The Paris Review's Blog, page 645

Loose Lips Make the World Go Round, and Other News

From U.S. World War II–era propaganda.

Last week, our editor Lorin Stein spoke at an event in San Francisco about Édouard Levé, whose work he’s translated—the audio from the discussion is now online.
Flannery O’Connor has been inducted into the American Poets Corner at New York’s St. John the Divine, the “only shrine to American literature in the country.” “Inducting O’Connor this year was a fairly easy consensus decision. More contentious was the selection of the quotation for her plaque. The challenge was to tread a line between what Nelson called O’Connor’s ‘grand pronouncements’ and what Alfred Corn called her southern ‘cracker-barrel humor.’ The quote they settled on is from a 1953 letter that O’Connor wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell … ‘I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.’ ”
John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man is banned at Guantánamo, and he’s altogether pretty psyched about it: “In banning my novel, the custodians of Guantánamo have once again demonstrated their sensitivity and respect for human dignity. No prisoner who has not been found guilty of any crime should be subjected to cruel and degrading literature.”
Today in bold claims from evolutionary psychologists: “Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.” Tell all your friends.
The long, strange birth of Fundamentalism in America: “The term itself was coined in the 1920s by American Protestants who resolved to return to the ‘fundamentals’ of Christianity. Their retreat from public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused on biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so, their enemy was no longer social injustice but the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems.”

Points of View, Points of Origin

This essay prefaces Matteo Pericoli’s Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views, out this week. We’ve featured Matteo’s work for years on the Daily, and his sketch of the view from our old office graced the cover of our Summer 2011 issue. To celebrate his new book, we’re offering that issue for only eight dollars, and only until Thanksgiving. We’re also holding a Windows on the World contest—submit a photo of your view and you could win a sketch by Matteo.

Pericoli’s drawing of The Paris Review’s view from our former office on White Street, as seen on the cover of Issue 197.

Can you picture John Kennedy Toole, the author of A Confederacy of Dunces? I can’t. Say his name and I see his hero, Ignatius Reilly. How about Willa Cather? What comes to mind isn’t a person at all—it’s raindrops in New Mexico “exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air.” What did Barbara Pym look like, or Rex Stout, or Boris Pasternak, or the other writers whose paperbacks filled our parents’ bedside tables? In most cases we have no idea, because until recently, the author photo was relatively rare. You could sell a million copies and still, to those million readers, you’d be a name without a face.

Things are different now. Nearly every first novel comes with a glamour shot, not to mention a publicity campaign on Facebook. The very tweeters have their selfies. We still talk about a writer’s “vision,” but in practice we have turned the lens around, and turned the seer into something seen.

Matteo Pericoli’s drawings recall us, in the homeliest, most literal way, to the writer’s true business, and the reader’s. Each window represents a point of view and a point of origin. Here’s what the writer sees when he or she looks up from the computer; here’s the native landscape of the writing. If you want an image that will link the creation to its source, Pericoli suggests, this is the image you should reach for. Not the face, but the vision—or as close as we can come. To look out another person’s window, from his or her workspace, may tell us nothing about the work, and yet the space—in its particularity, its foreignness, its intimacy—is an irresistible metaphor for the creative mind; the view, a metaphor for the eye.

It is crucial that these window views should be rendered in pen and ink, in lines, rather than in photographs (even though Pericoli works from snapshots, dozens per window). In his own writing and teaching, Pericoli likes to stress the kinship between draftsman and writer, starting with the importance of the line. His own line is descriptive, meticulous, suspenseful—one slip of the pen and hours of labor could be lost, or else the “mistake” becomes part of the drawing. Labor, it seems to me, is one of Pericoli’s hidden subjects. That is part of the meaning of the hundreds of leaves on a tree, or the windows of a high-rise: They record the work it took to see them, and this work stands as a sort of visual correlative, or illustration, of the work his writers do.

Of course, most writers tune out the view from day to day. In the words of Etgar Keret, “When I write, what I see around me is the landscape of my story. I only get to enjoy the real one when I’m done.” I think Pericoli has drawn the views of writers at least partly because they are seers as opposed to lookers—because they blind themselves to their surroundings as a matter of practice. The drawings are addressed, first of all, to them, and their written responses are no small part of the pleasure this book has to offer. Each of these drawings seems to contain a set of instructions: If you were to look out this window—if you really looked—here is how you might begin to put the mess in order. Yet the order Pericoli assigns is warm and forgiving. His omniscience has a human cast. His clapboards wobble in their outlines. He takes obvious delight in the curves of a garden chair, or a jar left out in the rain, or laundry flapping on a clothesline. He prefers messy back lots to what he calls (somewhat disdainfully) “photogenic views.” He knows that we are attached to the very sight we overlook, whether it’s tract housing in Galway or a government building in Ulaanbaatar. These are the everyday things we see, as it were blindly, because they are part of us.

Some of the writers in Windows on the World are household names. Many you will never have heard of, and a few live in places you might have trouble finding on a map. That, it seems to me, is part of the idea behind this book. Here are streets and alleys you won’t recognize that someone else calls home and takes for granted; look long enough and they will make your own surroundings more interesting to you. In Pericoli’s sympathetic—you might say, writerly—acts of attention, the exotic becomes familiar, and the familiar is made visible again.

Cabinet of Wonder

Mmuseumm revitalizes the tradition of the Wunderkammer.

