Welcome to my 21st century sweatshop

.pink leather forecast.pink leather forecast.pink leather forecast.

GOT THE SHOES JUST WAITING FOR THE RIGHT WEATHER

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+++ready for FAB…ready for FAB…ready for FAB+++

Measuring a poem

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Five metres of poetry have been measured up for hanging.

The scroll will be shown at Bloodlines, a group exhibition at FAB, the UK’s biggest fringe arts festival, opening in Bath on 24 May.

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Technical details: Song of Songlines, poem (written 1989), scroll inscribed 2013

Black Staedler felt pen on Toppits greaseproof paper (bleached)

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Back in the early 2000s a small group of artists in Berlin had the enterprising idea of a show to sell art works by the metre. This inspired me to make poetry scrolls, which were hung in the exhibition and sold surprisingly well.

A bargain for the customer, if you think about it: one metre of poetry of your choice, cut from a roll with scissors by the poet herself — for only €10. Modest materials for social & environmental responsibility: black or green felt pens, and rolls of greaseproof paper familiar to past schoolchildren as wrapping for lunchbox sandwiches. Bespoke poems to order, on request. Poetry scrolls are almost a model of creativity in the age of the service society.

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The Torah test

Later, roaming in the land of association I inhabit, I found written scrolls on every pathway of human communication. In arduous hours of copying I could identify with the ancient calligraphers of Asia, the scribes of the Orient and medieval European monks.

If composing poems is an act of ultimate freedom, copying them is a trial of patience and requires extreme discipline.

Each time I make a mistake inscribing a poetry scroll, I have to start again from scratch. Sellotape simply won’t do. If I have to throw a botched scroll away I always think of the Torah scribes who have served religious Jewish congregations from ancient times until today. Hand-copying a full Torah scroll takes around 2,000 hours (a whole year of work). Absolute accuracy is demanded. A series of strict rules governs the work. For instance, the scribe must copy from a certified text, not by heart, and must speak the words out loud before he transcribes them. Departure from any of the rules (especially addition or deletion of a word or letter) renders the scroll useless for public readings. A Torah scroll in which any mistake has been found can’t be used, and must be fixed within 30 days, or buried.

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Follow the songlines…

Based on Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines, my poem retells the story of the aborigine creation myth as a kind of rhyming rap. Songlines, the musical topological tracks of Australian nomad tradition, are part of the bloodlines that connect people with their families and ancestors.

I wrote Song of Songlines on a portable typewriter, sitting on a cushion on the floor in a rundown apartment in East Berlin shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can still recall the sense of claustrophobia behind the Iron Curtain, the suffocating masquerade of détente, and the desperate need to break out into a new, wide, free world without boundaries. The poem forced itself out all at once in a powerful rush.

Reading it again reminds me of the elation when I pulled the final page out of the typewriter. If ever I wrote in defiance of dictatorship, it was then.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the poem was set to music and recorded by an East Berlin underground band, Ornament & Verbrechen. I still have the album, On Eyes, on sound cassette and vinyl.

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On Eyes LP (Ornament & Verbrechen 1989)
with Songlines (lyrics: Karen Margolis) on the flip side, 15 mins.

 

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Songlines for Bloodlines = FAB

It took three hours to inscribe the SONG OF SONGLINES scroll for the Bloodlines exhibition. Then came the measuring up (as requested by Bloodlines curator Brian Gibson) with invaluable help from my friend Charly, who took the pictures to match. Measuring in at five metres (the original long lines divided in half to fit the roll width), the poem takes up half of a standard greaseproof roll.

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You can see the SONG OF SONGLINES poetry scroll among splendid works by 13 other artists in our group show at Walcot Chapel during FAB 2013:

Bloodlines – Identity & Belonging – 24 May-9 June 2013
Part of the Fringe Arts Bath, Walcot Chapel, Walcot Gate, Bath UK.
Curator: Brian Gibson

Fourteen artists, emerging and experienced, poets, painters, filmmakers and the rest, from the UK and abroad, look at who we are within the boundaries of blood.

http://bloodlines2013.yolasite.com/

Fringe Arts Bath, 24 May-9 June 2013

http://www.fringeartsbath.co.uk/

Special thanks to Charly Lowndes

© Karen Margolis 2013

posted 12 May 2013

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***Song of Age new poem***Song of Age new poem***

from the sequence: Smiles Wide Open

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FREE PUSSY RIOT!! – Berlin-Mitte 2013

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Smokescreen in G

Each time we met again

it rained. You teased

about the wetness of London

and cats whose names

rhymed with G

needing feeding

I lit a candle for Pussy Riot

and carry a purple umbrella

always in the case

wherein my life lies

© Karen Margolis 2013

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Posted 7 May 2013

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<<<Brandenburg.revisited>>>Brandenburg.revisited<<<Brandenburg.revisited>>>

Last weekend I went to Brandenburg to visit the former concentration camp at Ravensbrück. In the Nazi era Brandenburg was a place of terror. Hardly a town or village that wasn’t tied into the concentration camp and slave labour network that stretched across Germany and the Nazi-occupied territories in Europe.

Brandenburg, the state with the countryside that surrounds Berlin, was always a place of recreation for the capital dwellers. After the Berlin Wall fell there was great rejoicing that all Berliners could now visit the resorts and sights that had once been out of bounds across the border. People bought dachas or moved into new periphery housing estates and settled in to the new reunited Germany.

Still, I never felt at home in Brandenburg. It always had the atmosphere of a sad state. Later, the more I learned about its history and began to understand the hostile climate, the less I felt comfortable there.

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Ravensbrück Memorial April 2013

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This poem, written around four years ago, expresses the unease.

A silver birch, me

“Lately life for Karen has not been all that kind /

She’s reached the outer suburbs of her inner city mind.”

— Johny Brown, from album ‘Love never fails’ (Band of Holy Joy)

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beyond the city ring, familiar streets

drift into towering monotony

blurs of mottled brown & grey

smokeless chimneys of empty factories

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blending out architectural misery

I count the motorway exits

through the Brandenburg March

till the yellow blaze of rapeseed fields

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city outskirts are wild country

maps turned in circles don’t help my bearings

nature and local spirits

aren’t friendly to intruders

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out of bounds I can’t belong here

buzzing insects disturb my mental traffic roar

panic withdrawal attacks

conjure mirages of espresso bars

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metamorphosis a metaphor

of escape. Across the other side

of the line a little boy drew in the dust

behind the derelict cottage

a silvery-white pillar, me

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slender in a trembling coat of leaves

dappled by passing shadows

temporarily reconciled

to this northern habitat

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the storks are readying for take-off

on the Cape Town flight via Istanbul

they tell me I’ll have to move on again

before winter’s stripdown

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© Karen Margolis 2013

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Ravensbrück – Wall of Nations April 2013

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Text & pictures © Karen Margolis      27 April 2013

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

upcoming.upcoming.upcoming.upcoming.upcoming.

Bath Fringe Arts Festival 2013

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…more details soon.more details.soon.more details soon… 

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Celebrating liberation – mourning the dead – honouring bravery

Ravensbrück concentration camp for women

21 April 2013

More soon….

Russian tank on the road to Ravensbrück commemorates the liberation from fascism on 21 April 1945

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Stone marking the site of the gas chamber

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Survivors meet at the annual commemoration of their liberation in 1945

photos and text © Karen Margolis 2013

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+++all s.a.d.seasonal affective disorder.all s.a.d.seasonal affective disorder.all+++

“Life is a topless ladder / with a snake on every rung …”

Grey weather report (BERLIN SPECIAL) in the year of the snake:

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Gustave Moreau, Hercules and the Hydra, 1876

Grey weather report

What happens when the seasons fail? — A lament of sunless suffering

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Gerhard Richter’s grey

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Grey Weather Report (Obituary for Planet Earth)

No spring no summer

no winter no fall

we gambled with our planet’s wealth

and lost it almost all;

the weather’s a roulette wheel

& when the stakes are called

the Grand Croupier dons his white gloves

for the next nuclear ball.

