On a Haunted Resort north of Brainerd

 

During the week of Valentine’s Day, my wife and I spent three days at a lake-shore cabin north of Brainerd. The weather was unseasonably warm, about 35 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.  At night, it was colder, but still without any discernible wind.  The lake beneath the steep hill on which the cabin was located didn’t seem to be reliably frozen: the ice was glazed with fallen snow, but there were polished blue-grey patches, brushed smooth by the winds, that looked fragile.  Networks of fissures spread over parts over lake like the craquelure on an Old Master painting and far across the frozen water where normally there would be small shack villages of ice-fishermen, I saw only a single black hut, abandoned, perhaps, due to dangerously thin ice. 

The country in this part of the State is more water than land.  Squid-shaped lakes cast tendrils out amidst the evergreen forests.  Dry land consists of narrow ridges between bodies of water, slim promontories and sandy points and this isthmus-terrain dissected by channels lined with brown reeds pushed up through the spongy ice at the margins of the swamps.  Islands clog the narrow passages of these lakes and, if nature were allowed to prevail here, all of the bays and inlets would be connected by marshes pierced here and there by aisles of open water.  To make railroad easements and, later, highways, the corridors of dry land between the lakes have been rationalized, some of the estuaries filled up with gravel and packed earth embankments on which to build train tracks and roads.  Villages are squeezed between big lakes, frozen white as marble at this time of year.  

The resort where we were staying consisted of an event center for weddings, six post-modern cabins, modular cubes with glass walls fronting the lake (or “forest-view” across the clearing), the sort of architecture you see in Iceland or along the fjords of Norway or among the Finnish lakes.  The event center consisted of some austere trapezoids stacked like sea-going storage containers on top of one another.  Bulldozers had been remodeling the land when the Winter stopped work and some shallow pits full of frozen mud were clogged with debris – knocked-over trees, abandoned tires and shattered utility poles, shards of plywood.  Around the edges of the compound, old summer houses built with decaying clapboard and wrap-around porches, screened against warm weather’s mosquitos, occupied high points overlooking the lake.  Some of these structures were small, dour-looking summer cabins but several of the buildings were bigger and had once been impressive although they were now in a state of partial ruin, windows hanging loose from their frames, doors askew, shingles abraded by storms and pierced by sharp, fallen branches.  The post-modern Ikea-style cabins inserted into the landscape were ribbed with aluminum fins and the color of autumnal woods, built to conceal themselves in the forest.  They were screened to hide the light that they emitted at night so that the sky would be dark and laden with wet-looking stars.  The wooden houses and cabins were points of darkness, relics spilling shadow out from their wrecked thresholds.

Although the resort, marked with signs of its lavish restoration, was supposed to be in the midst of unspoiled nature – in fact, the place was called Nature Link – it would be a stretch of the imagination to characterize the area as wilderness or uninhabited.  To the contrary, these lakes are only 150 miles from the Twin Cities and the area has been exploited for summer cabins and fishing bivouacs, bible and scout camps as well as resorts of all kinds, some of them grandiose and expensive others more rustic, for many generations.  The place where we were staying was a resort as early as 1898 with an austere, but large lodge (still visible but now abandoned) above the sandy point of land, an island, channel, and two big bays, each about a half-mile wide. This resort called Minnewawa, undoubtedly replacing a more primitive fishing camp, that was, itself, likely established on this isthmus frequented by woodland Indians since time immemorial.  A station on the rail-line about three-quarters of a mile from Minnewawa provided ready access to the resort.  (The train tracks are gone now, but the open-air stop with a row of benches under a wooden shelter – it looks a pleine-aire  chapel with pews – still stands on fill hauled in to make a earthen dam between lakes and a road-bed for the trains.)  A tourist town with motels and boutiques is located a mile to the east of the resort where several winding forests roads intersect.  Beginning around 1980, the resort was converted into a summer hockey camp.  Boys (and later girls as well) trained in meadows cut into the statuesque fir and pine woods.  Of course, there was no ice on which to skate and, so, the kids, apparently, played hockey with brooms and balls, out-of-bounds represented by the pine forest, mostly clear of underbrush due to the dense evergreen canopy overhead.  White-tailed deer flickered through the woods; the animals always seem to soar and leap as they run.  After drills in the mornings, led by down-on-their-luck, hockey pros, the kids adjourned to the lake to swim or row boats out to the island where fumbling love affairs took place and where there were caches of booze and marijuana stashed among the trees.  Bonfires flared on the point of land.  The professional hockey players stayed in the white frame cottages overlooking the lake, getting drunk and disorderly themselves at night.  The main lodge was already boarded-up, prey to marauding racoons.  Then, the hockey camp failed and the place was left to decay for a few years before being sold to Minneapolis investors and, first, rebuilt as a wedding event center and, then, a sort of woodlands motel for wedding guests and, at last, as the Nature-Link resort.  

On the first evening that we were at Nature-Link, as the sun was setting under a ribbon of salmon-pink light, I walked down to the point.  It was only a few hundred feet, navigating an asphalt trail laid on a diagonal down the hillside to a barrel sauna erected on the sandy spit next to a wooden shack used, I supposed, to store kayaks during the summer months.  Fairy lights hung in delicate curves overhead, strung between the tall, ramrod-straight pines.  A boy and girl had been sitting next to a smoky fire in a pit by the barrel-sauna but they had departed.  Flame still sputtered and hissed in the pit.  The barrel-sauna was convex on its side facing the lake, a big bubble of transparent plexi-glass.  On the hill overhead, the ruinous lodge and cottages glared down at me with windows like eye-sockets in a skull.  The island thirty yards across the frozen water was still, not even the reeds poking through the ice moving, not a breeze stirring and no birds seemed to be about.  Far out on the level plain of lake ice, veined with obscure corridors and frozen lagoons, I saw the single ice-fishing shack, a black, featureless monad against white that was now turning blue and grey as it became dark.  Something shuddered in the underbrush on the island.  It was the sort of place where you might panic, sense menace in a shadow or the flutter of a branch like an eyelid, and, then, run wildly to flee some imagined danger lurking in the darkness.

The next morning, the sun clawed its way through low-hanging slate-grey clouds and, then, the landscape was flooded with light.  The pines on the steep descent to the frozen lake stood at dignified intervals and we could look down between their scaly rust-colored trunks to the ice.  Near the shore, a line of footprints, each cupping blue shadow, marched out toward the island and some slicks of smooth, wind-polished ice too hard to imprint.  Two parallel lines marked the snow drifted up against the edge of the lake, apparently, left by sled-runners.  I didn’t recall seeing the tracks or the sled-marks the previous afternoon.  Was it possible that someone, pulling a sled had walked out over the frozen lake after dark?  And, if so, why?  The prints in the snow were aimed in the direction of the island although the marks ceased to be visible where ice blistered the lake surface in squashed blue-green domes.  At the edge of the island, indentations in the ice formed a shadowy grey hollow.  An upright boulder, thumb-shaped and crested with snow, jutted up over the crater at the edge of the ice.  The preceding night had been solemn, dark, still – we hadn’t heard voices.  The path of prints in the snow were thirty feet below the level of our cabin, and began at the crumpled shoreline directly under the glass facade facing the lake.  The most likely explanation for the tracks sudden visibility, I thought, was the oblique rays of sunlight raking across the frozen lake.

