R.H.I. Page 15

  The house was in chaos. They had talked about the decision late into the night. Events had made it impossible for him to stay in the East. Isi had said, ‘You could just work there? We’ve moved so many times.’

  ‘I think a clean break is better. It will be easier. I don’t want to be crossing over every day.’

  ‘We’ll have nothing … ?’

  He said, ‘Nothing?’

  She laughed. She knew what he meant. The activity, all the children and the household help, all working to pack their bags. Nothing?

  But there was something else in H today apart from his meaningful smiles. Isi knew it too, but knew also that they could discuss it only so far; that there remained something walled off.

  ‘I have to go and take my leave.’

  Outside, the city was warm and quiet, and something else too. A sluggish current was running through it, something that tugged at the ankles, that pulled, more importantly, at the bricks and buildings, at matter itself. It drained the energy he had found in the city when he returned, after the war. He would visit a number of close friends. He would visit Brecht—hadn’t Brecht felt it too? Or was the energy just in H himself, and not anything external, not any kind of principle to be found in matter after all?

  First, however, he ran for a streetcar. Someone riding it had caught his eye through the window: a woman? Who was she? She had dark hair in a style from the past. But the streetcar was just pulling away, and he arrived at the stop too late. He considered walking, but instead stood, his limbs pulled down by gravity, waiting for the next one. Riding it, he stared abstractly out the window. The suburbs seemed tidy and threadbare. Then, looking towards the front, he saw, seated in the same position, the haircut once more—dark hair, in a fashion he had not seen since the 30s. Did she look around at him? Was he, after all, on the first streetcar, the one he had missed? Here was some trick of time, annulling the wait, the run, the view of it departing. Or, where was he? There was an oscillation, a leap of time; he was split between two times or two histories, as if he was on one streetcar and on the other, the first and the second, both simultaneously. Was the woman even there? Was her presence unstable in some way? She reminded him of Isi when he had first met her. That look, out through the window when he first ran … was it her? That was a strange idea—as if she had been transported here from another life. But then, couldn’t times, histories, mightn’t they all crash in, as if everything were being lived all at once? What kind of streetcar was this, then, that he was riding? He should have walked. In other circumstances, seeing something of the nature of time itself inhabiting—what an idea!—a streetcar, he might have stood, urged it on, even run to the front to take hold of the controls. As it was he gripped the bar and looked about, trying to orient himself. The city outside had grown unrecognisable, devoid of people but occupied by buildings whose shattered sides gaped at him, stretched over by the struts of scaffolding, and impossibly dark inside. Peering into them, he had a sense of vertigo. He looked away, stood, and, as the streetcar stopped, made to step off.

  Outside, he looked up to find himself near F—strasse. There were some gaps where buildings had been demolished; and debris remained here and there in neat piles. Around the corner, clearance work was going on up and down the broad avenue. He approached a team. He felt he should ask how the work was proceeding, comment on the new buildings destined for the area—but under the circumstances such a conversation was impossible. The vision he had had from the streetcar, of the dark caves of buildings, stayed with him, angered him now, made him want to sweep away all the remaining ones. It was a NEGATIVE COUNTERPART, it might be said, of the architect’s illusion, buildings put up with thought: buildings as easily annihilated, as if the bombs were in him. Instead he asked simply after Fräulein R. She was supervising a team further down away from the city centre, not far. He walked quickly down. He didn’t want to be recognised—though this not for any good reason, except, again, to avoid the conversation that would ensue. Only one conversation was possible right now.

  He said to her, ‘Good. You are right. I’m leaving.’

  Had he said it too loud? No one seemed to be paying any attention, except Anita.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had persuaded me to stay.’

  ‘Had I?’

  Had she said as much, when they last talked? She looked suddenly uncomfortable. And, to be sure, he had put her in an awkward position. By doing so, he had also put himself in a firmer position. Did he understand that? We cannot be sure. In any case his ‘moment’ on the streetcar seemed far away, nothing to worry about. It was, we might say, I wrote, nothing to do with a change in the architecture of the city, the architecture of time and the way traffic moved in it—as if the streetcar had embodied a new relation to time’s structure—and everything to do with an unstable INTERNAL or MENTAL architecture within H himself. Structures were being shaken; some destructive impulse, some feedback of internal flame that weakened foundations, gutted contents. It also disrupted his relationship to the passing of time, leaving him unsure of which present he lived in. He knew, I think, that he himself might, like any revolutionary subject, become a kind of MEASURING APPARATUS for the change and instability around him—not only change, but change in the direction of change, change in change itself, change in the possibilities of what might change. No doubt his position had made him especially sensitive in such a capacity. By now, however, in conversation with Anita R, and by means of that conversation, he was restabilised.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk now.’

  He said, ‘That’s all right.’ He said, ‘You should be able to find me easily enough, if all goes well.’

  ‘I’m sure it will.’

  She had spoken quickly, and now turned back to her work, leaving him abruptly alone at the edge of the work team.