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June’s as cold as February

and rainy as November

The French restart atomic tests,

Hiroshima remembers;

Today the water dries up

in my leaky bathroom tap

Somewhere homes are flooding

from the melting polar cap.

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No night no day

no future for the young;

Life is a topless ladder

with a snake on every rung;

The morning’s grey and misty

the evening’s just the same

the forecast is a scoreboard

in a new computer game.

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June’s as smoggy as December

& full of April temperament;

Poland has an ozone gap

I’m wondering how to pay the rent.

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The summer solstice comes & goes

clouds nibble at the treetops;

Waiting for the sun to show

Time is an ocean filled with teardrops.

© Karen Margolis 2013

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Berlin in April I

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Berlin in April II

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One word can make a difference: Thanks to Laura Radosh for cheerful mind-jogging on a cold wet April day in Berlin-Mitte.

Text & photos © Karen Margolis 2013

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#sex & wieners in the city##sex & wieners in the city#

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sweet tooth sex: vibrator cupcakes

“They all want the handcuffs”

Gorgeous on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin: the shop window tempts with state-of-the-art sex toys and the discount bins outside are brimming with stuffed objects sprouting tentacles. Shoppers hurry past, hunched against the Siberian wind on this bitter April day. Enough competition on the wide boulevard with the overhead metro running down the middle and parrots screeching on their perches in the flower shop that doubles as a café a few doors down.

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Risky local café toilets

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Low-flying parrot: you have been warned

It’s just after Easter, no sign of spring, the crisis is evident from the boarded shop fronts and grim expressions, and nobody on the street looks as if they could remotely use a Japanese masturbation egg or silicon jelly dildo.

Such unlikely moments are exactly when the urge overcomes me to abandon the shopping list and indulge my curiosity. Time again to explore some authentic urban ethnology, I told myself. Here on this new daily round was a sex shop waiting to be explored. The modern femme d’un certain âge (in her Sexy at Sixty persona) seized the field research opportunity, stepped forward boldly and opened the door.

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“Hi,” said the young man behind the monitor on the curved counter to my left. He didn’t look up. His face wore the glaze of social networking on the job: languid expectation. He commanded the only spacious area, a wide counter that was probably a leftover from a defunct night bar on the premises. The rest of the shop was crammed. The long narrow interior offered a path to left or right separated down the middle by display shelves and stacks. The walls on both sides were lined with alcoves and glass cabinets. I took the left path. Two men facing the right-hand wall were discussing the relative merits of several types of love balls on display (for women). Silicon versus glossy; hook or thread; if I listened well, I could probably learn something… and survey the black silken masks at the same time. Or read the tasteful mini-leaflet about the benefits of Japanese masturbation eggs (for men).

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Seasonal sex toys….

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… with elaborate instructions for use

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—   Suddenly the door burst open and two small blonde-haired boys entered. The older boy, who looked about 9 years old, was brandishing a plastic twin pack of wiener sausages. His companion, aged around 7, may have been his younger brother.

“We want the handcuffs,” the older lad announced, sweeping past the counter and heading for my corner with the younger in tow. The two boys glanced over the smacking paddles, Japanese bondage cords, handwoven Tibetan leather whips with authenticity certificate, extra-large inflatable vulvas and penises and other accoutrements of the sophisticated 21st century bedroom or boudoir.

Then the younger pointed excitedly and the elder reached over and grabbed a cellophane packet containing a pair of very shiny metal handcuffs. In doing so he knocked over the display sign advertising the special attraction of this item: the “extra long chain” between the cuffs.

The shop assistant at the counter was still peering intently at the monitor, hand clutching his mouse. Facebook or Tumblr, the trusty time-killers for sales staff. The other assistant had finished his discourse on love balls (trend: rapidly declining sales) and had moved towards the front of the shop with his client to consider the market prospects for jelly dildos. The two men agreed there was little difference between the large array of items on display, aside from minor shape and colour variations. “It’s all in the packaging,” the salesman said. They both nodded wisely.

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“… all in the packaging…”

Meanwhile the two little boys were intently examining the handcuffs, turning the packet around.

“Is that okay for kids?” I asked nobody in particular. The man at the monitor barely looked in my direction. “It’s fine, they all want the handcuffs,” he assured me.

“Yes, we’ll take ’em,” the elder boy confirmed.

The assistant got up reluctantly and lumbered out of his comfort corner at the till. “Now listen,” he said, waving a finger at the boys. “I need to know where you got the money from. You didn’t steal the shopping money, did you?”

“No!” the younger boy squeaked indignantly. The elder stayed cool. “What are you talking about? We got sent out to buy sausages. Well, here are the sausages, as you can see…” (holding the packet of wieners above his head, turning it to left and right for his audience in the shop).

“… and now we’re spending our own money on the handcuffs!”

“Yes, we are,” the younger boy chimed in. “We’ve pooled our Easter egg money!”

The shop assistant almost let himself smile. “OK, that’ll be four euros then,” he said. “I’m giving you school pupils’ discount.”

The elder boy handed over the coins without further comment, still clutching the handcuffs in their packet. Pupils’ discount in a sex shop was par for the course. “We don’t need a bag,” he said graciously.

The boys departed, the elder carrying the handcuffs, the younger the sausages.

“Guten Appetit,” the shop assistant called after them.

Turning to me, he shrugged, spread his hands and said, “School holidays, you know. That’s when we always sell out of handcuffs.”

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Conjuring spring on Schönhauser Allee

Text and pictures © Karen Margolis 2013

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::local.sex.shop::local.sex.shop::local.sex.shop::

Visiting card from friendly local sex shop

Still waiting for spring in Berlin. Urban field research discovers Gorgeous, a friendly local sex toys emporium. Meet the youthful clientele on an ordinary shopping day. Watch this space.

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::::Plans and projects: Updates on UPCOMING page of the website::::

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April in Berlin with snow, ice and Siberian winds has some rare colourful moments:

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Blumencafé Schönhauser Allee Berlin April 2013

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::now that april’s here::now that april’s here::now that april’s here::

Icing the lilacs

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After the first winter of my new life in Berlin, the spring of 1984 was a long time coming. Expectation began growing in March, at around the time the first crocuses appear in London. I was attuned to the seasons of my adopted English homeland.  The three flatmates of my all-woman apartment in West Berlin laughed when I bought light fabric in a sale and asked to borrow a sewing machine to run up a spring dress. Just wait, they said. I felt I had waited long enough. Winter in the walled city was a miserable event that had already lasted too long.

Aside from the historic upheavals, a lot has changed in Berlin’s winter living conditions over the past thirty years.  The stinking oil heaters and briquette burning stoves of the 1980s have been wiped out by clean air laws and building renovations. The home media industry has made the long winter nights more bearable. The metropolitan transport net, expanded and modernised since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is one of the world’s best.

Still, nothing helps when it comes to the weather. This year, 2013, has brought record climatic nightmares all over the northern hemisphere — but waiting for the spring in Berlin is a yearly torture.

Back in 1984, I was sustained by the free libraries of the Allied occupying powers in Berlin. Amerika Haus and the British Centre were close to my flat, the one offering English, the other American publications at no cost. The stock was largely mainstream literature. At the rate of four books a week, I read my way through the classics from the 18th century to the 1970s with generous helpings of letters, diaries and poetry by the great writers. In the warm ambience of the bookshelves on icy mornings I would spend ages choosing the books, then leave with my heavy carrier bag and walk down Hardenbergstrasse towards the university buildings.

Opposite the beautiful old art college was a famous student and artists’ café where tall pot plants luxuriated in the steamy, smoky atmosphere and the high picture windows dripped with condensation. For the price of a cup of filter coffee I could sit for hours reading my new library loans or writing my journal.

I think my spring poem in mock-heroic couplets was heavily influenced by a bunch of volumes on Byron and the Shelleys. This year, with snow sculptures of bunnies in the city’s parks and the first narcissi and crocuses still buried in icy ground, my plaintive cry in rhyme for an end to winter seems all the more poignant.