Courtesy of Mmuseumm

On a recent weekend, Manhattan’s smallest museum was bustling. A man and a woman in matching red sweaters examined a display of North Korean household products and then rows of watches emblazoned with the face of Saddam Hussein. A child squinted at a row of pool toys from Saudi Arabia in censored packaging; she frowned at the strange black shapes that had replaced the women in bathing suits. Nearby, a man was having a caricature done of himself as a Halloween zombie while a small crowd spilled out onto Cortland Alley to watch. Later, though, on a Monday afternoon, the space was quiet, closed to the public. It was just me and the Down Syndrome dolls, the display of mounted moss samples, a soft babble of speech from a little video screen on one of the higher shelves, and a question: How ought we to think of this?

The “this” in question is Mmuseumm, a single-story space converted from an old elevator shaft on the edge of Chinatown, about four paces wide and four paces deep. Each of its three walls has four rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with a red, velvety material and brightly lit: at night, the whole place shines, an island of light in the alley’s murk. On my second daytime visit, I found Alex Kalman, one of Mmuseumm’s cofounders, down on his knees lint-rolling dust from the velvet of the lowest shelf, just beside a bizarre chip-and-snack tray under glass. Over the next hour, we sat outside in two folding chairs while Kalman told me about Mmuseumm’s genesis, purpose, and current form. Then he left me, generously, to wonder at the place on my own.

Now two years old and well into its third season, Mmuseumm contains an array of found and made objects, all of recent origin, taken from private collections. In Mmuseumm’s own language, they’re among the evidence that we exist—the stuff of a “modern natural history” or a “contemporary archaeology” museum. Those phrases are both deployed in Mmuseumm’s publicity materials; they’re equally applicable and insufficient. Roughly speaking, there are natural-looking things on the right side of the museum, unnatural-looking things on the left—on the right are squashed mosquitoes, for instance, and what would appear to be a display of rocks. But the distinction doesn’t quite hold, nor is it meant to. I learned first from Kalman and then from the crisp British tones of the interactive audio guide that the stones are Styrofoam, collected by the artist Maia Ruth Lee. Out walking, Lee picked up a surprisingly light stone. Instead of tossing it aside in embarrassment, as I would have done, she kept it. Then she started seeking out and keeping others.

One of Maia Ruth Lee’s styrofoam stones.

Lee’s stones testify to the existence of a strange and lovely human; they’re also a vision of a kind of soft, impersonal apocalypse in which the natural world becomes an aggregate of artificial flotsam. Each of Mmuseumm’s artifacts and collections is like this: they blossom into stories with just the slightest interpretative pressure. The more you look, the more networks of analogy, of uncanny connection, emerge. In one display, on the right, is a toothbrush made in an American prison; in another, a disposable, chewable toothbrushing ball used by London businessmen on the go; in another, dozens of tubes of toothpaste from around the world. In yet another, dozens of disposable spoons suggest the biomechanics of the human mouth, not just teeth but tongue, soft palate, throat, the many muscles involved in swallowing. Everywhere one looks one sees a metaphor. It’s a playground for those who love to interpret. (For me, this was so true that when I came across a large, artificial cake whose icing read, PARANOIA MAN IN A CHEAP SHIT ROOM, I recognized myself.)

As Kalman tells it, Mmuseumm was founded after he and two creative partners, Benny and Joshua Safdie, were offered a storage unit by their landlord. (The trio’s studio, the headquarters of Red Bucket Films, is in the building above Mmuseumm.) They immediately advanced the notion of opening a museum, though they took up the landlord’s offer without quite mentioning their intentions: they told him they wanted “to store things nicely, and sometimes invite our friends to see.” They forbade art, they forbade sentimentality, they went about securing contributions. This season, there are twenty exhibitions from fifteen contributors: artists, designers, reporters, the president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Some collections, like the Down Syndrome dolls—four of them, knee-high figures with close-set eyes and, in one case, a protruding tongue—are unattributed.

Mmuseumm belongs to a long lineage of cabinets de curiosité and wunderkammern, collections without the institutional imprimatur of a learned society, a university, or some other cadre of experts. Wunderkammern flourished in the West in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they’d begun to disappear by the eighteenth and nineteenth, when the West’s great collections were democratized into national institutions. Their contents were submitted to the disciplinary reorganizations that assigned ancient toothbrushes to one building and vanitas paintings of smiling skulls to another—clearing the ground, in some sense, for later curatorial gambits like Mmuseumm’s.

Courtesy of Mmuseumm

Visitors have interpreted the word Mmuseumm, Kalman told me, as a signal that the place is either delicious or insecure, a comment on its existence at the margins of official museumhood. (In one of its surprisingly lux cases—an homage to the displays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre, according to Kalman—is a sucker that supposedly fell from the giant squid that hangs in the American Museum of Natural History.) It can bring to mind other, stranger contemporary museums—and cemeteries, and zoological gardens, and freak shows—such as the Columbarium in San Francisco or Sir John Soane’s Museum in London or the now-famous Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, with its displays of dogs who died in space. The MJT might be Mmuseumm’s most obvious relative, though when I asked Kalman what he thought of it, he responded, “It’s dark.” And that’s true: The MJT’s mood, unlike Mmuseumm’s, is elegiac. (The lighting is also literally dim.) While Mmuseumm shares the MJT’s subtle prankishness, its collections contain nothing too old to buy in a junk shop. Even its samples of dirt and water from graves are preserved, playfully, in Starbucks bottles.

