Iris Hanika, born in Würzburg in 1962, has lived in Berlin since 1979. She received the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize in 2006. Her novel Treffen sich zwei was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2008. The Bureau of Past Management was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature and the LiteraTour Nord Prize. She was a resident at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 2017/18. Her most recent novel Echos Kammern won the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize in 2020.
Abigail Wender is a poet and translator. Her debut poetry collection, Reliquary, was published in 2021. She lives in New York City.
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Co-funded by the Creative Europe |
V&Q Books, Berlin 2021
An imprint of Verlag Voland & Quist GmbH
First published in the German language as Das Eigentliche by Iris Hanika
Copyright © 2010 Literaturverlag Droschl Graz, Wien, Austria, 2016
English edition through Nabu International Literary Agency;
www.nabu.agency
Translation copyright © Abigail Wender
Editing: Katy Derbyshire
Copy editing: Angela Hirons
Cover photo: Unsplash
Cover design: Pingundpong*Gestaltungsbüro
Typesetting: Fred Uhde
ISBN: 978-3-86391-307-6
eISBN: 978-3-86391-326-7
www.vq-books.eu
Über den Autor
The Bureau of Past Management
Referenced Texts
Translator’s Note
We are ugly, but we have the music.
Leonard Cohen,
‘Chelsea Hotel #2’
THERE COMES A TIME when it all falls away – the anger of youth, the sorrow you felt at the world’s injustice, and also the confidence that things would get better, maybe even good if you just tried hard enough, put your whole heart into it. There comes a time when that heart empties abruptly and you eddy down into yourself, entirely alone. Not a great time.
SOMETIMES HE RECALLED how he’d always think about the trains headed to concentration and death camps whenever he was on a crowded U-Bahn; how those trains had been even more crowded than the one he was in, and about the absence of any seats in those cattle cars. Graziela had described a scene from the American film The Pawnbroker (1964, director: Sidney Lumet) in which there was a leap from the quotidian into the past, and had made the comparison between today’s underground trains and the trains to Auschwitz. She said she couldn’t get the scene out of her head. At the same time, she continued, it made her feel disgusted with herself for two reasons. For one, it was pretentious of her to compare her dignified and privileged life with those who’d been abandoned by civilisation. But ‘pretentious’ was the wrong word, she said, it was feeble, ‘impudent’ might be a better word or perhaps ‘hubris’ would be best in this context, but it was also weak, much too weak, entirely too weak … ‘Obscene,’ that was the right word. The second reason, she said, was that she had the luxury to seek the right word, the time and ease, the time and space to think, and her brain at her beck and call, which made her self-disgust even stronger. Back then, he’d thought ‘obscene’ was overused and privately considered ‘immoral’ a better choice. But he hadn’t said anything, he’d just listened as she described the film’s protagonist, who she said was nothing like her. The film wasn’t about the granddaughter of a perpetrator – though he knew, because they’d discussed it extensively, there were no real perpetrators in her family. (There hadn’t even been a Nazi Party member in her family; there was only her grandfather, who’d been a soldier, strictly speaking a Mitläufer, a political hanger-on, a 22-year-old officer and troop commander in the 6th Army. And he had only survived Stalingrad because, shortly before reaching the city, after storming the Rostov airport, he had sustained a severe head injury. He’d received a so-called ‘blighty wound’ – a gift as it turned out, since it meant he was flown from the war zone to a field hospital in Hungary and released from combat duty post-convalescence. [After the capture of Rostov, the psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein, was murdered along with her two daughters in a mass execution. Graziela’s grandfather hadn’t been in an SS death squad and hadn’t taken part in the shooting, but he had assisted in the capture of Rostov, and hence had brought about the murder of Sabina Spielrein. They had discussed all of this, specifically how it could be endured and whether it could be borne.]) The Pawnbroker was about an entirely different character, namely Sol Nazerman, a man burdened with survivor’s guilt. (Rod Steiger, who played Nazerman, was nominated for an Oscar in 1966, as were Laurence Olivier for Othello, Oskar Werner for Ship of Fools, Richard Burton for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Lee Marvin, who won Best Actor for his performance in Cat Ballou.) She could never forget the scene and it played instantly before her eyes whenever she was on a crowded train.
