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Behind the Byline

Joseph Pearson

May 3, 2018

Joseph Pearson

Essayist Joseph Pearson, author of “This Is Also Tangier,” talks to NER Editorial Panel member Elizabeth Kadetsky on writing as a foreigner in a post-Bowles and Beats Tangier, the creative process, and a “raging debate: who is allowed to speak about foreign places?”

 

Elizabeth Kadetsky: “This Is Also Tangier” is a wonderful travelogue, or anti-travelogue, that upends both the celebratory aspects of that genre and the work of traveler/writers to that place who came before—most notably Paul Bowles. To what extent were you consciously in conversation with the genre of travel writing and the works of travelers from earlier times in your essay? 

Joseph Pearson: I recently reread Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a classic of the travel genre, and also one of my favorite books. I say that even though I’m all too aware of the travelogue’s limitations. It’s frustrating to read travel prose that approaches foreign places as ciphers or symbols for an agenda, or that props the author up as an authority or judge. West traveled to the Balkans (she contemplated going to Finland instead) only because she anticipated the expansion of German hegemony in Europe in World War II, and anticipated that Yugoslavia would be a victim. The Balkans become a symbol of resistance, placed in the dramatic light of ancient battles against the Ottomans. I read for her poignant descriptions, when meeting people (an old woman who wanders around a rocky hillside in Crna Gora, looking for what has happened to her life) or visiting landscapes (the harbor of Rab island emerging from a cloud of myrtle and thyme and rosemary). But I always feel the weight of a single heavy filter.

In contrast, Paul Bowles’s travel writings—from Sri Lanka and South India, for example—as opposed to his novels and short stories, are remarkably self-critical (and critical of others!). He was well aware of the problem of uncharitable readers who “regard any objective description of things as they are today in an underdeveloped country as imperialist propaganda” or the risk that his views might be misconstrued as the “reactionary attitude of Americans toward oppressed peoples” (I’m quoting from his forward to Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, 1957).

I certainly accept that I will be criticized, but since who I am is inescapable I go ahead and write in any case. The onus is to remain open, observant, and absorbing of conflicting messages and ambiguities. I wonder why, so often, do authors—like West—try to nail the butterfly to the board? One problem might be that travel journalism has influenced more “literary” travel narratives. Authors need to merit the byline, argue their right to comment, and, as they certify through big claims and arguments, they risk reductionism.

I attempted in “This Is Also Tangier” to create a structure that would allow for different voices to express themselves, to provide more than one lens through which to observe the city. Perhaps this is what you mean by the “anti-travelogue.” I wouldn’t say that these perspectival shifts are an innovation in the genre. But I do think they are against a canon of narratives that claim to be authoritative. Nor do I pretend I have succeeded, but I have tried.

 

EK: You often use terms that suggest the liminality of Tangier, a border city of sorts, such as the Interzone, and “the other side.” Your essay also evokes parallel worlds, alternate realities, “through the looking glass,” as it were, and even the view of the city streets on the GPS. Was liminality—the sense of being in between, in transit, or otherwise destabilized—a part of your quest as a traveler to Tangier?

JP: I was admittedly fascinated by Tangier’s position in the literary imagination as an in-between place on the straits separating Europe and Africa. During the Interzone years (1924–1956), this city on the African continent was shared by three European powers, making it a confusing loophole of laws. It was a place where many English-speaking artists came, as an escape hatch from the conformity of America or Britain. It was a place that attracted queer travelers. I know many people, especially artists, who are still looking for that place—because of its geography or political status—where they can go, live out-of-context, cheaply, un-ruled, with liberties unavailable at home (in more recent memory, Berlin has served this function). Tangier became—in the writing of Bowles, Burroughs, and others who spent time there during this period—then a symbol, a place of transition that was outside authority. The Beats told this story about it, and I went there full of the hope that Tangier would still be “out of this world.” Maybe I hoped it remained an exit-strategy. A bridge between Europe and the “developing” world, but somehow standing far above both. I was wrong, of course. Tangier is just another place. It’s a fascinating port city open to many influences. Rather than being liminal, on the edge, it turns out to be quite central, to the traffic between North Africa and Iberia and France, and to the Atlantic. I think I play with this expectation for Tangier to be an “alternate reality” and then try to undermine and demystify it, by considering Tangier as just another, very compelling, place where people work and live.

