Half an hour after missing this opportunity I was sitting on the balcony of my hotel room. Thunder rolled across the sky; the rain soon began pouring down and it suddenly turned very cold, which did not surprise me, for it had snowed the day before in the upper Engadine even though it was midsummer. Now and then lightning flashed, briefly lighting up the Alpine garden that covered the whole slope behind the hotel. It had been laid out in long years of work by a man called Josef Hoflehner, with whom I had struck up a conversation on the afternoon when I saw him working in his rockery. Josef Hoflehner, who must have been well over eighty, told me that during the last war he was a prisoner in a wood-cutting squad in Scotland, working in Inverness and all over the Highlands. He had been a schoolteacher by profession, he told me, first in upper Austria and then in Vorarlberg. I don’t remember what made me ask him where he had trained, but I remember he told me it was in Kundmanngasse in Vienna, in the same institution and at the same time as Wittgenstein. He called Wittgenstein a prickly character, but would say no more about him.
Before going to sleep that evening in Bregenz, I read the last pages of a biography of Verdi, and perhaps for that reason I dreamed of the way the people of Milan, when the maestro lay dying in January 1901, put down straw in the street outside his house to muffle the sound of the horses’ hooves, so that he could pass away in peace. In my dream I saw the street in Milan covered with straw, and the carriages and cabs driving soundlessly up and down it. At the end of the street, however, which went uphill at a curiously steep angle, there was a deep black sky with lightning flashing over it, just like the sky Wittgenstein saw as a boy of six from the balcony of the family’s summer house on the Hochreith.
An Attempt at Restitution
I can still see us in the days before Christmas 1949 in our living room above the Engelwirt inn in Wertach. My sister was eight at the time, I myself was five, and neither of us had yet really got accustomed to our father, who since his return from a French POW camp in February 1947 had been employed in the local town of Sonthofen as a manager (as he put it), and was at home only from Saturday to midday on Sunday. In front of us, open on the table, lay the new Quelle mail-order catalog, the first I ever saw, containing what seemed to me a fairy-tale assortment of wares, from which it was decided in the course of the evening and after long discussions, in which our father got his sensible way, to order a pair of camel’s-hair slippers with metal buckles for each of us children. I think zip fastenings were still quite rare at the time.
But in addition to the camel’s-hair slippers we ordered a card game called the Cities Quartet based on pictures of the cities of Germany, and we often played it during the winter months either when our father was at home or when there was another visitor to make a fourth. Have you got Oldenburg, we asked, have you got Wuppertal, have you got Worms? I learned to read from these names, which I had never heard before. I remember that it was a long time before I could imagine anything about these cities, so different did they sound from the local place-names of Kranzegg, Jungholz, and Unterjoch, except the places shown on the cards in the game: the giant Roland, the Porta Nigra, Cologne Cathedral, the Crane Gate in Danzig, the fine houses around a large square in Breslau.
In fact, in the Cities Quartet, as I reconstruct it from memory, Germany was still undivided — at the time of course I thought nothing of that — and not only undivided but intact, for the uniformly dark brown pictures of the cities, which gave me at an early age the idea of a dark fatherland, showed the cities of Germany without exception as they had been before the war: the intricate gables below the citadel of the Nürnberger Burg, the half-timbered houses of Brunswick, the Holsten Gate of the Old Town in Lübeck, the Zwinger and the Brühl Terraces.
The Cities Quartet marked not only the beginning of my career as a reader but the start of my passion for geography, which emerged soon after I began schooclass="underline" a delight in topography that became increasingly compulsive as my life went on and to which I have devoted endless hours bending over atlases and brochures of every kind. Inspired by the Cities Quartet, I soon found Stuttgart on the map. I saw that compared with the other German cities it was not too far from us. But I could not imagine a journey to it, any more than I could think what the city itself might look like, for whenever I thought of Stuttgart all I could see was the picture of Stuttgart Central Station on one of the cards in the game, a bastion of natural stone designed by the architect Paul Bonatz before the First World War, as I later learned, and completed soon after it, a building that in its angular brutalist architecture already to some extent anticipated what was to come, perhaps even, if I may be permitted so fanciful a mental leap, anticipated the few lines written by an English schoolgirl of about fifteen (judging by the clumsy handwriting) on holiday in Stuttgart to a Mrs. J. Winn in Saltburn in the county of Yorkshire on the back of a picture postcard, which came into my hands at the end of the 1960s in a Salvation Army junk shop in Manchester, and which shows three other tall buildings in Stuttgart and Bonatz’s railway station, curiously enough from exactly the same viewpoint as in our long-lost German Cities Quartet game.
Betty, for such was the name of the girl spending the summer in Stuttgart, writes on August 10, 1939, barely three weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War — when my father was already approaching the Polish border in Slovakia with his convoy of trucks — Betty writes that the people in Stuttgart are very friendly, and she has “been out tramping, sunbathing and sightseeing, to a German birthday party, to the pictures and to a festival of the Hitler Youth.”
I acquired this card, with the picture of the railway station and the message on the back, on one of my long walks through the city of Manchester, before I had ever been to Stuttgart myself. When I was growing up in the Allgäu in the postwar period you did not travel much, and if you did go for an outing now and then as the “economic miracle” set in, it was by bus to the Tyrol, to Vorarlberg, or at most into Switzerland. There was no call for excursions to Stuttgart or any of the other cities that still looked so badly damaged, and so until I left my native land at the age of twenty-one it was still largely unknown territory to me, remote and with something not quite right about it.
It was May 1976 when I first got out of a train at Bonatz’s station, for someone had told me that the painter Jan Peter Tripp, with whom I had been to school in Oberstdorf, was living in Reinsburgstrasse in Stuttgart. I remember that visit to him as a remarkable occasion, because with the admiration I immediately felt for Tripp’s work it also occurred to me that I too would like to do something one day besides giving lectures and holding seminars. At the time Tripp gave me a present of one of his engravings, showing the mentally ill judge Daniel Paul Schreber with a spider in his skull — what can there be more terrible than the ideas always scurrying around our minds? — and much of what I have written later derives from this engraving, even in my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.