The Doctrine of Photography

The city where I grew up

was not a western city,

nor an eastern city.

It lay north of Bohemia, south

of Greenland, below sandstone Switzerland

in a river valley, green with fields.

It was the dump in the middle, the rump

of an exquisite gesture in stone —

a suite in Hotel “Old Europe.”

Stuck under layers of wallpaper,

newspapers from a world gone by:

reports of Zeppelin flights,

League of Nations conferences,

“Miscellaneous,” alongside adverts

for brassieres and ironing boards.

But the view to the river

was blocked with gray barracks.

And the southern wing,

and the northern wing,

broken like the Baroque Palace,

furnishings given for junk.

All of it somehow stranded:

the steamers and churches, the domes.

And not much life in the bar.

But then I found it one day

down on the banks, under rusty nails,

heaps of nuts and bolts

from machines long since dismantled,

factories expropriated, torn-down,

I found it amongst the bones,

unearthed by scavenging dogs,

ribs and vertebrae, splinters

of human and beast, so it seemed —

the key to the city.

And found a kind of peace.

And knew where I was,

and where I came from —

until I saw the photographs,

not the ones at home in the album,

but for sale on the street market stall.

Archive pictures, postcards

of street scenes, city views

from between the wars, moments

from a life gone by,

some still with the stamp

“original print, by hand.”

Past the housefronts, all still intact,

over the bridges, the broad terraces,

along the Königsufer, the banks

of the Elbe, people walking, all dead now,

but the youngest in their prams.

Mothers in dark coats and hats

were chained for all time

to this or that man with a briefcase.

On a traffic island, a boy

in lederhosen who would never age,

staring from the poster

for “Riquet Cocoa Chocolate.”

“Alsberg Ladies Wear, Wilsdruffer Straße:

the new bathing costume from Alsberg.”

And the beauty in silk stockings,

getting out of the tram, no. 11,

picked out by chance, and her too,

fixed in that spot forever.

All of them passersby in time —

the girl at the flower stall on Altmarkt,

the one by the striped awnings

on Prager Straße. At the station

the clock forever at half past ten.

A morning that lasts for eternity —

mostly in spring, in summer,

in a city that was not eastern,

nor western. Scarcely a photo

that ever showed it in deep snow.

The sign for Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten

stood by the entrance to the subway.

Soon an r was missing, an n, then an a.

Power cuts, petrol grew scarce,

people took to bikes again after Stalingrad.

Not long now and almost all of it

will be erased, a phantasmagoria

like the desert palace of Kubla Khan.

And your gaze leaped back and forth

looking for the place it all began.

Was it the high tide? The moment

that saw the sparkling twenties in.

People peering over the railings

at Brühl’s Terrace, dismayed

at the rising of the Elbe.

Like mourners at a wake

all clothed in black. An entire

people clothed in black, back then.

Though the worst was behind them:

four years of war in Europe, carnage.

All of them losers, people suddenly

with time on their hands, time to

gather in dark clumps. Only a girl

in a sailor suit, laughing and spitting

over the railing into the swollen,

mud-brown river, cold as the grave.

Or maybe the storm in the thirties,

that wrecks the funfair booths

at the Vogelwiese fairground.

Visitors watch the chaos in despair.

Ghost train guests. Roll up and

test your strength, the man in the

straw hat grumbles, with a rakish eye

for the lady in the long white dress.

A storm has caught the swingboats,

toppled circus tents, whirled the

whole magnificent house of cards

into ruins like the glass of a kaleidoscope.

It was always the anxiety,

the thin howl of instability, of fear,

that brokered the everyday

and steered the course of politics —

a force that crept invisibly into

every house and hurried every life along.

Hopes stirred by the dream of

social stability that never came

to pass in the squares and streets

where election posters in garish red

and black promised the moon and the stars.

That, however, every picture is just

a point of view, in which history dissolves

into familiar stories, each one running

its own course, seeming as if it might be

halted for a moment, but in truth irrevocable,

that was the doctrine of photography.