But is this really the aesthetic that best suits our trashed world of information, power, capital, commodity? We can say that cabinets of wonder are now on trend, as are taxidermy, scale modeling, diorama, curation. Kalman admitted immediately that a person who is good at making Mmuseumms would also likely be extremely good at marketing. I asked him what it meant that I knew which of the Saddam watches I’d want to buy, and told him that I could easily imagine other people I knew wearing them. He readily admitted that collecting or sporting the emblems of political repression—even as an ironic denunciation of that repression—might not scan to someone who wasn’t one of the hypereducated global elite.

A bag of potato chips from Mmuseumm’s permanent collection.

Equally true, however, is that Mmuseumm is inseparable from its alley—from the smell and presence of garbage, exhaust, and the clandestine marijuana dispensary a few feet away—and that for the hour or so we talked, an unpretentious, careful openness never left Kalman’s face. Toward the end of our conversation, a man in a white van marked ON POINT TRUCKING pulled up Cortland and asked what we were doing.

“This is a modern natural-history museum,” Kalman said. “It’s for looking at modern life.”

“Oh, so a future thing,” said the man.

Kalman explained a little more, then the two laughed and the man drove away—without, I think, either he or Kalman realizing that the man’s first statement was exactly right. In its call to thoughtfulness, Mmuseumm is a future thing, a subtle way of asking how we’ll continue to discover systems of meaning that push us toward a wiser, better integrated collective life. In an age of information and commodification, we don’t need more of either in order to best understand our existence. We need tools for determining significance, places where we can stop and think through the shared story of our world and our lives. To my mind, Mmuseumm fits the bill. How ought we to think of it? As a cheap shit room for the paranoid—and a beautiful rarity.

Annie Julia Wyman studies and teaches literature at Harvard.

Classified

The crowd at Peter Matthiessen’s estate sale.

In early April, Peter Matthiessen, the beloved cofounder of The Paris Review, died at eighty-six. Last week, I received an e-mail from my mother, containing a link to the following announcement:

SAGAPONACK
THE ESTATE OF THE LATE
PETER MATTHIESSEN
RENOWNED AUTHOR &
NATURIST*

A treasure trove of artifacts and mementos. Both indigenous and from the 4 corners of the Earth.

Artisanal pottery, vintage typewriters, vast assortment of books, many annotated paintings, prints, photography and posters. Vintage LP collections in original portfolios, Early 20th century American piano table, 19th century French country dining table, additional chairs, tables, chests, beds, headboards, bedding, cookware, tableware, table linens, vintage luggage, toys and games, Vermont casting grill, teak picnic table, and much more!

Children under 10 must be closely attended by an adult. Please be respectful of neighbors when parking.

The subject line of the e-mail read, “Of course, we’ll be there!” (My parents live just down the road.)

The evening after the sale, my mother called. “How was it?” I asked. 

“Dramatic,” she said. It seems the advertisement had commanded a large crowd. Even before the sale opened, there was a long line of fans, collectors, and bargain hunters in front of the house. Due to space constraints, the organizers allowed only twenty-five people to enter at once—“This company always does that with their sales,” my mother explained.

My parents were near the front. It seems tensions were running high. Everyone had been waiting for some time for the doors to open when a woman strolled up and joined her friend in line; the friend had been saving her a place. This started a general grumbling that quickly escalated. One man, said my mom, started screaming. He was abusive, extremely profane:

Photo: Stephen Andrew Hiltner

“Bitch! Fucking bitch! This is bullshit! What do you think you’re fucking doing?!”

The rant went on; the line was taken aback. “We all agree in principle,” said one peacemaker, “but your way of expressing it is inappropriate.”

“Assholes!” the man screamed. 

“You’re upsetting everyone very much,” said another would-be patron—described by my mother as kind of an old hippie type—“and you’re leaving us no alternative but to call the police.”

“Dicks!” he cried.

“This is not in the spirit of Peter Matthiessen,” said a woman, sternly. 

“Fuck Peter Matthiessen!” he screamed.

There was a shocked gasp.

At this point, an organizer emerged. “Please keep your voices down,” she requested, and indicated the serene-looking hut located a few hundred yards away. “There’s a Zendo in progress.”

My dad bought a bathrobe.

In the melee, my mother spotted three colleagues of mine from The Paris Review—Matthiessen having been an object of admiration in the office. “I wanted to tell your friends to join us at the head of the line,” said my mother, “but it’s probably better they didn’t.” 

*To my knowledge, Matthiessen was a keen nature lover, not a nudist. He always showed up to Paris Review meetings in a tie.

It’s Already Right Behind You, and Other News

The Phantom Omni can make you feel as if someone (or something) is right behind you. User discretion advised.

“An editor whose taste is unique to himself is a bad editor. The only person who discovers a writer is the writer himself.” An interview with our editor, Lorin Stein.
Aldous Huxley doing calisthenics; Borges beneath a ponderous storm cloud; James Ellroy behind a lamp with no shade on it … and other portraits that give the lie to this idea that writers don’t photograph well.
Partying on the dime of New York’s most controversial literary publisher: Amazon. “Outside, a war was raging; inside there were friends, food, and funding—for now. Passed hors d’oeuvres were loudly heralded … ‘I saw the sliders coming around and it just suddenly crossed my mind. I guess all this is being paid for by Amazon!’ ”
A pair of new films offer two very different theories about creative life: In Whiplash, an aspiring drummer faces “an abusive professor who is convinced that relentless torture is the only way to coax his students to the peak of their abilities … the crazy guy is right: The only way to be any good at something is to not bother trying to be good at anything else.” Meanwhile, Adult Beginners suggests “that if you forego grandiose notions of achievement and settle for surrounding yourself with people who love you and provide you with emotional support, your definition of fulfillment will become more manageable.”
Today in our science-fictional reality: What if there were a robot that could produce the skin-crawling feeling that someone is right behind you? There is. We’re fucked. (Actually, the robot may help us understand schizophrenia—but still.)

