I went to Berlin primarily for Mary Wigman’s farewell performance. In 1928, a senior student of hers came to see my paintings. He said he was a dancer, and that his teacher was Mary Wigman, one of the great dancers of Germany. It was he who invited me this time to Berlin.
I was quite ignorant about dancing, with no clue as to what kind of dancer Mary Wigman was. Back after 1973, I came across the news of her passing in an old issue of “News for Reference.” I simply could not remember what year she died because I had not thought about writing a memoir at the time.
Mein Freund Levy was a student of architecture.Levy was a student of architecture. When he heard that I was going to Berlin, he suggested that I should look at some of the new architecture in the suburbs of Berlin. During that period, architecture in countries like Germany, Holland and Switzerland were being/had beendeeply influenced by the Bauhaus School -- the fine art and crafts institute founded by Walter Gropius. At that time, the school was promoting a movement in architecture known as International Style, advocating the use of modern, integrated methods, and abandoning the distinction between pure and applied arts. I really wanted to see the school’s theory and practice for myself.
During this time, the German way of life still had not returned to normalcy after the nation’s defeat in World War I, so people were living rather simply.
Although on the busiest streets in Berlin, one could see some people in stylish clothes, they were still in the minority. A bronze statue stood in a square, and one could faintly make out the marks of some posters put on the pedastal by the German Communist Party. However, by that time, the Nazis had already become active.
On my third day in Berlin, I went to Mary Wigman’s farewell performance. Her dances were accompanied only by drums. Of all the dances that day, I only remember the first one, which described a day “from dawn to nightfall.” When the curtain first went up, the stage was pitch black and empty. Only a series of very soft drumbeats could be heard in the background. The drumbeats built to a crescendo, as simultaneously the tempo picked and the stage slowly lit up. The spotlight focused first on center stage, where there was just a lump of indistinguishable matter. Then, two hands began to emerge out of it as if they were growing from the ground. Then came the arms and the head, as if a chain of smoke was rising out of the crust of the earth. Then, a body surfaced, which gradually rose to its feet from han initial kneeling position. No other movement was involved apart from this movement upward. At this time, the spotlight shifted over to her. Barefoot and unadorned clad in a long robe,, she began to dance like the early sun that has just risen above the horizon. All living beings on earth now came to life. The drumbeats quickened, as the dance movements changed from an expression of gentle emotions into an expression of strength. This description is merely a recollection of certain faint memories of an event that took place half a century ago.
The most unforgettable image was when, right after the performance, Mary Wigman stood at center stage receiving the applause of the audience. She had come back to the stage several times, but the applause and the cheering kept getting louder and louder. Then, finally, people gathered at the foot of the stage, together with those on the second floor in the private booths close to the stage. People lavished fresh flower petals on Wigman. The flower petals from the second floor, in particular, poured down like a gust of snowflakes. In no time, Wigman was buried in petals. That was how much people adored her, how much they adored art, and how much they adored life. What adoration could be purer than this!
Afterwards, I painted “Wigman’s Dance” in the style of Structuralism. In 1932, the painting was displayed in the lounge of my studio on Rue Marcel Tillot. The ultimate fate of the painting is now unknown to me.
As for the architecture -- I visited the suburbs around Berlin and had a tour of quite a few private residential buildings. Some of the buildings had been completed; others were still under construction. The influence of Bauhaus was evident in the private residential buildings. Overall, the designs of the buildings were highly variable. The use of a flat rooftop provided a great deal of freedom for the overall building concept. Inside, the . décor represented a complete desertion from tradition. Due to the development of the steel and glass industries, a lot of glass was used, bringing about a radical change in the interior lighting of a building and altering the “relationship between interior and exterior.” As well, steel was used in furniture and the plastics industry was also being developed at the time. Overly decorative ornaments, be they in architecture or in furniture, had all disappeared. While there was a simultaneous significant improvement in lighting.
Be Like Geothe
Kurt von Tuffas heard that I was going to Berlin, so he urged me, once I arrived, to visit his mother to whom he had written. before my departure. After I went to Mary Wigman’s farewell performance, I asked Günter Eich to phone Mrs. Tuffas. Kurt and his father were Mrs. Xu’s tenants in Vandenberg.
After the appointment was confirmed, I spent 10 German marks on 10 light yellow roses, which were the most beautiful roses I had ever seen, and also marked the only time in my life that I had bought such expensive flowers. I did so because I was visiting the mother of a friend. Since I didn’t speak any German and was new to Berlin, Eich was concerned that I would not be able to find the place, so he went with me. However, after looking for the place for a long while, we still had trouble finding it. Right at this moment, we noticed a gray-haired, elderly woman standing on the roadside. She also saw us, so we went over to her. And, indeed, she was Kurt’s mother. Eich said good-bye to her, and Mrs. Tuffas led me to her home. Mrs. Tuffas spoke French. After I took off my coat, I presented the roses to her. She took a good sniff of the roses, put down the flowers, and gave me a big hug. She said, “You are Kurt’s friend, so you are also my son.” As we sat down, she told me that both her grandfather and her father liked paintings, so they had developed a fairly large collection. Growing up with the arts, she particularly enjoyed painting. Kurt and his father had written to her before. She said, “You are their friend, and you are a very talented painter, so I am very glad you are here.” Then, she told me how the paintings in their collection were lost during World War I. While recounting these memories, she had tears in her eyes.
