The New Objectivity: Alleluia

The New Objectivity

Brigitte and Rudi are singing in a few hours and it makes me remember more vividly that I once stood next to her in performances and broadcasts of Beethoven’s Ninth and Handel’s Messiah.

It is really something to stand next to someone you are sharing part of your life with and sing the Ninth, with its strident and joyful appeal for a common humanity, in a live broadcast that takes you into the private spaces of people outside the concert hall. I wonder how the choir will be arranged and whether, if they are standing together, I will sleep again tonight.

Dresden, Old City

Coming back on the day train from Dresden, I force myself into thinking about its fortress of Christmas markets in the splendid old city that survived the firebombing enough to be reconstructed after the last war, and the drab line of stalls along a new city avenue that was built on what was obliterated.

Mainly I think about an exhibition of the artists of Germany’s New Objectivity movement at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen.
The New Objectivity spanned the Weimar Republic years from the end of the World War I to when the Nazi’s seized power in 1933.

Dresden, New City

It interprets the interwar years as ones of poverty, decadence, hardship, erotic allure, and sometimes the social disgrace of their coexistence: Germany’s reparations from World War I were crippling, but not all shared the injury. Otto Dix and Georg Grosz are the most well known of the group. One of Dix’s techniques is to paint inanimate objects in proportion and perspective, and to distort the body.

Otto Dix, The Salon, 1921

One bordello scene shows four women sitting around a table with a perfectly laid cloth that leads to a red light behind a partially drawn curtain. Dressed mostly in coloured chemises, they exhibit, according to their age, degrees of contorted ennui and weary expectation, as they await the call from a tireless audience.

Otto Dix
Three wenches, 1926

Another shows an ageing temptress wearing a bow in her unkempt hair like a young girl. She drapes a transparent blue shawl around her emaciated skin which has already shrivelled onto her skeleton, except for her buttocks, which appear to have sagged below her genitals. Another woman, prostrate on the floor, her heavy breasts pinching under their own weight, seeks affection from the innocent and undiscriminating loyalty of a small dog.

These are scenes of artifice and frailty, of the influence of a society whose proclivity to consume its temptations contorts the lives of those who are trapped by its excesses.

Alleluia

The concert hall is a half hour walk from Cottbus station and I have only a little more time than that to get there. I ask for a mittel-preis karte a few minutes before the bells ring. The Kasserin waves away my apology for my bad German and shows me a seat high above the stage. I step into the foyer with my ticket and see a woman in a red dress stomp through a winter crowd of grey and black.

I sit in the centre of the near-summit row. There are many empty seats lower in the balcony which I’m tempted to steal, but soon four serious and heavy looking Germans walk into my row, blocking my exit. They keep pounding their steps in my direction and then I see they flank the red dress in the middle. I stand to let them pass. Two take the seats five to my right. She stands next to me hoping the others will pass her, but the first two call her on and she is between them again. Togetherness was brief. No-one sits to my left.

Before the lights go down we glance often as through a shy smiling curtain of blonde keratin. Sometimes she leans on the empty seats in front, her head on her folded arms, like she is lying voluptuously unsatisfied on a soft pillow, with just a sheet covering a slice of skin. Thick curls spill over her face and she brushes them away to look through the steely couple protecting her like a picket. Sometimes I see her rise and fall in the strength of her slow and fulsome breathing. Her eyes seem to know instinctively, even with a cold winter settling, the smell of a spent and languid summer.

Some time into the concert, and after about a minute of the first of Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, 'Procession', I am captured by a delicately asymmetrical Alleluia that breathes the sighs I imagine we share when our eyes are not meeting.

At the interval we begin in opposite directions and disappear from one another. I drink a glass of red wine in the mezzanine. I see her only once. After she has stridden past me so fast that anything I say will sound like an afterthought. I stay silent. Still.

I keep the same seat after the interval. To my despair she stands at the bottom of the balcony amongst the vacant seats, looking over the balustrade, and remains there after the concert resumes. But she does not sit. She prances a few steps left and right along the rail, peering down into the hall, feigning interest. After a few minutes she walks slowly back along the empty row and sits one seat removed to my left. It is a distracting and alluring contrivance.

We glance. Smile. Her hands are empty. She reclines into the corner of her narrow theatre chair. Sometimes she watches the stage. Sometimes she is restless. Sometimes I hear her breathe. See her lean forward. Sometimes. Sometimes I hear the rinse of her dress drain heavily between her outspreading legs, like a din above the chorus.

In those moments I am almost motionless. I stare peripherally with gapening eyes from my straight jacketed seat. I breathe forgetfully. Choke down on almost forgotten saliva in a dry swallow.

Air comes more steadily after that. I find a rhythm. A slow rhythm. My ears thump, but the longer I breathe out the slower the beating goes. Eventually I stop long enough for my pulse to pivot, and then I let the air seep back in as if into a newly pierced vacuum.

I am still holding the program. It is all I have. I turn and offer it to make a silent connection. She accepts.

After the concert I ask if she speaks English.

‘Not so well.’

‘It must be better than my German!’

We walk out and when we stop at the bottom of the stairs, where she must turn left to meet her wating family and I must turn right to meet Brigitte for dinner, she tells me that five days isn’t long enough to spend in Berlin.

‘I’d love to spend more time there, but only if I had company.’

Johanna gives me her email address and asks where the pen that has a famous Mozart melody printed on it comes from.

‘Barcelona.’

‘It says Japan.’

I put the address in the visible window of my wallet and bury it deep in my pocket and hope I will be able to read her writing when the chance comes to write.

I step out into the cold air and meet Brigitte and we go for dinner. It is just before eleven when we get back and Brigitte explains that there is no password for the computer and I can use it as I like.

***

I send my email at 11.21pm in my best fast German. A few paragraphs take 20 minutes.

Bist du die schöne Dame, dass ich an der Konzert sehen heute abend (Samstag)? Es tut mir leid, dass wir nicht mehr reden, oder reden früher am Abend.

[Are you the beautiful woman that I tonight see at the concert (Saturday)? I am sorry that we no longer talk, or talk earlier in the evening.]

I explain my plans for Amsterdam and Paris. The reply comes in English …

11.30pm

i was impatiently dribbling my fingers at the desk waiting for an email of this strange guy sitting in an oldfashioned concert. now, waiting is over.

and i can not really understand you german. especially the part, when you are describing your travel-plans.

try again. in english. with no complicate words.

wiederhören? i hope so!

… but I don’t see it until the next morning. I've already gone to bed thinking it will be days before she will write, probably just in time for me to be on a train back to Paris:

7.54am

If I knew you were going to write so quickly I would have waited to reply.

First, I am going to Leipzig for the day. I will be on the 9.04 train if you want to come. I am coming back for the performance the Christmas oratorio tonight. …

That day in Leipzig I drink three coffees in Starkbucks in five hours trying to negotiate some time – at the concert that night, then in Paris, or Amsterdam, and finally Berlin – all on the strength of some steamy looks across a concert she was stuck in with her parents, and a five minute conversation about how a few days in Berlin isn’t enough. Only yesterday I found a new objectivity. Now I am contorted as I wander to find the buildings I've come to see as a reference point - Bach's Thomaskirche and Mendelssohn's house. Then it comes:

1.59pm

enjoy leipzig and the oratorum in st. maria! we won`t see us today, but maybe after amsterdam in berlin (be my guest!)?

be as free as possible (in your decision)!

***