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Berlin 29 March 2013

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The cruelty of April

In the month of April, Spring

Flirts with our hopes, a cruel tease

She hints at an end to winter’s freeze

With a glimmer of sun, a waft of breeze

Then again she’s gone on the wing.

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I thought I saw her yesterday

When I was down by the Lietzensee

From the colonnades on the bank above

I could see the people charmed by her love.

They took off hats and coats and shoes

Their flesh still tinged a wintry blue;

Lay on the grass in casual undress

To savour the warmth of her caress.

On all their lips the word was Spring

As they listened to the nest birds sing.

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But in the month of April, Spring

Plays the coquette, wicked flirt;

Gives a glimpse of secrets under her skirt,

Plays the fool and leaves us hurt

For beneath the smile there’s a sting.

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I thought I saw her yesterday

Her sunshine smile on a child at play;

Whispering to timid buds to be bold

To open in flower unfearing of cold;

And on the concrete city ways

Tables sprouted outside the cafés

Where people read papers, scanning the news

Noses buried in cultural reviews;

Or talked, or simply sat there staring

Pleasuring in the sense of sharing

The first blazing Sunday of the year

That brings the promise of summer near.

And white-aproned waitresses bustled around

Bringing ices in glass bowls, trophies crowned

With cream in peaks like mountain snow

Melting fast in the sun’s rich glow;

And apfelstrudel and white pots of coffee

Or whipped foamy chocolate or Indian tea.

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I saw fine ladies with hour-glass figures

Waists tightly belted by fashion’s rigours

Showing off the new season’s clothes

Raised by heels sharp as stilettoes,

Gold rings on their fingers, squires by their side,

Tiny dogs on leads running beside.

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And beneath a tree, its branches still bare

I watched a couple, both grey-haired

Pause for a kiss of full-lipped passion

Heedless of passers-by or fashion.

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But in the month of April, Spring

For all her fairness is a cheat:

She practises the wild deceit

Of blowing cold upon the heat

By turns that we find bewildering.

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I thought when I saw her yesterday

That she came in peace, was here to stay;

But when I woke, she’d flown with the night

The day was grey without her light;

The streets were washed with drizzling rain

The café tables interred again;

And when I looked at passing faces

They were hard and cold and bore no traces

Of the colour that only a day gone by

Had flushed each cheek, brightened each eye.

On all their lips the name of Spring

Was coupled with caprice and complaining.

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For in the month of April, Spring

Dallies with the days and hours

Taunts the sun with sudden showers,

Nips the bud and strokes the flowers.

Yet I feel my spirits ever ascending

For I know that April must have an ending.

                         © Karen Margolis 1984 / 2013

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Berlin 29 March 2013

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Passover peach blossom, Berlin April 2012

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Berlin spring 2012

Text & photos © Karen Margolis 2013

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::shining tear of the sun:::shining tear of the sun:::shining tear::

Slave labour and the grit of memory

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page from the Book of Leinster, ancient source of the “Song of Amergin”

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A word about Liberation

After a long spell earning my daily ration in the 21st century sweatshop, most recently translating about the indescribable horrors of Ravensbrück concentration camp—often in the words of those who had to live through it as prisoners and slave labourers—I’ve returned to my own writing.

How to describe the feeling? – the pent-up creativity, held for so long that it suffocates from within, causing restless days and sleepless nights. Living in suspended animation, waiting for the moment when the captive visions can leave the working body fettered to the laptop and fly away to their own destinations.

Everything in me was bursting to get free as I rendered into English the words of people lifted onto Red Cross lorries in a sequence of events called “the Liberation”. It actually meant something unique and different to each survivor in each place where it happened at the end of the war that had ripped the world apart. For the liberated prisoners whose accounts I translated, after months and years of hell on earth, after violence, exploitation, victimisation and the constant threat of annihilation by calculated hate or arbitrary command, liberation meant being transported by friendly forces and faces out of a country they never chose to enter, into a future they never imagined.

Working on multimedia material from a former concentration camp in the part of Germany that used to be under communist rule is a story on its own. I made many new discoveries, including a lesser-known aspect of the camp structure: the satellite camps and external commands where men and women prisoners were sent to work as slave labourers. In northern and eastern Germany, many of them worked in the aircraft and munitions industry, alongside foreign labourers who had been forcibly deported from Germany’s conquered territories – and ordinary German workers earning their daily wages. Famous German companies (some of which still exist today) made vital contributions to the Nazi war effort, building the V2 revenge bombs, the FW 190 fighter plane and other deadly weapons of mass destruction. The slave labourers often had to build the factory halls or camp housing themselves, as well as the access roads to the plants. They were guarded by SS men and female concentration camp guards, fed on starvation rations, forced to work twelve-hour shifts or more, and often slept on straw pallets in unheated, lice-infested huts. If they got sick, they were sent back to the main camps to be killed. If they died on the job, they were buried in unmarked and mass graves.

Hardly a town or village in northern and eastern Germany remained outside the vast net of slave labour organised by the SS and Himmler’s agency for economic exploitation that ran the concentration camps. Today there is a tentative local memorial movement around some former sites of these factories and labour camps, as historians investigate and people in the area rediscover the past. As recently publicised, the US Holocaust Memorial in Washington is engaged in detailed research on the astonishing extent and nature of the networks of subcamps and slave labour camps attached to concentration camps all over Germany.

Nowadays in the depressed region on the Baltic coast and Polish border, real estate brokers have a greater interest in eradicating the last traces of that wartime legacy. There are a number of vacant castles on huge estates where slave labourers from all over Europe were once forced to work not only in hastily erected factory halls, but also as farmhands, gardeners and even domestic labourers for the Nazi aristocracy. It was actually the wife of Himmler’s masseur who thought up the smart idea of engaging concentration camp prisoners as household servants, or carers in special children’s and maternity homes…

Sometimes the few surviving slave labourers from that time, or their descendants, still visit for memorial ceremonies and to give talks. But most were glad to be liberated never to return.

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Black sheep of coincidence

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What about the other side – the onetime torturers and employers of those prisoners? The company bosses who made fat profits in the wartime economy from mainly foreign and prisoner slave labour? Towards the end of the war, knowing this was a key region for weapons production, the Allies bombarded from the air until most of the factories were shut down or relocated and the slave labourers transferred to other camps. Few of the factories survived the war. The Russians took control of East Germany and blew up most of the remaining plants. The East German state later expropriated the rest. But by then most of the owners had fled, mainly to West Germany. Many managed to rescue at least part of their fortunes.

Some years ago I met a man I’ll simply call ‘G.’, a descendant of a prosperous family that ran a big weapons company based in a Baltic port in eastern Germany during the Nazi era. A teenager during the war, G. immigrated to the USA as a young man and lived most of his life abroad. Yet he remained haunted by the experience of the war and his family’s role in weapons production for the Nazis. He enjoyed telling the story of how he, the family black sheep, had refused to join the Hitler Youth. I don’t remember him ever mentioning the satellite camps or slave labourers. Research shows that his family’s firm used slaves from one of the biggest external branches of Ravenbrück concentration camp — a satellite camp with one of the highest death rates among slave labourers.

G. happened to be born in the same year as my father, who came from Memel (now Klaipéda), a port further eastwards on the Baltic coast of Prussia. I was constantly reminded of their cultural similarities as Prussians and their contrasting fates (my father came from a big Jewish family and lost many relatives in the Holocaust). It was this unlikely link across the older generation that made me give G. a place in my poetry cycle “I am a hill of poetry”. I had already written the second poem in the sequence for my father.

The first three poems in the cycle were recently published in the Green Anthology (Silver Birch Press). Altogether there should be 13 poems, each representing a month in the lunisolar year. I am currently working on the sixth poem, concerned with the month of July. An advance peek: it may concern a battle-waging spear. It all depends on which version of the original Amergin poem I choose.

