Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

I soon saw that things were heading in a different direction, perhaps still a touch darker than I had imagined, and perhaps even more complicated. It was necessary, vital, that I go to that platform, Boston said, looking at me with the same rage she had on that previous, horrible occasion. Never before in my life had anyone pressed me in such a manner to go to a train station. I asked, timidly, why this displacement was so essential. The sun was setting almost completely and the clouds over Kassel had been turning an intense scarlet. Because, Boston said, almost chewing her words, I want to go on walking awhile, I like walking, and also it’s about time you finally understand you’re not in a Mediterranean country, but a profoundly tragic one. It’s unbelievable you don’t know the relationship between a bottle of Aryan perfume and avant-garde art, she said, revealing at last why she was so angry with me.

That had surely been my big mistake of the day: not being convinced that Braun’s perfume could be related to avant-garde art. Although a new question arose: did avant-garde art really exist? Much was said about an art that was ahead of its time, but for me it was far from clear it existed. The very expression avant-garde seemed to have a different meaning now from what it had meant at the beginning of the last century. . but this wasn’t the right time to talk about that.

During the arduous walk that followed, I was able to discover, among other things, that Kassel’s great postwar reconstruction didn’t come about until 1955, when its citizens bravely opted to take a much more insecure path than the one other compatriots had chosen; instead of industrial development, they decided on rebirth of a cultural nature, putting Arnold Bode — an architect and lecturer — in charge of the first Documenta, which had a clearly restorative character. Germany under Hitler had classified contemporary art as degenerate, expelling and murdering its artists, but now it paid tribute to the art of the twenties and thirties, with an exhibition that, according to Bode, “finally brought art to the workers.”

When at last we arrived at the city’s old central station, we headed with slow steps to the far end of platform 10. Once there, I was able to understand almost in an instant why that sound installation, Study for Strings , was a better place than any other to think about the Nazi years (what Boston called the great Collapse).

Everybody knows that most so-called avant-garde art these days requires one part that is visual and another that is discursive to back it up and try to explain what we are seeing. Curiously, nothing of the latter was in evidence in Study for Strings. At Susan Philipsz’s installation, it was enough to simply position oneself at the end of platform 10 to understand it all at once; there was no need for a leaflet that would finish off the story being told there.

Study for Strings was a somber installation, a simple piece that went directly to the heart of the great tragedy, the end of the utopia of a humanizing world. Philipsz had situated loudspeakers in an enclosed area of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof that were audible to people walking to the end of that stretch of platform — exactly the same stretch on which a great number of Jewish families waited for the train that would transport them to concentration camps; from these loudspeakers came beautiful but devastatingly sad music: a sort of funeral march for those who died before their time called Study for Strings . It was a composition that in Kassel 2012 harked back to the memory of the Holocaust. Its composer, the Czech musician Pavel Haas, wrote the piece for the chamber orchestra in Theresienstadt, shortly before being transferred to Auschwitz, where he died.

We listened to the piece standing, with the same grave expressions as everyone else gathered there, watching other spectators come join that railway music performance that lasted under half an hour, one of many identical performances that were separated by short time intervals and played one after the other on the cheerless platform every day. In the end, a group of around thirty people formed, who had followed the concert of violins and cellos with emotion, remaining motionless and sunk in thought, moved, profoundly silent, as if recovering from the collapse provoked by what they had heard, and also by what they remembered, what had been evoked, almost reenacted, I’d go so far as to say experienced, because it wasn’t difficult to feel vulnerable and tragic there, like a deportee.

I would have liked to confess to Boston that it seemed incredible to me I hadn’t been aware from the outset that the political, or more accurately the eternal illusion of a humanized world was inseparable from artistic endeavors, from the most forward-thinking art. But I said nothing because underneath it all I felt a certain resentment toward her. At that point in the evening, I still hadn’t been able to get over the fact that my question about the Nazi perfume and avant-garde art had led her to punish me, to literally punish me, and, consequently, to oblige me to take one walk too many, perhaps with the severe notion that I’d correct such thoughtlessness at the far end of this platform.

I would have liked to say to her: How could I have been so stupid? Or perhaps the opposite: to reproach her for the fact that she had wanted to scold me like that, albeit in such a subtle manner. Whatever the case, I opted to keep quiet and devote myself to carefully observing the general mental recovery of the people gathered there. I ended up identifying an intense communion between all those strangers, who, having surely come from such different places, had congregated there. It was as if they were all thinking, we were all thinking: we’ve been the moment, and this is the place, and now we know what our problem is. It was as if a spirit, a breeze, a current of morally bracing air, an invisible impetus, were pushing us toward the future, forging forever the union between the diverse members of that spontaneous, suddenly subversive-seeming group.

This is the kind of thing, I thought, that we can never see on television news programs. There are silent conspiracies between people who seem to understand one another without talking, quiet rebellions that take place in the world every minute without being noticed; groups form by chance, unplanned reunions in the middle of the park or on a dark corner, occasionally allowing us to be optimistic about the future of humanity. They join together for a few minutes and then go their separate ways, all enlisting in the hidden fight against moral misery. One day, they will rise up with unheard-of fury and blow everything to bits.

I already knew how to get back to the Hessenland unaided, I told Boston, I just had to stay on Königsstrasse. Two kisses and farewell. Boston didn’t specify a time, but she said she’d come pick me up from the hotel the next morning to take me to the Chinese restaurant. Just as I’d feared, it was clear no one was going to save me from the trip to the Dschingis Khan. Over the course of the afternoon, I’d avoided asking her anything to do with what I privately called “the Chinese number.” I’d done so, foolishly thinking that I’d get out of the whole nuisance that way. But the ostrich approach doesn’t always turn out to be useful and, ultimately, when we were saying goodbye, I saw how “the Chinese number” ended up bobbing to the surface and, what’s more, it did so at the moment that packed the most punch, just when I thought I’d outmaneuvered it completely.

It was late now, and everything was starting to get dark.

I observed that for the first time in my whole life it wasn’t fun to feel as though I were inside someone else’s novel, in this case, a book by Robert Walser. Although it was poetic to think that, as in The Walk , it was late and everything was getting dark, it nevertheless seemed more appropriate for this to be experienced by whoever wrote it, in other words by Walser, and not me. And yet it was unsettling to see that what was happening to me was exactly what happened to the happy narrator in that book: it got dark, and I suddenly thought it better to stop walking. Usually I was already at home when darkness fell, so it followed that my melancholy there in Kassel was in fact similar to Walser’s.