With that story, she’d planted the scene in him. He borrowed The Pawnbroker from the university’s media centre and watched it once more at work on his Bureau’s video recorder. After that, he too felt uneasy on every crowded train.
Now as he recalled this, he noticed that the uneasiness had disappeared, but he wasn’t ashamed. In the past, he would have been thoroughly ashamed of himself for not being ashamed.
Not any more.
Now he could travel on an overcrowded train, even think about the people who had once been transported to the camps, and not feel ill. Now he could see birch trees and not think birch, Birke, ‘Birkenau’ – and he didn’t believe it was because he’d become insensitive.
In the past, he had feared just this lack of sensitivity and was constantly on his guard. Over and over, he’d scrutinised and tested himself and decided he had undertaken every possible act of remembrance.
AUSCHWITZ LIVES IN EVERY SONG,
every flower, every tree.
Auschwitz lives in every song,
every German, including me.
Fiderallala, fiderallala, fideralla lala la.
HE WAS NOW PLAINLY USED TO HIS UNHAPPINESS. (Bless his post-war birth, ha ha.)
To his unhappiness he was now plainly used.
Fiderallala, fiderallala, fideralla lala la.
He wasn’t certain when he’d got used to it, most likely after his thirtieth birthday – aeons ago. Perhaps when ‘commemoration’ was declared the official state duty. After that he no longer dared hope that his unhappiness would end, and so he no longer made the effort to end it. It existed like he existed – it was a part of him. He couldn’t think about it any other way, couldn’t imagine being without it; he lived with his unhappiness as a matter of course. Some people live in the countryside, others in the city, some have dark hair, others fair hair. Some have good fortune, others misfortune – that’s the way it was. He belonged to those who lived with misery.
In the past he’d been able to laugh about it. And there was a lot to laugh about, because nothing went smoothly for him. He was a clown, clumsy, brooding over the smallest things, had no success with women, couldn’t overcome his quirks, was always being barged into, and so on. In daily life he was a joke, but it was no longer funny to him. It was just too much effort. But in fact, the laughable things about him had not changed, only the most ridiculous thing about him. In the past his misery had had a concrete source. As long as he’d believed it stemmed from Auschwitz, his misery had substance. And the cause of his misery wasn’t just the fact that Auschwitz had happened, it was his fixation with it. He thought constantly about what he could do and what the Auschwitz prisoners couldn’t, and that Auschwitz had had a very different meaning for them than it did for him. When he went to bed, for example, he thought about how they couldn’t go to sleep when they wanted, how they’d had no beds, they’d had berths – that’s what he thought about as he lay in his bed. Invariably his next thought was that there hadn’t even been one berth per prisoner, whereas he couldn’t recall when he’d last not slept alone in his own bed. Besides that, they weren’t allowed to use the toilet when they needed to; they could only go at prescribed times and these were extremely brief, so their need was dire – that’s what he thought about when he used the bathroom. Under the shower, he’d think about them being led to the ‘sauna’, as they had called it, and made to stand under a shower with temperatures they didn’t control, suffering as the water switched from freezing cold to scalding hot.
All this.
For quite some time that had been his real affliction, the Auschwitz comparisons; and his obsession had worsened because it was absurd. Eventually, his distress began to lessen. He had worked day-in and day-out in the vineyards of memory through the years, and perhaps this was the reason he no longer had to compare his every action to those of Auschwitz prisoners. Throughout, he did whatever was in his power to relieve the survivors’ misery: so that their suffering would never be repeated, and so that what had happened to them would never happen to anyone again.
Since that time, he saw no reason for his misery. Not in Germany.
Occasionally a terrible hatred of GERMANY overcame him, but it went by quickly. This hatred was intrinsic to the national character, and, he, Hans Frambach, was no less German than the others, even if he couldn’t have precisely described what that was, where this essentially existed, this German-ness, (cf. Walter Abish, How German Is It. © Walter Abish 1979, 1980, 1982). Whenever he was overwhelmed by self-loathing, he’d feel suddenly young, and that was the real horror; it was suffocating to feel young and full of pure, righteous hate. He never wanted to be a boy again and was glad he had more than half his life behind him.
