Gert Jonke - Awakening to the Great Sleep War

Of course she hadn’t heard his answer with all that noise.

Do you have any idea where we are? she asked again.

No, I don’t know, answered Burgmüller, who didn’t want to ambush her with a reckless answer; maybe it wouldn’t suit her at all if she found out she was at his apartment?

Don’t you understand what’s happening here? she kept asking, in this surprisingly charged, overpowering atmosphere around us, you aren’t seriously going to claim that you know anything at all!

No, Burgmüller answered, I don’t know anything at all, what should I know, where did we come from and where are we now? Right now, at this essential moment, he couldn’t allow himself to be an opinionated know-it-all maker of claims in her presence, because he hoped that she was now finally surfacing from her story in his apartment, which was however still incomprehensible to her, that she was entering this room properly at last, although she had already been there for such a long time; soon he would also be able to start gradually showing her around the city outside, or would she refuse even that?

Until now, she had invented their common past, which hadn’t even existed before her story, but which now seemed almost finished as it lay before them; but she would also want to invent a present for them, which in any case already existed, it didn’t need to be invented at all; how would a present invented by her find its way around in this city here, he didn’t want to, couldn’t think about it, couldn’t get it into his head — it would lose its way, get lost in her invention, no, he must try to spare her that.

Don’t you even know approximately where we could be? she asked. No, he said again, but she should take a look around; he was trying very carefully to point out to her that here, in this room, she happened to be with him in his apartment, and didn’t she notice that?

No, she didn’t notice that at all, what was that supposed to mean?

Because the noise from below slowly moved off behind the building, he directed her gaze out the window again by starting to talk about the adult education center library vis-à-vis the city kitchen, something like this:

Couldn’t it be that it’s not only over there the pages of all books are merging with one another, the content of the stories between their covers starting to move, because their letters have started to dance, hopping, hooked together, springing into readers’ eyes, and then, toppled headfirst in bent, crossed, intersecting lines, or flowing into black puddles in blotting-paper swamps, presumably reaching in time beyond the edges of their books to roll at last through the valleys whose rivers have drained away through the white plains like lakes in the paper-fiber of the snowfields; yes, one day soon, all our shelves will become cascades of life, waterfalls springing with infinite slowness from our walls of books, breaking through, yes, even here, even out of the walls of this very room, slowly plunging through the corridors of every apartment, down the stairwells, out of the buildings; yes, even the ocean and its Sargasso Seas will come to rustle with the book-heaps that have filed out of our library doors through the streets of this city; soon they will be full of all our always-being-imagined stories, thoughts, pictures: inundated, our protagonists having already hopped down undisturbed from all the library ladders, clambered down out of the windows, and then, staggering outside, being caught by a wind, blown up and away through the entire Republic, only going to ground beyond the farthest limits of vision — soon they will even start crossing the unimaginably high wall of the sealed-off ocean!

As if our hope had not yet turned to rage!

But she was shocked, not at all in agreement, no, she didn’t notice anything at all like that, not in the slightest, what unthinking bits of nonsense he so unrestrainedly allowed to issue forth from himself, once again one sees how vague a sense he has of this world, namely, none at all, no, no, not even a weakly twinkling glimmer; how unrealistically lost you would be here without me, it’s a good thing I’m here with you, which I am, aren’t I? she called out to him.

Burgmüller knew then it wouldn’t be so easy to lure her out of her story.

So had he entirely forgotten everything they had overcome, that lay behind them, she went on, did he really think one could behave as if nothing had come before?

By the way, when looking through documents dating from a time that lay far behind them, she had come across a piece of writing that had flowed from his pen, perhaps he still remembered what he himself had set down on this official document, and indeed, as she remembered, during the final days of that previous era, no? She handed him a very yellowed piece of paper that might be at least ten or fifteen years old and was recognizable to him by his own handwriting from that time: Back then I wrote entirely differently, much more plainly, clearly, he thought, but what he was supposed to have written there ten or fifteen years ago, no, he had never written that, it would never even have occurred to him, no, so how could it nevertheless have wound up in his old handwriting on this piece of paper. .? Forged! of course, the piece of paper was forged, but how, that part was inexplicable to him, how could someone have been able to imitate his previous handwriting so perfectly, where could the culprit have gotten such insight into the apparently so clearly progressing lineaments of his handwriting from that time, which couldn’t be compared in any way with his handwriting today, such that not even he himself could have imitated it so well: a forgery, which someone had somehow known how to palm off on him, the very first forgery in her story of the invented life the two of them had previously lived together, yes, the first falsification of that history, and he felt somewhat deceived — lied to, no less — unfortunately, no, not by her, he would never have considered that, no, but by her story instead.

He read the piece of paper over and over again, thoughtfully, while she said to him, maybe it’s only now dawning on you how exceptionally unusual it is to simply throw the two of us into this room through the window, without ever making it clear to us what the two of us should actually be doing here. .!

Thanks to the selfless initiative of Herr Karl, one has at one’s disposal one’s whole life long a universal historical work that displays such obsessively detailed accuracy that one inevitably, unquestionably, has to equate it with the history itself, which is why all the various scholarly approaches to history succumb to an increasingly unhappy decline, from which they are hardly ever permitted to be rallied and brought back again because, for centuries, all scholars have been voluntarily condemned to do nothing but read the already available historiography more closely, since it is no longer possible to differentiate between the history and the historiography, and usually, even before the actual occurrence of a historical event and the details of its progress, the historiography had already reported on it more exactly and in greater detail than would the history itself, which then went on to prove itself incapable of expanding on the former, and for that reason, precisely for the sake of scholarly certainty, one turns to the former, namely the historiography that fully surpasses history for clarity, so, once again, the historiography, for its part, consists of a still more exactly amplifying, substantially more detailed, incredibly more extensive historical view of the universal historical work mentioned above, which we continue to have at our disposal our whole life long thanks to the selfless initiative of Herr Karl.

A long time before that, Karl had decreed that everyone should learn to write, so that no one would start any unnecessary fussing and so make history anymore, but rather just write history down, with each person exactly determining his own place in the course of history, so as not to keep coming back with more useless histories afterward. Soon thereafter, no one made history anymore, because everyone was just writing history, without fussing with other histories and thereby unnecessarily making history again. All the books and documents that have been produced and are being produced are collected for Karl and arranged in his library, which is said to have long since surpassed the size of the one in the capital city of the land. Karl has at his disposal such an extensively exact historical work precisely because no one is making history anymore, but rather just writing histories so as not to make history, and because in this manner the passage of time itself gradually became a historiography in which for a long time now no one has made history, history itself today and tomorrow will be nothing other than a history of historiography.