To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it –
Block it up
With Other – and ‘twill yawn the more –
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air.

Emily Dickinson

I took a plane from Berlin to Kaliningrad this time. I thought that it would not make a difference whether or not I arrived over land, by train or by car. I would lose the connection to my own world anyway, as I had each time before. Kaliningrad is a world of its own. It is a Russian city, and what is left over from Königsberg—a few old, massive, red brick city gates and fortifications, the villas in the leafy northern suburbs, an industrial building, a school or a hospital here and there—would not be of much help. They are too scattered and would now, after the city’s lavishly celebrated 750th anniversary, be freshly painted in the standard Russian yellow, light blue and deep red, like strange bright sails in a heavy sea of grey concrete.

Moreover, as every German town has old villas, schools, hospitals and factories, they don’t actually mean much to me. But in Kaliningrad, they are cherished, people are proud of them because they are unique, because there is no other major Russian city with pre-war German architecture. Actually, these buildings are not specifically “German”, but were erected in many parts of Europe, including St. Petersburg and Moscow, for example, during the industrial revolution. So, Kaliningrad looked to me no more and no less Russian (or German) than other Russian cities. In fact, Kaliningrad is a Russian city pretending to be what it imagines is “German”. This crude, half-hearted mimicry emerges as rudimentary German in gothic letters, nostalgic maps with street names like Horst-Wessel-Straße and as mistakes of Moses Mendelssohn for Israel Salanter, for instance.

And, unlike most German visitors, I have no family links to make up for the anonymity of Königsberg’s leftovers and the Soviet and/or Russian quirks that have changed them almost beyond recognition.

Why then did I come again?

Gradually, over years of research and writing about Lithuania and Russia in German, Kaliningrad-Königsberg had become for me something like the crucial missing piece in a puzzle for which I did not even have a blueprint. I began to suspect that the cataclysms of the twentieth century had opened an abyss not only in time but also in space. And the more familiar I became with Lithuania and Russia, the more schizophrenic I they felt; either something at the core of these languages was untranslatable or something was (had become?) inaccessible in German. My own, native language appeared hollow to me—intact on the surface and somehow empty underneath. But I was not sure. Perhaps this had nothing to do with historic catastrophes, maybe it was just an ordinary case of getting lost in translation? (Writing, too, is a form of translation, says a friend of mine, a Russian-Jewish émigré author in London).

So I decided to bridge the gap between Vilnius (or Moscow) and Berlin by finding the missing link between Kaliningrad and Königsberg, or vice versa. I also thought that, by entering Germany through the back door, I could shed some light on my native country. I began to collect descriptions of Königsbergand Kaliningrad, mainly in literature, but also, for example, in official documents (like protocols of the city’s prosecuting office from the Nazi-era and official reports of the bombings by the British air force) or in letters written from the city through the ages. By the time I set off for Kaliningrad this February, I had read hundreds of texts about the city in German, Russian, English, Lithuanian and Polish. In four years of research I had produced a detailed, entirely virtual image of the city. Inmy imagination it was standing in front of me, in vertical layers: the starry skies of Regiomontanus and Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the city’s astronomers, the aeroplane carrying Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution, and the swans shot down by mistake in the spring of 1945; Kant’s house (torn down in the 19th century), its rooms, his dinner-guests sitting at table and Johann Georg Hamann arriving from the harbour; Heinrich von Kleist, sick and sad in a street called the Loebenichtsche Langgasse in 1805///; Michael Wieck, a boy who slipped into the entrance-hall of Nordbahnhof to watch family members, class-mates and teachers being sent to an unknown death-camp in 1941; in the 1950s in the middle of the night a little girl called Apollinarya Zuyeva amongst hundreds of admirers of the queen of the night, the rare, beautiful flower of a cactus, in the Botanical garden; Tolik Dolgov, Kaliningrad’s bestmountaineer, climbing what is left of the cathedral and taking down the cross one night in 1974; and right there, almost underneath, Immanuel Kant’s remains being exhumed one night in 1880.

K., as I called the city, was bustling with noises—from the roars of thunders and aeroplanes to the whispers of the lovers and the dying.

