The Illogic of Kassel

20

It seemed to me a more than demonstrable fact that every time communication problems arose between the two of us and our relationship collapsed, it recovered immediately. It was as if the acts of ruin and recuperation really could make up a single entity and share the instant perfectly well.

And so, talking of this and that, in reality philosophizing or aspiring to philosophize — possibly the most pivotal activity in contemporary art — darkness was falling over Kassel and extinguishing everything sluggishly, like any old Tuesday on Earth.

Suddenly, Boston showed signs of taking a leap forward, embarking on a surprising new ode to walking, at the same time proposing we go and see a sound installation, which, according to her, was not far, but actually required another long stroll. We had to get to the old central station, the end of platform 10.

During the war, she said, that platform had been the main setting for the deportation of Jews; now it was the setting for the resonant sound installation Study for Strings, by the Scottish artist Susan Philipsz.

I balked gently at this new initiative, telling her that, as she had work to do, I didn’t want to bother her any longer and, moreover, I had to get to the hotel, because I was beginning to feel my energy running out. She seemed not to have heard me, so I stressed my need to go to my room in the Hessenland and immediately set up a cabin, insulating myself at that early evening hour from any sign of the continuity of life outside.

I didn’t tell her, but among other things I had a terrible fear of her seeing the unpleasant expression I habitually started to have at that hour; I knew if I let a few more minutes go by, my face was going to get gloomy, my personality turn bitter, everything was going to get extremely complicated, and this time I couldn’t rely on the help of Dr. Collado’s tablets.

And while I was insisting, I remembered The Walk, by Robert Walser, where, after the more than lengthy description of a happy day’s wandering by the rambler who walks his way through the book, we arrive at a final page as perfect as it is gloomy, with some last words containing a revealing change of mood on the part of the walker: “I had risen up, to go home, for it was late now and everything was dark.”

Walser’s tiny dodge reverses the rules of the game for the book, and the happy wandering comes to a sudden end. The streets go completely dark. If up to that point the walker had always professed to feeling good (tremendously good), to being constantly delighted by everything, all of a sudden he tells us it has grown dark and things have changed, to the extent that the book has reached its end and the rambler wishes to take refuge in his den.

Soon after this, I was going on about my health to María Boston when abruptly — as if night were falling on my words — she interrupted me to say that Study for Strings was a better place than anywhere else to meditate on the great Collapse. Her delivery was so forceful, I was left rather mired in the boggy state brought on by my fragility, as if carrying my grandfather’s two pounds of mud on the soles of my shoes. And this caused me to wonder whether Boston was attempting to keep hold of me, or if she only insisted on the walk so I’d say no and that way couldn’t subsequently claim she’d had no intention of spending further time with me.

I soon saw that things were heading in a different direction, perhaps still a touch darker than I had imagined, and perhaps even more complicated. It was necessary, vital, that I go to that platform, Boston said, looking at me with the same rage she had on that previous, horrible occasion. Never before in my life had anyone pressed me in such a manner to go to a train station. I asked, timidly, why this displacement was so essential. The sun was setting almost completely and the clouds over Kassel had been turning an intense scarlet. Because, Boston said, almost chewing her words, I want to go on walking awhile, I like walking, and also it’s about time you finally understand you’re not in a Mediterranean country, but a profoundly tragic one. It’s unbelievable you don’t know the relationship between a bottle of Aryan perfume and avant-garde art, she said, revealing at last why she was so angry with me.

That had surely been my big mistake of the day: not being convinced that Braun’s perfume could be related to avant-garde art. Although a new question arose: did avant-garde art really exist? Much was said about an art that was ahead of its time, but for me it was far from clear it existed. The very expression avant-garde seemed to have a different meaning now from what it had meant at the beginning of the last century. . but this wasn’t the right time to talk about that.