 

EK: You wonder if Bowles needed “that constant jolt of being pulled out of oneself, of being the observer.” Since you live abroad and often write from the experience of the foreigner, I wondered if that in some way also described you. 

JP: You are asking about the creative process here. If you are a traveler who visits a place for a short time, you get an initial strong jolt of impressions. It’s the most productive time for a travel writer. I try to harness that flood of perceptions when I travel somewhere. One should be wary of first impressions. But you shouldn’t ignore that you are a sponge soaking things up during the initial days in a place, before your body adjusts and begins to normalize the situation, make choices, and seek out coordinates. You see things in those first days that you might filter out later because they do not fit into pre-existing frameworks. This vividness is worth capturing in writing, and then revising once you settle into a place.

Bowles, of course, lived in Tangier for fifty-two years, and did not operate from first impressions. But I can imagine Tangier on a daily basis was still a place that offered many more surprises than, say, the French Riviera, which was also popular with expatriate artists in his time. But even there, if you are not French, one’s alterity provides friction. If you are attentive to those moments of friction—when a social practice surprises you, or when you are made to feel like you don’t fit in, or that you’ve made a mistake—then you are probably on to something worth exploring. This can become a generator of, hopefully, revealing prose. As for myself, I was born in Canada, but have lived abroad since I was sixteen, and have lived in a dozen places. For the past decade, I’ve been in Berlin. It is a city that is in flux and I change with it, as an outsider-insider; I find there’s no end of this kind of productive friction.

 

EK: Through your essay, the reader comes to understand the Beats, Bowles, and even the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri to have been exploitive, profiteering, and sometimes violent. There is a sort of lifting of the veil on literary icons. I recall a Facebook thread recently where a commentator was nearly eviscerated (virtually) for suggesting Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky as an exemplar of fiction writing from the vantage of a foreigner. In the #MeToo era, the sex tourism and other exploits of these writers are no longer looked upon romantically or even tolerantly. Is your essay in some way an expression of a traveler looking for a new way to engage or pursue beauty as an outsider in spite of one’s own ignorance and even desires? Are you interested in taking back Tangier from Bowles and the Beats? And yet, since those writers have made such an imprint on the city’s own self-conception (as your essay shows so well), is that even possible? How to resolve the paradox? Must we just shrug and chalk it up to the rapaciousness of colonialism and its irreversible after-effects? 

JP: Yes, I try to put a harsh lamp on the sexual escapades of the Beats in Tangier, which are too often described as positive and liberating. Many of us have a reflex to celebrate queer identities in the era before Stonewall. But then we get into trouble when those actors, having escaped the vice of American puritanism, go abroad and act like cads, assuming positions of power because they are rich and Western, hiding sexual abuse under the cloak of the “bohemian.”

(Although I would nuance that the category of the “sex tourist” is a problematic one. How do we consider it in a dispassionate way, detached from, often unconscious, American moral and political categories? What of a gay man from Saudi Arabia coming to, say, Berlin to avail himself of what is illegal back home? And by what moral authority do we presuppose that prostitution under all circumstances is wrong? Certainly, the moral position by which to judge “sex tourism” is not monolithic. And we should avoid condescension, denying agency to those, from “non-Western” countries, who might practice it themselves.)

How then do we read Paul Bowles with a more critical stance given the Beats’ exploits abroad? Is it possible to continue to love Bowles’s writing, even if The Sheltering Sky has some of the most atrocious scenes of misogyny and North African caricature that I have ever seen in print? One could argue that Bowles treated everyone badly in his novels: men, women, expats, and locals alike. But Kit Moresby’s sexual enslavement to Belqassim in the desert, and her resulting Stockholm Syndrome, makes one think we need to revisit this misplaced romanticism. But there’s plenty that is objectionable in the history of artistic production. I don’t think we are required to stop listening to Mozart’s Magic Flute because Monastatos is a distillation of eighteenth-century racial hatred. In fact, we need to continue reading these Bowles texts critically—with their remarkable descriptions of the desert and evocation of the terror of existence—and not fear that we will be persuaded by every part of them. Doing otherwise would be a form of revisionist history, a loss of control of the literary past. With critical reading comes an opportunity: to move on and to add reflective voices to the story we tell about places that have so often been done a disservice.

 

EK: In her 2002 essay from Harper’s arguing for Bowles’s relevance as a post-9/11 author (“The Coldest Eye”), Francine Prose identifies Bowles’s subject as “the tragic, even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided and often presumptuous encounters with the mysteries of a foreign culture.” Do you have an updated take on that subject, or suggestions to other writers on how—or whether—to pursue that theme?