This Week on the Daily

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Davoser Café, 1928

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jenny Erpenbeck remembers her childhood in East Berlin: “My parents would bring me to the end of Leipziger Strasse, to the area right in front of the Wall … This was where the world came to an end. For a child, what could be better than growing up at the end of the world?”

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And Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi visits East Berlin’s famous Karl-Marx-Allee, where the Stalinist architecture still reminds of the dreams of another era.

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“At the Well”: four new paintings by East Germany’s Neo Rauch.

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Sam Stephenson on the insightful, unconventional approach to biography on display in Tennessee Williams: Notebooks.

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Why is a penny called a penny? Damion Searls looks at the etymology of our coins.

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Plus, Sadie Stein looks back at the dark days of her creative-writing workshop and Black Bart the Outlaw Poet strikes again. (“I’ve labored long and hard for bread,/ For honor, and for riches,/ But on my corns too long you’ve tread,/ You fine-haired sons of bitches.”)

Homesick for Sadness

A childhood in incompletion.

The Berlin Wall in 1990.

What was I doing the night the Wall fell?

I spent the evening with friends just a few blocks from the spot where history was being made, and then: I went to bed. I slept right through it. And while I slept the pot wasn’t just stirred, it was knocked over and smashed to bits. The next morning, I was told we wouldn’t need pots anymore.

There was a lot of talk of freedom, but I didn’t know what to do with this concept, which was suddenly drifting about in all sorts of different sentences. The freedom to travel. (But what if you couldn’t afford to?) Or the freedom of expression. (What if no one was interested in my opinion?) The freedom to shop. (But what comes after the shopping trip?) Freedom wasn’t just a gift, it was something you paid for, and the price of freedom turned out to have been my entire life up till then. Everyday life was no longer everyday life: it was an adventure that had been survived. Our customs were now a sideshow attraction. Everything that had been self-evident forfeited its self-evidence within the span of a few weeks. A door that opened only once every hundred years was now standing ajar, but the hundred years were gone forever. From this point on, my childhood became a museum exhibit.

My life was accompanied by the Socialist life of Leipziger Strasse, which today leads to Potsdamer Platz but at the time came to an end at the Wall. Today I know that a hundred years ago, Leipziger Strasse was a narrow, popular, and highly populated commercial street filled with tobacco shops, horse-drawn streetcars, sandstone curlicues on the buildings, and women with fancy hats. There were still Jewish-owned textile mills in the neighborhood at the beginning of the thirties. But when I was a child, none of this remained, and I didn’t know there was something, or someone, missing. Today I also know that the tall buildings, like the one I lived in, were constructed with propagandistic intentions as a response to the Springer Publishing headquarters on the West side of the Wall, but as a child, I simply enjoyed all the lights we could see on the other side from the terrace above the twenty-third floor. We read the time for our Socialist recess from an illuminated display in the city’s Western half, visible from our side of the Wall. That the building to which this display was attached also bore the illuminated letters B.Z., advertising a newspaper we’d never heard of, was of no interest to us. For our Sunday walks, my parents would bring me to the end of Leipziger Strasse, to the area right in front of the Wall, where it was as quiet as in a village. There was smooth prewar asphalt perfect for roller-skating, and the final stop on the bus line, no through traffic beyond. This was where the world came to an end. For a child, what could be better than growing up at the end of the world?

A half of the city was the whole city for me. Even today, it’s only my mind, not my feelings, that understands that the city is now functioning again as it was built and intended to. I can drive down Chauseestrasse—a street, now perfectly normal, that leads from the East Berlin district Mitte to the district Wedding in West Berlin—one hundred times, and one hundred times I will be driving through a border crossing. This growing-together-again of the city feels to me like a perfectly arbitrary addition. In the half I know so well, the functions of a capitalist metropolis have returned to the buildings that belonged to them fifty years before, and I suddenly see that these buildings knew more all along than they were able to tell me.

But something, some wholeness, that I failed to learn as a child still eludes me now. Someone like my neighbor, who always bought his breakfast rolls across the street before the war—in a place that suddenly became the inaccessible West—no doubt had a very different experience. For him the Wall can only have been a subtraction.

When I was a child, I didn’t distinguish between the ruins left behind by World War II and the vacant lots and absurdities of city planning that came about when the Wall was built. In the seventies, the buildings still bore inscriptions in the Fraktur script so beloved of the Nazis (Molkerei or Kohlehandlung) long after the dairy and the coal merchant had closed up shop. These were just as familiar a sight as the blocked-off entrances to the subway stations that had been closed when the Wall went up. The wind blew old paper and dry leaves down these stairs, which no one descended for thirty years; sometimes one could hear, through the ventilation shafts, the West Berlin subway lines that ran beneath East Berlin without stopping. Children of the East were familiar with the warm air that would waft up from those inaccessible tunnels. Just as the dairy and coal merchants could disappear forever, we learned, there were paths beneath our feet that were not meant for us, there were airplanes flying over our heads that we would never set foot in: we heard the workmen on the construction scaffolding in West Berlin hammering and drilling and we knew that an entire world that seemed so close could still be out of reach.

At the same time, though, there was a second world quite close to us, hidden in the earth and sky. For me, an empty space did not bear witness to a lack. It was a place that had been either abandoned or declared off-limits by the grown-ups and therefore, in my imagination, it was a place that belonged entirely to me.