“K.” is what Joseph Brodsky called the city in one of his poems thus quoting E.T.A. Hoffmann, the grandmaster of German gothic literature. Hoffmann, who grew up in Königsberg, is much more popular in Russia than in Germany (Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Nutcracker” is perhaps the most famous example of his afterlife in Russia). Hoffman used the initial “K.” in his novel The Serapion Brothers, after which the Russian “Serapion Fraternity” of writers named itself at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Thus, to me the initial “K.” contains the essence of the city: you barely touch it and, like with a live wire, you sense in an instant that it contains and transports powerful, invisible energies. “K.” not only stands for Königsberg and Kaliningrad (and Kant, for Brodsky and more people, including some who would prefer the city to be named “Kantograd”) but also for its Lithuanian name Karaliaucius and the Polish Królewiec.

My virtual K. filled up with curious, enlightening twists, turns and short circuits. The more I found out, the less schizophrenic it all felt. “K.” began to look more like a place of transit and transition to me, a place of metamorphosis as well as transgression, rather than a dead end or an appendix that is cut out and not really missed.

But how would my virtual K. relate to contemporary Kaliningrad? Would I be able to “ground” this live wire there? And most importantly—where should I begin? Which text, which date, event or motif, which street, which house would hand me what I called to myself “Ariadne’s thread”? Almost blindly, as if sleepwalking, I chose, literally, the next best thing—the text that seemed to me the most mystifying of all yet somehow felt closest to my heart—a letter titled “Shadows” that Hannah Arendt wrote in 1925 from Königsberg to Martin Heidegger.(1)

Now, as I am writing this, I am quite amazed to find that “Ariadne’s thread” is actually also a term in logic “used to describe the solving of a problem with multiple apparent means of proceeding—such as a physical maze, a logic puzzle, or an ethical dilemma”. I have behaved in full accordance with the procedure described on Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia): “At any moment that there is a choice to be made, make one arbitrarily from those not marked as failures, and follow it logically as far as possible.”(2)

Hannah Arendt, who had spent most of her childhood and youth in K., was, as we know, a woman of reason. Her favoured sentence, repeated often, like a programme or motto, was: “I want to understand.” Very rarely did she mention either Königsberg or her own emotional matters, despite her passionate, free-spirited, courageous nature. But “Shadows” (which she wrote at the age of nineteen) is utterly different—it is a lyrical psychogram of herself. And in it, it is the following paragraph that had initially caught my eye:

The sky in her native city, which was so intimately familiar to her, was too hazy, and she was too close-minded and self-absorbed. She knew a great deal from experience and constant attentiveness. But everything that happened to her as a result made its way deep into her soul and remained there, isolated and sealed off. Her lack of tranquillity and her close-mindedness made it im­possible to respond to events except with vague pain or a dreamy, spellbound sense of being ostracized.(3)

I realised that Arendt’s encapsulation, her sense of being cut off from reality, was identical with her perception of her “native city” (which after World War I had, indeed, become cut off from the rest of Germany, with the “Polish Corridor” in between), or more precisely, with the overcast sky above it. She mentioned this sky again, in a conversation with Joachim Fest (the Hitler-biographer). Fest recalls that she talked of Königsberg, of her parents’ home, of reading Kant’s Critique of pure reason at the age of fourteen, then looked up briefly to the sky and said: “Those clouds up there are very German. Such clouds don’t exist in America. So changeable, hazy, fleeting. In lyrical moods one can read a lot into them. I know the temptation. But it doesn’t take me more than just this moment to resist it. And after a short pause: “But nonetheless, this image makes me happy.”(4)

As we all know, Hannah Arendt later found her way into what she would have called vita activa. But it is her early “bewitched” state of total estrangement, of“not belonging to anything, anywhere, ever”, “the rigidity, the sense of being haunted—so that joy and suf­fering, pain and despair ran through her as if she were dead flesh—obliterated all reality, caused the present to shrivel”(5) which struck a strangely familiar cord in me.