JP: I think we enter here a raging debate: who is allowed to speak about foreign places? Especially those places we call “non-Western” (a problematic, too-monolithic, category)?

I certainly feel like my voice has been deauthorized in the wake of the postcolonial experience. It is enlightening, even productive, to being taken down. And I am sympathetic to those who say we need to privilege local writers, allow authors from non-Western cultures to describe their own worlds. I see this as an important antithetical position to how Westerners—often ones who desire the East—have previously positioned themselves as authorities.

But I do not believe that coming to terms with the colonial tradition in literature can end here; there are a number of risks involved if we do not come to a synthetic position. One risk is to say that outside—and by this I mean critical and “Western”—voices are no longer useful. They exist and will continue to do so. People visit other places, they see them, and have ideas about them. Should they not be recorded and read if they are self-critical? I am not at all advancing the right-wing cause of the neglected, essentialized, “white voice,” in the context of foreign travel. But I was trained and still work as a cultural historian, and I do not exclude documents from my research just because they were written by foreigners: in fact, they can provide invaluable evidence precisely because they come from a foreign perspective. Shutting out the view from outside—including my view because I am a white man born in North America coming to North Africa—I think is absurd. I am sometimes tempted to claim a fellow-subaltern privilege to speak, by appealing to a non-gender-conformist queer identity. But I feel that’s somehow cheating, that I simply would be joining the choir of those who require permission first to voice an opinion.

There’s the other risk, which is to fetishize what constitutes an authentic local voice. It creates national(ist) categories, fictions of stable identities and essentializing ideas of what it means to be a culture, which has the bad aftertaste of something worse than provincialism. It ignores the global movement of people and voices in the era of mass communications, as if we still (or ever had?) neat compartments of belonging. It pretends conveniently that there is no variation, in our globalized neo-liberal market, between, say, a wealthy patrician Moroccan from Casablanca, and someone like Choukri who came from impoverished circumstances in the Rif. The former may well have more in common with her colleagues in Dubai and New York than a poor man from the mountains in her own city. I balk when I am told by entitled individuals from “non-Western” countries—who enjoy more corporate privilege in their home countries than I will ever know, who have inherited the mantle of the postcolonial structures, now perhaps live abroad, or work at private institutions—that they are more authorized to speak for the disenfranchised in their home countries than an outsider with more class consciousness and anger for social justice.

You ask for suggestions. Mine is that we should not be afraid to be curious, to learn, and to write about our experiences in unfamiliar places. In our increasingly fractious geopolitical reality, there’s an ever-greater need to have conversations across borders. We have an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves, as travelers, with many places already visited, but in a way that is, I hope, more humbled. We can visit having come through the sensitizing of the post-Saidean experience. Because in fact, the deauthorized voice—gutted, self-doubting, and guilty—is a textured and compelling one, more so than one that feels empowered.

 

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Joseph Pearson is a writer and historian based in Berlin, and author of Berlin, his portrait of the German capital (Reaktion Press, 2018). Pearson is the essayist of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin, and also writes for the BBC and Newsweek.

Elizabeth Kadetsky serves on New England Review’s editorial panel for nonfiction and is the author of the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (Nouvella Books, 2015), the story collection The Poison that Purifies You (C&R Press, 2014), and the memoir First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004).

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, News & Notes Tagged With: Elizabeth Kadetsky, joseph pearson

This Is Also Tangier

March 14, 2018

“in your arms, in your arms” by John Gregory Brown

You come from the other side?” a young man later asks me, in the bar in Tangier.

♦

On the flight from Lisbon to Morocco, I try to see where Europe ends and Africa begins. The coast must be somewhere below me, but it’s lost in the diffusion of clouds. I stare at the cabin wall opposite, where strange shapes, long trapezoids, morph; they’re projected from the late sun blazing to the south. I want to say “African sun,” but that rings false, like something said in the nineteenth century.

 

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Joseph Pearson is a writer and historian based in Berlin, and author of Berlin, his portrait of the German capital (Reaktion Press, 2018). Pearson is the essayist of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin, and also writes for the BBC and Newsweek.