Then, someone came in and announced that lunch was ready. She took me into the dining room, which was not just a dining area located in a regular house, but a huge dining hall. There was a long dining table, which could seat at least 14 people. Mrs. Tuffas sat at the head of the table, and I sat beside her on her right. With only the two of us in such a large dining hall, the place felt quite solitary. At this time, I noticed that the windows there were different from those in more modern buildings. All the other fixtures in the room were not modern in styling. The chair I was sitting in had a distinctive look: the back was quite high, with some engraved patterns; the arms too were engraved. It looked like an antique. Just as I was getting curious about it, Mrs. Tuffas rang a small bell on the table. A tuxedo-clad man in his fifties entered carrying a bottle of wine on a silver platter. “This is from before the War,” Mrs. Tuffas said. “The only bottle of Rhine wine left in the cellar.” The man in the tuxedo poured us each a glass of wine, then left the room. I noticed then that his tuxedo was also different from the ones normally seen at the time. Lunch was simple, reflecting the reality of the time; in marked contrast to the other conventions being displayed during the lunch. Mrs. Tuffas seemed to have read my mind. She smiled and said, “This is all Kurt’s idea - to let you know what type of life we had in our home. You might want to look at the chair you are sitting in. Goethe sat in it when he came here for dinner. This dining hall has been preserved in its original form. What we used to eat was not the simple food we had today.” Then, I understood everything.
When I said good-bye to her, she gave me a hug again and said, “My boy, be like Goethe: Love your country.”
The National Gallery
Eich had to work in the morning, so he took me to the National Gallery, where several of the staff members spoke French. The National Gallery was actually an art museum which was celebrating its bicentennial anniversary with an exhibition of the gallery’s new collection. My favorite was Ludwig Kaulins’ (1858-1925) 1909 portrait of his mother. Kaulin’s strokes were so lively. Then, there were also the works of Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Klee …, , joined Bauhaus in 1920, where he held the position of Technical Instructor in the Textile Workshop. An understanding of this historical episode helps us appreciate his paintings. Before my trip to Berlin, I had already seen Klee’s personal exhibition in a gallery in Paris. What excited me was that his work was a catalyst for leading me down to the basement, where three major categories of collections were held: painted vases from Greece, mummy portraits removed from Egyptian mummies, and porcelain from China.
The painted vases from Greece were mostly from a period between the Fourth and Fifth century B.C., which is roughly the same time as the Warring States Period in China. Beautifully designed, the vases were decorated with figure paintings, which could be divided into two main types. One was based on themes from mythology. The other type showed the lives of slave masters. The human bodies were painted realistically with the men, in most cases, depicted naked and the women typically clad in long dresses. The basic technique employed was that of outlining, which gives the contour of the subject being depicted, with few details. The style was similar to those found in ancient Greek carvings and murals. Images of the mythic Birdman could be found in vase paintings from the Fourth century B.C., which, in turn, bore some resemblance to the Birdman figures found in the Wu Family Shrine of the Han Dynasty in China. The designs of these vases and the ornamental elements in them could be summed up with one word: “exquisite.”
As for the Egyptian mummies, I had no particular interest in them. However, I was interested in the mummy portraits removed from the heads of the mummies. I was astonished by the number of such portraits collected in the gallery. At first glance, they looked like oil paintings, since, in fact, a thick layer of transparent oil coating had been applied to the surface of each painting. Strangely, unlike other ornamental artifacts from Egypt, these mummy portraits were painted in an essentially realistic style. Some of them were quite similar to the styles of certain modern European painters.
As for the Chinese porcelain, I just took a brief look at the collection, as I always did during the few years that I was in France. When I saw Chinese artifacts in a museum, I always had this uneasy feeling that it was an insult to my ethnic pride. Subconsciously, I would always keep a distance from them. I always felt that the Chinese had really let themselves down by allowing others to take or steal these artifacts from them. In many cases, it was we ourselves who secretly sold these artifacts to foreigners. On the other hand, however, these artifacts have been well kept and valued as precious works of art in foreign lands and, had they remained in China, their fate would have been hard to secure. The gentleman who was guarding this collection was very enthusiastic and gave me quite a bit of freedom to browse through the artifacts, so I spent two mornings there.
At noon, Eich came to take me home for lunch. Eich’s mother, Eich and I, the three of us, had lunch together. We had hot soup, steak, and a plate of potatoes for each of us as a bread substitute.
Eich wrote a lot of poetry, which he often read on the air, receiving an honorarium with each reading. On the Monday following my trip to Berlin, Eich was invited by a radio station in Cologne to do a reading there, so Eich used his honorarium to invite me to go to Cologne with him. The architectural style of the cathedrals in Cologne is very well known in European art history . The tall turrets of the cathedrals point upward to the blue sky and are completely different in style from the cathedrals in France. That night, we stayed overnight with Eich’s relatives who treated us with the warmest hospitality. After dinner, we sat around in the living room in their home house built on a hilltop. Looking out and down from the living room, we had a view of the cliff.
The Chinese characters for the name “Günter Eich” were transliterated from German by Eich himself. He was a year younger than me, born in Lebus / Mark Brandenburg on February 1, 1907. He passed away on December 20, 1972 in a convalescent home in Salzburg. We corresponded before the Second World War, then he became a lyrical poet and radio-playwright. In 1930, he published his first collection of poems and subsequently received many prizes for his works. ….