  Next, Brecht. The latter knew, by the time H found him barefoot, backstage of the theatre, that the heads of the Academy had been denounced by the Central Committee for their designs. The meeting’s process had been reported in Neues Deutschland. H, more than he had realised, was to be made into a public example. At the same time, a city was destroyed—an imagined one, a planned one, one that existed in models and drawings. From those models and drawings, the city reached inwards, its structures forming part of H himself. His head opened outwards onto the reality of the plans; the walls of this city were open too, movable or glass structures; its weight was borne on thoughts, pillars. Is this way of speaking overly dramatic? Brecht didn’t think so. The Central Committee, according to the report, and also according to their own statements in the meeting with H and his colleagues, thought the plans were destructive of cultural identity. It was all part of something larger. Yes, Brecht and Dessau were also reworking their opera The Condemnation of Lucullus, Dessau more than Brecht himself, it had to be said. H wouldn’t leave. He told Brecht that he had to leave. Dessau was, of course, also a lover of formalism.

  H said, ‘Also … ?’

  Brecht himself, his work, showed pacifist tendencies, according to the Central Committee. They were, however, working on it, Dessau substantially, rewriting the score in a grander style consistent with socialist realism.

  ‘So,’ said Brecht, ‘I know what you’re going through.’

  But let us take a step back. The meeting with the Central Committee had taken place in the Academy building; their criticisms were predictable—H, in fact, should have predicted them.

  Brecht, in the small back room of the theatre, said, ‘You knew their thoughts on architecture, you knew the regulations.’

  ‘I thought I would persuade them, that the designs would persuade them.’

  The Central Committee said, ‘The architects have not taken account of the example set by the Soviet Union.’

  H: ‘The new Soviet Embassy building has received very poor reviews from architects.’

  Brecht: ‘And from the people?’

  H: ‘I don’t know.’

/>   Brecht: ‘There!’

  The Central Committee (in the room in the Academy building): ‘We have to turn away from formalism, towards realism. Realism for us must mean a turn to the classical German tradition LOVED BY THE PEOPLE. The people at Neuruppin were given the chance to criticise H’s design for a cultural facility, and they found it—their words—insane.’

  H: ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Realism, formalism. A realistic attitude to the conditions in which we live, which is realistic about those conditions and hopes to change them for the better. That is how I understand realism. Classicism reflected the CONDITIONS OF ITS OWN TIME. It looked back at the past and forward to the future, but it failed to make anything more than an eclectic mix.’

  Brecht, in the room behind the stage, looked at him.

  The Central Committee said, ‘We have established a very precise understanding of realism.’

  H did not say, ‘These words!’ Classicism now could only be a matter of costume. Buildings must be more than costume. But neither, it might be said, should they be naked; the mere display of meaningless matter. H was caught between two conversations. This is why our attempt to take a step back, back to the room in the Academy building, has met with such mixed success. Words spilled from one room to the other, the outcome of unfinished thoughts, unfinished conversations. Modernist design imagined a future that its time was not ready for. Its design was not realistic because capitalist RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION could not allow the completion of its projects, the functional design of life, but also the SPIRITUAL design of life, the design of life that corresponded to the design of the buildings. Such terms taken from Marxist doctrine, H did not quite think, might have found the ear of the Central Committee.

  H said (in the small room behind the theatre), ‘It’s a matter of how to build a new society.’

  The Central Committee (in the room in the Academy building) said, ‘Yes. The question then is whether these architects—whether you—are going to join us, to take part in building it.’

  H said, ‘What conditions would mean that the utopias envisaged by Taut, by Mies—that these buildings become MORE than what they were? What conditions mean that the tenement blocks and office blocks become places of peace and freedom? How do we build those conditions?’

  H, with the other heads of the Academy, said, ‘Yes.’ There was nothing else to say. By the same token, of course, they, H and his colleagues, meant it. They would take part. —No. H would leave. Already his family was packing, would have packed, enough to move west and establish themselves in a hotel for the time being. There would be no problem returning later for their furniture once they found a house. And their earnings might certainly be doubled.

  Brecht said, ‘What conditions will you be building in the West?’

  H said, ‘Classicism—in any case, classicism is not a German tradition at all. Schinkel’s classicism is derivative, even if it has good features at times. Modernism, though—that began here; that is German.’

  ‘How much time will you need to come up with designs that meet our regulations?’

  ‘… Two months.’

  ‘That,’ said the Central Committee, ‘is too long.’

  ‘Then … ?’

  ‘You have eight days.’

  Brecht said, ‘Eight days?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Silence. Then Brecht said, ‘I can see why you want to leave.’

  H said, ‘But you’re right. I will be back to biding my time.’

  Brecht said, ‘What will you be waiting for? Another revolution?’

  ‘This … situation, it is only temporary. We all know that. I will be working within a revolutionary paradigm in the meantime.’