Filed Under: News & Notes, Nonfiction Tagged With: John Gregory Brown, joseph pearson

New Books by NER Authors

June 27, 2017

The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine—or fathom—the great world. —University of Michigan Press

From the publisher: The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both the poem and the essay work beyond a human sense of time. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. The essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of an odd detail or bothersome question that would not quit—Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous, or as quiet as a half-second of genuine discovery? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going, so what if the world is ending! Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open?

Marianne Boruch is Professor of English, Purdue University, and a faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her ninth poetry collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (Copper Canyon Press), was cited as a “Most Loved Book of 2016” by the New Yorker. Two of her poems appear in NER 38.2; prior to that NER 33.2 featured “The End Inside It,” an essay republished in The Little Death of Self.

University of Michigan Press released The Little Death of Self as part of its series, “Poets on Poetry.”

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book coverThe freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home—all come crashing down . . . —W. W. Norton

From the publisher: In 2007, Todd Boss crossed the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis just twenty minutes before its disastrous collapse into the Mississippi. Thirteen people died in the accident, and 145 were injured. Tough Luck, a collection of poems, is anchored in this event and the questions it raised for him, his family, and his community. The poems’ down-to-earth quality and strong sense of place will appeal to readers of Robert Frost, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney.

Todd Boss, director of external affairs at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His book Yellowrocket won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for Poetry. Boss’ work appeared in NER 28.4.

Tough Luck is available from publisher W. W. Norton & Co. and independent booksellers.

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Dimitrov instills palpable emotional yearning in his readers, as if you’re a tourist inside your own life: “A little of our misplaced lives, / we saw them waving on the roof in the dark / and thought they were birds.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, Together and By Ourselves, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal or professional lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.

In addition to Together and By Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov is the author of Begging for It and the online chapbook American Boys. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. He has taught creative writing and literature at Bennington College, Columbia University, and Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He currently resides in New York City. His poem “Champagne” was included in NER 36.3.

Together and By Ourselves can be purchased directly from the publisher, Copper Canyon Press, as well as from independent booksellers.

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With exceptional candor, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds—the multitudinous experiences of mothering, illness, and the ever-present embodiment of race—finding fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. —W. W. Norton

From the publisher: Camille Dungy journeyed across America working as a poet-lecturer, all the while tending to her daughter, then only a toddler. In her prose debut, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, she recounts the experience, paying particular attention to the way in which she and her child were perceived as two black females. Dungy grapples with the painful legacy of the slave trade, but she also celebrates motherhood and those bright moments that characterize her daughter’s entrance into the world.

Camille Dungy is a professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. Her collections of poetry have won numerous honors, including the American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Open Book Prize. Her essay “A Shade North of Ordinary,” an excerpt from her travels, appeared in NER 36.2.

Guidebook to Relative Strangers is available from publisher W. W. Norton & Co. and independent booksellers.

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A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day. —Victor LaValle

From the publisher: In Norman Lock’s fourth book of The American Novels series, Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity, culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His work has appeared in New England Review numerous times, most recently in NER 34.2.

A Fugitive in Walden Woods can be purchased directly from its publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, or from independent booksellers.

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The first collection from the multi-award-winning American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien, including The Body of an American.

Plays One includes the following five pieces: The Body of an American, The House in Hydesville, The Cherry Sisters Revisited, The Voyage of the Carcass, and The Dear Boy.

Dan O’Brien is a playwright and poet and recent Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. In addition to his work as a playwright he has published multiple volumes of poetry, most recently in 2015 in a collection entitled New Life. An alumnus of Middlebury College, he currently resides in Los Angeles. An excerpt from his play The House in Scarsdale will appear in NER 38.3.

Plays One can be purchased directly from the publisher, Oberon Books, or from independent booksellers.

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A comprehensive yet eminently readable—even exhilarating—romp through Berlin’s history, coupled with a native’s view of its colorful present. Eveything you need to know about the German capital, and more. —Kimberly Bradley, Monocle Magazine

In Berlin, Joseph Pearson retraces the history of Germany’s capital city, from its beginnings as a small settlement to its present role as one of the world’s economic and political centers. Berlin’s nine-hundred-year history has been colored by vicious regimes, pivotal artistic movements, scandalous night life, and industrial innovation. Pearson walks the streets of modern-day Berlin to find echoes of this tumultuous past, and to turn up the city’s little-known secrets.

Joseph Pearson is a cultural historian and writer at New York University, Berlin. His essay “Three German Cities” appears in NER 37.3. You can read more about Pearson in his “Behind the Byline” interview, in which he speaks with nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree regarding the link among self, history, and politics.