Often I would stand at my grandmother’s side at home behind the curtains in the living room, looking at the large building that could be seen behind the Wall, over there. It might have been a school or a barracks. In the mornings the sun would shine brightly on its walls. I liked this building, and I wondered what sort of people lived or worked there. The Wall, the barbed-wire barrier in front of the Wall, even the strip of sand under the barbed wire, which probably had landmines hidden in it, and the border guard patrolling right beneath me—these were of far less interest. While my grandmother was cursing because a dust rag she’d hung over the balcony railing had blown down into the border strip, I stared at the building. In the evenings, its windows stayed illuminated for a long time, every window with the same neon light. So they probably weren’t apartments after all. An empty space is a place for questions, not answers. What we don’t know is infinite.

My aunt, who always sent me the most wonderful “West packages” from the other side of Berlin, lived on Sickingenstrasse. Sickingenstrasse: German children learn about the legend of the trumpeter of Säckingen, and for my entire childhood I thought it was the trumpeter of Sickingen. And that trumpeter could not possibly have been the same trumpeter I thought of when I sang “The Song of the Little Trumpeter”: “Among all our comrades, not one was so fine, as our little trumpeter, the Red Guard’s pride and joy, the Red Guard’s pride and joy.” It was a song that moved me to tears every time. But when you’re a child it doesn’t surprise you if a baroque, bourgeois trumpeter from Säckingen sings Erich Weinert’s communist trumpet song, even singing it in the inaccessible Sickingenstrasse of West Berlin—and so for me Sickingenstrasse was a lovely street, a lovely street in the inaccessible West, where everything was fragrant with Ariel laundry detergent and Jacobs Krönung coffee, while in the East our little trumpeter always died a heroic, melodious death, as well he must.

After the fall of the Wall, I visited my aunt, and of course the Sickingenstrasse turned out to be loud and dirty, and my aunt’s apartment was in a modest housing block from the fifties—a dark, one-bedroom flat with low ceilings, a wall unit, collectible teacups, and an L-shaped sofa. I peeked through the curtains and saw a building across the way with a sign, UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICE, and many sad-looking men standing in front of it, apparently waiting for the office to open. Even with the window closed, I could hear in my aunt’s quiet living room the din of the nearby freeway. The newly accessible West didn’t look, smell, or sound anything like the West still blossoming inside my head.

On the other side, though, the unknown was probably just as great. East Berlin was gray, said people who’d ventured over from the West. Imagine what an adventure it must have been to pay your entry fee and find yourself in the forbidden zone. When, as a teenager, I lived near the Friedrichstrasse border crossing, Westerners who hadn’t managed to spend all the money they’d been forced to exchange sometimes handed me twenty-mark bills. These Westerners looked as though they were a little ashamed to be treating me like a beggar, and they also looked as if they didn’t have a clue how things actually worked here in the East, and they looked as if they were glad to be able to go back to where they knew their way around.

East Berlin, it seems to me today, probably wasn’t much grayer than the Western part—it’s just that there were no billboards and neon signs on the bullet-pocked walls and in front of the vacant lots full of rubble. Admittedly, plaster was falling from the walls in Prenzlauer Berg, and some of the balconies were no longer safe to stand on. Our front doors were never locked because private property was not an issue, and for that reason drunks would sometimes take a leak in the entryways, I’ll be the first to admit it.

But leaving aside the question of the grayness, I remember above all a sort of small-town peacefulness that made a deep impression on me as child, a sense of being at home in a closed-off—and, for that reason, entirely safe—world. From the outside, there may well have been something exotic about our Socialist reality, but we ourselves saw our lives neither as wonder nor terror. It was just ordinary life, and in this ordinariness we felt at home. The only thing that connected us children with the so-called great wide world out there were the West packages (which not everyone received) and international solidarity, the worldwide struggle for the release of Luis Corvalan or Angela Davis, for example, which we as schoolchildren translated into readily comprehensible “sandwich bazaars” or “scrap-material collections.” My parents filled their home with Biedermeier furniture and used money that weighed no more than play money.

Having no legal autonomy didn’t hurt as long as one had not yet reached the age of maturity. As a child, you love what you know. Not what grown-ups or strangers think is beautiful; no, you simply love what you know. You’re glad to know something. And this gladness sinks into your bones, is transformed into a feeling of being at home. As for me, well, I loved this ugly, purportedly gray East Berlin that had been forgotten by all the world, this Berlin that was familiar to me and that now—at least the part where I grew up—no longer exists.

When my son and I are in the country in the summer, sometimes we roam around, crawling under fences that have been blown over and knocked full of holes to access vacant lots once used for company holidays. We open the doors of empty bungalows; they aren’t even locked. We gaze at the carefully folded wool blankets at the foot of the bunk beds, the curtains that were neatly drawn shut before some long-ago departure, and the Mitropa coffee cups that someone washed and put away in the kitchen cabinet twenty-five years ago. Without saying anything, he and I gaze at all these things that have been preserved unchanged, as if by a magic spell, ever since the last Socialist vacationers spent their holidays here—just before their companies were phased out at the beginning of the nineties, transforming an absence that was to last only two days into an absence forever.

Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She is the author of several works of fiction, including The Book of Words (2007), Visitation (2010), and, most recently, The End of Days. Also an opera director, she currently lives in Berlin.

Susan Bernofsky is the translator of six books by Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. She is currently working on a biography of Robert Walser and writing a novel.

