An Eruption of Contingency: On Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses
Judith Schalansky | An Inventory of Losses | New Directions | 2020 | 224 Pages
In the very center of Berlin lies the Berliner Schloss, a painstaking – and eye-wateringly expensive – reconstruction of the baroque Royal Palace that housed the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty from the 17th century until the Kaiser’s flight into exile in 1918. A reconstruction, because the Communists who ran East Germany (then the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) throughout the Cold War decided to demolish its bombed-out remnants and replace it with the Palast der Republik– a “People’s Palace” home to parliament meeting rooms in addition to art galleries, a bowling alley, and a variety of event spaces. Santana played a show there in 1987.
Once the Berlin Wall came down, the triumphant government of West (now reunified) Germany decided to pull it down, overruling the protests of many easterners who had fond memories of the place. Nasty regimes, after all, are not entitled to nice monuments. And so the structure was dismantled, the steel from its foundations sold to the auto industry and to Dubai for building the Burj Khalifa. In its place now stands the Schloss 2.0, with a cross-topped dome and the city’s Ethnological Museum inside. The palace’s new name, the Humboldt Forum, is an homage to the curiosity and Enlightenment values of the Humboldt brothers – one a naturalist who made his name exploring in Latin America, the other a prominent Prussian linguist and pedagogue.
The Schloss may well be the most controversial building in modern-day Berlin – no mean feat in a city prone to massive architectural change and impassioned debates about the past. But it is the now-vanished “People’s Palace” that captures the imagination of the young German author Judith Schalansky, providing the subject of one chapter in her recently-translated An Inventory of Losses. Schalansky, a 40-year-old Berliner, was born in the small GDR city of Greifswald and saw her homeland’s demise at the age of nine. She is one of the most visible – and most celebrated – of Germany’s Wendekind (“reunification-child”) generation, having authored the 2009-2010 coffee table hit Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will and the dark 2011 novel The Giraffe’s Neck, which featured a cruel old biology teacher whose faith in Darwinism is shaken by the decline of her left-behind eastern town. Schalansky’s latest work weaves elements of fiction and nonfiction into a thoroughly original exploration of memory, wonder, erasure, and loss. Each of the book’s twelve genre-bending essay-stories is dedicated to a single vanished historical thing – from Sappho’s love poems to the extinct Caspian tiger to thePalast der Republik. As the preface explains:
“This book springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, to call to mind the forgotten, to give voice to the silenced and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced. Hence this volume is as much about seeking as finding, as much about losing as gaining, and gives a sense that the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.”
Throughout, Schalansky is concerned with resisting both the dangerous naivety of nostalgia and the ruthless erasures that accompany authoritarian visions of the past, whether that’s ancient Rome or European colonialism or the cultivated blankness of neoliberal capitalism. “Being alive means experiencing loss,” she writes. But what we understand by loss – our very sense of what’s worth mourning – is determined by what we value. If the past is constantly reshaped by the eye of the present, then the present too is shaped by what we understand about the past. Something that is missed is never really gone. In rapidly-gentrifying Berlin and the declining smaller cities of post-industrial eastern Germany – as in the US, with its hyped coastal megacities and “manufactured decline” across the Rust Belt – there is a political urgency to the question of what deserves to be preserved, what deserves to be mourned, and what was always doomed to fall.
“When things disappear,” Schalansky argues, “we must begin to narrate.” Her essay-stories try on a formidable range of narrative perspectives and voices, often treating the lost thing only indirectly. The chapter on a lost Murnau film takes the form of a monologue by a reclusive, elderly Greta Garbo walking the streets of Manhattan in a huff; the Palast der Republik one is a conventional realist short story that only briefly features the GDR’s "People's Palace”. A unicorn skeleton is represented by a story where an unnamed narrator gives up on their project of writing a catalogue of monsters, having concluded that all these fantastic creatures were just dreamed up to distract from fear of emptiness. These are not stories about specific lost things – they are stories concerned with loss itself, and with the various strategies that people have employed in their desire to avoid it. Most of the protagonists are themselves flawed researchers or collectors; their narratives illustrate the dangers of fascination and the risks of imposing a sense of order on the past. Personal, ironic, and self-consciously researching, Schalansky’s stories stage the author’s own process of investigation, and the fears and desires behind it. In doing so, An Inventory of Lossesmingles the indulgence of curiosity with a subtle internal critique of dominant European habits of knowledge production about the world and its past.