I had encountered quite a few other texts about Königsberg—memoirs, poems, prose, written through the ages, which read like curious prophecies of the fate that was to befall the city in the twentieth century (for example, Thomas de Quincey’s vivid description of Kant’s decline over the last years of his life(6)). I had become used to such visions, so much so, that Königsberg’s destruction appeared to have been somehow inscribed, in sheer unbelievable, blood-curdling detail, into the city. Count Lehndorff, a doctor opposed to the Nazi-regime who had witnessed the Soviet invasion, remembers thinking at the time that Königsberg, this city “we’d never taken really seriously, had been, it seemed, waiting to unfold its full, previously hidden grandeur in horrific destruction.”(7) In his famous examination of total destruction in German literature, Winfried Georg Sebaldfound that this was quite a common perception at the time.(8)

But unlike the prophecies which had become true in the past, Hannah Arendt’s voice was somehow still alive, and in it I heard Königsberg speaking to me.

I took it as one of those coincidences which are clearly no coincidence that my hotel, Hotel “Moscow”, faced the very street I had decided to look for: Ulitsa Ogareva which was called Goltzallee when Arendt (her beloved grandparents, to be precise) lived there. So I took a walk down Goltzallee to see what I would see. None of Arendt’s biographers mentioned a house number, so I wasn’t sure what exactly to look out for, but I was quite pleased to see some rows of old houses still standing on Ulitsa Ogareva. More than that, I was happy because above the pouring rain was the overcast sky that Arendt had described.

Parallel universes, I thought: Hannah Arendt who’d loved the Cohns, the Russian branch of her ancestors (the family of her mother Martha Cohn Arendt), for their Russian warm-heartedness and open-mindedness, had no place here now, she was a complete stranger in contemporary Russia, in this Russian city. I too felt as if I were in a parallel universe, walking around with a virtual image of a city supposedly right here, in the very same place, but invisible. I felt invisible, untouchable, utterly strange and encapsulated like Arendt in 1925. Still, I continued to follow Arendt’s route to her parents’ house in Tiergartenstraße which she had taken frequently, almost daily, in her childhood—I walked to the end of the street and took two right turns until I was on Ulitsa Serzhanta Koloskova, formerly Hornstraße, which a little further up North, beyond Hufenallee (now the somewhat Chinese sounding Prospekt Mira, in English “Boulevard of Peace”), would continue as Tiergartenstraße (Ulitsa Zoologicheskaya), Arendt’s former address.

Then, on Hornstraße, in front of a very similar row of pre-war houses, I was suddenly struck by the sight of a satellite dish, rusted through and through. On previous visits I had become accustomed and somewhat immune to the fact that Kaliningrad was a city which shocked even the hardiest visitors with omnipresent decay, rather than with the anticipated traces of massive destruction during and after World War II. This can be very confusing, an additional smokescreen, so to speak, between contemporary Kaliningrad and Königsberg—you expect traces of“conscious”, “human” forces of deliberate annihilation, and instead you are confronted with the chaotic, seemingly blind indifference of neglect. (These two, and by the way not necessarily mutually exclusive, forms of destruction are a frequently encountered, classical dilemma of interpreting Russia.) Anyhow, as I was trying quite hard not to get distracted by monstrous decomposition everywhere around me (crumbling concrete, cracking asphalt, piles of litter in courtyards, hallways, bushes and underneath the icy, slippery, melting snow right on the pavement, as well as gaping black windows, broken glass etc.), the stunning sight of the completely rusted satellite-dish did make me wonder: how come an item as large and recent as a satellite dish manages to decompose faster here than anywhere else, faster than one could possibly expect, faster than physically possible or at least probable? As my thoughts were finally giving in and taking the all too familiar turn into the notorious straits of traditional Russian thought, while glancing absent-mindedly at the “russified” houses, I had an unexpected flashback.

For a few moments I was back in my own childhood, in Gotha, my home-town in the GDR. Just like here, I was two streets away from the house I grew up in, in a leafy, northwestern suburb, very similar to this one, in a street called Ossietzkystraße. Only two or three hundred metres long, Ossietzkystraße was not a street I had frequently been in, but its sight is nonetheless deeply ingrained in my mind. Its villas and old houses were reserved for the officers of the local Soviet garrison and their families. By the time I must have first seen it, in the early seventies, the entire street, its houses, gardens, entrances and pavements looked more or less the same as Ulitsa Koloskova in Kaliningrad: the same strange brightly coloured yet crumbling facades, the same dishevelled vegetation mixed with coal and litter in the front gardens, the same enormous, dented, overflowing rusty waste-containers, blackened by fire and surrounded by mud, the newspapers instead of curtains in the windows, and above them, the sight of dimly glowing light bulbs hanging straight from the ceiling, front doors missing altogether or without handles...

