Some photographs and notes taken on my journey to trace the ends of Europe across the continent - enough reading European philosophy and history, it was time to live it.
I
flee Australia searching for history, seeking my culture in that old world of
Europe. My first stop is Berlin, where
history ended in 1989, where history entered my mind, my earliest memory of
watching the news and thinking: “this is an event, this is me watching the
world change.” Little did I know I was
watching the world disappear, watching, as desperate people hacked away at the
grey concrete of the wall, as all that was solid melted into air, not by the
force of their hammers, but by the force of what lay beyond, by the force of
the destruction of the possibility of beyond.
A new
tourist I mistakenly do that which will hide all history from me: a walking
tour. The guide tells us how he worked
in Berlin for the British Secret Service, helping refugees from the East settle
in the West. Capitalism saw no borders
within Germany, it had already broken down the Chinese Wall, it knew that this
one too would fall. My guide tells us
that he had named his daughter Maureen, after ‘mauer,’ German for wall. The word inscribed at intervals on the double
line of cobbles that traces the path of the Wall. Later I follow this line, East on my left,
West to the right.
Another
guide (I have not abandoned them yet), a week later in Prague, tells me of how
forty years previously he had come home to find a Soviet tand in the flower bed
outside his house, inside his wife in a pool of blood. He doesn’t tell me what the Soviet soldiers had
done, only that his wife is still in a wheelchair. This is why he works, 70 years old, a speaker
of seven languages, once a great Czech opera singer, now he must repeat the
history he only wants to forget. I am the
only one on the Communism walking tour.
“Why do you want to know these things?” he asks. All he wants to do is forget, the loss of his
state pension does not allow this, he must work, he is forced to remember. “Why would you leave your perfect life in
Australia to come and see these horrors?
Go home, forget Communist Czechoslovakia, live your life,” he tells me.
But I
want more than that life, I am searching for the beyond glimpsed backwards
through those chinks in the Wall on television all those years ago. Something else, something to believe in. In Berlin I visit Hegel’s grave, just to make
sure he is dead. The great thinker of
historicity, of the end of history. In
Jena I look up at the window out of which he watched Napoleon ride past in 1806:
“Today I saw the spirit of the world,” he wrote to a friend. What do I see gazing back up at that window
looking and longing to be touched by history?
A tram rumbles past, there is a market in the square, I catch the train
back to Weimar and my hostel. His grave
was small, there were bullet makes on the mausoleums in the cemetery, another
war for another freedom.
The
streets in Mostar are also full of bullet holes. “This was the front line,” I am told, the war
raged along this street, now all the houses are left in ruin, the monuments and
public squares have not been rebuilt. Is
this because people want to remember, or want to forget? When the war broke out the Bosnians and
Croats joined forces to drive out the Serbs, that done they then turned on each
other, bisecting the town. The bridge here once connected the world in a way
that Napoleon never did, destroyed in the war but rebuilt, now the tourists
come here in the summer to dive off: fifteen metres to the water below, they
get a certificate afterwards.
A few
days earlier, there are fewer bullet holes in Sarajevo, but the streets have
the stars of falling shells. I see the
Holiday Inn, outside it sniper alley, in the distance the tops of the high
rises where the snipers took aim as people ran through the open spaces. I see the Latin Bridge, where Franz Ferdinand
was assassinated, where the world descended into the maelstrom of mechanised
war, where the twentieth century started.
Sarajevo captures that century - beginning and end - and its
meaninglessness. But here the people
dance in the bars, the music is sung in Bosnian, like a reminder (remainder) of
a world before globalisation. Perhaps in
excising the twentieth century from their memories the people have done away
with the end of history. I am never more
foreign.
“My
brother, he live Melbourne,” the taxi driver tells me. The bus station is way outside the city. Buses from Belgrade only go to the Serbian
side of Sarajevo, old divisions lie deep.
In Australia football teams can no longer have ethnic names, it causes
too much violence when the Serbs play the Croats. “Idiots, we came here to leave that history
behind, to forget all that,” a friend with Yugoslav heritage once told me. But the opposite is true. If the twentieth century is removed in
Sarajevo, as history continues to progress, then in Australia the twentieth
century is the only history they have. Founded
peacefully in 1901, Australia must create itself the myth of violence necessary
for statehood. It violent origin is an
export import business: export soldiers
to die on a faraway peninsula, import a creation myth of violence. State violence and power is legitimised
through the enforcement of memory that everyone else would rather forget,
history is fetishized. Franz Ferdinand and the importance of that narrow bridge
in Sarajevo repeats itself across football stadiums and tennis courts, removed from
historicity. I continue to seek the
ghost of Hegel.