I put on my coat and hat and walked from the cabin to the entrance of the resort.  Loops of pale, yellow lights were strung like pearls between trees and outlined the name of the resort hanging over the gate entry.  Among the pines, it was always gloomy and the lights shone against the darkness falling from the evergreens.  The clouds had returned and the day was dark again.  The drive-way into the resort joined with other lanes accessing lake cabins along the shoreline.  At the county highway, a third of a mile from the cabin, the two-lane blacktop ran parallel to a snowmobile and bike trail.  The unseasonably warm weather had left most of the asphalt trail bare.  Between the road and trail, stands of fir were interspersed among hay-colored reeds.  I walked for a mile or so and, then, turned around and went back in the direction that I had come.  A couple of crows derided me and my feet were cold.  On the driveway back to the resort, beyond the amber Christmas lights dangling from the gate, I saw a peculiar building or, rather, several buildings.  Two long rectangular houses were linked by an enclosed corridor and a smaller structure between them.  The smaller building seemed to once have been one of the cabins at resort – it had screen windows and the vestiges of a porch.  This squat little building was locked between the much larger and taller sheds, barren utilitarian structures with walls pierced by a few windows asymmetrically (and haphazardly) placed.  The siding on the big rectangular houses was faded blue and water pitching off the overhanging eaves had cut foot-deep trenches in the forest mulch on all sides of the buildings.  I had seen pictures of Shaker dormitories, or cult buildings in Guyana or  Nevada, and this complex of abandoned structures, set back from the access road, intrigued me.  I walked across the field and, then, walked around the dormitories.  They were large, austere, obviously abandoned – when I pressed my face to the cold window-glass, I could see bare joists and damp-looking studs in the shadows inside.  The interior surfaces of the walls were either stripped away or, perhaps, had never existed.  A stench pushed me back from the buildings.  Something was dead here and rotting.   

The night was dark and moonless.  Most of lake cabin were empty this time of the year and the curving shores of lake beyond the long reach of the ice were dark.  Fairy-lights, also yellow and faint, festooned the barrel-sauna.  There was no bonfire on the point of land.  The hillside below our cabin was studded with small lamps, probably solar-powered, and they emitted a faint luminescence in the darkness.  How anyone could use those ghostly lights to illumine their way was mysterious to me.  Sometimes, an unseen dog barked.

Two black-and-white pictures adorned the walls of the cabin, blow-ups, apparently, of old snapshots.  In one picture, a timid-looking girl stood on a dock in the lake.  The shoreline behind her was murky, with stands of trees and dark undergrowth.  The girl wore a one-piece bathing suit and was unwilling to enter the water.  Below her feet, in the lake, some heads bobbed above the white, rumpled surface of the water.  On the wall above the bed, another picture showed a ramshackle bridge crossing to the island from the point of land where the barrel-sauna and the fire-pit were now located.  The bridge looked like something from a wood cut by Hokusai – it appeared to be improvised, low arches of plywood spanning a half-dozen piers lined up in the channel.  The footbridge was already in disrepair when the photograph was taken and it seemed fragile, something that a strong wind or a blizzard or, even, a heavy snowfall might topple into the water.  The island was a black mass of trees and brush, a destination that wasn’t worth crossing the water for – the thumb-shaped rock on the margin of island glowed like a tombstone in the gloom.  

In the morning light, more tracks had appeared on the snow drifts under the shore-line.  Two more sled marks incised the snow and three or more sets of tracks were pressed into the snow, the path lost where the bare ice on the lake was exposed.  The trails pointed in the direction of the boulder and the concave hollow at the edge of the island.  

In the afternoon, I drove into the resort town.  The place consisted of a single road and an intersection.  Most of the shops were seasonal and closed.  Places sold expensive women’s clothing and kitchen plaques with other knick-knacks for lake cabins.  A florist’s place was shut for the season – a sign said it would open in May.  Several realtors had offices on Main Street; there was probably a brisk business involving lake cabin transactions.  A low embankment marked the old railway right-of-way through town that was now a foot-trail and, near the promenade, there were several candy shops and ice-cream parlors, also shuttered for the Winter.  One place sold fashion accessories for Nordic skiiing – it was also closed, possibly due to the lack of any snow in the woods and along the lake shores.  The two businesses selling cabin decorations seemed to be adversaries.  On the door of one of those places, a sign said: We are a profanity-free store – we don’t sell merchandise with obscene writing on it.  The other store had a sign on its door: F-Bombs dropped here.  It amused me to think that both of the stores were, perhaps, owned by the same enterprising merchant.  In any event, neither was open.

I was intrigued by a shop that advertised that it sold fine olive oils and balsamic vinegars.  The shop’s storefront said that it was “tasting bar.”  Inside, a slender woman in her sixties was reading a paperback behind a granite counter-top.  She greeted me with a little skepticism.  Lining the walls were stainless steel canisters, all identical and about the size of a large coffee pot or samovar.  Identical bottles occupied the niches enclosing the canisters, flanking those containers.  I told the woman that I had never seen a place of this sort.  She raised her eyebrows: “Really?” she asked.  I wondered why she wasn’t down in La Jolla or Coral Gables.  She probably wondered the same thing since she looked a little morose.  No prices were listed anywhere – I suppose it would be gauche to a suggest that someone in the market for exotic olive oils or hand-made balsamic vinegars would care about the prices for these luxury products.  I selected a bottle of pomegranate balsamic vinegar.  The woman watched me closely and was concerned, I think, that I would drop the precious stuff and break the bottle on the floor.  

“Can I help you?” she asked.  

I said no.

She asked me if I would bring her the bottle so that I could shop “hands-free.”

I carried the bottle over to the counter and set it on the granite.  She reached out, fumbled the thing, and the glass clicked hard against the stone.  For a moment, I expected the bottle to break but it simply rolled on its side in her direction where she caught it before it toppled onto her lap.

“These counters are so wide,” she said.

I bought a couple more bottles.  The woman asked me if I wanted to taste the merchandise.  I told her that this was unnecessary.  I supposed the balsamic vinegar tasted like vinegar; I presumed that the olive oil tasted like olive oil.   

I drove back to the resort with my precious cargo.  On the way back, I stopped at grocery store on the edge of town.  The food prices at the grocery was shocking.  A can of tomato soup that would cost two dollars at Walmart was selling for $5.99.  Ramen noodles, normally 30 cents a bag, were selling for 80 cents apiece.  I entered the resort offices.  Not one but three desk clerks were crowding around the check-in computer terminal.  This seemed odd to me – there were only six cabins available for rent and only three of them seemed to be occupied.  I asked the clerks about the odd buildings with the faded blue siding across the empty lot from the office.  