G. inspired the fifth poem in the cycle. He was born in late March, the present time of year. It is the season of Passover and Easter, of winter’s burial and spring rebirth.

This is a brief introduction to the idea of the Hill of Poetry cycle:

 

 

I AM A HILL OF POETRY

poem cycle in progress

The title of this cycle is taken from The Song of Amergin:

“said to have been chanted by the chief bard of the Milesian invaders as he set foot on the soil of Ireland in the year of the world 2376 (1268 B.C.E)”. Written originally in Old Goidelic, the only surviving versions are in colloquial Irish translation.

The phrase ‘I am a hill of poetry’ represents knowledge and is assigned to the month of September, which has the vine as its tree and is the month of the titmouse and the poet “the least abashed of men as the titmouse is the least easily abashed of birds. Both band together in companies in this month and go on circuit in search of a liberal hand; and as the titmouse climbs spirally up a tree, so the poet also spirals to immortality. And Variegated is the colour of the titmouse, and of the Master-poet’s dress.”

— Robert Graves, The White Goddess

Note: This cycle of 13 poems is based on the lunar calendar Robert Graves describes in The White Goddess. Each month is associated with specific natural/mystical characteristics and a particular tree.

The cycle consists of a poem for each month based on a particular person’s birth date and character.

So far I have written 5 of the 13 poems (the sixth is hatching).

 

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Poem No. 5, written in September 2001

 

                              remembering G., born in late March 1927

 

 

 

I am a shining tear of the sun

 

 

Begotten by a wave of passion

at the midsummer orgies. Born to the world

when Persephone had paid off her yearly debt

for the last seed.

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                                   With the child Hercules

I have sailed in a coracle over the floods.

Now I lie glistening in the first pale shafts of light

at the end of winter’s tunnel.

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“All so still I came

Where my mother was

Like dew in April

That falleth on grass.”

My father was training his sons for the army.

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Three score years and more I have lived with remembrance

of a child growing up among haters and murderers;

the legends I tell are streaked with gold

from the sale of weapons for human destruction,

and fastened with strings

that bind what love cannot hold

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money is my motif and my guiding threat:

why should I work for friendship or praise?

— when I can buy it, the cheaper the better

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I have been a drop in the air

that fell to the ground between blades of grass;

mine is the time of anticipation, calculation

the time of narcissi and steeled ambition.

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Matted and wearied the glow of my being,

too cowardly to fight the grip of my past,

the Prussian diseases:

NEID, GEIZ & EIFERSUCHT /

envy, jealousy & miser’s greed,

pomp & repression. Alles korrekt.

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From trees on the march I have hewed out a battle plan;

the front-line alders begin the affray.

The high sprigs on my shield are window dressing,

the squares of my chessboard carved out for slaughter.

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In my heart I carry a dewdrop for clearness

I once loved a woman not more than my self.

The pain of her death is sharpened by guilt.

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On her grave I wrote “poet” to polish my rough stones.

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At night I wake coughing to spew out my thoughts,

before breakfast I place a call to my broker.

Sometimes the chill factor seizes my throat

and the ghost of Germanity mocks my faked inventory.

.

On the windswept Atlantic beach I gather huge clams

At home in my loft they lie in cracked bowls

sucking in soured water

and spitting out the grit of memory. I am old, I am cold.

With my eyes on the ground for gold, I stoop

towards the future

bent on revenge with my will.

 .

 

.

 

 

 The earliest manuscript entirely in Irish is the Book of Leinster (MS 1339, 12th century), properly Leabhar na Nuachongbhála. It is an anthology of Irish prose, verse and genealogy which takes its name from an ecclesiastical foundation in Co. Laois. A copy is preserved in the library of Trinity College Dublin.

.

page from the Book of Leinster, ancient source of the “Song of Amergin”

.

Note: Thanks to Michael Murray for some timely inspiration.

Text and marked photos © Karen Margolis    24 March 2013

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

*spring*equinox*spring*equinox*spring*equinox*

.

.

sweet spring nothings

First, a quickie (new):

.

vernal lizard song

lick me stick me suckle me

lizard flick your tongue and lie

sunning in my crevices

.

let’s cull our teardrops

at the vernal equinox

and spin the silk of skin on skin

.

five to seven in the gloaming

(2013)

.

.

Then, a long slow dance of the senses (old):

.

sweet spring nothings : spell of a sunday witch

for sir lancelot

.

tango tango

mango django

kiwi kiss me

lick me love;

nefertiti

lipstick smartie

follow my leader

child with a dove;

minxy miney

make me tiny

filmy fill me

cock ’n bull;

hexagramma

hole & hammer

rosehiphoney

cummin me  –

mélangitis

sadeyed isis

mannoman

a megalite;

quasidomo

seamy sartre

arms akimbo

yen yen rice;

dragonada

halva deeper

seep you slipper

april green

fanny hill

is in the belfry

balaton

the battle cries  —

wet me sweaty

hunger bite me

mangolds slurp

sultanas fly:

meet you there

beyond the belfry

pickmeup

the threshold’s high

codex mantis

mingle seashell

how d’you greet

a humming bird;

hell’s a waiting

waking echo

grown within

nonevergo  —

swing a starburst

bend our bridges

jellyfish

are floating by:

cybernetic

moonismatic

mirror shards

in marrow cells

Ekhnaton

the one true son

papyrus

inside the thigh  —

coat me lazy

I’m your lady

radiator

gladiator

bubble pop

& lie like easy

samarkand

here in my hand

odalisque and

harem man

crème brûlée

catch if you can

            amenomen heavens seven

            magnificunt and magic wand

                                                         (1991)

.

.

 

.

poems & photos © Karen Margolis 2013

***************************************************

+++US invades.US invades.US invades+++

Bad time for poetry

“In these dark times I write unstoppably… “

.

Coming up to the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, I’m reminded of the poets’ campaign against the war in the USA and Europe. Ten years on, it seems repression is growing everywhere against poets and artists who speak out. Times aren’t getting better for poetry.

Here’s a poem from the poetry movement back then that may still be relevant today.

.

Bad time for poetry

                                “In meinem Lied ein Reim

                                 Käme mir fast vor wie Übermut”

Bertolt Brecht, “Schlechte Zeit für Lyrik” (Gedichte 1938-1941)

.

“A rhyme in my song

would seem almost cocky”

Bertolt Brecht ,”Bad Time for Poetry” (Poems 1938-41)

.

Though I write lots of poems in these troubled times

tinged with anger & distress

I don’t like thinking of myself

as a war poetess;

I’m not at home enough anywhere

to boast of a fatherland

and due to my lapsed trotskyist tendencies

I’m against war profits & secret agencies

.

Yet somehow I’m forced into close combat

fighting daily swings of mood

and brushing up my rusty words

to attack entrenched attitudes;

I’m driven to look again at my picture

of the world & people around me

I’m pushed into taking a radical stance

by appalling historical ignorance.

.

When fleets go up & fleets go down

and the stock markets follow suit

when bombs & bread are delivered by air

and the troops are already en route:

I fritter away the precious hours

firing verbal missiles at windsocks

cutting through brainwashed argument

and rescuing friends drowned in pious lament.

.

I’ve had enough of religion

I don’t want a Buddhist conversion

it’s hard enough being a renegade Jew

without all this karma diversion.

But I do see something about the Jews

that helps them stay alive & thrive:

they often talk tacheles with their God

and laugh at themselves for being so odd.

.

In these dark times I write unstoppably

and worry less or more

But I won’t line up politically

as a poetess of war;

It’s not a good time for poetry

but I’m moved by passion, not fashion:

if a rhyme today is almost cocky

I’m guilty — and proud of poetical heresy.

.

© Karen Margolis 2003/2013

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

%.international women’s day 8 March.%.international women’s day 8 March.%

You can be a mistress woman

Time to throw off those chains and live as the women we want to be.

To celebrate this special day, here are some poems from the perennial cycle

GODDESSES AND DOORMATS

.