With this flashback, all of a sudden, I had understood. What? Well, everything, really. What had happened in Kaliningrad and what had happened in Königsberg before, and what had happened in between—horrible violence and mindlessness, deliberate and negligent destruction had suddenly become identical; they had merged into one and the same banality. I stood on Hornstraße and on Ossietzkystraße, in Kaliningrad and Königsberg and Gotha, and all of them had finally become real.

I sensed it all in one instant. I was calm, not, as one may expect, haunted by gruesome images of murderous war and totalitarianism, by images that had actually been haunting me for as long as I can remember. I simply knew and I knew that I knew.

Only afterwards, once I was back in Berlin, did I begin to examine what had happened to me in Kaliningrad. I discovered that I must have been guided by the spirit of Hannah Arendt—her notion of the banality of evil, for example, must have fallen into place there and then, with an ease and pleasure I felt almost ashamed of and which reminded me of Arendt’s laughter when she spoke of Adolf Eichmann in her famous interview on German television in 1964:

Well, you see, there are people who are upset by one thing that I’ve done, and I can, in a way, understand it: namely that I can still laugh at this. But I, indeed, thought that this Eichmann was a fool, and let me tell you: I have read 3,600 pages of his interrogation, and very attentively, and I don’t know how many times I have laughed; and laughed out loud! This reaction is what angers people! There is nothing I can do about it. But I know one thing: I’d probably laugh even three minutes before my certain death.(9)

I discovered that the coincidence of absent-minded neglect and wilful destruction that I had seen in K. corresponds with the notion of “unintended evil” which Susan Neiman, a currently Berlin-based American philosopher, identified as Arendt’s major contribution to Western philosophy, a notion that had become obscured and almost lost by the demonisation of evil in Western conservative discourse.(10)

I realised that Arendt’s voice, which had sounded to me like the still present, lively voice of Königsberg, speaking of an obscured reality, of listlessness and rigidity strangely combined with an acute sense of perception and a kind of somnambulist “longing for its own sake” (as Arendt put it in Shadows) was as much the voice of a young person who had not yet found a place in life, as it must have been the voice of the Zeitgeist that had pervaded, infected, stifled much of Germany’s population after World War I.

I only understood this after re-reading W.G. Sebald’s famous essay on total destruction in which he used almost identical words when describing the mental state of the Germans after World War II. To make sure, I then turned to Arendt’s article “The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule. Report from Germany”, an account of her first visit to Germany after the war from August 1949 until March 1950, where she describes a vast majority of people who “fend off reality”. She continues:

And one wants to shout out: But all this [constant, hectic activity in rebuilding the country from the ruins] is not real—the ruins are real; the horror of the past is real, the dead are real, who you have forgotten. But the people one speaks to are living ghosts who can no longer be moved by words, by arguments, by the look of human eyes and by the sadness of human hearts.”(11)

In “Shadows”, her letter to Martin Heidegger from 1925 which now seems lessmysterious to me, and surprisingly clear, even prophetic, Arendt had actually expressed the suspicion that her own desperate state of mind had been somehow reflecting an age characterised by depravation and hopelessness:

Perhaps this change from longing to fear brought about by the destructive desire for power, this slavish-tyrannical self­-violation, might seem clearer, more comprehensible when one considers that, at least in part, an age that was so depraved and hopeless also created opportunities for monstrousness, all the more as a naturally fastidious and cultivated taste more fiercely and consciously resisted the loud, extreme, and desperate efforts of an art, literature, and culture that were basely and mindlessly pursuing their illusory existence in extravagance that verged on shamelessness.(12)

Now I find it almost unnecessary to say that the curious, indescribable lack of reality I myself had been sensing all my life must have had something to do with this unreal post-war Germany, “this completely irreal reality in which we had to exist for years and in which we actually are up until now”, as the writer Hans Erich Nossack put it in his “pseudoautobiographical notes”, published a year after I was born into that reality, in 1966, and quoted by W.G. Sebald in his essay on literature and total destruction.(13)

“Poetry is closest to thought”, Arendt wrote in her book The Human Condition. Her obituary in the New Yorker (not signed and probably written collectively) ended with the sentence: “She revered the poets of the world, as though she did not know—is it possible she did not know? —that cerebration itself, when it was hers, became poetry.”