On the whole, he felt fine about Germany, at least the Germany he lived in.
He’d learned to differentiate the Germany he lived in from the era he worked on.
Really, he felt fine about Germany now. The public infrastructure functioned well, no one starved, fresh produce flowed without interruption, and corruption took place high up in executive suites, not at his low level where neither police nor doctors needed to be bribed.
What more do you want.
He had taken a long time to admit he liked his country. Once it would have seemed like a betrayal. Whenever he was asked why he worked at the Bureau of Past Management of all places and not in some more pleasant archive, he gave the same answer: he did it for the survivors, the elderly women and men with eyes as deep as drill holes, in which you couldn’t, and didn’t dare, look to the bottom. Moreover, they appeared so full of joie de vivre that he felt dead in comparison.
And yet he knew too well that there were some who’d survived the camps without an ounce of vitality left inside.
The survivors occasionally spoke of themselves in the past tense because most survivors were already dead. Those who weren’t dead usually wanted nothing to do with his Bureau or any other memorial institution. And every day, there were fewer and fewer survivors.
No one had ever asked him the reason he’d chosen this occupation.
People used to go pale and silent when he responded to their questions about his work, whereas today they just nodded as if it were self-explanatory.
Memory work, right.
And then they changed the subject.
He’d already changed it.
At least it seemed to him that he’d changed it.
He went to the archive each day, carried out the work, preserving records and doing his duty.
He realised that concentration camp guards had given the exact same answer when they were asked why they’d done that job, of all things, and not some other. If nothing else, they’d all been taught what it meant to be German, which was to do a thing for its own sake. (Here came to consciousness and received its plain expression, whatG e r m a nis: to wit, the thing one does for its own sake, for the very joy of doing it; whereas Utilitarianism, namely, the principle whereby a thing is done for the sake of some personal end, ulterior to the thing itself, was shown to be un-German. Wagner, Richard. Prose Works, Art and Politics. Tr. by William Ashton Ellis, vol. 4, p. 107, Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, Ltd., 1895, London.) Furthermore, he’d been taught to question everything critically, and foremost, his German-ness. (Though he hadn’t been taught to consider the reference to joy in this citation.) His discomfort at the loss of his unease stemmed from his German-ness because if he questioned its loss, he would have to recognise that he was another self-loathing German. He had become another prison guard, and it didn’t bother him any longer. They dwindle, they fall / the suffering people … (Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion or The Hermit in Greece. Vol. II, ii. [Hyperion to Bellarmin, ‘Hyperion’s Song of Destiny’]). And while he could no longer refer to a specific, concrete cause, his misery remained, and he
gave himself over to it.
The misery, as natural to him as breathing, was large, immeasurably larger than he, and yet it was completely dependent on him; if he did not exist – he prided himself, in comparatively happy moments – the misery would have no host animal. Actually, he knew the misery couldn’t care less about him and was as independent as it could be. But if there were no misery, he’d be nothing – he lived only with and on misery. Without misery he would have been unable to define himself. It was never his; in reality it didn’t belong to him. It was not his misery but
The Misery.
If he removed it from himself, nothing of him would remain, nothing. Utterly nothing. (He knew this. But it was no use to him.)
TODAY, AS HE RECALLED THIS, he wondered if Graziela still dwelled on the scene while travelling on crowded trains and if she thought of those people transported in cattle cars to barracks, barracks that had been designed as stables for Wehrmacht horses. Every time he remembered, he resolved to ask her, but he always forgot. Nowadays, they rarely spoke about Auschwitz, and when they did, their tone was dry and factual. It wasn’t the way they had once spoken, with a lump in their throats and feeling they were at an abyss.
In any event, they saw each other much less often than they once had.
NEW WEEK, SAME OLD MISERY. He took the lift to the 16th floor of the Bureau of Past Management, held his plastic ID to the designated spot by the entrance until he heard a quiet click, opened the door and stepped into the archive’s familiar reception area – a cube of cold light. Above him the ceiling’s fluorescent strip buzzed insistently, lighting up every corner of the room so that Frau Kermer’s perfectly styled blonde hair gleamed like ice. It flowed down to her elbows and, because she made certain never to let her hair get out of place, she sometimes looked like a statue, a glistening reception Buddha. But mostly like a dragon at the mouth of a cave. Or the guardian of the Grail. And sometimes like the Beast of Buchenwald.