“That’s a very sinister-looking building,” I said.

The girl nodded her head: “I agree.”

“What is it?”

She said that when the resort closed in 1980, the place was a Summer hockey camp for forty years.  The big rectangular structures had been a dormitory.

“That’s a scary building,” I said.  “I was wondering what kind of cult lived here.”

“Well, when you return next time, the buildings will be gone.  We’re going to have them demolished this Spring.”

I thanked the three clerks for the information and went to the cabin to show Julie my bottles of vinegar and olive oil.     

I suppose there are cults lurking in the North Woods.  Once, I visited my father-in-law’s cabin on a more remote lake northeast of Duluth.  If you’re not a “lake cabin” person, the pleasures of being “up north” as it is said pall quickly: after an obligatory tour of the shoreline in the row boat powered by an outboard Evinrude motor, you sit on a porch and watch water-skiiers; inside, people are napping or frying something or reading dog-eared mystery novels – flies slip through the screen door every time it is opened and kids amuse themselves swatting them.  Bored with these tepid amusements, I went for a drive.  The road running north toward the Canadian border was suspiciously smooth, well-maintained, and straight, grinding its way through tamarack swamps and endless forests in which pine and fir trees planted by logging companies stood in obedient, perfectly straight ranks lining the polished black top. After thirty miles, the highway came to a dead end.  At the turn-around, underbrush veiled a lake, a prism of water green with algae.  An extension of the asphalt curved through the trees to a stout gate that was padlocked.  Beyond the fence bearing a shrill spiral of razor wire at its top, I could see part of the lake on which a twin-float plane was bobbing off-shore.  Some aluminum docks slipped down into the water and I could see a compound of steel sheds near a nondescript house covered in blue siding with several clapboard cottages attached.  What kind of place was this? – at the end of the road with nothing between this compound and the north pole but several thousand miles of forests, one of two lonely roads and a vast, empty tundra stretching to the Arctic Sea.

I recall that once I attended a family re-union for which an out-of-use Girl Scout camp had been rented.  There was no electricity at the site, but the buildings were reasonably well-maintained and someone had cut the lawns in the clearings where there were flagpoles with cottages standing under the tall, straight columns of the pine trees.  During the day, the place was cheerful with curved trails leading down to a small oval lake on which a wooden dock floated on pontoons.  Picnic tables stood in the shade and there was a fire-pit on the bluff above the water where a shelter made from field stone and heavy timber with a shingled roof had been erected.  It was all pleasant and convivial and the sunset over the lake lingered for a long time as if the summer sky was unwilling to surrender it’s light and, then, when it was finally dark, a bonfire hissed and crackled and threw its orange light at the edges of the great forest.  Someone carrying a lantern led us to our cabin and there it was pitch-black and the inside of the sleeping area smelled of pine-resin expressed from the log walls by the heat of the day.  In the corners of the cabin, there were rustling noises and I supposed that the overhead beams and joists were swarming with spiders and centipedes and, perhaps, the sounds under the iron bedframes and springs were made by mice or bats or, even, marauding raccoons.  In the modern world, we are accustomed to electrically powered light and it was strange and disturbing to be in the middle of the vast forest without any light any where to be seen.  

I was grateful that we had missed the first day of the reunion and that we had to spend only one night in the girl scout camp cabin.  Early in the morning, when the first light of dawn drew me outside, I walked along the soft, pillowy trail covered in pine-needles up to the fire-pit where a wan, greyish swirl of smoke was rising.  My sister-in-law was sitting at the picnic table with a mug of coffee in front of her, the drink also emitting a little coil of steam.  It was chilly and my sister-in-law, who lives up north and likes to camp, was wearing a tattered sweater.  She told me that the night before we came to the reunion, the family’s sleep was disturbed by a pulsing sound, a sort of rhythmic humming from across the lake that some interpreted as chanting.  The next morning, a couple of the men took a canoe and paddled across the water to a landing flagged with “No Trespassing” signs.  They ignored the signs, beached their canoe and walked up into the woods.  In a small clearing, the men found some folding chairs arranged around a sooty fire-pit and a dead cat.  

“What do you think?” my sister-in-law asked.

“I didn’t hear anything last night,” I said.

“No, it was quiet last night,” my sister-in-law said.  “It’s a satanic cult,” she added.

“I’m glad I didn’t know about it,” I said.

We left the camp around noon, a little after lunch.  It was a long drive back to our home in the southern part of the State.

The next morning during our Valentine’s Day get-away, dawn lifted the darkness over the lake below our post-modern cabin and I saw that there were new sled marks in the snow drifted against the edge of the frozen lake.  More tracks had appeared below the hillside.  After I dressed, I gingerly walked the path leading down the steep slope to the ice.  There were patches of ice on the trail and I didn’t want to slip and fall and roll down onto the ice.  At the edge of the lakeshore, I saw that the ice was in disarray next to the bank, mottled with blue transparent windows showing through the veins of snow.  The marks made by sled-runners (at least, so I interpreted them) curved in parallel out across the ice, visible where there were patches of snow, but otherwise not discernible an the plates and shields of frozen lake.  All of the marks angled toward the island and the place where the thumb-shaped boulder stood like an apparition at the edge of the underbrush.  It was probably just a trick of the light slipping obliquely over the lake, but the tracks looked as if they had been made by bare feet.  Sole-marks sprouted little toe impressions.  It may have been that the sun from the previous day had somehow melted around the footprints and distorted them.  

On the night-stand next to the bed, a machine offered noise in different hues to assist guests in falling asleep.  The noise could be tuned to “white,” “brown” or “green.”  As Julie packed for out check-out, I tinkered with device.  The “white” noise was a faint sizzle, like rain falling on metal roof.  “Brown” was more granular, sandy, something like the feeling of a beach underfoot.  The “green” noise was the color of algae in a lake simmering under a hot sun, iridescent dragon-flies with great rainbow-colored wings hovering over the moss-colored glaze floating on the water.  I wondered if the noise machine had been placed to keep people from hearing the rhythmic chanting coming from across the lake.

When checking-out, I asked about the footprints in the snow covering the ice.  

“People see those all the time,” one of the clerks told me.  (Today two young women wearing ski-sweaters were manning the front desk.)

“I thought they were barefoot,” I said.

“Probably people using the barrel sauna and, then, cooling down with a trot over the lake,” the other clerk said.  But she looked a little disturbed and glanced to her colleague.

The other clerk asked me where the footprints led.

“Over to the island,” I said.

The young woman said that there was a natural spring at the edge of the island, near a big rock on the bank.  

“It doesn’t freeze in that place,” the young woman said.  “Many years ago, a couple of kids drowned next to the island.  They pulled them out of the water, but they were dead.  Then, they dragged them over the ice on sleds.”

“When was that?”

“No one knows, but a long time ago,” the young woman said.     

We checked-out and drove home.  We made good time from the pine forests to there corn and soy-bean fields, unplowed and lying Winter-fallow near our town.

Leipzig: Enchiridion and Scholia

 Leipzig: Enchiridion and scholia

1.

