jürgen fauth’s muckworld

This is not what architect Peter Eisenman had in mind when he designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs (or stelae) on a 4.7 acre site between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate: “The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” (Wikipedia)

It’s possible that the man hopping from stone to stone like Q*Bert in the photo above is enacting some sort of postmodern commentary on Eisenman’s intentions — after all, “losing touch with human reason” is second nature to some of us, and “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere” is what we like to call “the modern condition.” Either way, instead of remembrance, introspection, and grief, the 2,711 stones seem to invite inappropriate behavior. Visitors can be seen sunbathing on the stelae, playing hide-and-seek, or eating curry sausages.

Other scandals and failures accompanied the memorial: the stelae were covered in anti-graffiti paint by Degussa, a company that produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers, the stones are already beginning to crumble, light fixtures are broken, and Der Spiegel reports that in the darkness, drunkards from a nearby club come to urinate and horny couples screw in the maze.

Perhaps R. Mutt would have enjoyed the Stelenfeld’s playground repurposing, but there is a harsh lesson here about the disconnect between artistic intention and actual use; clearly, the memorial’s symbolism is too arbitrary, too wide open to interpretation, to produce the desired effect. I don’t know of another memorial that fails on such a spectacular scale.

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There’s nothing quite like a thousand pages of Thomas Mann. It’s a luxurious, slow-moving book in which the way time passes and doesn’t pass is part of the point as well as part of the experience of slogging through this monster. It’s a very simple story: Hans Castorp goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his sick cousin for a couple of weeks, and he stays for seven years. The end. In between, in the hermetic world of ‘Berghof’ the “perfectly average” hero finds himself educated in love, life, death, the arts, the life of the mind, what have you. Scores of pages are devoted to the disputes between the Italian free mason Settembrini and Naptha, a Jesuit, while Castorp listens and slowly learns to contribute. It took me hundres of pages to realize how funny it all is–the way Castorp hopes his fever keeps rising so he can stay longer, the way people interact over dinner, the way they wrap themselves up on the veranda every day to air out their infected lungs. By the end, it’s clear that the place is a metaphor for Europe before the Great War (the book is from 1925.) What’s most fascinating to me, though, is Mann’s prose. I haven’t read such quality German in a very long time. No matter what they say, in the right hands, it’s a beautiful, beautiful language, in both vocabulary and structure, which, when Mann really gets going, resembles finely crafted Chinese boxes that are stacked within each other in pleasing and surprising ways. I kept wanting to read passages to Marcy, but she wasn’t having it.

I think Buddenbrooks is next.