K. is a city that has always been susceptible to being cocooned in myth more than most other cities because—due to its almost unbridgeable remoteness (both in space and in time), its isolation from the rest of the world—it has been mainly heard of, rather than actually seen. A forbidden city, almost totally cut off after World War II, it has been frozen in myths, anti-utopian (the bulwark of Prussian and Russian militarism) and utopian (“the city of pure reason”, “a cosmopolitan republic”). These myths used to be incanted like mantras, now their repetition sounds automated, tired and worn out.

The text of K.(14) has been written continuously through the ages. This text corpus, the mental body of the city, spreads out widely across different languages. Once applied to contemporary Kaliningrad – the texts located as precisely as possible in the city and the city traced in its text corpus—both could become real. They could come to life by evocation of memory and imagination.

Hannah Arendt also said that thinking could melt “thoughts that are frozen in words”.

When I was there, K. was drowning in water: deep puddles on the pavements; parks like swamps; Moskovskij Prospekt, a major road, under water again after a decade of building works; bits of wet plaster dropping from the walls of the rebuilt cathedral... And in Germany, the ice of the cold war—frozen words and emotions—is currently beginning to melt. Whether in thaw, global warming or even the Flood, the city of K. is very likely to become crucial in this process.

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Notes:

1. Arendt, H. & Heidegger, M. 2004. Letters 1925-1975. ed. U. Ludz Harcourt, London.

2. See ‘Ariadne’s Logic’ at Wikipedia [online]. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariadne's_thread_(logic).

3. Arendt, H. & Heidegger, M. 2004. Letters 1925-1975. ed. U. Ludz Harcourt, London, p 13.

4. Fest, J. 2004, ‘Das Mädchen aus der Fremde: Hannah Arendt und das Leben auf lauter Zwischenstationen’ inBegegnungen. Über nahe und ferne Freunde. Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, p. 187.

5. Arendt, H. & Heidegger, M. 2004. Letters 1925-1975. ed. U. Ludz Harcourt, London

6. de Quincey, T. 1862. The Last Days of Immanuel Kant and other Writings.Edinburgh, p.99-166

7. von Lehndorff, H.G. 1961. Ostpreußisches Tagebuch. Aufzeichnungen eines Arztes aus den Jahren 1945-1947. München, p.72

8. Sebald, W.G. 2003, ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte. Über die literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung’ in: Campo Santo. Carl Hanser Verlag, München, Wien.

9. Arendt, H. 2005, ‘Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache’ in Was bleibt, sind Fragen. Die klassischen Interviews. ed. G. Gaus, Das Neue Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin, p. 328.

10. Susan Neiman, Das Wesen des Bösen. Interview with Neiman on Deutsche Welle Radio broadcast from 2 November 2005.

11. Arendt, H. 1986, Besuch in Deutschland(1950). Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin, p. 51.

12. Arendt, H. & Heidegger, M. 2004. Letters 1925-1975. ed. U. Ludz Harcourt, London, p.15

13. Nossack, H.E. 1971, ‘Er wurde zuletzt ganz durchsichtig – Erinnerungen an Hermann Kasack’ in Pseudoautobiographische Glossen, Frankfurt S.50, quoted in Sebald, W.G. 2006, ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte. Über die literarische Beschreibung totaler Zerstörung’ in Campo Santo, Carl Hanser Verlag, München, Wien, p.71. (first published in Jahrbuch der Freien Akademie der Künste, Hamburg, 1966)

14. The term ‘Königsberg Text’ was coined by the Lithuanian poet and semiotician Tomas Venclova. It is an analogy to ‘Petersburg text’, a term used in Russian cultural history. See Venclova, T. 2003 ‘Über den “Königsberg-Text” der russischen Literatur und die Königsberg-Gedichte von Iosif Brodskij’ in Osteuropa. Zeitschrift für Gegenwartsfragen des Ostens. 53. JAHRGANG/HEFT 2–3, FEBRUAR/MÄRZ 2003, p.159-177.