An enchiridion is a small volume printed so that it can be readily carried, or, even, concealed in one’s garments.  Generally, such books are spiritual manuals of some sort, hymnals or prayer books or collections of useful aphorisms.  But there are many examples of enchiridions (or plural enchiridia in some sources) that are not religious.  One of the most famous enchiridions from the ancient world is a handbook on Greek prosody.  

Think about why such a volume, properly described as a “handbook”, would need to be inconspicuous and readily hidden.

2.

The Leipzig museum of Phillip Reclam’s Universalbibliothek is not easy to find.  I don’t need to give you walking instructions as to how to reach that place.  I don’t expect you to seek out this collection of old books and so you won’t need directions. 

With Martin and Angelica, I walked from our Hotel, the Seaside, near the Leipzig Bahnhof to the Reclam Museum on Grimmischer Strasse.  The sun was setting and the chill of night well-advanced when we set off, crossing the big plazas near the train station, an arc of open squares left over from bombing and the removal of the city’s medieval walls.  We passed an opera house with white pillars and windows displaying lofty and grandiose stairways.  An obelisk in a shabby park celebrated the inauguration of the Dresden to Leipzig railroad in the 1840's and there was a canal in which a well-regulated river flowed under slightly hunchbacked bridges.  Then, the streets were uniform and barren, mostly empty between completely nondescript modern structures: research facilities (the Max Planck institute has laboratories here) and sterile-looking hotels.

The Reclam Museum is inside a parking ramp.  You walk along a cold sidewalk next to the entrance ramp and, then, a sign directs you through some grim, concrete corridors, lodged between levels of parked cars, to the small museum.  On one side of the brightly lit room, an enormous bookshelf holds every Reclam edition published prior to 1945.  On the opposite side of the chamber, another equally enormous bookshelf lines a wall and contains Reclam editions, arranged in chronological order from World War Two to the present.  Glass cases contain rare editions and books noteworthy for one reason or another.  The small books are displayed next to typed labels on glass shelving, standing upright against frames of the sort you might find in someone’s bedroom enclosing pictures of family members, or a boyfriend, or a beloved pet.  Some vertical shelves that rotate on a central access are in the middle of the room where there are a couple chairs and an old, plush couch.  

The proprietor of this museum is Hans-Jochen Marquardt and, fortunately, he was present when we showed up at his door.  Marquardt is 70, a distinguished-looking man with a cheerful face in a halo of white hair and whiskers.  He seems a bit heavy-set, but isn’t fat – it’s just the shape of his body.  When we came to the museum, there were two other visitors, both of them sitting rather uncomfortably on the sofa.  These were also tourists, possibly from Scotland or Australia (I couldn’t figure this out), English-speaking like us, and, obviously, anxious to escape Marquardt’s hospitality to attend some other function, a place that they had to reach at a specific and imminent time as the woman, a lean girl with stringy blonde hair and woolen mittens tacked to her sleeves, kept reminding her boyfriend, using a loud enough voice to make sure the message was understood by our host.  The young man looked sullen and resentful as if he couldn’t believe that he had been dragged to a place like this and, then, lectured by the proprietor as to the history of the little books in glass cases – a lecture that seemed capable of telescoping itself through time to be an hour or ten hours long or, even, long enough to last your entire lifetime.  When we entered the room, Herr Marquardt brightened visibly, happy to have additional visitors to attend to his tour and, after a half hour, the Australians or Scottish students (whatever the case) exploited our interest in the lecture to slide out the door sideways, making faint protestations of regret.  

As I have remarked, the better a Germans English, the more apologetic the speaker.  Herr Marquardt disclaimed any real facility in English, making these disclaimers in elegant, grammatically precise words.  He told us that his wife is English-speaking, a native of South Africa (although he met her at the University of Wisconsin in Madison); however, he said he speaks only German at home and, as a consequence, his English had deteriorated somewhat.  Of course, Herr Marquardt was easily understood and faltered only with respect to esoteric English terms, words that I could readily supply him when he stuttered a bit and paused.  He was a charming and voluble fellow and not in any hurry to depart from his museum for other pursuits; it’s a place that is his labor of love.  

In Homer’s Odyssey, visitors (xenia – or strangers) are greeted with hospitality that includes slaves washing the guest’s feet and bathing his hands, roast meat on skewers, and “sweet, strong wine.”  After these amenities, your host asks: “What is your name?  How have you come to this place?  Who is your father?”  And, so, after an initial walk around the room, and after Herr Marquardt told us that he had collected every Reclam edition known to exist, a total exceeding 10,000 volumes, all displayed on the huge shelves bookending the room, he made polite inquiries as to our identities and why we had come to visit his museum.  

3.

I began acquiring Reclam editions myself in college, now 45 years ago.  Lower level German classes used readers with glosses (scholia) in the margins or footnotes.  These were books designed for elementary and mid-level instruction in German literature.  But more advanced classes invariably were assigned Reclam volumes.  The books were, then, and remain now, very affordable.  They are light, readily carried in a pocket, and well-edited – indeed, the Reclam textural and editorial apparatus is renowned; most German literature exists in definitive, carefully annotated Reclam editions.  For instance, if you want to read Gottfried Benn’s shorts stories published as Gehirne (“Brains”), you will likely encounter the work in a Reclam edition, with textural variants identified in the end-notes and a critical essay by a leading critic specializing in the work explaining the context and meaning of the writing.  These are not necessarily student editions, although they are often assigned in that setting, but rather full-fledged scholarly versions of the text under consideration.

As you progress through German studies, more and more of the required reading consists of studying Reclam volumes.  Students are poor and move a lot and most people studying German don’t keep their books.  As a result Reclam editions pile up in used bookstores near campuses and can be easily purchased for coins when I was younger, or a few dollars now.  I have a hundred or more of the little books, easily recognized by their size (they are about 3 x 5 inches) and color – the books are a bright vibrant yellow.  Often the used books that I have acquired show little sign of being read – generally, there is a name inscribed on the first page of the text, a few light underlinings in the afterword by the critic, but no trace otherwise that the writing so lovingly edited has been read by the former owner of the book.  When a friend of mine left the country in something of a hurry, she abandoned her Reclams to me, a stack of little volumes including poetry by Ludwig Uhland (a favorite book), essays on the “Aufklaerung” (“Enlightenment”) focusing primarily on a famous text by Kant, plays by Lessing and Schiller, collections of modern and baroque lyric poetry, several volumes of novella by Theodor Storm, Benn’s Gehirne, and so on.  Years ago I read Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissius Simplicimmus in a Reclam version.  The first book of this sort that I bought for a class was not even originally in German – it was a translation into German from the Latin, Tacitus’ Germania.  The course that I was taking involved medieval German literature and I also had to buy a copy of the Latin vita of Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne) once again translated into German as well as an abridged Parzival by Wolfram von Eschebach and a picaresque poem, written in doggerel (“Knittelvers”) called Meier Helmbrecht.  I continue to acquire these books even today.  During the Covid quarantine, I bought a copy of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and read a few pages each day until I had completed that long and maddening novel.  

