Seiler In Case of Loss

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-913505-79-0
Verlag: And Other Stories
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

In Case of Loss reveals Seiler's essays to be different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Beautifully anecdotal and associative, they throw a light on literature and his East German background, including the Soviet-era mining community he grew up in, and are full of insight, humanity and an attention to overlooked objects and lives.

Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Seiler, Lutz

Weitere Mitwirkende

Crucefix, Martyn

Leseproben

?Under the Pine Vault
1.
The house stands on the western edge of the village. The woods begin on a level with the house, the garden extending into the woods to be completely surrounded by the woods. Guests, stepping out of the house onto the terrace, exclaim, ‘Oh, there isn’t even a fence here.’ The fence is deep in the forest, invisible. Coming south down the narrow, paved road, you have the impression of heading straight towards the house, then the road changes direction. To begin with, I did not notice that the property lies in a depression. The snow lingers here for so long, even in a time of thaw, that it is hard to believe it is snow and you feel the need to step outside and check. Before work every morning, I walk around outside the house. I look at the bark on a pine tree or at a patch of grass. I stand beside the garage, or I gaze back towards the house from the rear, from the margins of the forest, and I am hardly present. With its pointed roof and square base, the house resembles a pyramid. The tall pine trees stretch above it; they dominate it. When the wind blows, the branches beat on the roof beneath which we sleep. On those occasions, we do not get much rest and we lie there thinking it is about time the forest was taken in hand. The pine trees form a vault that seems to close over the house at night. Francis Ponge once described a pine forest as a ‘factory of dead wood’. The branches that wither on the tall trees, then break off, lie scattered like dark limbs about the garden. I collect them up and pile them in the corner of our woodland plot. For a long time, this was all the gardening I ever did. Last winter, one of the branches that had blown off in a storm crashed through the roof of the bicycle shed which stands near the writing shed. In the writing shed are kept all those things that have not managed to find a place in the house: books, a suitcase of letters, photographs, discarded toys, a terrarium with two shrivelled-up blindworms, plus other bits and pieces, including a desk. On the shelves, there are manuscripts and, for reasons I have never really explained to myself, my notes from university lectures on topics such as ‘Aspects of Indus Culture’ or ‘History of the German-Italian Crusades’. I thought, perhaps, there would be something in them I might find useful. What that will be, only time can tell. Sometimes I stand there, in the shed, taking a look at something, though as if from a distance, the way I stand looking back at the house from the edge of the forest, or the way I stare at the bark of a tree. What is familiar enables me to absent myself. It is then things begin to come to mind. 2.
Beside the writing shed is the oldest of the three sheds, the ur-shed, the others being additions from later periods. The poet Peter Huchel used this as his cats’ quarters, but also for tools and for parts of his Sinn und Form journal archive, which included correspondence and submitted work. The cat flap in the shed door is broken. Apart from a few stray items, the archive vanished after the death of the poet Erich Arendt, who lived in this house on Hubertusweg after Huchel. It is said that Arendt never once set foot in Huchel’s tool shed. He was not a man much interested in tools and not especially drawn to the idea of life in a rural setting. But Huchel was, and this was, in part, to sustain a closeness to the materials and matters of village life, and it was from his memory of these things that much of his writing arose. In a radio programme in 1932, Huchel followed St Augustine in laying claim to that ‘great estate of memory, where heaven, earth and sea are present’. Huchel wrote in 1963 (in a letter of thanks to the West Berlin Academy, which had just awarded him the Fontane Prize) that the fact it turned out to be an estate in Brandenburg did not make it any less broad or limitless. Others, such as William Faulkner, Seamus Heaney and Les Murray, have also later moved back to the land which had already been cultivated in their writing. When Huchel bought the house and garden on Hubertusweg in the early 1950s, he had long sacralised the land, a process which, according to Joseph Campbell, is about recognising mythic symbols in the forms of the local landscape. Bertolt Brecht, who acted as real estate consultant on the purchase of the property, advised not paying any more than 6,000 marks for it. In the end, the purchase price was four times as much. Firewood used to be cut in front of the shed: ‘Looking up from the