Staff Picks: Tom Magliozzi and Dr. T

A still from Dr. T and the Women, 2000.

“One of the striking features of the discourse of man to modern eyes, in a sense the most striking, is how unreadable it is, how tedious, how unhelpful. The puzzle is why it is unreadable.” Thus, Mark Greif in his exhilarating study The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America 1933–1973. By “the discourse of man” Greif means the vast midcentury literature on human dignity, from Being and Nothingness, to the “Family of Man” photo exhibition, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a discourse that Greif interrogates with verve, erudition, sympathy, and suspicion, and that he follows into the fiction of our time. I’ve been toting The Age of the Crisis of Man around for the last month, using a pencil for a bookmark, because there’s something to underline on every page—and I haven’t even got to the chapters on O’Connor and Pynchon. —Lorin Stein

Like many nineties kids, I received my first doses of NPR while buckled up in the backseat of my parents’ car; Saturday-morning drives, often to visit my grandparents, meant one thing: Car Talk. The show has been a constant in my life ever since. (In fact, if you’ve ever wondered what occupies The Paris Review’s staff on our five-hour quarterly drives to our press in Pennsylvania, look no further than the Car Talk podcast.) So many of the tributes to Tom Magliozzi, the elder “Tappet” brother who died this week of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, focused on his inimitable and infectious laughter—and rightfully so. But the somberness of the occasion reminded me of a letter Tom and Ray once fielded from a troubled freshman at Mount Holyoke College, a young listener named Lea. (You can listen to Tom read Lea’s letter here; she later called in to the show.) Give them a listen and you'll be reminded of just how much the show provided: laughter, yes, and advice about cars—but also the occasional window, especially for its young listeners, into the sort of life one might aspire toward, one where the adults of the world still engage in “water-pistol fights, with whipped cream.” —Stephen Andrew Hiltner

I can’t in good faith claim that Robert Altman’s Dr. T and the Women (2000) is a “good” movie, but it captivates, in its quietly provocative way. Imagine the eye rolls after this pitch meeting: “Well, it’s this sexy, envelope-pushing comedy where Richard Gere plays a hunky gynecologist in upper-crust Dallas, but he doesn’t boink his patients or anything lewd like that—he just treats everyone really respectfully, including his daughters and his wife, who goes insane, in fact, because of how deeply loved she is and how well her personal needs are met.” Dr. T is a farce, a riff on the “Book of Job” and the suffering of the virtuous; all of its women are kooky and dependent in some way on the ministrations of the good doctor, with his boundless patience and his way with the speculum. Altman wrings a lot of jouissance from his ensemble cast, especially Gere, who really does seem too sensitive for this milieu. But what is this milieu? Why are all these rich ladies so gabby, so troubled, so sad? That’s where Dr. T is ultimately thwarted: in spite of its lead’s genuine (and believable) reverence for the feminine, the film can’t help but lapse into misogyny. It’s called Dr. T and the Women, for god’s sake. But right up to its positively outlandish ending, it asks questions about chivalry, materialism, and gender that not many movies would dare to touch, then or now. It’s audacious filmmaking—and that alone makes it worth watching. —Dan Piepenbring

In 1892, long before the O. J. Simpson trial or the Lindbergh kidnapping, there was a court case that swept the nation’s interest. It wasn’t because the violence of the crime—one woman publicly slashing the throat of another—but the motivation: a same-sex love affair. Using love letters, archives, newspaper articles, and government records, Alexis Coe’s Alice + Freda Forever brings to life the story of Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward, who lived in a much too-familiar world intolerant of any relationship outside the norm. Coe’s narrative covers the perceptions of sexuality, women’s role in society, racial hierarchy, media manipulation, and even mental health, but she never strays too far from the heart of the story: the tragic romance between two women forty years before the word lesbian would be in circulation. —Justin Alvarez

Our friend and contributor John Hodgman raked John Cleese over the coals this week at BAM. Highlights include Cleese on jokes and Hodgman’s defense of American sports. —L.S.

You could spend years going through the archives of The New Yorker, but thanks to their Facebook page, I spent the better part of last night enjoying Truman Capote’s 1957 profile of Marlon Brando. One of my favorite sections is a past neighbor’s description of Brando’s New York home, one of the most insightful investigations into the mind of our greatest actor: “It’s as though Marlon lived in a house where the doors are never locked. When he lived in New York the door always was open. Anybody could come in, whether Marlon was there or not, and everybody did. You’d arrive and there would be ten, fifteen characters wandering around. It was strange, because nobody seemed to really know anybody else. They were just there, like people in a bus station. Some type asleep in a chair. People reading the tabs. A girl dancing by herself. Or painting her toenails. A comedian trying out his night-club act. Off in a corner, there’d be a chess game going. And drums—bang, boom, bang, boom. But there was never any drinking—nothing like that. Once in a while somebody would say, ‘Let’s go down to the corner for an ice-cream soda.’ Now, in all this Marlon was the common denominator, the only connecting link. He’d move around the room drawing individuals aside and talking to them alone. If you’ve noticed, Marlon can’t, won’t, talk to two people, simultaneously …  I sometimes think Marlon is like an orphan who later on in life tries to compensate by becoming the kindly head of a huge orphanage. But even outside this institution he wants everybody to love him.” —J.A.