Aphrodite riding goose

.

                     apotheosis                                 

                              (song für Bea)

hey, I’m the moon goddess

since I stopped hammering

on your sickle

.

hey, I’m the silver huntress

since I stopped spiking myself

on your arrow

.

hey, I’m the black princess

since I stopped choking

on your sword

.

hey, I’m the purple songstress

since I opened my legs

drank my juices

.

I’m the moon goddess

silver huntress

black princess

purple songstress

.

since I came with a candle

                            melting your axe  

.

© Karen Margolis 1991/2013

.

Graves’ homage to the triple goddess and poetic muse

.

It is the women who bring me flowers

It is the women who bring me flowers

it is the women who stand

full-handed before my door

proud like the palms of Jericho

bearing rich dark oasis dates

.

© Karen Margolis 1988 / 2013

.

I have skills Nice March 2011

.

… and here’s a proposal for the future of feminism and free love:

from Love Poem in Eight Songs

.

VIII

You can be a goddess woman

you can be a doormat too

You can run around complaining

’bout the things men do to you.

But you don’t have to:

.

You can sob, cry shout scream

and fight to make him better;

You can burn his clothes, slap his face

and send him lawyers’ letters

But you don’t have to:

.

You can be a model woman

you can fast and exercise

and if you’re good enough you’ll win

the next man as your prize

But you don’t have to:

there are other things to do.

.

You can be a mistress woman

the hetaira of the Greeks:

the classic sovereign courtesan

whose praise the poet speaks.

A woman who’s unique.

.

© Karen Margolis 1991 / 2013

.

These poems are currently online

under the title Goddesses, Doormats and Love Artists

at http://parisiana.com/content/goddesses-doormats-and-love-artists

.

Untitled in navy

.

Happy Women’s Day to all sisters and pussy lovers

§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§$§

shh…kiss’n'tell…shh…kiss’n'tell…shh…kiss’n'tell…shh…kiss’n'tell

Kiss-a-pig-and-tell

Publishing for scandal in France  

The story started with a poster and ends with a poster, veering in the middle between courtroom drama and gossip column. In other words, it’s like many other stories the media regale us with. It barely lasted the proverbial week of general attention span and the details will certainly be forgotten pretty quickly. Already it stands as a lesson in the pitfalls of publicised revenge in the private sphere.

The poster, standing prominently on the street outside my local newsagent, announced the scandal: “My story with DSK – the explosive account…”

.

The telltale poster

The book wasn’t even published yet, and the author was already trying to dictate the terms of the debate. The main protagonists are Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund and Marcela Iacub, a Franco-Argentinian jurist, writer and journalist who lives in Paris. Apparently they had an affair in 2012 during the time Strauss-Kahn was buying himself out of a tricky legal case over his infamous alleged assault on a room attendant at a New York hotel. He was also (and still is) facing charges of pimping for sex parties in northern France and Washington.

Obviously, the story already has many of the necessary ingredients for a good yarn about sex, blackmail and spying, including wealth, influence, frequent flying etc. Hubris, and its come-uppance, too: Strauss-Kahn was tipped to become the next Socialist candidate for the French presidency before his fall from grace. Maybe this Icarus aspect was what attracted Iacub, described as a brilliant jurist and researcher, who had already made a name with controversial and provocative articles on weighty subjects like the tyranny of motherhood worship. Anyway, she took up the cudgels to defend him against his moralistic accusers and earned a lunch date with him in the restaurant of an expensive Paris hotel. One thing led to another, but we can’t say what, and certainly not from reading her kiss-and-tell book written after the affair ended several months later.

Aside from what happens directly to us, we can never know what goes on between two people in any kind of close relationship, least of all in sexual life. But what leads one of the partners to write an exposure destroying the intimacy? – when it is the intimacy that makes sex so precious and thrilling and unique, a way of being ourselves unlike any other.

 

Kiss-and-tell: the genre

 The happy mutual end of an affair rarely results in a book like this. Kiss-and-tell is about frustrated passion, the attempt to reach an estranged lover, the desire to hurt, betrayal, revenge for rejection… Iacub obviously wrote in the grip of strong emotion. Her first, much-quoted sentence reads: “You were old, you were fat, you were small and you were ugly. You were macho, you were vulgar, you were insensitive, you were petty. You were selfish, you were brutal and you had no culture. And I was crazy about you.”

If you study the kiss-and-tell genre, you’ll discover it takes more than writing up diary notes after a heavy night of fucking. There’s enough porn out there already, much of it freely available online. Realising this, the author apparently tried to spice up the story with salacious details that might or might not be fictional. But more than that, given the tough media trial inevitable for high-profile exposures, you need strong nerves to carry it off. Iacub seems to have panicked. She gave an exclusive interview before publication to advertise that it was about the notorious sex fiend Strauss-Kahn, even though his name is not mentioned in the book. Yet her defiance collapsed when he produced a crazy, confused e-mail in court in which she apologised for luring him into a trap and claimed she was directed by others.

 Cover story

 

On the basis of the excerpts I’ve read, the book’s cover reflects the writing style. The design resembles the greetings cards in dusty French stationers’ racks I can’t bring myself to buy. It’s almost too coy and embarrassing to be real. Belle et Bête, the title, could be translated as “Beauty and Beast” or “Beautiful and Ugly”. No prizes for guessing who’s which. Nor for spotting references to various fairy tales, Cocteau art films, Walt Disney cartoons etc.

The author compares her ex-lover to a pig. He’s half-man, half-pig, she says.

(My first thought: that’s not kosher! – is hastily suppressed. Perhaps it’s my association with another of her notoriously “provocative” remarks: that not everybody imprisoned in Auschwitz was traumatised by it. Pause to think about why people need to say things like that…  

 — Sorry, I’ll try to keep to the point from now on.) 

Let’s go back to the pig metaphor in this self-appointed literary endeavour. Whereas the man is unspeakable and inhuman, the author tells us, the pig is endearing. Up to a point, of course. He’s also brutal, and that seems to appeal to her need to submit and denigrate herself — until it goes too far. The affair in the book ends when she lands in hospital with an ear half chewed off. True or false, it’s fairly tasteless. As are her vituperative remarks like the assertion he would have turned the Elysée into a swinger club and sprayed all over the place with his sperm if he had become president.

Disgusting and sad, as one male commentator said, reviewing the book on ARTE tv.

All that in the name of literature. Of course it backfired. A Paris court awarded Strauss-Kahn substantial damages, and a slip of paper has to be inserted in each copy for sale stating that the book infringes his right to privacy. The critics have been almost universally damning, and some members of the French intellectual establishment (mostly men) have leapt loudly to Strauss-Kahn’s defence, arguing you don’t kick a man when he’s down.

.

Sex, lies and liaisons dangereuses from Paris St. Germain to the Vatican

The most interesting comments were in the online press forums. “Typical antics of the French intellectual class / the rich / the nobs in power,” was the general tenor of many contributions. The fact that Anne Sinclair, Strauss-Kahn’s estranged wife, was almost invariably referred to in the media coverage as “super-rich” or “the millionaire heiress” added to the envy and sarcasm. “So this is what the residents of St. Germain get up to,” was one sour comment among many.

There was also some genuine anger at so-called “left” publications wasting their time on trivial sex scandals. A few readers applauded Iacub for practising “free” sexuality and being self-assertive, but most commentators saw her book as an abject capitulation to male sexual dominance. Many media commentators seem to regard her as a feminist in the same mistaken way people see any successful woman, from Thatcher to Merkel to Christine Lagarde, as an embodiment of women’s equality. Clearly they don’t understand what feminism is. Or liberated sexuality, for that matter. What a wasted opportunity – there could have been a real debate on bourgeois morality, sexual freedom and so on.

The scandal also inspired some amusing cartoons about sex-crazed pigs and sows, horse meat masquerading in pig’s clothing, and piggy creatures at the annual Paris agricultural fair held the same week.

.

