I began the sketches for the Variation on a Theme by Bruegel that very night. Huddled in a hole carved out of the clay, I drew with a ferocity I hadn’t known I was capable of feeling. For Robert’s torn-off legs, for Thomas’s charred body, for the blood spurting from Klaus’s ears, for the eyes bugging out of Günter’s head after it was shot open. . “One more down!” one after the other. With names I no longer remember and lives that could have been my own.
Every time someone died by my side, I asked myself the same question I asked when I lost Konrad many years later: “Why him and not me?” Then, unable to accept that my continued breathing was just a matter of luck, that, no matter what I did, it was impossible for me to alter the course of events, I grasped at any explanation to try to make the arbitrariness of my existence bearable and overcome the distress I felt over my survival. “He took too many risks,” I would tell myself. Or “He wasn’t crafty enough.” Or “He didn’t clean his rifle well enough.” The idea that it could all have a palpable cause helped me with the devastating routine of the trench. It’s different with Alma and Konrad though. Hard as I try, I can’t find anything that consoles me.
Of all the possible ways to die, gas was what terrified me most. Every time the rattle sounded to warn us a toxic cloud was on its way, the idea of putting on my gas mask was so distressing that I would wait till the last minute, when the burning in my eyes and throat was unbearable. I couldn’t stand the lack of pure air, the veins in my temples about to explode, the fogged glass. . Many years have passed, but all the nerves in my body still tense up when I hear a child playing with a rattle. I can’t help it.
After putting the front behind me, I struggled for a long time to convince myself that there was any point to starting over, going back to the place where I’d left behind my previous life and resume it, to keep going forward. After five months in the sanatorium at Görden, unable to go it alone, I had to move back in with my father. For almost a year, my life was hampered by insomnia and anxiety attacks. My father, more affectionate than he’d ever been before, really tried to lighten up the situation, but I only had to observe him when he lowered his guard to realize that a listless son filled with nervous tics wasn’t exactly the outcome he’d been hoping for from my war experience.
To cheer me up, he would buy drawing materials and take me to the Gebergrund valley or around Meissen, two of his favorite hiking spots, in search of landscapes to paint. Time and again he came up against my helplessness in front of a blank canvas, but he did manage to make me feel like a kid again, captivated by his stories.“What a contradiction, don’t you think?” he asked me one day, as we sat in front of a hillock covered in vines, with the sun’s rays illuminating many nuances amid the leaves.“It’s impossible to make any of these greens from the plants around us. .” I didn’t say anything, but I remember that, while my father kept talking about the vintage angels of the apocalypse, I thought that it was even more incongruous that the gas that could have charred my lungs was the same color as the chlorophyll that allows us to breathe.
Despite my father’s good intentions, I was unable to climb out of the well until a member of my company sent me my drawings from the front. Recovering the sketchbook I’d given up for lost gave me a good jolt, but it pushed me to start painting again. Little by little, as if my only possibility of moving on to the next chapter depended on it, the project of Variation on a Theme by Bruegel became my obsession. I sensed that, if I were able to see it through, able to distance myself enough from what I’d experienced to capture it in a painting, I would be back to my old self, without nightmares and trembling hands. I worked on it for two years. The canvas, 2.50 x 4 meters, is the largest I’ve ever painted. Like in some sort of macabre dance, a throng of skeletons lay waste to a battlefield. The soldiers, transformed into a grotesque swarm of horrified faces and blood-covered bodies, try to cling to life, but can’t resist death’s assault. The landscape that envelops them is a chaos of cadavers, pit craters and wrecked trenches, of star shells, tethered hot-air balloons in flames, charred trees and dead animals. In one of the corners, a skeleton drags a soldier by his feet. One of the soldier’s hands has been run through with a bayonet.
Shortly before finishing it, and despite my father’s objections — who, without telling me anything, had asked the Bürckels to discreetly keep an eye on me — I returned to Berlin. Living alone again and resuming a routine of work in the studio, gatherings at the cafés, and evenings in my friends’ studios helped me recover. Not entirely, but enough that I didn’t live in fear of the more awkward symptoms of my illness showing up at any moment.
I exhibited the painting, along with some pages from my war sketchbook, in a group show at the Hans Goltz Gallery. When Erika saw it, after reminding me of the day she threw the watercolors into the garden fountain, she made a confused face. “Being that this is your first exhibition,” she said,“you could have chosen a different piece. People will think you don’t know how to paint.” It was more or less what the critics who visited the gallery pronounced: “Outlandish figures,” “strident, poorly-combined colors,” “preposterous composition,” “unpatriotic aberration. .” Plus all the comments my father hid from me, which I found in a folder filled with clippings in one of his desk drawers after his death. I have to admit that bad reviews are hard to accept, especially at first, when you are too reliant on other people’s opinions, but over time I’ve learned that you can get something useful even out of their biases and incomprehension.
Of all the paintings on Hofer’s list, the Variation was the most arduous and painful to reproduce. Not only because of the size of the original and its particularly intense and bright colors, which are difficult to get with watercolors, but because of the memories, which plagued me so virulently that, at moments, I feared my hands would start trembling again and I would have to desist. But, even though there were times when I had to paint with my heart in my throat, I managed to finish it by thinking about how disappointed Hofer and “the artist from Prussia” would be if I pulled off what I was planning.
Yesterday Georges Braque died. It’s hard for me to explain, but today I feel I’m a bit more alone. I felt that same way about Matisse and Kurt Weill. Even though I never met them, their disappearance felt like an abandonment. Almost like a low blow. And now Georges Braque. . Despite the difference in our ages and career paths, I’ve never felt as close to any other painter. I would never have dared to tell him, I’d have been too embarrassed and afraid to seem pretentious, but I always saw him as a kindred spirit. Solitary and discreet, reserved, apprehensive about showing his work, patient and tirelessly hardworking. . I visited him for the first time at his Varengeville studio. On our strolls, I realized that his words were like his paintings. Austere and precise. Like the black flint that streaked the white chalk cliffs we had to skirt to reach the beach, where he began gathering stones, starfish, and shells. Even a bit of blue fishing net.“Working to perfect the soul. That’s all that counts. The rest is just fool’s gold,” he told me. Separating what counts from the trappings. . I don’t know if I’ve achieved that. I often have the feeling I spent too much time groping around in the dark. I should have been shrewder about how I used my time, and focused on what I now know was the most important thing.