Squeaky Wheels

Photo: Vladimir Kirakosyan

Yesterday was very rainy and everyone was cranky. I was covertly trying to take shelter under the edge of a stranger’s golf umbrella while I crossed the street, when suddenly there was an outraged blast of honking horns and an explosion of profane shouting from several drivers. We all looked over to the opposite intersection, where a large, elderly man in a sateen Yankees jacket and one of those woven plastic fedoras was making his leisurely way against the light, against traffic, and, in the process, blocking the way of a large truck. He seemed oblivious, or indifferent to the commotion he had caused.

A block later, I was in the supermarket, pushing a basket with a broken wheel through the produce section. Someone bumped into me hard. I turned in irritation, but then saw it was the same oblivious old man in the Yankees jacket and figured it was hardly worth it. He banged into me again, in DAIRY. He was banging into people all over the place. It was late; I had the grim realization that I had come down with a cold. Always dispiriting, in its petty way. 

I got into the elevator to go down to the bulk section, where I planned to buy some dried beans. There was one other person inside: the guy in the Yankees jacket. 

“They’re liars,” he said, before the door had even closed. “Liars. This is the second time they’ve lied to me. About queso fresco,” he said pointedly, when I didn’t ask. Normally I live for this kind of thing, but I just wasn’t in the mood. I stared stonily at the placket of buttons, willing the elevator to hurry.

“It’s that one manager—Jason!” he continued. “I got his name. I’m going to destroy his career. I’m not a person you want to make disgruntled,” he added menacingly. 

Awesome plan, I thought sourly. Good job on life. Nice hat. 

“I’m sure you can find that anywhere,” I said. “They’re probably sold out. If they don’t have it in, it’s not the manager’s fault. It’s the supplier or something.”

The doors were open now but it was taking him a second to shuffle his cart out. He looked kind of like Rumpole, but malevolent.

“It’s a specialty ingredient,” he said. “I know about it because I watch Rachael Ray.”

“Okay, well, good luck,” I said, finally pushing my way out, the little cart squeaking loudly behind me.

“Rachael Ray is the most beautiful woman on television,” he said then. 

I guess it was sad. But, at the end of the day, I was the one who’d remember the conversation.

Berlin’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Part 2

Life on the Karl-Marx-Allee. Read Part 1 here.

Karl-Marx-Allee Block C South, 1951.

Philipp and Quentin live in an apartment next to the Rose Garden, in Block D North, a comely segment of the Karl-Marx-Allee designed by Kurt Leucht.

“It takes time to get used to the style of the buildings,” Quentin tells me. “It’s so massive. There’s nothing delicate in the style.” He points to the oversized street lamps from his window. The lampposts dwarf the cars parked beside them; the lights alone are taller than a seven-year-old child. Life disappears in this enormity. “If you’re sitting on the grass, you don’t see the insects. If you look out the window, you see everything.”

The apartment’s former tenant, Philipp tells me, spent some six decades here and just recently passed away. In the kitchen, Philipp shows me the “refrigerator” that tenant used in the days of the GDR: a wooden cupboard under the window, built into the building’s thick walls. It was the coolest space in the room.

When they were built, the buildings of the Stalinallee were—with their elevators, gas heating, warm water, and private bathrooms—considered luxurious. But the GDR faced a severe lack of resources: certain innovations and foreign-produced goods, like automobiles and refrigerators were produced and acquired at a stiflingly slow pace. Over time, the immaculate facades of the Karl-Marx-Allee fell off. The GDR was coming apart, and so were its buildings. The ceramic tiles began to drop—some fifty thousand square meters of them were lost. There were no replacements, and even if there had been, there were no volunteers and hardly any workers to put them up.

The disrepair was just another reason for citizens to scorn the Karl-Marx-Allee, which came to be associated with an increasingly disagreeable regime in an increasingly insufferable state. The secret police had their equipment in the attics and the basements; they were everywhere in the walls.

The tiles were already falling in 1973, when Wolf Biermann released his song “Acht Argumente für die Beibehaltung des Namens Stalinallee für die Stalinallee ” (“Eight Arguments for Keeping the Name Stalinallee for the Stalinallee”), a scathing satire of the boulevard, which by then had carried Marx’s name for more than a decade.

Accompanied by a festive accordion and upbeat drumming—just the sort of hearty Volksmusik a good laborer could drink to after a full day’s work—Biermann roars out his dissatisfaction:

The white tiles fall
But only on our heads
The houses will stand forever!
(in a state of building repair!)

Café Moskau, 1964.

In its second half, the song shifts into a didactic plea for the vision that had brought Biermann, Brecht, and other artists and ideologues to the East: a socialism with the “most beautiful streets, where people live happily” with the ability to trust their neighbors and to be trusted by them, too. A real Karl Marx Boulevard, befitting of its name.

Biermann had already spent seven years on the GDR’s blacklist when he released this song, and he would be exiled three years later; Brecht had died twenty years before that, not surviving the GDR’s first decade to see the erection of the Wall. A quote on Block A North of the Karl-Marx-Allee bears witness to Brecht’s initial enthusiasm. It’s one of seven he wrote for his friend Hermann Henselmann on the occasion of a nearby building’s inauguration in 1952:

Als wir aber dann beschlossen
Endlich unsrer eignen Kraft zu traun
Und ein schönres Leben aufzubaun
Haben Kampf und Müh
Uns nicht verdrossen.

But when we then decided
To finally trust our own strength
And to build a better life
Did neither struggle nor toil
Vex us

But Brecht’s relationship to the GDR was itself vexed: he was a Marxist, not a Stalinist. For him, a new Socialist state presented a promising opportunity to build anew, to attempt a utopia, as the Stalinallee was meant to be. Of course, reality blocked the ideal course. Brecht initially supported the regime’s response to the uprising of the seventeenth of June, at least publically. “Organized Fascist elements tried to exploit the [worker’s] unhappiness for their own bloody purposes,” he said; a letter to the secretary of the Socialist Unity Party was excerpted as evidencing his total support.

