Durs Grünbein

The city where I grew up was not a western city, nor an eastern city. It lay north of Bohemia, south of Greenland, below sandstone Switzerland in a river valley, green with fields. It was the dump in the middle, the rump of an exquisite gesture in stone — a suite in Hotel “Old Europe.” Stuck under layers of wallpaper, newspapers from a world gone by: reports of Zeppelin flights, League of Nations conferences, “Miscellaneous,” alongside adverts for brassieres and ironing boards. But the view to the river was blocked with gray barracks. And the southern wing, and the northern wing, broken like the Baroque Palace, furnishings given for junk. All of it somehow stranded: the steamers and churches, the domes. And not much life in the bar. But then I found it one day down on the banks, under rusty nails, heaps of nuts and bolts from machines long since dismantled, factories expropriated, torn-down, I found it amongst the bones, unearthed by scavenging dogs, ribs and vertebrae, splinters of human and beast, so it seemed — the key to the city. And found a kind of peace. And knew where I was, and where I came from — until I saw the photographs, not the ones at home in the album, but for sale on the street market stall. Archive pictures, postcards of street scenes, city views from between the wars, moments from a life gone by, some still with the stamp “original print, by hand.” Past the housefronts, all still intact, over the bridges, the broad terraces, along the Königsufer, the banks of the Elbe, people walking, all dead now, but the youngest in their prams. Mothers in dark coats and hats were chained for all time to this or that man with a briefcase. On a traffic island, a boy in lederhosen who would never age, staring from the poster for “Riquet Cocoa Chocolate.” “Alsberg Ladies Wear, Wilsdruffer Straße: the new bathing costume from Alsberg.” And the beauty in silk stockings, getting out of the tram, no. 11, picked out by chance, and her too, fixed in that spot forever. All of them passersby in time — the girl at the flower stall on Altmarkt, the one by the striped awnings on Prager Straße. At the station the clock forever at half past ten. A morning that lasts for eternity — mostly in spring, in summer, in a city that was not eastern, nor western. Scarcely a photo that ever showed it in deep snow. The sign for Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten stood by the entrance to the subway. Soon an r was missing, an n, then an a. Power cuts, petrol grew scarce, people took to bikes again after Stalingrad. Not long now and almost all of it will be erased, a phantasmagoria like the desert palace of Kubla Khan. And your gaze leaped back and forth looking for the place it all began. Was it the high tide? The moment that saw the sparkling twenties in. People peering over the railings at Brühl’s Terrace, dismayed at the rising of the Elbe. Like mourners at a wake all clothed in black. An entire people clothed in black, back then. Though the worst was behind them: four years of war in Europe, carnage. All of them losers, people suddenly with time on their hands, time to gather in dark clumps. Only a girl in a sailor suit, laughing and spitting over the railing into the swollen, mud-brown river, cold as the grave. Or maybe the storm in the thirties, that wrecks the funfair booths at the Vogelwiese fairground. Visitors watch the chaos in despair. Ghost train guests.Roll up and test your strength

The huge scar-pocked palm leaf outside the papeterie in Papeete. The bikini billboard at the bus station of a busy mining town in Bohemia. That moment’s hesitation in the photo studio: how did I come to appear in this light? The philologist’s pink index card, his commentary on a line from the Iliad. Letters that the lazy postman left behind in a sack labeled “Destination: The Azores.” Now it’s turned out different after all, so different from what we imagined in our evening courses. No idea who it is will one day give the speech to summon up an army of heroes. Fighting machines were the latest hit when our children’s children still went to the movies. What now? How should I pass my days, with the world exposition long since over? Discovered by divers, far from the coast, a yellow pianola at the bottom of the sea. The calm of images thick with dreams in the banana republic of the real. Translated from the German