TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

I’m sitting in the archive, bent over some of the papers Sanderling left behind. Having put on the white cotton gloves I’ve been given for this purpose, I first reach for his shabby address book. Before I take the miniature spatula, about the length of a fork, that’s another item in my archive equipment, and delicately slide it between the pages, I study what remains of the sharkskin or galuchat binding, with its dark, dull pearl pattern; the pale red letter tabs down the right side are thin and bent with age, and some of them are missing, beginning with A and C: the teeth that fell out of the alphabet. The B tab is barely still attached. And how strange it feels to find, between the names von Bötticher —Carl Wilhelm, a senior Prussian official—and Brouwer —a Dutch professor of mathematics—the name Benjamin, W, with the address Grunewald Delbrückstr . 23; above it, in parentheses, something illegible ending in the digits 1488, possibly a telephone number. Elsewhere, similarly squeezed in amongst 148

unfamiliar names, v. Hofmannstahl , Hugo , Rodann bei Wien . These names are scattered just as unthinkingly and indiscriminately as all the Smiths, Webers, and Joneses in our address books, the famous and the forgotten, friend and foe right next to each other under the shared roof of one letter. Through careful handling of the spatula, I see a web that extends, in the early 1920s, from Berlin to Vienna ( Mayröcker, Frau Dr. Hofrat ) from Munich ( Scholem, Gershom, Munich, Türckstraße 98 ) via Holland ( van Eeden ) to New York ( Oppenheimer, Franz, Maiden Lane, N.Y. ). As if in a group photograph taken shortly before a shipwreck, they’re all gathered together one last time in the address book. Before removing the cotton gloves and turning to Sanderling’s autobiographical fragments, I slide the unspoiled world of the address book back into its binder. Heile Welt , the world of before, the unspoiled world: one of those concepts, like Sehnsucht or Heimat , that only exist and therefore can only be expressed in 149