To my eyes, Reclam Universal Bibliothek editions, the compact yellow volumes with tiny print, epitomize what books should be and, so, I understand the impulse to collect these things.  Despite their small size and the light paper on which they are printed, the volumes are surprisingly durable.  I own a copy of Theodor Storm’s novella Aquis Submersus that lost its cover due to being crushed in someone’s pocket.  The covers on these things, all alike in any event, are unnecessary.  The book held together fine even in mutilated form and I still have it on my shelf. (You can’t shelve the little Reclam editions with normal sized books – they get swallowed up and lost; instead, you pile up about a dozen of them and put the stack at the front of your bookcase.)  A much-thumbed version of Hamann’s Aesthetica in Nuce (or the Socratische Denkwuerdigkeiten) that I translated when I was about thirty – almost forty years have passed from that time – is still in good enough condition to be read and, sometimes, I peruse this old friend.  When I decided to read Eichendorrf’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts this last Spring, I used a Reclam edition, handy, easily carried, with small legible print, something I could take with me to the Nature Center and sit and read on a bench on a remote bench two miles by woodland trail from the parking lot.  Birds sang while I read and the trees rustled and a little box-elder bug explored my sleeve.  What could be more wonderful?

Although I treasure these books and like to handle them (if I’m sad or lonely I will deal the books out on a table like cards and, then, shuffle and re-shuffle them), I don’t have any illusions as to their fate after my death.  I presume someone will gather them up and toss them in a waste-bin and that will be that.   

4.

Herr Marquardt took my enthusiasm for Reclam editions for granted.  Needless to say, he shared my interest and his passion surpassed mine by many orders of magnitude.  He showed me his favorite books.  Of course, there is the first volume in the Reclam Universal-Bibliothek series, predictably Goethe’s Faust,  printed in 1867.  (For some obscure reason, the first actual text in the series, published a few months earlier, is Shakespeare’s Romeo und Juliet, demoted to number 5 to give Goethe’s classic pride of place.)  There are rare volumes, for instance, Heine banned and burned by the Nazis, also rare books in the series that were suppressed by the Communist authorities.  Reclam editions had such authority in Germany that during both world wars there were so-called “Tarn-Editions” (that is, counterfeits) printed by the Allies and dropped by the thousands onto the front lines.  One example is a slim book called Zwei Fragen (“Two Questions –that is “Why are you fighting?” and “What is your objective?”)  The notion was that soldiers would be demoralized to discover anti-war messages in their beloved field editions of the German (and world) classics.  Herr Marquardt pointed out several ammo boxes stuffed with Reclam editions, circulating libraries as it were to distribute books in the trenches.  The display cases are full of autographs on letters or signed galley proofs – you can see the signatures of Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rilke and others.  Black and white pictures show dignitaries greeting authors.  People wear tuxedos and stand with hand’s extended toward the writers in front of ranks of German academics, professorial types with medals on their chests and long white beards.

Anton Phillip Reclam (1807 - 1897) was a Leipzig bookseller.  At age 21, he acquired a press and issued small books and pamphlets of a Leftist revolutionary persuasion.  (In the political agitation preceding the uprisings of 1848, Reclam ran afoul of the authorities and was sent to prison for publishing a translation of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.)  When the revolutions were suppressed, Reclam focused on printing literary classics, primarily Shakespeare.  In 1837, the Austrian legislature, the body with authority over Leipzig, enacted a law allowing copyrights to pass into the public domain after the lapse of thirty years.  It’s for this reason that Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek was inaugurated in that year with the publication of Goethe’s Faust, a work then in the public domain.  Reclam, then, initiated a series of books making German classic literature, mostly Schiller, Lessing, and Goethe, available to the general public in very cheap “little yellow editions.”  By the time of his death in 1897, Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek boasted 3500 separate volumes.  By 1908, the Bibliothek had expanded to 5000 volumes.  By this point, the Leipzig publishing house was printing not only world classics but works by modern German authors such as Mann, Hesse, and Hoffmanstahl.  In 1927, Thomas Mann, then regarded as Germany’s greatest writer and a Nobel prize winner, delivered an address commemorating the hundred year centenary of the publishing house.  

During the Nazi era, the regime forbade the publication of Jewish writer such as Heine and suppressed works by Mann, Franz Werfel, and other emigre authors.  On December 4, 1943, Allied bombers destroyed Leipzig and with it the Reclam publishing enterprise and warehouses – reportedly 450 tons of books were incinerated.  After the War, Reclam’s headquarters were moved to Stuttgart in West Germany to avoid the restrictions and censorship imposed by the Soviet-backed East German government that controlled the Leipzig facility.  The East German branch of Reclam was nationalized by the government and continued as an influential publishing house based in Leipzig.  Meanwhile, the Stuttgart (West German) division also continued printing books in the Universal Bibliothek series in the West.  Hans Marquardt, an influential broadcaster in the Eastern zone, was appointed the chief executive officer and director of Phillip Jr. Reclam Verlag (as the Leipzig operation was known).  Marquardt, the father of our tour guide, operated the enterprise for 26 years, specializing in the Universal Bibliothek’s publication of Russian avant-garde writers and contemporary DDR authors.  (He also supervised the printing of coffee-table books on the arts, the so-named “schoene Buecher”, and, a literary scholar himself, edited no fewer than 100 volumes for publication.)  Hans Marquardt was awarded every literary prize available in the East and was a famous man in Leipzig and the DDR.  He was considered a liberal and sufficiently powerful (and courageous) to periodically oppose the regime’s efforts to suppress books in the DDR.  His son, Hans-Jochen Marquardt, showed me an edition of Jerome Salinger’s Fanger in der Roggen (J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), a novel detested by the East German Communist authorities but championed by his father.  The last volume published by Herr Marquardt’s father was a book printed by the Verlag about the time of the October 1989 rebellion in Leipzig against the Communist regime.  The book is on display in the museum and is called Der Uebergangs Gesellschaft (“The Transition Society”).  On the cover of the book a woodcut in the style of Barlach or Kaethe Kollwitz shows a burly giant on the threshold of a burning house.  The giant, Herr Marquardt told me, is Prometheus, the divine figure who taught the first men how to use fire.  There was a polemical battle over the volume’s cover.  Is Prometheus running into the burning house to extinquish the flames?  This was the interpretation preferred by the Communist authorities – the house was on fire but the flames could be extinguished and the structure saved.  Or was Prometheus fleeing the fire that he had set himself to free the inhabitants of a building that was doomed to burn to the ground.  This meaning could also be read from the cover of the book which is, in fact, ambiguous.  Herr Marquardt assured me that his father intended the latter interpretation – the house was on fire, the blaze had been set by the God to liberate men, and the structure would burn to the ground.  For a year after the destruction of the Wall in Berlin, there was a uncertainty as to whether the political and social institutions in East Germany would be preserved in a State within the State or as a federation of some kind.  But this uncertainty was resolved in favor of the complete elimination of East Germany – the Communist State and its structures were wholly dissolved.  

