Ursula Pflug, author of “Mountain” and “Motion Sickness” writes about Weimar and pre-Wende Berlin, activism, her writing, and the rise of white supremacy.
“Fires Halfway,” my short story in the 2018 Snuggly Books anthology Drowning in Beauty, edited by Justin Isis and Daniel Corrick, is inspired by my first trip to Berlin in 1981. The editors asked us to write a personal essay about our story, to be posted on author Dennis Cooper’s blog. I’m grateful for the opportunity to repost here on the Inanna blog.
In Berlin, my grandparents and I went to the premiere of Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene. My maternal grandmother Regine Faust was an active member of the German resistance, part of a communist cell led by Harro Schultze-Boysen. Several of her friends were captured by the Nazis and executed for espionage. In one scene a member of the resistance is seen cycling through the night city on his way to a rendezvous. My elegant grandmother stood up in the crowded theatre and said, “I knew him, and he didn’t look at all like that!” Everyone turned and stared. Who was she?
When I looked up the film on imdb I learned that Fassbinder, in a cameo, played author Günther Weisenborn. But Weissenborn was a real person, a member of Rote Kapelle, the same anti-Nazi group of which my grandmother was a member. The film is based on a novel and as such is a fictionalization, yet I do wonder why Weisenborn appears under his actual name as others in the film do not. These intersections between fiction and nonfiction have always been important in my writing. One element may be real, another invented. As writers we deliberately subvert or erase this distinction.
My partner at the time was a musician, but he wasn’t with us on the trip. Rudy and Kim’s Berlin tour is invented but influenced by the stories of pre-Wende Berlin, where Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie lived and worked. Did they ever go to Die Ruine, the club in the story which is more or less exactly as described? It seems like the kind of place they would have romanticized, but Berlin was Berlin long before they set up shop, and it was the fatalistic romance of the bygone Weimar era which drew them.
Matthew David Surridge, writing some years ago about my story collection After the Fires in Black Gate, pointed out that my settings are elegiac, multifaceted and even have agency in a way that mirrors how other writers build characters.
The structures of the tales fuse with the weird ideas they contain; the surreality comes out in measured doses, working with the narrative and even moving the narrative forward in a way that the surreal typically avoids. You could say that these stories exist in a kind of liminal zone between the surreal and the fantastic — between the hallucinatory existing as pure imagery, and a world in which the unreal is easily codified. In a sense, if character seems rudimentary, that’s because it’s been displaced onto setting: what these worlds are, the way we experience them and come to learn them, effectively replaces traditional character development.
This, I think, is why in the end the stories succeed for me. Pflug uses form in a precisely apt manner, both the form of the short tale and the form of speculative fiction. These stories have to be what they are, or else they become something entirely different. It’s not just that Pflug selects her words carefully, building up her settings with well-chosen details; it’s that those details are so unexpected that not only do they imply more than they say, but also remind us that there may be other things we do not yet know that can again turn all we thought we understood on its head — and that this is a process possibly without end. Again, the world becomes a larger and stranger place than we thought.
In Toronto I had a roomate, a young poet and musician. The story in “Fires Halfway,” of the radio playing a song before the writing of it is finished comes from her. I was enchanted but when I returned from Berlin she wasn’t at our apartment, instead incarcerated in a psychiatric facility. We were close, and in one way, “Fires Halfway” is a paean to her.
My grandmother was a queer ally long before the term existed, a thing I didn’t quite get till we were in Germany together and visited an artist she had been close to decades before, now in his sixties. I never shared “Fires Halfway” with Regine, as it wasn’t completed till after she passed away, but she would have grasped its Weimar vibe; she was a Brecht fan, which isn’t surprising, given her political work.
Adapted excerpt from “Fires Halfway”:
We heard voices on the radio, talking to us about what we were experiencing. One night when I was alone I was sure I heard the fire song we’d written together a few nights earlier and had been singing together every day, as we cried or laughed at our plight, or more likely, just made strange new love again. But of course that was impossible; he hadn’t recorded it yet. The music was very beautiful. I wished I knew more of music so I could sing him the melody when he returned from seeing Lou, my euphemistic name for his Orange supplier, and he could write it down, because it was far better than the one he’d made up.
But the words were the same, word for word.
I could stay here forever
counting down
and never get to zero
I could stay here forever
with you
Fires halfway burn the brightest
halfway through the night it’s darkest
What is time?
What is creativity? I felt like we were sent out on a space probe, the two of us, to bring back the unearthly answers to those questions but who could survive that? He might not have made money on the radio’s full melody anyway; it was way too scary, too true.
Still, waiting for him to come back I tried to tap it out on the room’s piano, but I have little ear for music. And I never got it right. When he eventually got back he said, “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard you play; it captures so perfectly the eerie sadness of our watery trajectory.”
“It’s a quarter of the original, if that, and many notes misheard. It’s the melody to Fires Halfway.”
“How do you know? Fires Halfway already has a melody.”
“This one’s better,” I said. “I heard it on the radio.”
“You’re a technology based Coleridge,” Rudy said. “I know you said you wanted to be Kim, and I said I’d be happy if you could, but now you’re pushing it.” Still, he madly scribbled notes, and the lost portions he replaced with accessible, poppy riffs, not nearly so frightening. It was a good collaboration, the one and only between ourselves and the Sirian extraterrestrials singing to us and only us from the radio. Or so I joked to Rudy. He winced. I could say things like that and still remember to pick up the dry cleaning; it was before Fan came. Rudy was concerned; he had a lighter grip that week than me. Kim, whom he’d conjured, strange wise beauty, was turning out to be a little more than he could handle. I, on the other hand, didn’t see myself that way at all. I resented the fact that we hardly ever went out; I wanted to look cool and show off.