He drew up the corners of his mouth so she would think he was smiling. There would be no other choice. He observed all social conventions, which was why he pulled up the corners – it was customary, that’s how people smiled.
‘Good morning, Frau Kermer,’ he said, turning at once to the coat rack to let the corners of his mouth drop to where they belonged. She addressed her greeting to his back as he hung his coat with elaborate care. Sliding a hanger into the shoulders symmetrically, he then put the hanger on the pole, paying even closer attention so that his coat hung as freely as possible – barely touching the wall and certainly not Frau Kermer’s, which already hung there. He bent down, tucked his briefcase – which he’d gripped between his legs – under his left arm, and, standing once again, pressed the case to his belly while combing down his hair with his right hand. Frau Kermer must have been watching because she threw her grappling hook after him just as he turned away.
‘Herr Frambach!’ she called, dragging him off-kilter, and as she spoke, he couldn’t prevent the corners of his mouth from sliding up. It was automatic.
‘Herr Marschner asked if you would keep eleven-thirty free. He’d like very much to speak to you.’
Frambach nodded.
‘When will he arrive?’ he said, simply to stretch out the conversation and relax the corners of his mouth.
‘Around eleven,’ said Frau Kermer. Frambach nodded once more. The smile, which Frau Kermer did not mirror, hurt him, pushing itself ever more firmly into his face. Naturally, Marschner knew it didn’t matter what time they met during work hours. It would be highly unlikely not to meet in the office during those hours, particularly because Frambach sat faithfully at his desk from early until late, feeding one document after another into the archive, and had no meetings outside the office; Marschner nevertheless scheduled meetings in advance, always asking Frau Kermer to make the appointments. It was his way of giving an overall impression of urgency and professionalism. And it was very successful.
The heavy creases on Frau Kermer’s forehead tilted her face back down in the direction of her desk. Her paperwork always seemed of utmost importance, as if it couldn’t tolerate the slightest delay. She had not responded to his smile, and consequently it had not waned, which was why, as he entered the dim corridor that led to his office, he shook himself to hurl the smile from his face. He clutched his bag with both arms and gave himself a shake, short but sharp, a quick but powerful shake to get rid of his idiotic smile. Now it lay in the dark on the already cluttered floor among all the other smiles he’d forced every morning to greet Frau Kermer. The cleaning woman casually swept his smiles into the corners, but she couldn’t remove them because she didn’t have the proper machine.
THE BUREAU OF PAST MANAGEMENT is situated in the centre of Berlin, a large city sprawled against the flat landscape. Compared to other cities in Germany, it’s not very old; actually, it’s fairly new. Nonetheless, full of history. History has battered this large city with heavy hammers time and again, and you can see it – precisely because the city sought to shake off, make smaller, clear away whatever had been created in bygone eras. That desire to shake off, make smaller, clear away is the city’s trademark, as one resident recognised long ago, prophesying that Berlin was ‘damned always to become, and never to be,’ (cf. Karl Scheffler, Berlin, Ein Stadtschicksal. 1910. Berlin –The Psychogramme of a City. Tr. by Michael Hofmann, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2021). The city has honestly fulfilled its fate. And history didn’t just leave a wasteland behind, it left grand edifices as well.
At sixteen storeys high and nearly four hundred feet wide, the Bureau’s office building was erected by the East Germans during the city’s most recently completed historic period, and instead of being razed to the ground, it was completely renovated. Six lifts ascend and descend the floors at once, carrying people up and down, yet the Bureau’s employees often have to wait for a free lift. Why? The Bureau has innumerable employees. They need vast numbers of people because the past, which they manage, is itself vast; they aren’t rolling a single boulder into the future like Sisyphus did, but a mountain of rubble.
Everyone who works here meets regularly, without an appointment, on the eighth floor in the middle of the building – if it’s considered vertically. That’s where the cafeteria is. Here you can enter freely, and without a plastic ID card, for the doors are always open. However, you can’t buy anything without the plastic card and, before purchasing, you have to put money onto that card.
