39 Books: 2015

In the Spring of 1997, I visited a friend in Kassel, a city in the middle of Germany, home of the Brothers Grimm and Franz Rosenzweig, and not very far from Weimar, hence the visit to the Goethehaus mentioned in the entry for 1989. I hadn't heard of it before and nor had my friend until she got a job there. By coincidence, the tenth edition of the Documenta festival of contemporary art, which I had also not heard of before, was taking place, with Gerhard Richter's large-scale Atlas exhibtion showing at the Fridericianum and Joseph Beuys' das Rudel at the Neue Galerie, so we could add arts tourism as we rekindled our louche student lifestyle.

Unfortunately, bar the Museum für Sepulkrakultur, I don't remember visiting any other exhibitions and now regret not spending more time looking around. But the visual arts are a blindspot for me, as my 2006 entry explains. On the plus side, I did enjoy living there for a few weeks and treasure my souvenir Documenta X tee-shirt with its huge logo, although this wasn't ideal wearing in public later that year when Princess Diana died. 

I'm not sure when I discovered that Beckett had stayed in Kassel many times, but it was before I got there, as I studied the map looking for Landgrafenstraße 5, which is the address on the first entry in volume one of the Beckett correspondence, and sent to none other than James Joyce. Many years later, I discovered that the street name had been snappily renamed to Bodelschwinghstraße and I had stayed a two-minute walk away in Pestalozzistraße.

For many years after, Kassel felt like a secret between me and Beckett, so when I found out one of Europe's best living novelists was publishing a novel about the city and the Documenta, I was taken aback. The first-person narration follows a writer invited to speak at Documenta 13 fifteen years after my visit and comprises the comical convolutions of the circumstances of the visit and the "atmosphere of fatality" in Europe at the time that led him "to see the world as something now tragically lost" and, in unnecessarily long digressions, how this atmosphere relates to the avant-garde works on display.

That said, the lack of necessity characterises avant-garde art: "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".

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.
           [Trans. Anne McLean and Anna Milsom]

If an arts festival held "in the center of Germany, in the center of Europe...where it was more obvious than anywhere else that everything had been cold and dead and buried for decades" demands anything it is to forget "the triumph of reason and the idea of progress in the age of Enlightenment", and to not-forget while forgetting: "Nothing could be ruled out in a place like Kassel, which, opening its doors to the ideas of the avant-garde, was implicitly rejecting any invitation to logic." 

While The Illogic of Kassel is exhausting to read, its length challenges my preference for short, aesthetically constrained novels. "Without cruelty, no festival" wrote Nietzsche.