Hans Marquardt died at his estate on the island of Ruegen northwest of Hamburg, on November 11, 2004.  Part of his wealth was used to found an institute for the preservation of culture and the arts on Ruegen.  

Hans-Jochen Marquardt told me that he wasn’t close to his father.  His mother and father divorced when he was 14.  Nonetheless, he attended many of the gala functions associated with first editions printed by Reclam and met most of Germany’s leading writers.  A photograph in one of the display cases shows a group of young people bowing slightly to the famous anti-Fascist novelist Anna Seghers.  Seghers was Jewish and fled Germany for Mexico in 1937 – there she wrote the novel The Seventh Cross (1939) adapted into a Hollywood movie promoting American intervention in the European war.  (The movie was released in 1944 and stars Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy, and Agnes Moorhead).  Seghers returned to Berlin in 1947 and, a Communist supporter, voluntarily moved to the Eastern sector of the city.  She was one of Hans Marquardt’s leading writers and, in the picture, the grand dowager holds a book and a pen.  The young Hans-Jochen Marquardt is reaching forward to shake her hand – “they made me wear a tuxedo to meet her,” Marquardt recalled to us.  Marquardt said that Seghers was a terrible reader of her own work; she spoke in a hurried, soft monotone and made no attempt to dramatize the text.  By contrasts, Marquardt said, Guenter Grass was a fantastically effective reader, theatrically highlighting his work and employing various accents and dialects to establish differences between characters.  Marquardt told me that he heard Grass read several times and that the writer was always fantastic.  

My readers can interpret Marquardt’s obsessive project, acquiring every single volume of the ten-thousand published by Reclam as a reflection of his vexed relationship with his father.  It seems no accident that Marquardt’s collecting activities commenced when he was 14, the year that his father divorced his mother.  A larger divorce loomed over the collection.  The division of Reclam into two competing entities, one East and one West, required Hans-Jochen to acquire not only the books released by the Leipzig operation, helmed by his father, but also the editions printed in Stuttgart in the Bundesrepublik.  Herr Marquardt resents the implication that his father assisted him in acquiring the books that comprise the collection – to the contrary, Hans-Jochen told me, his father didn’t help him at all with regard to locating and purchasing rare examples in the library of the Reclam Universal Bibliothek.  When Hans-Jochen told his formidable father that he was collecting Reclam editions, the older man sniffed at him and said: “I prefer to collect fine art, not cheaply printed mass-market books.”  Our interlocutor was a good East German, a supporter of the regime, and, presumably, rewarded for this loyalty.  He told me that he was elected to city council and provincial parliament seats on several occasions and that he traveled widely as a young man, attending literary conferences frequently in Moscow.  (In school, of course, he was taught Russian not English, hence, his anxiety about the quality of his spoken words to us.)  Hans-Jochen is seventy.  He looks like a German version of me.  He is my brother. 

5.

During our conversation, I told Hans-Jochen Marquardt that we went to see the Stasi museum at the Runde Ecke, that is, the Staatssicherheit or “state security (secret police) headquarters.  He seemed a bit discomfited by that information and looked away from us, glancing out from his bunker under the cement parking lot, to the facades of the houses across the street.

The Stasi Museum in Leipzig is a place that is alternatively horrible, comical, and inspiring.  The museum documents the intrusive and surreal surveillance of East German citizens and the Staatsicherheit’s repressive measures – this is the horrible aspect of the exhibition.  The comedy lies in the Stasi’s bumbling efforts to conceal their activities, their ridiculously obsessive repressive measures, and their bizarre overreach – Hitler had something like 50,000 Gestapo; the DDR had over 200,000 agents to scrutinize a much smaller population and, ultimately, more than half the population was informing on the other half, measures that were documented with thorough, and inadvertently hilarious, Teutonic efficiency.  The inspirational aspect of the museum is its documentation of resistance to the Communist regime, the fearlessness of some of the Lutheran pastors and students who opposed the authorities, and, ultimately, the mass demonstrations that brought down the government.  I toured the museum when I was in Leipzig a few years ago and found the experience intensely interesting but, also, emotionally disturbing and, so, I vowed not to go to the Runde Ecke again.  But, on this visit, Martin was with me and I thought that he should see the museum and so we spent an hour-and-a-half there.  

People who worked in this office building, returning twenty years after the regime collapsed, report that the place preserves its characteristic odor – it smells, it is said, like it did in the seventies and former employees (or prisoners) are immediately transported back to the DDR by the scent in the air in the building.  There’s an odor of steam heat volatilizing dust on radiators, the faint smell of cigarettes imbuing the drywall and doors (everyone chain-smoked here), an odor of sweat and fear, the smell of carbon-paper and typewriter ink combined with the stench of mildew – the place feels damp and noisome.  (In a recent essay, Timothy Garton Ash recalled the perfume of the old DDR, a combination of diesel exhaust from inefficient Trabant vehicles, the stink of cheap Chinese-made cigarettes, disinfectant, and body odor – he notes that this was the aroma that met him when he first crossed the Berlin Wall into the rubble-strewn lanes and empty lots of old East Berlin.  The smell is gone now, but older people, Ash observes, recall it with a certain bitter nostalgia or “Ostalgia” as it is sometimes called.)

If you disregard the horror, the Runde Ecke has a clownish, Monty Pythonesque aspect.  The small rooms are full of displays cluttered with bombastic medals and ribbons, banners of all sorts, plaques embossed with Marxist-Leninist slogans, an entire surreal world now cast aside and rotting in the dust-bin of history.  Stasi operatives once flounced about in unconvincing wigs and moustaches.  Leipzig’s streets were full of weird-looking figures wearing leisure suits and jackets padded with cameras and recording devices; these apparitions looked like they had stumbled out of a High School theatrical production, faces made-up and sporting improbable wigs and whiskers.  Briefcases and brassieres were fitted out with tiny cameras.  People suspected of subversion had their body odor captured and stored in zip-lock bags.  Archives of underwear and sweat-stained tee-shirts were on file so that savage dogs could be pressed into service literally sniffing-out subversives.  Every letter received from outside the DDR, and, ultimately, it seems every piece of intra-state correspondence as well was laboriously steamed-open and inspected by secret police goons.  (Equipment for this purpose is on display in the museum – it looks like the gear in some infernal laundry.)  This practice led to an entire genre of gallows humor: one young man sent a letter to a friend remarking that he had concealed a gun in the garden behind his house; predictably, Stasi agents appeared and dug up the entire garden, leaving the lawn ripped apart and gouged full of holes – the kid is, then, said to have written to his grandmother to tell her that she should send the tulip bulbs previously ordered for planting since the garden “has now been tilled and carefully dug up and is ready for cultivation.”  Apparently, everyone kept pictures of Marx and Lenin on their walls as insurance against persecution.  Armies of finks, rats, stool-pigeons and informers (Mitarbeiter) were recruited to file reports on their neighbors – as the regime collapsed into rampant paranoia more than 300,000 informers were busily spying on each other: of course, with this number of rats in the population, the informers spent most of their time informing on the suspicious conduct of other informers. Spies spied on spies who spied back on them, creating weird and paranoiac Moebius loops of clandestine data.  Registries were created to document sexual encounters of people under surveillance.  The polity was so intensely involved in gathering information on its own citizens that it really didn’t have resources to do anything else.  

