Dear Martin,
We hardly ever talked about Johann Gottfried Seume. Walking as an all encompassing way of being en route in the world was too self evident for us to make a reference to him as we were striding along or breaking our journeys to eat and drink. But now, for everybody, an addendum: Seume, who walked from Leipzig to Syracuse and returned via Paris, full of praise for his cobbler, wrote in „My Summer of 1805“ : „He who walks sees on average more, anthropologically and cosmically, than the one who drives. … Where there is too much driving things don’t go well, just look around you! As soon as you are seated in a coach, you are removed from original humanity by a few degrees. You can’t look anybody in the eye any more with a firm and clear gaze as one should…. Driving indicates powerlessness, walking indicates strength.“
Martin, your solid shoes, your firm, reserved but occasionally also buoyant, even joyful stride. Places opened themselves up to you, you have the ability to walk on, regardless of potential boundaries.
Martin, you are a „wanderer“, wandering in urban space rather than in landscape. You never even mounted a bicycle. You as a driver of an automobile – inconceivable! With you I could walk my familiar Berlin and see it in a different light. Every passage way, every courtyard, every strip of wasteland, every housefront, every cemetery, every ornament, every faded sign, every bar – they all meant something to you. They gave you pleasure.
We wondered how many horses might have been around in Berlin after the Second World War. Where they would have been stabled, where they got their feed. When did the horses disappear from the cityscape?
Before you moved into Schöneweiderstraße in Rixdorf you asked me, to my bafflement, to show you the the cellar. You tried to imagine how many people would have been squatting there in the nights when the city was bombed.
You are earthed in the past, and your roots go deep.
You are a very polite person. Listening, appreciating. But with very firm principles. „Peace to the shacks!“. The new Berlin takes a different view. The shacks rather than the palaces have always been your dwelling place, as they’ve been mine. Our views are alike.
We will continue our exchange, dear Martin!
Bernhard
Category >> Tributes