  Brecht said, ‘You were biding your time under Hitler …’

  ‘Under Hitler I was made to design according to Hitler’s idea of a German tradition, and I don’t want that anymore …’

  Brecht said, ‘False freedom. False freedom, is that what you want?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Is it? It can’t be. Back to before the war, as if the war never happened.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I ran away from it of course, to America. I thought something might happen there. This is what I mean. I thought something might happen in America. Remember that the other side there, it’s America. I thought something might happen. And think about Peter, Peter Lorre, remember him? He was my actor. Lorre would turn his head in such a way that the gesture was more real than real, and the viewers, broken from their trance, knew not to unthinkingly turn their heads along with him. On stage he would be at once two people, five. My scripts were turned down and Peter was given work playing ridiculous villains, big eyes, shifty looks. I find it sad. It’s worse, it’s the same, as what the Fascists were doing.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s what is there, on the other side.’

  ‘More houses for the rich.’

  At the house, Isi said, ‘Are you crazy?’

  H said, ‘I think so.’

  She said, ‘Unpack?’

  H laughed.

  Brecht said, ‘What is funny?’

  ‘Well, I did write something that praised Schinkel.’

  Brecht said, ‘Good!’

  H said, ‘I didn’t mean it.’

  Brecht said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The Feilner House had been destroyed in the war, but it had been a good example of a Berlin style, relatively plain, with generous windows. H was not yet thinking of it, but it would creep into his designs. The household was chaotic again around them; H helped to unpack their things back to their familiar places. Isi said to him, ‘I guess these times were never going to be easy.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ve made the right choice.’

  Brecht said, ‘Of course you have. Just go and unpack—there’s no shame.’

  But there was more work than merely setting the house straight. He said to her, ‘I will need to work like mad.’

  She said, ‘Only eight days.’

  ‘Only!’

  ‘I’ve made do without you for longer. We’ll survive.’

  Brecht (in the room behind the stage) said, ‘So they have a point. Here you will be working to build a new society. You’ll be doing that, working to build it. Go back to them and tell them you’re theirs.’

  ‘Is that what you told them?’

  Brecht said, ‘We’re carving something out of the materials we have at hand. I wish my words alone could confront the chaos out there, but they can’t, not in the same way your buildings can.’ After a silence, he said, more softly now, ‘You might need to play along now, at least. Maybe they’re not ready, maybe people aren’t ready. You might need to work on them slowly. And in the meantime …’

  H left the house for his studio in the Academy building. It would be quiet—though, he guessed, Hopp and Paulick would be there too. But something else weighed on him—a responsibility, and one that he hadn’t mentioned either to Brecht or to Isi and the family. It was an unmentionable responsibility. Isi might have said (if she had known), ‘Why didn’t you tell me about her?’

  He might have said, ‘You’ve no reason to distrust me!’

  ‘Then why keep her a secret?’

  But it wasn’t that kind of betrayal—no mere betrayal of love. A betrayal of love was minor and meaningless, a complication of life, even it might be said a complication that owed its existence to bourgeois modes of relating. H did not quite think about it in those terms. This was a different and, it might be said, larger form of betrayal. He had, it had to be said, not betrayed Isi at all. Why was it difficult to mention Anita, whether to Isi or to anyone else? Anita represented another danger—a danger to the whole world that they were building. Why? With Anita, something escaped from its bounds.

  So, in front of the Academy, he hesitated. He turned away from the door and began to walk towards the east. It was not, in general, advisable to walk around the city in the middle of the night. The danger, he thou
ght, however, I wrote, was not in crime—it was not a danger to the person, to the body—but was contained somehow in the situation with Anita R. A danger to the SPIRIT. Was there a ‘situation’? Did H sense something of the further complication, which might be expressed using the formula K/R? K/R, the formula of Anita R’s lie/transformation from K into R, represented an escape, a ‘leak’, a failure of the WORLD to fully constitute itself. Something in H, something that he himself was probably, we can say, not at all aware of, detected this failure, made him rush faster through the streets (they could be very dark). K/R—not the person but the slippery formula of identity attached to her—was now THE CAUSE of every difficulty; and that formula expanded to include H, since it was H himself who had, finally, encouraged Anita R to leave for the West. He was not sure he had remembered the address correctly. She had told him—when? He had never been there. He entered through into a yard, then through another passageway into the dim yard behind it. The door at the far end of the yard had a list of numbers on it and opened when he pushed. He walked up and found the correct door. Was it? Was this where Anita R lived? He knocked. The building was run down; the stairs were bare and worn, creaking under his feet. In winter, it would be a job to haul coal up here, if coal could be afforded in the first place. Something would have to be done about the housing situation. That was the simplest truth that an architect could face now. There was no response, so he knocked again. Well, it was good to visit such places, the places where the workers were forced to live, at least in the meantime. Did she share the apartment with someone? He had no idea. In fact he knew nothing about her, partly of course as a result of K/R (though he couldn’t know this). He waited longer, and knocked again. The silence in response was deep enough that it convinced him there could be no one in the apartment. Where was she? Was she a deep sleeper? Once more, loudly. To which the silence deepened. He turned. Outside, he realised it was also the silence of the city. Where was she? F—strasse was close. He walked to the work site where he had last seen her, earlier that day. Strange to think that she might still be there, at this hour. Of course, she wasn’t. He did not think he could conjure the ghost of her, or that he could reverse time in this spot and undo what he had said. He ran towards the west, in pursuit of her. At the border he showed his papers.