chopping-block / under a light rain, / with axe in hand…’ The woodyard is bordered on the garden side by a couple of felled robinias, the so-called ‘sitting logs’, the best place to pass the time out of doors. Though a small table had been set up – nailed to a fallen acacia at the far end, closest to the forest – to let the poet work outside undisturbed, it is said he only rarely used it. At the time, the tool shed abutted another flimsy wooden shed and a sturdy fence behind which horses or sheep could be kept, something that was perhaps done in the pre-war years when the land still belonged to the novelist and scholar Bernhard Hoeft. But in Huchel’s time, the gate would stand wide open and the fenced area was used as a coal store. Last summer, my son found ‘black stones with writing on them’ as he was digging in the garden, and he proudly filled his rucksack with these treasures. Buried beneath the sand, from the era of the coal store, there are still coal briquettes bearing the fragmentary lettering of the REKORD brand. 3.
In 1993 we moved from Berlin to Wilhelmshorst, initially to a house at the other end of the village. I hardly knew anything of the circumstances in which Huchel had lived in Wilhelmshorst. The sandy soil on the paths around the house and the pine trees spoke of ‘the North’ to me. When we used to go on holiday from Thuringia to the Baltic Sea, the coastal region began for us in this area and beyond it lay the sea. As an initial image of our new home, Cape Cod Evening by Edward Hopper seemed about right. Hopper owned a house in Truro, on the North American Atlantic coast. The picture, painted in 1939, shows a man sitting on the steps of a house and a woman standing beside him, leaning against the wall. A dog, in tall, browning grass, is looking for something the man has thrown, or perhaps has yet to throw. The gesture the man is making with his hand is not clear; perhaps he is just brushing the tips of the grass, while the woman, whose dress is dark like the forest beyond the house, is gazing towards the dog. The forest behind the house did not remind me of our forest, yet the image still reminded me of our new home, of a kind of easeful absence that I recognised in the man and that gesture he is making by reaching out his hand. That attentive, abstracted look, which can bring poems into being, turned ‘Cape Cod’ into ‘Cape Good’ and that became ‘good evening Cape’, the title of the first poem I wrote while living ‘out’ in Wilhelmshorst. In this unfamiliar Brandenburg landscape, among people who were strangers to me and who did not greet each other on the street, I was able to write in a way that I had never managed in the city. I felt at home from the very first day. My short poem ends, as the daylight is fading off the tops of the trees, with the strange utterance of a dog, or more precisely the shadow of a dog, standing at the gate, saying: ‘out here, I’m loved, you know, I’m loved’. In Hopper’s work, the individual brushstrokes remain visible, though they subordinate themselves to the overall impact of the image and what it intends to convey. An ideal model for a poem: every one of the means used is to be taken to the limits of perceptibility, where it remains visible and invisible at the same time and, without imposing itself, contributes to the story the poem wants to tell. 4.
On 8 October 1995, I wrote in my notebook: ‘Broke into Huchel.’ There had been difficulties with the local housing authorities, who worked from a couple of dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of Beelitz and had refused to hand over the keys to the house. Beside the house, in the sand, lay a corrugated-iron sheet. Beneath this was the opening to the coal bunker through which we gained access to the cellar and from there into a bathroom with flower-patterned tiles. A dead pine marten lay in the basement bathtub covered in coal dust. Peter Huchel’s widow, Monica Huchel, who had, from a distance, instigated and legitimised this break-in, later explained over the phone how to work the National Boiler in the basement: a cast-iron marvel that not only required coal but coke as well, for which coal merchants in the 1950s had to be bribed. Back then, under cover of darkness, the black consignments would be dropped at the gate or lugged to the coal-hole: ‘from their filthy baskets they pour / the lumpen black grief / of earth into my cellar’. Huchel called verses like this ‘occasional poems’ in the Goethean sense. He wrote directly from the things that surrounded him. These were the objects of the house, the garden, the everyday and, above all, the landscape. There is no doubt, the poems go far beyond the visible and the concrete but, for their author, it remained important that they were firmly ‘of the earth’. Before we broke open the front door from the inside, I wandered round the locked house for a while. The bathroom was the former laundry room for the ‘maid’, who until 1957 lived in a room between the kitchen and the dining room. Wastewater and sewage were pumped from the cellar out along a pipe into the pines. The cellar stairs led up to the kitchen and,...