Things in the DDR changed after Helsinki Human Rights Accords, 1975 conventions to which the East German government was signatory.  The old mobster paradigm of beating people to death in basements yielded to something more sanitary, if equally, brutal.  This was the policy of “Zersetzung” – a word that means something like “ripping apart.”  To avoid accusations of hypocrisy after the Human Rights Accords were inked, principles devised largely to decry repressive practices in the Capitalist West, DDR’s Stasi had to refrain from direct blood-letting.  Instead, they conspired to damage their victims by a death of a thousand cuts.  A salary man, ostensibly on the way up, when under state suspicion would find that he was suddenly excluded from important business conferences, that his girlfriend had inexplicably lost interest in him, that government papers required for licenses or travel had gone missing, that tax filings had been misplaced while anonymous memoranda suddenly appeared at work accusing him of deviation from party principles.  A loan necessary for the purchase of a new home might be denied without explanation and the victim’s children found themselves receiving failing grades and were excluded from all the better schools notwithstanding their diligence and best efforts.  Invitations to birthday parties and other celebrations dried-up.  Bills for purchases never made appeared in the mail and phones rang at all hours although there was never anyone on the other end of the line.  “Zersetzung” consisted of a million minor dirty tricks and its objective was to harass and exhaust the victim and, if possible, drive him or her mad.  People can be destroyed without spilling their blood or busting apart their skulls, particularly when half the population had been enlisted to participate in this harassment of other half.  Promising academic careers simply evaporated into thin air.  Successful businessmen found themselves filing bankruptcy.  Your wife was cold and quarrelsome and, soon enough, she was filing for divorce and your children watched you suspiciously as if awaiting your lapse into some terrible crime.  The larger apartment for which you had yearned for years was no longer available.  The summer cabin at the lake was sold to someone for far less than you would have offered for the property.  

Just before the DDR collapsed, a 14 year old boy with good grades, some athletic ability, and promising prospects wrote a brief essay about passion for cars.  The boy imprudently suggested that the best cars were made in Italy or America and showed some disdain for the badly engineered and noisome Trabants that working class people (if they could afford a car) drove.  The boy’s teacher was a Mitarbeiter, a stool-pigeon, and he photocopied the short essay, obligingly sending his student’s text to some harried bureaucrat at the Runde Ecke, that is, the Stasi building now occupied by the museum.  The bureaucrat faithfully read the essay, wrote some marginal comments on the photocopy as to the boy’s politically incorrect opinions, and, then, typed a short apercu indicating that the young man would be barred from admission to any type of higher education and, even, prohibited from vocational school or working on automobiles – denying the kid access to cars was a sadistic frisson to the plan to thwart the young man at every turn in his future life.  One week after the secret policeman wrote the memo intended to destroy the student’s future, the Berlin Wall collapsed, the East German regime imploded, and, no doubt, the young man, who is now almost fifty lives in Dresden or Prenzlau or, perhaps, Hamburg even, where I hope that he owns his own car dealership or, at least, service station.   

6. 

Hans-Jochun Marquardt, proprietor of the Reclam museum, told me that he had written his doctoral dissertation on Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kolhaas.  In the opening sentence of the novella, Kleist tells his readers that the title character was einer rechstschaffendesten zugleich und erschrecklichsten Menschen seiner of Zeit – that is, “one of the most honest and, at the same time, most terrible men of his time...”

Beginning in 1912, Reclam placed book-vending machines in train stations and hospitals.  These machines were designed by the great architect and industrial engineer Peter Behrens, famous for the massive AEG Turbine-House in Moabit (Berlin) and other iconic structures.  Behrens’ book-vending machine is about 15 inches wide a three feet tall.  Behind a glass pane, Reclam editions are available for purchase, displayed three books across and in four registers (a total of 12 titles available in the device).  The machine is labeled RECLAM in an oval cartouche above the books on display.  The purchaser puts a coin or coins in the side of the automat and, then, punches in the number of the selection shown under each book available for purchase.  At Herr Marquardt’s urging, we put a half-euro coin in the device, typed in our selection, and the machine (dating back to1912), wheezed a little, a screw turning somewhere behind the slender volumes to push a book to the fore where it dropped into a tray at the bottom of the display.  The machine, now 112 years old, was a little cranky but it delivered the goods.  Out of respect for the old DDR, I bought Heiner Mueller’s Revolutionaerstuecke (“Revolutionary Theater Pieces).  Mueller was a renowned avant-garde East German playwright, a generation younger than Bertolt Brecht and completely uncompromising – his proletarian works involve recondite references to Greek mythology and lots of copulation, vomiting, and shit.  (Mueller, who seems to have been a disagreeable person, flourished in parallel with the East German regime that he served; when the DDR collapsed, Stasi files made open to the public showed that the man had been a nasty collaborator with the communist thugs and, of course, an informer; the volume of Mueller’s Revolutionary Theater Pieces includes an afterword, written after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, conscientiously denouncing the author, after praising him fulsomely for ten pages, for his complicity with regime.  The first ten pages were written before the DDR collapsed; the last four paragraphs were composed in 1991.)  Hans-Jochun Marquardt looked at me a bit suspiciously when I bought the Reclam book collecting Mueller’s writings.  Was I making fun of him or his museum or the late lamented DDR?

Herr Marquardt told me that I could use the vending machine to buy a copy of Goethe’s Faust, of course, Reclam’s most popular title, for 1 ½ euros.  

“If you buy the same exact book at Auerbach’s Keller,” Herr Marquardt told me, “it will cost you six euros.”  Auerbach’s Keller is a very old restaurant in the center of Leipzig, a place where student’s gathered in the late medieval period – it’s near Leipzig University – and Goethe frequented the place.  A rambunctious comic episode in Faust is set in the tavern: Mephisto gets everyone drunk on beer and, then, one of the student’s flies around town riding bareback on a big cask or tun of booze that the devil’s emissary has animated.  

Herr Marquardt is the author of a scholarly book called Reclams Universal-Bibliothek: Vollstaendiges Verzeichnis nach Bandnummern 1867 bis 1945 – that is, Reclam’s Universal Bibliothek: Complete index of all volumes from 1867 to 1945.  The publisher of this book?  It’s a handsome bright yellow Reclam edition. 

7.

At the Stasi museum at the Runde Ecke, the entrance to the building (the structure is modeled on an Italian renaissance palazzo) opens into a loggia with a fan-shaped grand stairway leading to a landing.  Panels of text on the walls memorialize victims of Stasi violence and repression and there are some displays about the demonstrations that toppled the regime in the Fall of 1989.  As you climb the marble steps, the entrance divides: the museum is to the right with its information desk and ticket sales behind a double glass door; on the left, a single glass door opens into a reading room where visitors can access files from the Communist era.   A middle-aged woman sits at a reception desk studiously viewing her computer screen.  At cubicle stations behind her, some shadowy figures were stooped over files spread out on their tables.

