn't think him ambitious enough, and so she left him eventually…”

But at some point I began to listen to the stories, at least to those of her own childhood. They were nothing short of fantastical to me, all the more so now that I was placing them in reality. I learned that she was raised in a castle called Rechenberg that possessed forty rooms and was surrounded by hundreds of acres. Many of these acres were covered by dense forest, and her father used to take her along while he hunted boar, sometimes letting her carry the rifle until she grew tired. A cohort of ducklings that had lost their mother used to trail behind her as she made her rounds feeding the various denizens of their apiary. During some calamitous war various servants and acquaintances hid out within their great stone edifice. Naturally this all struck me as thoroughly magical. All those decades later as my brother and I trekked through the woods outside her home in Connecticut, which had its own mystical qualities, with red moss scrawled across the rocks and tiny newts darting about the moist bed of pine needles, I would ruminate on whichever tale she'd told before sending us off. Gradually my impression of her youth had shifted from faint disinterest into a numinous idea of her as a predecessor, my existence itself become the reconfigured aftermath of fairy tales.

As I grew older my conception of her past became more sophisticated and less fantastical, as did the types of stories that I was told. I learned of particulars that would have previously been irrelevant to me, like the source of her family's wealth, as well as the disputes and missteps that brought the family down from the summit of fable. I could again hear the difference between what she said and what I believed, this time not out of childish disinterest but from attempts at discernment. Of course, nothing was related in any kind of systematic fashion, and much later I learned from my mother that my grandmother was utterly resistant to the idea of being recorded. That we were collectively fascinated by her history must have been a source of pride to my grandmother, but seemingly not to the point that she wished to demystify it. I may not have been completely cognizant of the pull that this history had on my interests, but as with the dawning awareness of my childhood, I ended up drawing closer to it anyway. This manifested itself first during middle school, when I opted to learn German without really considering the other choices. A vast majority of the students at my school took Spanish, and absent this unfelt magnetism I would have followed suit, as I was not a particularly outgoing or determined student. And yet I chose German. Though it's true that on the first day of class I told my teacher that I was learning German because of my background, this felt very much to me the "official" answer, given to satisfy teachers who needed to see causes and ambitions. I could not have actually said why I wanted to learn German, and perhaps I did not even have any specific desire to learn the language at all.

My teacher would probably have concurred on this last point. My disregard towards her various homework assignments over the years was galling and would have been sufficient cause to remove me from the German program, as happened to many of my slacker brethren, had I not at least sometimes expressed my interest in other ways. For though I persisted in the erroneous belief that I could learn grammar by a process akin to osmosis, I did participate actively in all cultural lessons. I would undertake projects on the lives of luminary figures—often compassionately commissioned to buoy my grades—ranging from sober presentations on Leni Riefenstahl and Karl Friedrich Gauss to skits about the invented friendship of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud that were in all likelihood tragically unfunny. As the culmination of my lopsided efforts I also chose to participate in the exchange program when many more dedicated students did not. I remember a few of them laughing at the idea of it, as though going to another country was weird.

And of course it did turn out to be weird in some instances, notably those that involved discotheques. But I was also struck on that first visit by the fact that it did not feel particularly foreign. Though the biggest meal of the day was eaten in the afternoon, and though the showerheads were designed to rise up to the navel, there was an overarching familiarity to Germany that struck me like a scent that revives vague memories. I can't claim to be certain that what I felt was real, and I wasn't Patton standing astride a battlefield in Tunisia. I simply felt an apprehension that my presence there was not awkward, that I did not feel alien. At one point I briefly met up with a relative of mine, the son of my great-grandmother's sister. His name was Michael, he was approaching sixty years old, and I liked him a great deal. He seemed like family, and this only solidified my yawning sense of communion. Admittedly, it must be said that of all the cultures of the world, Germany’s is not the furthest removed from our own. It must also be said that when I rode the train through the countryside and saw the sloping hills and the thick forests and the uniform red roofs of the densely congregated villages, I was seeing a moving image of the pictures and photographs that filled my grandmother's home. And so perhaps I was not having a mystical experience at all.

But regardless of whether I divined a missing link, I did return from that first trip with a casual certainty that I would visit Germany again. By that point my grandmother was beginning her battle with the cancer that would take her life during my freshman year of college. My mother visited her every week over those two years, and would report that she often spoke in German during her more painful episodes. When Oma was feeling comparatively well my family would visit her together, though she no longer lived in the tranquil home that kindled such whimsical fantasies in my youth. She and my step-grandfather had taken residence in a gated community for the aged, one that was admittedly a pleasant scene by any standard for such places. Their townhouse itself was fine, not too clinical in outward appearance, and surrounded by tall pines that admitted a view of a fairway. The indoors were clean and flush with sunlight, but the effect they had on me was strange. To see the furniture uprooted and reorganized, to see it confined to white rooms with low ceilings, represented a jolt away from the past. The legs of the ornate credenza almost appeared to hover slightly off the carpet, and the wood seemed lackluster against the white walls, where before, nestled in crannies and bedecked with knick-knacks, it had seemed suffused with a warm glow that emanated a charmed history. Much of the stuff of memory was sold or put in storage, and the bleakly utilitarian presence of walkers and pills and heating pads and charts with emergency contact numbers frustrated the antiques’ ability to create a reminiscent synergy. But understandably this couldn't be considered important under the circumstances.

