Lance Olsen: There

:::: In German, the noun gift means poison.

It shares the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English word gift — ghabh , meaning to receive —but German employs the original meaning as a dark gesture: Gib ihm das Gift. Give him the poison .

The verb for to poison in German used to be vergeben , a word that now means to forgive.

:::: Immense Allied bombing raids authored Berlin’s pastiche architecture.

On 3 February 1945, e.g., nearly a thousand B-17 bombers attacked the railway system in the city center. Although incendiary bombs weren’t used, monster fires erupted. Strong winds fanned the blazes, driving them east for four days. They burned out only when they had consumed everything combustible in their paths and reached a waterway, large thoroughfare, or park.

:::: From the French hôte , meaning host , referring to any building seeing frequent visitors, rather than a place offering accommodation.

:::: My first excursion upon arriving in Iowa City to begin work on what would strike me in retrospect as nothing if not a fraught M.F.A. was into the corner of library stacks housing theses by previous Workshop graduates.

I touched the heavy spines protecting Flannery O’Connor’s writing, John Irving’s, T. Coraghessan Boyle’s, hoping some of their prose would rub off on my hands.

It’s the same electric gratitude I feel walking the halls of the American Academy.

Hello Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Jeff Eugenides.

:::: We hotel when we’re in a state of physically not-being-at-home, but also when we read, think, become curious, start paying attention as we reach across the writing desk for our morning cup of coffee, focus more than a millisecond on a building or a bird, notice how the light outside the window has just now changed from Honda Accord gray to chalk smudged with blue.

:::: Jenny Holzer, Jed Rasula, Helen Vendler.

:::: Kafka’s three sisters were deported — Elli and Valli to the Łódź Ghetto, Ottla to Auschwitz.

None left their hotel rooms again.

:::: There should be special punctuation for not-being-at-home.

Maybe:::: for what cannot be articulated accurately.

:::: Because between 1919 and 1923 Germany experienced inflation of one trillion percent.

When a single bar of soap began costing a wheelbarrow full of banknotes, people often found money more valuable for other uses than paying bills — heating houses, say, stuffing leaky windows.

:::: Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, Henry Louis Gates: Guten Tag.

:::: The words hotel and hospital are related. Both stem from the Old French hostel, from the Late Latin hospitale : a guest-house , an inn.

When we hotel, we are concurrently guests in a shelter for the needy, patients in an institution for the ill, residents in an establishment for the lodging and entertainment of travelers.

:::: A few minutes later, it is February.

:::: The surface of the lake starting to freeze.

:::: We hotel when we feel things we don’t recollect feeling before, sense ourselves becoming interested, when we imagine, recollect, stare at the shimmering whiteness of our computer screen the second before we commence typing the next sentence—

:::: Maybe [[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.

:::: As in: [[Once upon a time, we already knew these things.]]

:::: On 4 July 1945, less than a month after entering Berlin, U.S. Forces requisitioned Arnhold’s villa as an Officers’ Club.

Forty-nine years later, as the last American troops departed the city, German ambassador Richard Holbrooke proposed the establishment of a research and cultural institution designed to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and Germany.

He approached Hans Arnhold’s daughter Anna-Maria Kellen, former Federal Republic of Germany president Richard von Weizsäcker, and Henry Kissinger with the idea.

In 1998 the first class of fellows walked through the Academy’s doors.

Since then, more than 300 writers, artists, musicians, and academics in literature, humanities, politics, economics, law, and philosophy have worked here: a dozen each spring, a dozen each fall.

Look: there [[I]] am.

:::: My ambition is to say in ten sentences what each andre in a beech says — what every andre in a beech does not say.

Is what you get if you feed Nietzsche’s original line into Babylon’s online German-to-English translator.

:::: To walk is to lack a place, Michel de Certeau felt. It is the indefinite process of being absent.

:::: Alltäglichkeit : Heidegger’s term for that which in our lives is most familiar, and therefore invisible, furthest, unknown and constantly overlooked in its ontological meaning.

:::: A Russian saying: If anyone is born a German, God has sufficiently punished him already .

:::: The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein unwittingly agreed with Heidegger, a member in good standing with the Nazi party from 1933 until 1945.

:::: On the grounds around the villa stand several faux-classical statues put up by Walter Funk when he moved in in 1942. The form of such pieces, the Nazis believed, embodied an inner racial ideal uncontaminated by Jewish influences.

The Arnholds, however, preferred the antipodean: the very sort of modernist work Adolf Ziegler chose in Munich for the Degenerate Art show. Between 19 July and 30 November 1937, he displayed 650 paintings, sculptures, books, and prints in a deliberately haphazard mess throughout what had once been the Institute of Archeology, a site selected for its dark, narrow, unpleasant stairwells and rooms.

The exhibition featured works by Beckmann, Chagall, Dix, Ernst, Grosz, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Nolde, and Schwitters, among many others. That is, its visual argument went: depraved artists were Jewish whether they were Jewish or not.

:::: Contemporary Berlin has been hung like those pieces.

:::: A Polish saying: One German a beer, two Germans an organization, three Germans a war .

:::: Because when traveling you’re aware of maneuvering inside the spacesuit made of your own skin, which isn’t the same skin you wore 40 years ago, let alone 40 months ago, let alone 40 weeks, let alone, quite, 40 seconds.

:::: For me this is exactly what writing the contemporary feels like.

:::: As rector at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger prevented students from holding a book burning, from hanging an anti-Semitic poster at the institution’s entrance, yet simultaneously signaled his sympathies with the Nazi student leaders’ activism.

:::: Impressionism. Expressionism. Fauvism. Dada. Surrealism.

Too Jewish.

:::: But O. doesn’t want to play the stereotype game, the Jeopardy of fraudulent categories.

Here is all he can do: all he can do is write what he thinks he thinks he sees and hears, understanding that ignorance will invariably be the foregone conclusion, that not-knowing will be every narrative’s terminus.

:::: Theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from happening.

Advised Jean-Martin Charcot, teacher of both William James and Sigmund Freud, the latter of whom optimistically underestimated the Nazis and remained in Vienna for almost a month after the Anschluss in March 1938 before fleeing.

:::: On the opening day of the Degenerate Art show, Beckmann fled to Amsterdam.

A few months earlier, Alfred Flechtheim, a leading German art dealer, died penniless in London.

A year after the show closed, Kirchner shot himself through the heart — a gesture Debord would repeat in 1994 in a remote French village as his final act of defiance, his final off-stage anti-spectacle.