The position was tremendously unpopular. Brecht was never really forgiven in the three sorry years that remained of his life. After his death, the West German Die Welt published his now oft-quoted “The Solution”:

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Over the next four decades, little improved regarding the confidences of the government or the people. The Karl-Marx-Allee remained tarnished, a reminder of the sorry confidences that were lost. “The low point was 1990, when many shops closed and the once famous restaurants and cafés stood empty,” Der Spiegel reported in 1997. Long before Green Day used the phrase, Der Spiegel called this “the boulevard of broken dreams.”

* * *

After reunification, the property of the GDR was inherited by the respective district housing associations, loading them up with whole districts full of decrepit buildings in sore need of repair. The historic Karl-Marx-Allee, which shortly before reunification had been declared Germany’s longest landmark in one of the last successful actions of the Socialist regime, had racked up an immense bill of overdue repairs fully beyond the Housing Association Friedrichshain’s means.

The fourteen landmark Stalinist buildings were sold in December 1993 to DePfa Immobilien, the real-estate subsidiary of a large German Bank, with the stipulation that they be renovated true to their landmark status. The finances were more than a little tricky. A plan was brokered with the city of Berlin involving tax breaks, subsidies, and waivers of dividends, and the first six buildings were completed under this model. But financial difficulties on the city’s side cut the promised subsidies, and Predac had to sell the eight remaining houses. They were purchased by a number of large interest groups, which subsequently renovated, divided, and/or resold the properties as condominiums or parts of investment portfolios, and some did better or worse jobs managing and restoring the properties.

“The houses were in an extremely poor state and the average rent was about one deutsche mark per square meter [roughly six cents per square foot] per month. The costs of repair were higher than the normal costs of construction for a new apartment. Alone, the windows, and especially the facades, cost nearly two thousand deutsche mark per square meter,” Werner Pues, the head of DePfa’s successor Predac Real Estate Management, tells me. Pues has been involved in the Karl-Marx-Allee in some capacity for over twenty years now. He hopes “to develop the Allee into a place where one can expect the extraordinary, the exceptional.” We meet at the opening night of a photo exhibition he co-organized called “Utopia, Uprising, Congestion—What do we have to pass on?”

Kino International, 1969.

When Berliners talk about life in Berlin, they like to talk about Kiezleben and Kiezkultur, colloquialisms for something like “neighborhood life.” Someone who never leaves the neighborhood is a Kiezhocker, a criticism that Berliners level against each other but never against themselves: Berliners have strong affinities toward their neighborhoods, their streets, the convenience stores nearest by their houses. Berliners always believe their Kiez to be the best Kiez—why would they go anywhere else?

The Karl-Marx-Allee doesn’t have a Kiezkultur, and everybody knows it. One lives in the Karl-Marx-Allee and goes out elsewhere; works in the Karl-Marx-Allee and cycles over to a distant coffee shop. Even the grocery stores struggle to succeed. The vibrant sidewalk life that existed when the GDR had its huge department stores, such as the Kaufhaus des Kindes, and its entertainment venues and “nationalities restaurants,” such as the Kino International or the glamorous Café Moscow, hasn’t been revived in the past twenty-five years.

Business owners and creative types set up shop here, conducting lives apart from the GDR residents—most of whom are now beyond their late seventies. The street is ninety meters wide, with heavy traffic. Just crossing from one side to the next can rid you of the urge to strike up a friendly conversation. None of the people I spoke to spend much time out here. Philipp and Quentin avoid eating on the street; Juri Wiesner drives his car into fashionable Mitte for client meetings over lunch. As an exception, Otto Stark is well acquainted with his neighbors—all from the GDR days, though their numbers are thinning.

There’s a great deal of effort that goes into forging a community feeling, or at least increasing visits to the Allee, by owners and developers like Pues, although by now he, too, believes that re-creating a thriving pedestrian zone isn’t on the horizon. He tells me that demand for the apartments has increased significantly in the last years; what matters is bringing in the right people, the right businesses—influential galleries, or the popular Museum of Computer Games, which moved here in 2011—to establish the Karl-Marx-Allee as a worthwhile cultural attraction that will draw the right visitors, if not quite crowds.

Café Moskau, 1969.

When I first visited the Karl-Marx-Allee in 2011, I was just passing through in a car, with plenty of other cars around me, all of us surrounded by the imposing, towering beauty of this place, a beauty that felt ideological and maybe terrible and graceful. I’d just begun to acquaint myself with modern architecture, finding awe in its embodied idealism—and, especially, in its idiosyncratic German strain, which spoke of so much tragicomedy, so much utopianism, so many mighty attempts. The Karl-Marx-Allee provides a parallel to that energy, a grand promise, something hopeful but never quite realized, which anyone passing by can feel.

This was never a street that belonged to anyone, nor a street to which anyone ever belonged—it’s far too monumental for that. It’s weighted with history, with heavy walls, too heavy for individual lives to bear. It’s a street to feel small in: a street that has tried at greatness, terrible and sublime.

This is the second in a two-part series. Read Part 1 here.

Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi is a writer based in Berlin. Currently, she spends her time thinking and writing about the once divided capital and, separately, the merits of metaphysics. She’s written for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Berfrois, and others.