Spurious - Lars Iyer [5]
Freiburg’s a terrible place, we agree at the top of the observation tower on the Schlossberg. It was rebuilt to look exactly like it was before the bombing, that’s the problem, W. decides, and compares it unfavourably to Plymouth, which was rebuilt in an entirely different style.
W. reminds me of Abercrombie’s Plan for Plymouth, published during the war, which saw the city organised in long boulevards, transected by the avenue that runs from the train station to the Hoe. Modernism at its finest, we agree.
But Freiburg’s fake. I remind W. of Warsaw, the central part of which was built in an exact replica of what was there before the bombing—weren’t we at our happiest eating out with our guide in the old square?—‘That’s because it was obviously fake’, W. says. And then there was the warmth and conviviality of the Poles.—‘The Freiburgers are cold, cold!’
Last night, we worked our way through all the wines on the menu, glass by glass. In the end, the Polish waiter sat down with us and told us the bar was terrible. He was keen to try his English: ‘My heart, how do you say it? (he makes the gesture, and we say “aches”) aches for you. Go somewhere else’.
Where should we go? In moments of crisis, W. always asks himself what Kafka would do. What would Kafka do in our place? What would he make of it all? But that’s the point: Kafka would never find himself in our place; he would never have made the mistakes we’ve made.
Kafka was at least a man of Europe, of old Europe. A Europe in crisis, but Europe nonetheless. And us? What does Europe mean to us? What could it ever mean? We’re lost in Europe, two apes, two fools, though one is infinitely more foolish than the other.
We have to get away. But where to? W. takes the situation in hand.
Strasbourg soothes us. Strolling through the wide boulevards, we grow calm and quiet. So many beautiful buildings, one after another! It’s too much, we’re dwarfed, humbled … and for a time, we’re quiet, really quiet, lost in wonder at old Europe.
The phrase, old Europe, is an oxymoron, W. and I decide. The Europeans live in history, as we do not. What can we do but pass across its surface like skaters? Its historical depth is something of which we are only half-aware, we decide. It troubles us, it makes us feel uneasy, but in the end we can have no relationship to it.
What did we say to the European professor who asked a whole circle of us how many languages we spoke, rather than read? We can read a whole bunch of languages …, that’s what we said. That’s not what he asked, he said. Not one of us spoke a single language. Most of us hadn’t really been to Europe. None of us thought of ourselves as Europeans …
He was disgusted, of course, W. says. We were disgusted with ourselves. We were mired in self-disgust, our whole circle. We hung our heads. If we could have hung ourselves at that moment, we would have done so.
Strasbourg. Isn’t this where Levinas and Blanchot met for the first time? We remember the photo of them both from Malka’s biography: two students, the one tall and thin, the other cheerful and plump; one dishevelled in a double breasted suit and the other dressed like a dandy with a silver-knobbed cane …
‘Compare our friendship’, says W., ‘to that of Levinas and Blanchot’. Of their correspondence, only a handful of letters survive. Of ours, which take the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, everything survives, though it shouldn’t. Of their near daily exchanges, nothing is known; of our friendship, everything is known, since I, like an idiot, put it all on the internet.
Blanchot was above all discreet, but I am indiscretion itself; Levinas barely spoke of his friend, but I am gossip and idle talk itself. Whereas both men were immensely modest, and weighed everything they said with great consideration, I am immensely immodest, and weigh nothing I say or write with any consideration at all. Whereas both wrote with great care and forethought, I write with neither