The Arnholds, however, preferred the antipodean: the very sort of modernist work Adolf Ziegler chose in Munich for the Degenerate Art show. Between 19 July and 30 November 1937, he displayed 650 paintings, sculptures, books, and prints in a deliberately haphazard mess throughout what had once been the Institute of Archeology, a site selected for its dark, narrow, unpleasant stairwells and rooms.
The exhibition featured works by Beckmann, Chagall, Dix, Ernst, Grosz, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Nolde, and Schwitters, among many others. That is, its visual argument went: depraved artists were Jewish whether they were Jewish or not.
:::: Contemporary Berlin has been hung like those pieces.
:::: A Polish saying: One German a beer, two Germans an organization, three Germans a war.
:::: Because when traveling you’re aware of maneuvering inside the spacesuit made of your own skin, which isn’t the same skin you wore 40 years ago, let alone 40 months ago, let alone 40 weeks, let alone, quite, 40 seconds.
:::: For me this is exactly what writing the contemporary feels like.
:::: As rector at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger prevented students from holding a book burning, from hanging an anti-Semitic poster at the institution’s entrance, yet simultaneously signaled his sympathies with the Nazi student leaders’ activism.
:::: Impressionism. Expressionism. Fauvism. Dada. Surrealism.
Too Jewish.
:::: But O. doesn’t want to play the stereotype game, the Jeopardy of fraudulent categories.
Here is all he can do: all he can do is write what he thinks he thinks he sees and hears, understanding that ignorance will invariably be the foregone conclusion, that not-knowing will be every narrative’s terminus.
:::: Theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from happening.
Advised Jean-Martin Charcot, teacher of both William James and Sigmund Freud, the latter of whom optimistically underestimated the Nazis and remained in Vienna for almost a month after the Anschluss in March 1938 before fleeing.
:::: On the opening day of the Degenerate Art show, Beckmann fled to Amsterdam.
A few months earlier, Alfred Flechtheim, a leading German art dealer, died penniless in London.
A year after the show closed, Kirchner shot himself through the heart — a gesture Debord would repeat in 1994 in a remote French village as his final act of defiance, his final off-stage anti-spectacle.
:::: Heinrich von Kleist shot his lover through the heart as well, as they stood on the shores of Lake Wannsee, but he chose to shoot himself in the head, careful to place the bullet so as not to disturb his elaborate hairdo.
:::: The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.
Pointed out Francis Picabia.
:::: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Advised Beckett.
:::: Otto Dix fled to the countryside and began painting unpeopled landscapes that offended precisely no one.
:::: Some not-news that often feels like news if we don’t think about it too long or hard: We live in shards.
Why would we choose to write otherwise?
:::: Nolde, whom the Reichskulturkammer banned from buying art supplies, chose to carry on secretly with watercolors because they wouldn’t give him away through their telltale oil pong.
:::: Apfeltorte. Mandelhörnchen. Schwedische marzipan.
:::: Restless Berlin: its urban planning guide the one for the book you’re holding, the architecture its architecture.
:::: Because here is Beckett again, whose work seems empty of politics, and yet who functioned as a courier for the French Resistance after the 1940 German occupation, and yet who referred to those efforts as boy scout stuff, and yet who received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance from the government for them:
Habit is the great deadener.
:::: What I mean to say is this: culture makes believe it is all about remembering, when remembering is pretty much the last thing culture is ever about.
:::: Outside your window today, sparse snowflakes agitate gauzy air.
:::: More not-news, this time from Donna Haraway: Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic.
:::: Or Koestenbaum, redux: One way to be an I is to lose the I.
:::: J.F.K.’s assertion about being a jelly donut has been memed by media ever since: the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times. This novel. That monograph. It became a communal recollection of an adorable malapropism.
The problem is that Kennedy didn’t actually make a grammatical mistake. To a German ear, nothing sounds amiss. In fact, the gaff would have clanked had he said Ich bin Berliner, meaning I am a person from Berlin, as echt Berliners can and do.
By adding the indefinite article ein before the noun, however, Kennedy cast his sentence into the figurative: he was claiming he felt like a person living in Berlin rather than claiming residence. He was declaring solidarity with the German people in perfect German.
During the speech, he used the phrase twice. He had it carefully written out in English phonetics before him because he knew not a word of the language he was speaking:
Ish bin ein Bearleener.
:::: Here is Debord, back from the country of theory ghosts: The new towns of the technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest of indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded; their motto might well be:
On this spot nothing will ever happen — and nothing ever has.
:::: The fellow fellow living in the apartment above yours at the Academy enigmatically rearranges his or her furniture every night, beginning around 11:00 p.m. You can hear chairs and maybe a desk dragged back and forth. Maybe a small sofa.
:::: In Berlin everything can and has happened.
:::: Early each spring, I am told, Germans develop a fetish for white asparagus.
:::: Pockmarks on the facades, columns, walls throughout the city: the war still going on everywhere.
All you have to do is look.
:::: The American Academy provides a bus tour of the city. Unnervingly well-informed, our guide, a freelance art historian named Billie, tells us a version, I imagine, of what all guides here tell all tourists.
At the end, in private, I hear one of the fellows complain to another that Billie has done no more than perpetuate the clichéd Western narrative about the great triumph of democratic goodness over East Germany’s shabby authoritarianism.
Does the fellow mean to imply the East somehow wasn’t dingy and despotic?
The Stasi wasn’t known as the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agency in the world; didn’t boast half a million informers, 10,000 younger than 18; didn’t infiltrate all industrial plants, schools, universities, hospitals; didn’t drill holes through hotel-room and apartment walls to spy on its own citizens; didn’t employ psychological intimidation as well as physical torture (including the use of cold, damp, overcrowded, filthy, airless cells; sleep deprivation; standing upright until unconsciousness ensued; proto-waterboarding); didn’t thereby plant regiments of Foucault’s invisible police behind its people’s foreheads?