The verdict of literature

One of the claims Iacub made for her book is that it was far from the realm of psychoanalysis. You can read that how you want. Denial is one word that comes to mind. It just shows how little she understands about literature. Freud himself often said that writers of great literature (by which he meant classics including the ancient Greeks, the Hebrew Bible and Shakespeare) had already understood everything about the human psyche. His contribution was to systematise their discoveries into a science.

There’s no excuse for Iacub: there are plenty of wonderful writings about liaisons dangereuses in French that could have served as a model for her emotional tirade and from which she could have learned to see and express something about other people, not just the mirror image of her own projections. Her story seems to confirm the idea that people invent their demons in their own image.

English literature, too, has much to offer. All through the week as I followed the story intermittently, and every time I walked past that poster outside the newsagents’, certain phrases kept echoing in my mind.

The Restoration, a period in the 17th century renowned for libertinage, great comedy theatre and lax morals, seems ideally suited to give perspective to this sorry tale of the pig and the would-be mistress. Freud was right! – look at the works of William Congreve, author of some great Restoration plays. His only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, contains this famous gem:

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

                                                  Act III, Scene VIII.

(This is usually paraphrased as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.)

.

William Congreve ca. 1709
from the studio of Godfrey Kneller

.

A Shakespearean verdict for this sorry tale of two people who almost seem to deserve each other’s hell would obviously be the curse spoken by the dying Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.”

The pig metaphor recalls a charming old English saying:

“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

It means you can’t make a good quality product using bad materials.

And Congreve definitively sums it up in his classic comedy, Love for Love (1695):

“O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell.”

.

The Pope: “emotional farewell”

Footnote: At the end of the week the newsagent changed the poster – farewell to the Pope.

 

 © Karen Margolis       3 March 2013

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

just published:just published:just published:just published:

THE GREEN ANTHOLOGY

Here’s the blurb by fellow contributor and arch-publicist Eddie Woods:

Yes, folks, Everything

IS Coming Up GREEN! By which I specifically mean Silver Birch Press’ absolutely magnificent GREEN ANTHOLOGY Dedicated to Graham Greene. And edited by Melanie Villines (contributing editor Joan Jobe Smith), it contains poetry and prose by 72 authors (past and present) from eight countries on three continents (if you choose to include England and Wales as part of Europe, that is!). With 11 USA states + D.C. represented. There are 14 themed sections, ranging from Hues & Flavors, Money, Envy, Love & Marriage, all the way thru to Trees and New Life. And yes, yours truly is also on board. With 2x poems (“Green My Envy” and “Clear Queer Green”), plus a condensed version of my long interview with Jack Micheline. Who is likewise poetically represented. As are Karen Margolis, Tate Swindell, William Blake, Amy Lowell, Philip K. Dick, and even Henry VIII. The Green Anthology is available in both print and (soon) Kindle editions. For ordering information and to read more about the Green Anthology just click on this link: http://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/new-release-silver-birch-press-green-anthology/ And then yeah, go ahead and buy yourself a copy! Tee-hee. In her intro to the Green Anthology, the editor charmingly wishes everyone a Happy Spring. But since a number of you receiving this mailing happen to reside in the Southern Hemisphere, I feel compelled to add Happy Autumn! Cheers, EDDIE

… and here, directly from the anthology’s editors in California, is the full list of writers included:

Contributors to the 261-page, 57,000-word Silver Birch Press Green Anthology (in alphabetical order) are: Barbara Alfaro, Jena Ardell, Al Basile, L. Frank Baum, William Blake, Jane Buel Bradley, John Brantingham, Jessica Brown, Rachel Carey, Chris Davidson, Patrick Delaney, Colleen Delegan, Philip K. Dick, Barbara Eknoian, Dan Fante, Merrill Farnsworth, Joe Hakim, Syed Afzal Haider, Henry VIII, Donna Hilbert, Gaia Holmes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Zack Hunter, Rodger Jacobs, James Joyce, Michael C. Keith, Erle Kelly, Ruth Moon Kempher, Thom Kudla, Steven Kuhn, Moriah LaChapell, LeeAnne McIlroy Langton, Ellaraine Lockie, Gerald Locklin, Amy Lowell, Sandylee Maccoby, Tamara Madison, Marc Malandra, Karen Margolis, Clint Margrave, Andrew Marvell, Daniel McGinn, Lori McGinn, Marcia Meara, Jack Micheline, Benjamin Myers, Brooke Nia, Jax NTP, Ivon Prefontaine, Jonne Rhodes, Conrad Romo, Luke Salazar, Tere Sievers, Joan Jobe Smith, Clifton Snider, Dale Sprowl, Kendall Steinle, Tate Swindell, Paul Kareem Tayyar, G. Murray Thomas, Jeri Thompson, Margaret Towner, Mary Umans, Dirk Velvet, Philip Vermaas, Melanie Villines, Kurt Vonnegut, Fred Voss, Bruce Weigl, Tim Wells, Pamela Miller Wood, Eddie Woods. Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, Spring, Passover, and Easter with Green: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry & Prose —available for $10.00 at Amazon.com. A Kindle version will be available soon for $2.99. Also available at Amazon.co.uk and on the Amazon Europe sites.

.

=========================================

.

=clearing the mists=clearing the mists=clearing the mists=

WRITING MY DIARY WITH WATER

Painting by Gerhard Richter

 

 Writing my diary with water

                                    inspired by a work of art by Song Dong

                                    Chinese art exhibition, Berlin, September 2001

I’m writing my diary with water

to wash away my fears

dipping the pen in water

to drown the flood of tears

 .

the water runs into the words

blurring the green scrawls of hope

I’m writing a diary of slaughter

in a battle where I can’t cope

.

I’ll give up pen and paper

find an unmarked stone in a field

smooth a space upon its face

and ask my thoughts to yield

 .

I’ll dip the brush in water

write poems on the stone

they’ll soak in till they’re watermarks

an epitaph for me alone

               © Karen Margolis

This poem was written in 2001 and published in 2003 in the anthology, Poets Against the War, edited by Sam Hamill. The anthology represented the huge poetry movement against the US invasion of Iraq.

Back then the poem seemed to capture the bewilderment of the new millenium: the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the US war. Ten years later, the world is still living with the fallout.

Now the poem has a more intensely personal meaning. The fade-by date of my green ink diaries is the new metaphor for my race to save memories.

The battle I can’t cope with is against time.

So much to write and time squeezed out in soapsuds from the mop of the working day.

My nights filled with dreams of escape from the 21st century sweatshop. That’s a creative enterprise worth planning for.

Meanwhile the topic that’s been buzzing on the edge of my radar will have to wait for writing. It’s about a woman who embedded herself in the scandal-soiled sheets of the French elite. And then wrote a book about it that has hijacked media space for days now.

I won’t quote verbatim, it’s too embarrassing. Start with the idea of in-depth reporting. You see: however hard you try, it’s impossible to avoid the double entendre.

Still, it raises some serious issues about sex, politics, society, double morality etc.

Hypocrisy, actually.

And no coincidence that she’s put herself centre stage in the battle between the sexes against a live-streamed backdrop of news about sexual abuse and violence against women.

Maybe the reason it bothers me is that she’s labelled a feminist (!).

More soon… 

National Gallery Berlin, 2012

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

…1 year today…1 year today…1 year today… 1 year today …

… and here’s a spring version of the theme of the day:

FREE PUSSY RIOT — NOW!!!

.

Graphic courtesy of Pussy Riot Facebook page

.

***FREE PUSSY RIOT!!!***FREE PUSSY RIOT!!!***FREE PUSSY RIOT!!!***

>>> c’mon pussy lovers everywhere  >>>

FREE PUSSY RIOT — NOW!!!

.

. Today, 21 February, is the first anniversary of Pussy Riot’s protest in the Moscow cathedral. As a tribute, here’s a great cover version of Kropotkin Vodka, the song PUSSY RIOT sang in the church, by the Spanish band Las Tocayas: Turn up the volume and join the solidarity movement today! http://vimeo.com/59678839 . Update 24 February 2013: Las Tocayas in person got in touch via Facebook to welcome the sharing of their video, so now I can add their logo as well.