The first story, which is dedicated to the lost (and possibly fictive) South-Seas island of Tuanaki, is narrated by a researcher deep in the maps section of a German library. Led on by a “deep-seated remnant of childish hope,” this fussy-seeming character finds themselves engrossed by missionary reports from this island, whose inhabitants allegedly did not know the meaning of war. The narrator grows zealous about rescuing Tuanaki from forgetting. Their many attempts to take on the authoritative voice of the European researcher – gravely insisting on what can or cannot be backed up with evidence – are swept away by repeated flights of fancy as they imagine the exotic island landscape or dramatic colonial encounters. In Jackie Smith’s skillful translation, the long and snaking sentences of the German original are rendered into English with the same combination of throat-clearing fastidiousness and romantic self-projection – as well as the gradual sense of getting carried away. Towards this section’s end, the narrator looks upon a globe:
“Right there, to the south of the equator, between a few scattered islands, this perfect patch of land had stood, remote from the world, having forgotten everything it had ever known about it. The world, though, only grieves for what it knows, and has no inkling of what it lost with that tiny islet, even though, given the spherical form of the Earth, this vanished dot could just as easily have been its navel, even if it was not the sturdy ropes of war and commerce that bound them one to the other, but the incomparably finer-spun thread of a dream.”
A number of superficial misreadings of Schalansky accuse her of nostalgia. But the ironic distance between the author and her various past-hoarding subjects is as unmistakable as it is crucial to her project. Her book is less a cabinet of curiosities and more a cabinet of curiousnesses – an incomplete catalogue of incomplete catalogues; a partial, doomed inventory of partial, doomed inventories. Its resistance to authoritarianism extends to both the utopian dream of a comprehensive archive and the wholesale erasure of an inconvenient past. It is a work of fragments in the German Romantic tradition – a form both proudly impermanent and unashamedly personal, here employed to insist on the contingency of what gets preserved or remembered.
Above all, as Schalansky notes in her preface, the book takes aim at the “naturalistic fallacy”: the assumption that whatever exists must have earned it, and whatever has been lost must have been lost for a reason. Schalansky – who experienced the dismantling of all the GDR’s monuments, the disastrous rapid sell-off of its assets, the federal neglect of its shrinking cities (including Greifswald) – is well aware of how winner’s justice can dress itself up as survival of the fittest. Some vanishments actually are the result of moral ruin; others are simply caused by brute strength, by authoritarian prejudice, by simple cock-ups, or by the inherent incompleteness of any one person’s vision.
It is not only the Communist regime of East Germany that sought to wipe away the past. Under the neoliberal system that has dominated Germany since 1989, eastern Germans were told that their former GDR lives were irredeemably toxic. In the process, they lost more than their “People’s Palace” – they lost the public legitimacy of their own personal memories. As jobs and cultural institutions were lost to capitalist shock-therapy, the government marketed this process as “alternativeless.” But whose lost jobs are an outrage, and whose are inevitable? If the small cities of eastern Germany find themselves under-invested and culturally marginalized, then that is no simple fact of evolution – it was a choice. If the residents of the interior U.S. are poorly served by the 21st-century economy, then that’s the product of choices as well. So too if the majority of American Covid deaths hit people of color. And if those deaths, like so much of African-American suffering, goes unmourned by the mainstream U.S. public, then that disproportionate commemoration is also a contingent, uninevitable act of past- and present-making. What counts as loss, as this book argues, is determined by what’s valued.
It is on these terms that Schalansky turns to the past’s forgotten things: her book is an eruption of contingency into the alternativeless complacency of the present. If – she writes – humanity are heirs to a yesteryear that must be “constantly appropriated and recast, rejected and destroyed, ignored and suppressed,” then “it is not the future but the past that represents the true field of opportunity.” If the world only misses what it knows, then you can change the world by changing what gets missed. As the unicorn story’s narrator reflects:
“Why shouldn’t memories push for their own survival, preservation and propagation in the same way that organisms do? After all, virtually nothing was more formidable, probably, than the power of images, of the once-seen.”
All of which is easier said than done. Where I live, in east Berlin, is a short walk from the river that used to mark the border with the West. Here they’ve kept a long stretch of Wall as a memorial and art gallery – it is perhaps the world’s most iconic modern ruin. But where I sat to read An Inventory of Losses, a significant section has been removed: the recently-built Mercedes-Benz Center wanted a clear view of the water. (Fans will be excited to hear that Louis C.K. is due to perform there come May.) Piece by piece, the Wall and its memory are disappearing from the city. As Schalansky knows well, not every remnant is provocative, and not every absence is fertile. And if there’s something scarier than monsters – more unsettling than ruins – it’s a noisy void, a distracted forgetting, a bland and pastless blank.