When Oma died her husband's brood came East en masse from Idaho, purportedly with all intentions of helping to manage the funeral. But what they were really managing was the repossession of their patriarch, my step-grandfather. This, though sad for us, was clearly inevitable—but the forced, excessive sympathy they extended towards us for our loss was stultifying and offensive. At one point, my brother and I and our cousins were pulled outside by a thirty-something granddaughter of the other side whom we had just met. She told us that this was a very trying time for our parents, and that we needed to come together to be supportive of them. We certainly came together over disliking her immediately. These pretensions of support were a hasty shroud thrown haphazardly over their obvious designs, and they culminated in truly infuriating histrionics during the burial, in a show of tears and hollow shrieks that needlessly robbed us of a significant, cathartic moment. It's easy and justifiable to feel bitter about it. Still, I've found that however a funeral unfurls it will always throw some sort of light on the life it commemorates. I saw this descent of hypocrites on my grandmother's grave as a symbol of the effacement that time was wreaking on her history, a history that people such as they, and more broadly people of the now, could never appreciate. As I say, I was bitter. But I was also growing to understand the care that's required to snare some meaning out of the past.

Only a year after my grandmother's passing I found my way to Germany again, this time to stay with Michael in Aachen. A successful attorney, Michael was a bachelor whose pride was his wine collection. His cellar boasted thousands of bottles, and he asserted without a trace of doubt that he had the greatest collection in the city. As a rather large man of expansive taste, he also enjoyed Cuban cigars, and we spent our evenings in his living room drinking obscenely valuable vintages that were thoroughly wasted on me. Over our glasses and our preferred smoking products we gallivanted across a range of conversation subjects, and developed what I felt was a friendship. And that was what I got, a camaraderie and merry times into the evenings. What I did not benefit from was an ideal setting to remember and systematically set down my family's history. That this was the case owes itself to many sources: my generally deficient memory when it comes to recalling specifics of my own preference (I tend to remember a great deal of minutiae to which I am indifferent), my variegated and, in retrospect, obviously conflicting aims (to make memories or to record them?), and my consequent lack of industry and resolve. What I got were stories. Stories of family disputes over the running of the knife factory in Sölingen that continued into the present day. Stories of hiding out in bomb shelters during World War II, and of the murder of his father by the Gestapo, officially for very vague reasons regarding his politics but in all likelihood because he was rumored to be homosexual. Stories about Michael's relationships with family members I'd only vaguely heard of, his estimations of their characters, then maybe rounded off with a determination as to how I was related to them. Family intrigue and history and memories that were recollected with a burnt out cigar in his hand while I sipped my drink and did my best to follow his German. Indeed, I drank it all up, but in a reverie and a jumble—as Michael observed, we were both possessed of Lebensluste.

I also visited Michael's adopted brother Peter and his wife Ingrid. Peter was Michael's dispositional antipode, and it was over his endless dry sessions informing me about the stagnated development of Germany's economy as exemplified by, say, the wind generators we would pass during lengthy car rides (farmers with elevated land can make just barely over the value of crops on the acre by leasing it to the power companies) or the evolution of the knife industry that I realized the limited extent to which his angle of observation could interest me. I think it occurred to me while we were visiting the second historical knife factory that I needed my information cut with emotional pertinence or aesthetic trappings in some way to tether it to the "reality" I sought. It's true that I was working overtime just to understand the language these facts were being presented in, but the same could be said of my conversations with Michael—and I never wanted to understand German more than during those evening symposiums. Whereas Michael's recollections were illuminating and poignant but disorganized, conversations with Peter gravitated away quickly from personal history into topical speeches on his various hobbyhorses. Both men spoke in long chains of asides that spiraled around towards the semblance of a past made vivid, but the link remained obscure. I could never bring myself to produce pen and paper, or to doggedly redirect conversation until my curiosity was satisfied. To do either seemed crass and rather too officious; at the time I was ever anxious to avoid posture, and shyly wary of frank aims.

Towards the latter end of my trip I went alone by train to Berlin, and shrugged off the whimsical desire to find family and familiarity in favor of an immersion in bohemian Kreuzberg. And so I walked the streets and sat in outdoor cafes, drawing and reading and generally letting my mind uncoil. One day, I was walking along the streets in Charlottenburg, admiring the Biergartens and flower bushes when I happened upon the Berggruen Collection. A Picasso exhibit was advertised, and I went in to check it out. It was a fantastic collection in the way only small ones can be, featuring some pieces that I was surprised to be discovering for the first time. At one point, I came across Harlequin Sitting on a Red Couch. In the painting, a lean, pallid boy wearing the harlequin outfit sits against a vivid red background. His expression is impossible to read: it seems almost contemptuous but then slips into apparent indifference. I decided to sketch the painting. By whatever cause I managed to achieve in a few continuous lines the most perfectly proportioned drawing I've ever made. The satisfaction I derived from this approached glee, and I left the museum without finishing the exhibit. I went across the street to the Biergarten I'd seen and ordered lunch outside. At the table next to me a group of red-faced, potbellied men were celebrating each other's company over tall glasses of Whitbier. I proceeded to sketch them fervently, in a loose style, and was very pleased with the outcome of this effort as well. When the men left and my lunch came I took my time, savoring the bratwurst and salad as I flipped back through the pages of my sketchbook, my senses heightened by a rather emotional excitement. Upon finishing my meal my head felt light, and I leaned back and let my eyes lose focus, then close. As the sunlight played upon my eyelids, my thoughts drifted back to a painting that used to hang over the bed in the guest room of my grandmother's home. I remembered waking my parents as a child and staring absently at that painting, foisting on it my imaginings about some country called Germany. That it actually depicted a scene in Africa, as I learned later, seemed funny and insignificant at that moment.

—JSL

ESSAIS