I try
to provoke him. In Weimar I visit the
Nietzsche archive, there is the chair he sat stilly in after his sister moved
him here. A madman, a mute idiot,
perhaps the ubermensch? His death mask looks
sad, a certain pathos cast in the closed eyes, the long moustache. Perhaps he knew that one day Hitler would
visit his sister here in this archive – a maunsoleum, where he never wanted to
come. This madness was not the joyful
wisdom he sought, the dancing star of chaos.
I travel from Weimar to Buchenwald.
Barbed wire traces through the green trees, the silence is still, the
air clear, but in the forest are plain posts, the now marked graves of Soviet
prisoners strangled in a small and dark basement, hung up on hooks that line
the walls like a changing room. I think
of the violence of sports, the air is dank, I run back to the forest.
Prague
has the death mask of Jan Palach, whose self-immolation is commemorated by a
mound in the ground outside the national museum. His cracked voice speaks, recorded as he lay
dying of his burns. I cannot understand
it, but there is rage and resolution in those foreign words, hidden behind the
determination of that scarred mask. Once
again a Soviet tank stands beside his memorial, it is the forty-year
anniversary of the invasion. Why would
you want to see this? Why would you want
to forget, where would civilisation go then, what for poetry?
Auschwitz
has fewer trees than Buchenwald, and more barbed wire. More buildings, more bunks, more toilets and
more tourists. The size needed to
contain it all amazes me. Big numbers
are always written small, but the vastness of the expanse of the camp astounds
me, foundations are cast across the landscape like a geometry of terror, the order
is the worst thing. I watch nuns
listening to the headphone of the guided tour; girls casually do cartwheels on
an endless straight road, bored and out of the way. I avoid the tours now, I no longer want some
else’s experience, I have to find my own way.
Some doors are open and I am the only one walking along the rows of
bunks (five people to each) and rows of latrines. The train tracks end at the remains of the
gas chambers, blown up by the Russians when they found them. I am the only one to stare beyond, where
would the tracks continue?
In
Budapest the atrocities all roll into one.
The terror house documents the Fascists and the Communists, those
adversaries who ended up starring across another boundary in Berlin. From there I see the Body Worlds exhibit, the
commoditisation of death, dressed up as science to remove the personality. Now we only see the organs, without the
barrier of skin and touch they are no longer bounded. I am sickened, from one death factory to
another. But Budapest remains
melancholy. “Our country used to be so
much bigger,” the hostel owner tells me.
He is unkempt, but wearing a suit, like a caricature of the bedraggled
ex-academic. Maybe he too was once an
opera singer, or a philosopher who, like Lukács became a party member, before
the fall of Communism condemned him to the purgatory of the tourist trade. No wonder he is melancholy when he must mop
up the vomit of drunken backpackers. But
the land that used to be Hungary, that he laments the loss of, I am also told be
Romanians is theirs, by Moldavians, by Poles and Ukrainians. It is the same land, just the countries
shift, no wonder there are wars and death, and so many skeletons and ghosts,
but so few remembrances of them.
Perhaps
this is why the bones of the Sedlac Ossuary do not sicken me the way the
plastic corpses in Budapest do. These
deaths are supposed to be remembered - the plagues, the wars, the invasions -
memento mori. They remember not only the
end of this life, but that for the Catholics who keep them, that there is
another beyond. I find another barrier,
past the skin and the organs is the limit of death itself, no wonder skulls
smile, this memory extends back from my future, from my death to come, haunted
in advance, I find the history I was seeking not in the past but in the future.
There
should be more bodies in Timisoara, Romanina, but they are not there only their
images, but perhaps that is all that was there in the first place. The revolution against Romanian communism
started in Timisoara, started with these bodies that are not there. For the revolution death served a different
memory, lived a second life. The
anti-communist revolution reflected perfectly Marx’s injunction to “let the
dead bury the dead.” Here the living
made the dead live again. Recently
entombed corpses were exhumed and tortured for the sake of the news cameras, an
atrocity was simulated to stimulate the revolution, the dead were resurrected
and re-remembered for another reason.
The images of the cameras lied, just as the body could not be left to
lie, television ended at its own hands, as its spectacular images legitimised
themselves and the logic that propagated them.
There is nothing for me to photograph there, the whole town is already
an image, I pass through quickly.
Marx
himself is buried in London, but no bullet holes mark the mausoleums in
Highgate Cemetery. His grave is much
bigger than Hegel’s, a challenge itself, just like the words inscribed upon it:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point
however is to change it.” The future
intrudes again, Unlike Hegel, Marx’s ghost haunts Highgate not from the 19th
century, but from beyond, further than the 21st. I have been seeking the wrong histories. Four years later I return to Berlin, this
time I touch the Wall, up close, it is no longer an object and it matters all
the more. I no longer trace the path of
the Wall, but this time those of the tunnels, dug by people trying to escape. There is no longer somewhere to escape to, but
perhaps it is time to start digging again.