Berlin is available from the University of Chicago Press (North and South America only) and from their Reaction Books (UK/Europe), as well as from independent booksellers.

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Less a practical guide than an anthology of think pieces, How We Speak to One Another will nonetheless send nonfiction writers eagerly back to their desks. And it’s a fun read, even for nonwriters. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: How We Speak to One Another is some of the most engaging evidence we’ve got that the essay is going strong. Here, essayists talk back to each other, to the work they love and the work that disquiets them, and to the very basic building blocks of what we understand “essay” to be. What’s compiled in these pages testifies to the endless flexibility, generosity, curiosity, and audacity of essays. Even more than that, it provides the kind of pleasure any great essay collection does—upsetting our ideas and challenging the way we organize our sense of the world.

Craig Reinbold, one of the editors of this collection, has seen his writing appear in many journals and magazines including the Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Brevity. He was the managing editor of Essay Daily from 2013-2016. One of his essays, “All Things Equal on the West Side,” can be found in NER 33.3.

How We Speak to One Another is available directly from Coffee House Press and from independent booksellers.

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Simic has always had a knack for channeling the morbid—and managing to blend it with the joyous. It is in navigating those kinds of opposing emotions that he is at his most clever and profound . . . Image by image, Simic composes miniature masterpieces, offering what appears as a seemingly effortless study in language’s cinematic possibilities. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: The latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer’s pen—Scribbled in the Dark brings the poet’s signature sardonic sense of humor, piercing social insight, and haunting lyricism to diverse and richly imagined landscapes.

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University. He is a longtime contributor to New England Review, most recently with his translation work in NER 29.1.

Scribbled in the Dark is for sale directly from its publisher Harper Collins and from independent booksellers.

 

 

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books Tagged With: A Fugitive in Walden Woods, Alex Dimitrov, Berlin, Camille Dungy, Craig Reinbold, Dan O'Brien, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, How We Speak to One Another, joseph pearson, Marianne Boruch, Norman Lock, Scribbled in the Dark, The Little Death of Self, Todd Boss, Together and By Ourselves, Tough Luck

Joseph Pearson

Behind the Byline

December 19, 2016

joseph_pearsonNER nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree speaks with NER 37.3 author Joseph Pearson on Pearson’s essay “Three German Cities,” and the links between the “I,” history, and politics.

J. M. Tyree: “Three German Cities” beautifully blends your personal writing with your observations on cultural history as you travel through Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin, where you live now. In your notes on each city, you describe the effect of Allied bombing campaigns on these cities. Yet your annotations on these cities also connect with what’s going on there now. Do you think the balance between past and present is different in Germany?

Joseph Pearson: The past is never in the present, whether you are in America or Germany. But in some places there is what you call a different balance, and there are what I might call “better listeners.” Augustine, in his Confessions, writes about time, and compares its passing to the experience of listening to music. He calls our awareness of the past in the present “distention.” He observes how the moment we hear a note, it is immediately gone; we are distended over that note, and that distention is painful. Perhaps I like pop music—including some really obnoxious Eurotrash—because it gives me, the listener, a sense of control. The rhythms and melodies are so repetitious that I can joyfully anticipate what’s coming next even if I don’t know the song. This is very satisfying for a historian used to history rhyming but never repeating. Historians are always left contemplating what’s vanished, trying to represent it somehow imperfectly. And some political scientists spend time creating complicated, often useless, theories to anticipate what comes next. The public culture of memorializing in Germany, at least for now, compared to many other countries—because of the process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or “coming to terms with the past” of the crimes of the Holocaust—is more concerned with paying attention to these past notes.

Recently, with a group of friends, we sponsored two “stumbling stones,” or “Stolpersteine.” They are actually bronze plaques inserted into the pavement in front of our apartment building for two middle-aged Jewish sisters who were deported in 1942. Fifty thousand of these “Stolpersteine” have already been sponsored by individuals in Europe to victims of National Socialism. They are slightly raised, and the idea is that people stumble over them. Maybe when they look down at ours in Berlin-Kreuzberg, they will see the names of Meta and Margarete Zamory, and read that they were taken from our building by force and murdered in a camp in Poland. The women’s music is gone, but here there is an effort to write down a few insufficient notes. The sadness here is that their music—if we can belabor the metaphor just a little bit longer—cannot be replayed. But maybe we can learn from it to become better listeners. I would like to see a similar project of memorializing in other places, like in my birth country Canada (to the native populations who have suffered under state crimes).