During the arduous walk that followed, I was able to discover, among other things, that Kassel’s great postwar reconstruction didn’t come about until 1955, when its citizens bravely opted to take a much more insecure path than the one other compatriots had chosen; instead of industrial development, they decided on rebirth of a cultural nature, putting Arnold Bode — an architect and lecturer — in charge of the first Documenta, which had a clearly restorative character. Germany under Hitler had classified contemporary art as degenerate, expelling and murdering its artists, but now it paid tribute to the art of the twenties and thirties, with an exhibition that, according to Bode, “finally brought art to the workers.”

When at last we arrived at the city’s old central station, we headed with slow steps to the far end of platform 10. Once there, I was able to understand almost in an instant why that sound installation, Study for Strings, was a better place than any other to think about the Nazi years (what Boston called the great Collapse).

Everybody knows that most so-called avant-garde art these days requires one part that is visual and another that is discursive to back it up and try to explain what we are seeing. Curiously, nothing of the latter was in evidence in Study for Strings. At Susan Philipsz’s installation, it was enough to simply position oneself at the end of platform 10 to understand it all at once; there was no need for a leaflet that would finish off the story being told there.

Study for Strings was a somber installation, a simple piece that went directly to the heart of the great tragedy, the end of the utopia of a humanizing world. Philipsz had situated loudspeakers in an enclosed area of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof that were audible to people walking to the end of that stretch of platform — exactly the same stretch on which a great number of Jewish families waited for the train that would transport them to concentration camps; from these loudspeakers came beautiful but devastatingly sad music: a sort of funeral march for those who died before their time called Study for Strings. It was a composition that in Kassel 2012 harked back to the memory of the Holocaust. Its composer, the Czech musician Pavel Haas, wrote the piece for the chamber orchestra in Theresienstadt, shortly before being transferred to Auschwitz, where he died.

We listened to the piece standing, with the same grave expressions as everyone else gathered there, watching other spectators come join that railway music performance that lasted under half an hour, one of many identical performances that were separated by short time intervals and played one after the other on the cheerless platform every day. In the end, a group of around thirty people formed, who had followed the concert of violins and cellos with emotion, remaining motionless and sunk in thought, moved, profoundly silent, as if recovering from the collapse provoked by what they had heard, and also by what they remembered, what had been evoked, almost reenacted, I’d go so far as to say experienced, because it wasn’t difficult to feel vulnerable and tragic there, like a deportee.

I would have liked to confess to Boston that it seemed incredible to me I hadn’t been aware from the outset that the political, or more accurately the eternal illusion of a humanized world was inseparable from artistic endeavors, from the most forward-thinking art. But I said nothing because underneath it all I felt a certain resentment toward her. At that point in the evening, I still hadn’t been able to get over the fact that my question about the Nazi perfume and avant-garde art had led her to punish me, to literally punish me, and, consequently, to oblige me to take one walk too many, perhaps with the severe notion that I’d correct such thoughtlessness at the far end of this platform.

I would have liked to say to her: How could I have been so stupid? Or perhaps the opposite: to reproach her for the fact that she had wanted to scold me like that, albeit in such a subtle manner. Whatever the case, I opted to keep quiet and devote myself to carefully observing the general mental recovery of the people gathered there. I ended up identifying an intense communion between all those strangers, who, having surely come from such different places, had congregated there. It was as if they were all thinking, we were all thinking: we’ve been the moment, and this is the place, and now we know what our problem is. It was as if a spirit, a breeze, a current of morally bracing air, an invisible impetus, were pushing us toward the future, forging forever the union between the diverse members of that spontaneous, suddenly subversive-seeming group.

This is the kind of thing, I thought, that we can never see on television news programs. There are silent conspiracies between people who seem to understand one another without talking, quiet rebellions that take place in the world every minute without being noticed; groups form by chance, unplanned reunions in the middle of the park or on a dark corner, occasionally allowing us to be optimistic about the future of humanity. They join together for a few minutes and then go their separate ways, all enlisting in the hidden fight against moral misery. One day, they will rise up with unheard-of fury and blow everything to bits.