© Las Tocayas logo

Watch this band!! . . Worldwide solidarity events are being mounted by Amnesty International and other groups. Pussy Riot has become a cultural icon for freedom of speech and expression and women’s right to stand up for what she believes it. Pussies of the world unite!!! We have nothing to lose. Nothing. © Karen Margolis       21 February 2013 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ————————————————————– +++green.ink.update+++green.ink.update+++green.ink+++ . Wonderful, how some people care about the little things…  like my faithful reader MK (no connection with any mirror image of KM). He mailed me round midnight with a link to an ever-flowing source of green ink… I quote directly: “Next time you run out of green ink, call this ambulance and stay afloat in it. Life has become so simple.” The www. path leads directly to a page at amazon.de, where Pelikan grüne Tinte und Patronen (green ink and cartridges) are available overnight at knockdown prices. Now I only have to battle with my conscience. Amazon in Germany was recently pilloried in a major tv documentary for appalling exploitation of workers and sharp business practices. The German labour ministry is investigating. Still, the thought was spot on for a 21st century sweatshop worker trying to keep pace. There are other online suppliers… thank you MK — and enjoy the Palatschinken! +++ Coming soon: 21st century sweatshop escape strategies +++ watch this space ++++

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

…a spring trip to the museum at Cimiez is on the agenda… 

HOMAGE TO MATISSE

. Untitled picture, 2013 ========================================= from dragon to snake. from dragon to snake. from dragon to snake .

LOOKS GOOD FOR LADIES

Happy new year of the snake!

.

People all over Asia have been welcoming the new year since 4 February, when the snake took over from the dragon as zodiac sign of the year. The really big celebrations with fireworks and wonderful processions, from Beijing and Shanghai to Melbourne and London, happened today, 10th February.

Some of us have personal reasons for saying goodbye sadly to dragon year, but on the whole we have admit it lived up to its fiery and turbulent reputation. There was certainly enough rainfall, hurricane and flood. There were also plenty of other signs and wonders to confirm the dragon’s legendary potency and auspicious aspect – but let’s not dwell on the past. We have survived dire predictions and apocalyptic forecasts. We have even enjoyed life against all odds. And now we’re waiting in suspense to see what the Year of the Snake will bring.

.

One of Snake Year’s popular logos spotted all over the web

Astrologists tell us this is the year of the yin water snake. Which means beauty, wisdom, intelligence, pride and anger.

The list sounds promising. I have the feeling this will be a good year for the ladies and all men who love and appreciate ladies. Gentlemen, here’s your chance.

Snake year is full of possibilities and promise. For a start, it’s the occasion to enjoy old Chinese poetry — which for me means in translation, as I can’t read Mandarin. Fortunately there are the superb translations by the German Sinologist Thomas Höllmann. This is the ideal moment to send my new year’s greetings to him wrapped around a few English versions of his German translations from ancient scrolls and other sources.

And since we Westerners associate snakes primevally with temptation and divine retribution, I’ve picked poems that tell of transience and human frailty.

(Each English poem translation is followed by the German version it is based on.)

.

Great White Egret

Like a floating ice crystal

the great white egret glides

down towards the shore

tempered with autumn.

Motionless I wait:

all my senses

fixed on the sandbank

at whose edge

he now lingers alone

 (Li Bo, 8th century – no precise date)

 

Silberreiher

Wie ein schwebender Eiskristall

gleitet der Silberreiher

hinab an die herbstlich

gestimmten Gestade.

Reglos verharre ich:

alle Sinne

auf die Sandbank gerichtet,

an deren Rand

er nun einsam weilt.

(Li Bo, 8. Jahrhundert, nicht näher datiert)

.

White-haired in the mirror

Once I dreamed of my career

but I’ve idled away the years

till my hair turned white.

Now we just feel sorry

for each other

my mirror image and I.

But who would suspect that?

 (Zhang Jiuling, around 730)

.

Weißes Haar im Spiegel

Einst von der Karriere träumend,

hab’ ich die Jahre doch vertrödelt,

bis das Haar weiß geworden ist.

Nur noch Mitleid

empfinden wir jetzt füreinander:

mein Spiegelbild und ich.

Aber wer ahnt das schon?

(Zhang Jiuling, um 730)

.

Temptation on the wall at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

.

Up to the heights

 

Under the wide sky

the roar of the storm and the

plaintive cries of monkeys.

Birds circle above

glittering white sandbanks

on the endless billows

of the Great River.

All around, the rustling

of fallen leaves.

.

Left to fend for myself

I climb the tower:

worn down from the autumnal pain

of ten thousand weary miles

tormented by hundreds of years

full of affliction –

the hair on my temples

already covered with hoar frost

from worry and grief.

.

It’s enough for despair.

And on top of that

I’m expected to

give up drinking!

(Du Fu, 766)

.

Hoch hinauf

 

Unter dem weiten Himmel

Sturmgetöse und die

Klageschreie der Affen.

Vögel kreisen über

weißglitzernden Sandbänken

an den endlosen Wogen

des Großen Stroms.

Ringsum das Rascheln

fallenden Laubs.

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Ganz auf mich gestellt

erklimme ich den Turm:

zermürbt vom Herbstschmerz

zehntausend beschwerlicher Meilen,

gepeinigt von hundert

Jahren voller Gebrechen -

mit Reif überzogen

bereits das Schläfenhaar

vor Kummer und Gram.

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Es ist zum Verzweifeln.

Und dann soll ich

auch noch

das Trinken aufgeben!

(Du Fu, 766)

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Sombre meditation and appreciation of the beauty of nature are fine subjects for poetry at the turn of the year. But now it’s time for celebration. How wonderful that the words of Li Bo have survived down the centuries so we can feel and share his sheer joy of living today:

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The night out with friends

 

We drowned the sorrows

of thousands of generations

in a hundred tankards of beer.

What a night,

what conversations!

The moonlight kept us long awake

but now we’re lying drunk

in the endless barren mountains:

the sky a blanket above us

the earth our pillow below.

(Li Bo, 8th century, no precise date)

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Nächtliches Beisammensein mit Freunden

Den Kummer

von tausend Generationen

haben wir ertränkt

in hundert Kannen Bier.

Welch eine Nacht,

was für Gespräche!

Lange hielt uns das Mondlicht wach,

doch jetzt liegen wir trunken

in der endlosen Ödnis der Berge:

über uns als Decke der Himmel,

darunter als Polster die Erde.

(Li Bo, 8. Jahrhundert, nicht näher datiert)

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Cranach’s snake 

One of my favourite painters, the German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder, used the snake as his signature. This was clearly no coincidence. I have been lucky enough to see some of Cranach’s finest paintings in Dresden and in the magnificent Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. (Yes, this is a plug for the campaign to keep its collection on public show and not consigned to cellars.)

Cranach is unforgettable for his paintings of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The snake, representing Satan and original sin, occupies centre place in each picture. The examples below are probably under copyright, so don’t be surprised if they disappear.

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Look at the snake (picture above), pretty much dead centre. (And just look at that other apple she’s sneakily hiding at her behind. Can you see the obvious affinity between woman and snake? The conspiratorial energy?)

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There again (above,) this time pointing like an arrow to the culprit, Eve, with the apple of temptation in her hand. You don’t need an art history degree to understand which female (and male) body parts the apple stands for.

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Finally, in this more elaborate version populated by innocent woodland animals as well as the loathsome devilish snake, the deed is almost done: Adam’s leg is bound to the tree by a snake-like creeper while Eve’s hair is wound into stiff Medusa coils. The word inextricable comes to mind. It’s supposed to.

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The really interesting point about all this is that, centuries before Freud, Cranach knew exactly what he was doing on the subconscious level. His emblem, found in many of his works, was ― the snake.

This one, to be precise:

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Cranach, who lived c. 1472-1553, was already well-known as a young artist before the turn of the 16th century. By 1504 he was the prosperous court painter for the Elector of Saxony. Among his honours was the gift from the Elector in 1508 of the winged snake with ruby ring as his emblem. From then on it replaced his initials as the signature on his paintings.