 

JMT: In The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner describes the German love of ghosts and mist, as well as that territory of moods covered by the word Stimmung, that Murnau-like atmosphere that seems to pervade your description of the sea fogs of Hamburg and “storage hangars that always feel like cemeteries to me . . .” I picture postindustrial analogues of the street lanterns of Nosferatu or the glistening pavements from The Last Laugh! About Berlin you wonderfully describe ghosts who “won’t share a pillow.” But Stimmung, according to Eisner, also contains the atmospherics of nostalgia and desire, “lust of body and soul.” Does this term resonate with your observations of Germany?

JP: I always run into a hermeneutic problem when talking about Germany, or any other country for that matter. Germany is so many places—regional, city, countryside—but then again it is also almost immediately recognizable no matter where you are. This might be because of the clean fonts in rail stations, the aridity of public spaces, the smell of certain cleaning products, or the paucity of verbose politeness. I was recently in Basel, Switzerland, and took a city bus ten minutes across the border into Germany to what might as well be a suburb. The clues that I’d left Switzerland were more the tattiness of the discount shops and the more serious expressions on people’s faces in public transport than anything as atmospherically Murnau-like as mist or moody atmosphere. So the question for me is why so many German artists cloud these everyday realities in this mist, or why I, too, as you’ve rightly pointed out, use these devices (although in “Three German Cities” I am talking about a city, Hamburg, where there is actually a lot of fog rolling in from the North Sea). What I can say, for my own part, is that the mist is maybe a way to soften talking too firmly about how things are. It gives solid things a sense of changeability, and therefore also more flexibility to meaning. I don’t wish to direct readers, but rather to give them something more unstable that also provides some freedom of interpretation. Stimmung is a lovely word because it too means so many things within certain limits: atmosphere, morale, spirit, vein, temperament, the mood among a group of people, or even how the piano in the next room is voiced. Maybe some German writers—who historically have had quite enough of authoritarianism, and are often more in love with ambiguity than their “Anglo-Saxon” peers—have influenced me just a little.

 

JMT: It feels honest and refreshing to let in the free play of first-person subjectivity. Was this decision difficult or did this leap of faith feel organic to your creative process? It’s always a dilemma about how much autobiography to include, isn’t it? And do you see your project here—and your new book on Berlin—being connected to the journalistic projects on the city and its culture undertaken in the 1920s by writers like Benjamin and Kracauer?

JP: Berlin has a long tradition of first-person narration about historical subjects that, as you suggest, really came into its own in the 1920s, especially in the politicized climate of New Objectivity. Writers of the period, more broadly, were writing what they called “fiction” with the tools of nonfiction writers (the docu-fiction of Christopher Isherwood, Ernst Haffner, Irmgard Keun, or Hans Fallada), and others are working from the opposite trajectory (the literary journalism of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Joseph Roth, Franz Hessel, Kurt Tucholsky). I felt rather more legitimized to approach my subject with a narrative focalized through a first-person character than I would have if I were still living in North America. There, the English courses I took at college were still influenced by New Criticism and my historical training banished the word “I” from any serious analysis. This might sound a little naïve, but I think the “I” is just more honest (and also a usefully flexible variable that can indicate: I am here. I am the observer. I am not just a camera. I might be a character. My “I” could just as easily be “you”). Certainly the personal essays in my forthcoming book,* a short history and portrait of Berlin, are indebted to this tradition.

There is also a political desire here. I do not believe in great unseen historical spirits. All these I’s will determine how history will unfold. And living in Berlin, with Europe and America moving towards intolerant populism, I feel the link between the “I”, history, and politics very strongly. I want to indicate that connection in my writing, to suggest our political agency in light of past tragedies; “I” is the pronoun of witnessing, and we need witnesses in complicated times. The “I” is a vector for political change based on historical understanding. And I do not think the political impoverishes writing (this is just an excuse to keep artists out of politics). We are the ones who occupy all these moody places—shipping yards, mountain trains, or Jewish cemeteries—so briefly. What we do—as the ones who remember, or vote, or then protest and resist, to make for a better future when we are gone—counts so very much in the instant. Germany provides, in the 1920s and 1930s, an instructive warning for a future we can’t anticipate but can still influence.

*Joseph Pearson’s book Berlin will be published by Reaktion Books in 2017.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: joseph pearson, Stolpersteine

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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