In the eastern territory of Germany, you might wonder what came between you and your wife, or why your children suddenly became distant and remote.  You might wonder about meetings with your boss at which you were denied promotion or not given the raise that everyone else in the bureau enjoyed.  You might have questions about why your car was unreliable and about bill collectors dunning you for obligations that you didn’t recall having incurred.  Maybe, the answers are in your Stasi file, although, of course, it is sometimes good counsel to not look too closely into events in the past.  Perhaps, you were betrayed by your parents or the woman you loved or your best friend.

After the fall of the DDR, of course, it was revealed that the editor-in-chief of the Reclam Verlag, Hans Marquardt, a man universally respected and, indeed, feared, had been an enthusiastic informal Mitarbeiter with state security police.  The files were open and available at the Runde Ecke for everyone to see.  Marquardt reported to authorities under the title “Hans,” not a particularly inventive official pseudonym, and we should not be surprised that he was entrusted with surveillance of East German literary figures.  His role was to attend gatherings of writers and authors and report on their allegiance to the Communist state.  When German writers in the Bundesrepublik visited the East, Hans was supposed to spy on them and record their contacts with DDR intelligentsia.  For instance, he made memo reports on each occasion that Guenter Grass, reputed to be Germany’s greatest writer in the sixties and seventies, came to the DDR.  No doubt, he made inventories of the people who spoke with Grass after public readings from his books that Hans’ son, Hans-Jochun remembered as being so impressive and memorable.  

Although the comparison is unfair and inexact, it’s pertinent: when the DDR collapsed, its leading writers and artists were profoundly compromised and had a status similar to that of leading Nazi poets and novelists and painters after World War Two.  No one was “de-nazified” as it were after the DDR’s absorption into the German federation, but the darlings of the discredited Communist regime were regarded with suspicion and some degree of contempt.  (The same phenomena vexed Heiner Mueller and the DDR’s greatest painter, Werner Tuebke – both of whom were exposed to some level of derision, despite their accomplishments, based on their association with fallen regime.)  Hans Marquardt had been the chairman of PEN in the DDR, an affiliate branch of the international organization that advocates for free expression and political autonomy for writers.  Of course, Marquardt’s membership in this enterprise in the context of the profoundly repressive and censorious East German regime was more than a little problematic.  Nonetheless, after the DDR collapsed, Marquardt applied to membership in the united Germany PEN organization.  Initially, he was denied membership on the basis of his previous activities involving the DDR Stasi.  It’s possible to construct several narratives about Marquardt.  One might accuse him of complicity with a regime that censored literature and conspired to ruin writers who opposed the Communist government.  But, one might also argue that Marquardt used his prominence in East German literary circles to ameliorate and mitigate harms that might otherwise have been worse if he had not softened government response to writing that the Stasi and its apparatchiks deemed subversive.  This issue of Hans Marquardt’s application to the PEN club for the united German was briefly a cause celebre.  In the end, Marquardt was admitted, primarily on the basis of advocacy by Guenter Grass.  

8.

St. Augustine in his Confessions tells the story of his conversion.  For eight years, he had studied Manicheanism.  During this time, he was intellectually troubled and slid into sexual licentiousness.  Weeping over his transgressions one afternoon, the young Augustine heard voices, “like little children, either boys or girls” reciting again and again the phrase Tolle lege – that is, “Take up and read.”  Augustine had Christian scripture at hand and, commanded by the sing-song voices, opened the book at random.  On the page, he saw verses admonishing the followers of Christ to “walk in the daylight and renounce orgies and drunkenness.”  Augustine construed the text as selected for him by the Holy Spirit and this incident, as he recalls in his memoir, was instrumental in his conversion to Christianity.  

While writing about my recent trip to Germany, I had occasion to recall my German teacher in college, Wolfgang Taraba.  I remembered a party that he had hosted at his home near the University and how he had encouraged my study of German lyric poetry.  I visited him once after graduating from the University after I had been practicing law for a couple of years.  Professor Taraba expressed interest in my career and said that he had been engaged by a downtown Minneapolis law firm to translate internal messages produced by Volkswagen in the context of product liability litigation.  (This was a lawsuit prosecuted by the lawyer David Fitzgerald and Rider & Bennett, a now defunct firm; I had been in the margins of several cases involving Fitzgerald and knew him slightly).  Later, I wrote a letter to Professor Taraba thanking him for his influence.  The letter was ultimately returned to me unopened.  As I recall, Taraba had gone to Germany to visit places in Poland where he had grown up when that territory was part of the Reich.  (“Taraba,” of course, is not German name, but Polish or, indeed, Sarmatian – Professor Taraba’s favorite poet was Johannes Bobrowski, an East German writer, whose first volume of lyrics was called Sarmatische Zeit (“Sarmatian Time”.)  Somewhere in Germany, Professor Taraba died from heart failure.  I don’t know if these facts are literally true, but I believe in them.

I found on my bookshelf a bright yellow Reclam volume containing poems by the German romantic writer Eduard Moerike.  The book was in mint condition, never opened, it seemed, and I had no idea how I acquired the volume or when.  In fact, I was surprised to find this book among the hundred or so Reclam editions that I own.  About four days ago, I opened the book at random and this is what I read:  

(Commenting on the meaning of Moericke’s poem Um Mitternacht (“Around Midnight”), the author’s exegesis of the lyric states – ) “It has always and repeatedly been observed that an opposition between night and the springs (or fountains - Quelle) is embodied in the poem.  Whether this opposition, however, expresses a rigid polarity or signals a conflict between the terms or whether this can be even be decided in favor of one side or the other remains controversial.  (See, for example, Pracht-Fitzell at page 215 contra. Taraba, footnote at page 48.).  

The citation directs the reader to Taraba’s dissertation on file with the University of Muenster (1953), a paper entitled “Past and Present in Eduard Moerike”. 

9.

We left Hans-Jochun Marquardt’s museum, walked to the street corner nearest the parking ramp in which the place was embedded, and, then, went in the exactly wrong direction.  Martin had misread the map on his cell-phone.

We walked for a half-hour along spacious avenues lined by large marble buildings that might have been palaces or the homes of the very wealthy or, perhaps, business enterprises and research institutes too secretive to publish their names street-side.  The villas stood in gardens that would have been fragrant but for the sleet and mist in the air.  At a public park, grassy mounds sloped down to a canal and statues on chest-high plinths gestured to us.  We retraced our steps and reached the Seaside Hotel about forty-five minutes later.

10.

The original meaning for the word “enchiridion” is “small, concealed dagger.”  Greeks and Romans carried enchirdions in their chitons and togas.  The blades were like small hidden books.  Julius Caesar, I think, fell under the thrusts of enchiridions wielded by his fellow Romans, including his friend, Brutus.