Toby Litt
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Walberberg 2005: Whose English? |
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Two Short Walks in Germany
I.
Out of the Walberberg monastery grounds and right, down the gentle incline of the hill; then right again, towards where I've heard there are a couple of rarely-open shops. This is a dormitory town. One of the conference delegates told me it felt far more monastic than the monastery. Townsfolk are rarely seen on the streets. If you catch them, they are furtively repairing the exterior of their houses or getting into their cars to go elsewhere. These cars are all very sensible. These houses are all very practical, but each has some instance of kitsch laid upon it – some obviously removeable detail. This one has a front door decorated with a metal spider's web, that one a stag's head above the entrance. Neighbours are, I think, reassured by these – reassured that the inhabitants of this or that house participate in innocuous village values.
Many of the houses I pass, to my puzzlement, have scary plastic clowns in the windows. With the first one, I assumed a child's birthday; by the third, I thought (joking) that it was religious (Ronald McDonald's Passover); after the twentieth, I knew it must be some kind of festival. The Rhineland Dormitory Town Scary Plastic Clown Early Spring Festival, perhaps. When I asked, later, I was told that it was to do with ‘karneval'. A less carnivalesque place than Walberberg, on the still surface at least, it would be hard to imagine. As I continued in the direction of the shops, I was struck by how ungenerous the front gardens of the houses were. There seemed very little desire to give pleasure to passersby, or to delightfully humiliate neighbours to left and right. Fine, you say, it was early spring. But even in summer gravel, concrete and Tarmac do not flower. No joy in growing things was exhibited. There was no exhibition at all. The houses all looked inwards. Only the clowns looked out. It is a town that is elsewhere.
II.
Out of the monastery carpark, right down the hill; left at the crossroads, off towards the motorway underpass. I have my Walkman on. I am listening to Beethoven's op. 135 String Quartet. In this famous Quartet, Beethoven asks the question, ‘Must it be?' and answers, ‘It must be.' To my right is a ploughed, snow-dusted field of many acres. I think of Anselm Kiefer's paintings of German fields, soil seen in an awareness of blood. I think also of the last line of Pasternak's ‘Hamlet': ‘Life is not a walk across a field.' As always, I want to check with Pasternak. Ask him, ‘Why?' Because a walk across a field is too easy? Too direct? Too unassailed? We see Hamlet in a graveyard but never in a field. He doesn't exist there. To my left, up a bank of shaggy grass, are industrial greenhouses. Far off on the right are chimneys spurting clouds – I reach fifty and stop counting. There are enough chimneys. Under the bridge, under the autobahn, and left, through a small, swish town. I see what I am walking towards: a tall water-tower, rendered interesting by the mock-battlements around its top.
The people of the village next to Walberberg once built castles in the air, but they required them to have a practical use as well. As I reach the icy road leading up to the water-tower, the Quartet asks its question. ‘Must it be?' There are a middle-aged couple ahead of me, walking a small dog. I don't want them to see me, to find me an object of curiosity. The water-tower is built within a small park, surrounded by a grove of beautiful trees. I step off the road and onto some frozen grass. I walk up to the fence and look into the pleasure garden of the castle, into the restricted area surrounding the municipal water-tower. ‘It must be.'
Toby Litt
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