Your gaze leaped back and forth.

Five years later a spectacle of horror

breaks all attendance records: “The German

People’s Show: Fire Exhibit ‘Der roter Hahn.’”

The bird with flaming feathers

hops over the solemn city roofs.

A new talking point: civil air defense ...

in the arcades of the old town

an army takes up position to extinguish

the conflagration, an armada of blackened vans.

The climax is when, in the dark of night,

a training house is set ablaze.

Fountains of foam and light, hurray!

The destruction of the city street gives

a foretaste of the future.

A million Reichsmarks is what it costs

the state to lose a little town,

40,000 a single farmer’s house.

Long before the bombs, the firestorm

in which the city will perish, the skies are

lit with signs that advertise fire insurance.

The hoses lie on the asphalt

like fat boa constrictors,

rolled up by exhausted men

who have tamed the inferno.

Dresden, the press proudly declares,

has the most modern fire service in Europe.

And with that Death, the bitter little man

from the old German fairy tales,

rubs his hands with glee.

In “Die Mücke,” a café with dancing,

ladies and gentlemen fox-trot across

the floor, flushed at the show.

And then it all went well again.

Legal protection and rescue services:

the state myths of the moment.

Soon there is child benefit and animal

welfare for our household cats and dogs.

Write that in a letter home to the ones you love

and remember the new tariffs:

“Airmail saves you precious time.”

Was that grandmother standing

in the crowd by the entrance hall

at Blüherpark, in a people’s queue

at the edge of the road, behind

the brown-shirted stewards? That tiny woman,

with a handbag clutched to her chest,

could really be her from behind.

(Very soon she will be pregnant, just

a girl eighteen years of age.

And then once more, while her husband,

butcher by trade, is already a soldier

marching his way through Europe.)

Another spring. Imperial gardens on display:

for six months the magic of flowers

seems to ease the effects of the new

constraints, the new laws.

A hymn to existence, a sacred hymn

to the beauty of nature around us,

the newspapers swoon in the

grandiose style of the times.

More powerful than any Olympiad,

closer to a feminine aesthetic sense,

like Hitler’s hands, eunuch-white.

Departure of the concert steamer, the Leipzig:

on the bank at the embarkation point,

swastika flags flutter in the summer breeze.

An ice cream seller has opened his parlor

on the quay and waits for the

regiments of Hitler Youth to pass.

The city is the clearing. What could it know

of the aerial shots that would reveal

its wound, long before the thunderclap

that always comes after lightning? Often

a forest of raised arms stood there.

Then all of a sudden no one knew

what it was that brought the madness,

turned their heads for twelve long years.

Time had moved on. Dumb force

drenched everything in a primal light.

The pavements gleamed and thunderclouds

rolled down across the bridges,

with the clatter of refugees,

handcarts and armored tanks.

And then I knew that the cursed history

of this people, from the moment they

had taken on that fatal badge,

could only be recounted from below.

From the cellars, the gray corners

of air-raid shelters, with the sirens

screaming, the children in their

moments of final helplessness.

I was born in Weißer Hirsch —

a wealthy quarter spared by the bombs.

And I exist, like these images exist,

that bear witness to a life gone by,

but say nothing of the dead. Mother

was in safety when the bombers came.

She recalls the blown-out windows,

white curtains streaming from them,

the scorching heat of the winter night.

A neighbor took the children in, sought

refuge in the cellar, that’s what saved them.

When the house was hit, the entrance

reduced to rubble, she took the children,

made for open country, to the meadows

by the Elbe, heading out of town.

That’s when the second wave rolled in

and unleashed the fire storm.

“Here we are in the Lößnitz valley for the cider,”

wrote an unknown correspondent.

The postcard shows a glorious summer’s day.

Translated from the German

Notes:

All postcards and photographs are from the collection of the author.

Source: Poetry (December 2017)