“How was your meeting with Lou?” I asked.
“Not very productive. Perhaps a good thing as I have to play tomorrow night and dogs aren’t very good at guitar.”
“They’ll love you,” I said. “I was going to go shopping with Katie to buy a dress to wear tomorrow night but I completely forgot, deranged as we are. I hope she’s not mad.”
“Yes,” he sighed as if he didn’t like it much. “I could spit on them and they’d love me. Why do people worship celebrities?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wondering whether he was ready to hear me say he wasn’t much of a celebrity compared to the real Lou but thought I’d wait. “But I think we need to go out finally, you and I.”
“Where is there to go? We’re past Pluto, Kim. And the bars have closed.”
“Die Ruine’s private and open all night.”
“You’re not kidding,” Rudy said, laughing a little bitterly, and took a
dry cleaned silk jacket off its hanger and passed me mine: one black, one
mauve.
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Justin Isis suggested we include music in our list of references.
My grandfather sang “Lili Marleen” to me on that trip, and told me the story of how it was the last thing played on Radio Belgrade every night, and was beloved by both sides. I like the Dietrich version more than the Lale Andersen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7heXZPl2hik
I found a duet of “Lili Marleen” by Nina Hagen and Nana Mouskouri, but I want you to think well of the mother of punk, and it’s execrable. Still, you can look at it for historical interest, which it indeed has.
1980:
https://myspace.com/ninahagenrocks/music/song/ziggy-stardust-27672944-27474129
Before I left for Berlin my talented, ill-fated friend and I had toyed with the concept of a twinned, mirrored aspect to consciousness. The divided winter city, landlocked in communist Germany, with its towers and wall separating one side from the other became a kind of coded metaphor.
Listening to Nina covering “Lili Marleen” and the Brecht/Hauptmann/Weill collaboration.”Alabama,” I thought of how a cover is a kind of time travel, but also something more. When we listen to Hagen sing a Weimar or WWII anthem, she casts light not just on those periods but on the pre-Wende music scene in West Berlin. We gain insight into multiple time periods in a way that we wouldn’t if we were visiting them discretely, listening only to originals anchored in the time of the song’s creation.
Nina, it turns out, is still performing. On March 14 2018 in Berlin, she sang Brecht lieder at the Museum für Kommunikation.
https://ninahagendas.beepworld.de/
In a way, Hagen is the soundtrack to “Fires Halfway,” more than Bowie or Lou Reed, though Reed is the one I mention. Bowie, Reed and Hagen reprised the permissive glamour of the Weimar period, but Hagen, in spite of the unneveness of her work, did so with the most legitimacy.
After all, she is the one from the other side.
2015:
Marcus Bullock, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, tells us “Remarkable for the way it emerged from a catastrophe, more remarkable for the way it vanished into a still greater catastrophe, the world of Weimar represents modernism in its most vivid manifestation.” The culture of the Weimar years was later reprised by the left-wing intellectuals of the 1960s especially in France. Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault reprised Wilhelm Reich; Derrida reprised Husserl and Heidegger; Guy Debord and the Situationist International reprised the subversive-revolutionary culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture
Brecht’s agitprop theatre was intended, he said, to wake people up. I often wonder what my grandmother would have to say about the current rise of white supremacy on both sides of The Big Pond. How to wake?
Matthew Surridge suggested that in my short stories I imbue my cities with more personality than my characters. If that’s the case, the main character in “Fires Halfway” may not be Kim but Berlin.
I keep going back, and I keep writing about her.
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Toronto fimmaker Carol McBride directed this 1986 35mm film inspired by my first published short story, “Memory Lapse at the Waterfront.” The early 80’s were a fertile time for me. The story, which appeared in 1981’s Emanation Press anthology New Bodies, was reprinted in 2008’s After the Fires. Timely but unplanned, McBride digitized the original the year ATF came out. It’s a near future cli-apocalypse thing, but as in “Fires Halfway,” redemption, such as there is, comes via writing and friendship between women. Posted with permission.
1986:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Chs5LDHP0
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It seems as true now as it did then:
To Those Born Later
Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.
What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?
It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I’ve been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost.)
They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfill your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times.
II
I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger reigned there.
I came among men in a time of revolt
And I rebelled with them.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
My food I ate between battles
To sleep I lay down among murderers
Love I practised carelessly
And nature I looked at without patience.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
All roads led into the mire in my time.
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers.
There was little I could do. But those in power
Sat safer without me: that was my hope.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.
III
You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped.
― Bertolt Brecht
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Ursula Pflug is author of the novels Green Music, The Alphabet Stones, and Motion Sickness (a flash novel illustrated by SK Dyment); the YA novella Mountain and the story collections After the Fires and Harvesting the Moon. She edited the anthologies They Have To Take You In (a fundraiser for mental health) and Playground of Lost Toys (with Colleen Anderson) and has recently edited a new anthology, The Food of My People, with Candas Jane Dorse for Exile. Her fiction, reviews and essays have appeared in Canada, the US and the UK, in Lightspeed, Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Leviathan, LCRW, Now Magazine, Bamboo Ridge, Back Brain Recluse, The New York Review of Science Fiction and elsewhere. Her books have been endorsed by Tim Wynne-Jones, Candas Jane Dorsey, Charles De Lint, Matthew Cheney, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Heather Spears, Jeff VanderMeer and others. Her award winning short stories have been taught at universities in Canada and India, and she has collaborated extensively with filmmakers, playwrights, choreographers and installation artists. Spring 2018 saw the release of a new novella, Down From, also from Snuggly. http://www.ursulapflug.ca/