The interesting thing about Cranach’s snake is that it strongly resembles a dragon. Well, that’s a complicated issue I won’t go into now. Let’s just look forward to the year of the snake.

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蛇 年 快 樂 萬 事 如 意

. With all good wishes for the year of the snake

 

Special thanks to Thomas O. Höllmann.

Text © Karen Margolis 2013

German poems from the Chinese © Thomas O. Höllmann  

NOTE: Readers searching for particular images on this site should contact me directly. 

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

…joys of fetishism…joys of fetishism…joys of fetishism…

Our daily fetishism

Green ink, black coffee and other fuels of creativity

Writing in national colours: Hungarian poster, 1920s

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Sometimes I catch myself imagining I am involved in a serious accident. When the ambulance came they would probably find me in clean panties (well trained in girlhood!). So no worries on that score. My nightmares plough a different furrow. The blood flowing out of my wounds all over the place would not be the normal fluid. It would be  a mixture of black coffee and green ink and I’ve spent many a wakeful night wondering what colour that might be.

It’s precisely that mixture I tank up on for writing, and its intake has become so ingrained and ritualised that it belongs in the realm of fetishism.

Fetishism is just one of the joys I’m exploring in the book I’m writing now. The deeper I go, the more I have to admit to discovering it all over the place. It goes beyond friends’ jokes about funny little quirks or curious habits. It becomes a significant issue all of its own, a constituent of personality, laden with a symbolism that’s wholly individual. On the great diagram of life-as-it-is-lived, this kind of everyday fetishism intersects with addiction, compulsion, creativity, free will and a whole lot more.

That’s fine as long as it stays in the realm of thought and psychology. It’s when it coincides with the material world that things start to get tricky. Especially if you’re on the move as the ideal worker in the 21st century sweatshop is expected to be.

Coffee and green ink? — just try landing in the next city and tanking up, as I did recently. First find your fuel. The coffee turned out to be easier. It took hardly more than a day to adjust to the particular brand of arabica sold in French supermarkets, although I miss my accustomed German variety, Dallmayr’s from Munich. The plucky mobile worker takes it in her stride because she’s remembered to pack her little 2-cup pression coffee maker. That, at least, seems to be standard Euro ware so there’s always a replacement at hand when hers eventually shatters from overuse.

Obtaining green ink, however, requires the perseverance of a fetishist. Taking up winter quarters in Nice, I noted with pleasure that despite the crisis scenery of boarded up boutiques and cafés, many of the old stationery shops were still there. I’m particularly enamoured of the kind that have long since vanished from bigger cities, giving way to gift emporia with gilded paper clips, fancy magnets, elaborate notebooks and the rest of the ubiquitous stuff that makes shopping so boring. The traditional stationers in Nice are big spaces with half-empty shelves and ancient stock with dog-eared corners, remaindered diaries from a bygone decade, art cards from the days of hand colouring and other retro delights.

But don’t be deceived into thinking this is the fairy tale paradise where bottles of green ink slumber waiting to be discovered, dusted off and taken home.  Blue, yes, we have blue… and black… and violet, perhaps (because some doctors still write prescriptions in violet ink…) But green? We stopped stocking green years ago.

Cartridges? I gasp desperately. If you can’t fill up my precious flea market Mont Blanc pen for me, at least you can provide cartridges for my handbag ersatz, the school pen I always carry just in case a writing bout seizes me when I’m out on one of these daily fruitless shopping expeditions.

This made me realise the severe nature of my fetishism. It has become an irreversible condition. For a whole month I was obsessed with the need to find green ink. I asked everybody, everywhere. I tried one euro stores, two euro stores, stationery departments on the top floors of suffocating department stores; shops for children’s games; fancy goods shops; artist materials stores. I combed through bubble packs in the school and household sections of any and every kind of shop and market. All I ever found was black and blue. Black and blue, the bruising colours of DIN norms and monotone aesthetic culture… how I cursed and wept! At night, as the winter storm winds swept the pebble beaches of the Côte d’Azur,  I dreamed of oceans of green ink, the waves tipped with eau-de-nil coloured froth.

The end was perilously close. However hard I tried to ration my dwindling supplies, the ink bottle and cartridges I had brought with me were depleting daily. I was already trying to imagine life without this cherished fetishism. A foot fetishist, I told myself bracingly, can switch to hands. At this point I expect my foot fetish friends to start objecting fiercely. And so they should, and when they do, I shall argue that my fetishism isn’t inferior to theirs…

Fortunately, chance intervened just at the point where it could chalk up a miracle. On the way to the Arab vegetable market behind the train station I happened to take a new route along the Rue d’Alsace-Lorraine (note the evocative name) and passed by a stationery shop I’d never seen before. Or maybe it appeared out of the mists like in those wonderful English fairy tales, the shop you find unexpectedly and when you go back it has vanished… anyway, it was just such a magical shop — or you might say my fetishism invested it with magical qualities.

A bell rang loudly when I pushed open the door. Inside, my eyes had to get accustomed to the dark. I was surrounded by sparsely filled shelves and racks, with hardly any room to move. A large photocopier barred my way. Behind it stood a woman in a shapeless dress covered with an apron. Her hair was tousled and she wore big-framed glasses. She stared at me unsmilingly.

Green ink, I mumbled. You have a bottle of green ink in the window.

“Have we?” She frowned sceptically.

“Yes, I saw it from outside,”  I said, gesturing towards the window display. She peered in the direction of my hand, half-shut her eyes as if concentrating intently, and reached for the bottle in its dark blue cardboard box.

“Oh yes,” she said, lifting it towards her, pointing at the tell-tale colour spot. “Green.”

Never have I loved that little Pelikan box containing the beautifully-shaped bottle so tenderly. I could have hugged her. I didn’t even think of asking the price. She could have held me to ransom. Such is the nature of fetishism. I managed to gather my thrilled, addled wits just enough for the next question. “Do you have green cartridges as well?”

“Hmm.” She leaned backwards, slid open a drawer in a very wide cabinet and grabbed a bunch of cardboard boxes in her fist. She flung them down on the table that served as a counter. “Here. See what you can find.”

It was my turn to grab.

I rushed home with my trophies and photographed them with another fetish object (my little red pocket Canon camera), just in case they should vanish in a puff of smoke before I had time to use them.

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Fetish objects take many different forms

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Life soon recovered its comfortable fetishistic contours and I almost forgot my passionate green ink quest.

Still, fetishism requires its own brand of insurance. Just to be safe, I went back to capture the image of the shop. It is really there, a relic of a bygone era, like the green ink that will fade and the ground coffee from real beans that will vanish before the present century is over.

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Reflections of things past

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A dying species of shop

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Fetishism is barely a step away from superstition. I’m reminded of this because I grew up among secret voodoo practitioners in South Africa and don’t want inadvertently to raise any spirits I can’t banish. Along with the green ink, the scratchy Mont Blanc pen, the squared paper, the coffee maker and other fetishist accoutrements of my chosen trade, are two matching objects that accompany me wherever I go. They belong in the intersection between beauty, impudence, origins, goddess worship and voodoo.

Their names are Flopsy and Mopsy (respectively, the green one and the pink-and-yellow one) and they are my African fetish dolls (made in Nigeria). They live in my suitcase or at my bedside and have many stories to tell. For the moment I can only say that it didn’t feel right to discuss fetishism without mentioning them.

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Flopsy (right) and Mopsy

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Text and pictures © Karen Margolis 2013

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Update your iCals, pals! Update your iCals, pals! 

Just updated Upcoming page… keep in touch… new post coming shortly…

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Holocaust Remembrance Day. 27 January 2013. Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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“How much remembrance do we need?

— And what should it look like?”  . This year Holocaust Remembrance Day finds me immersed in a marathon task of translating hundreds of recollections of concentration camp survivors. The more I read, the more questions I have. It’s around 25 years since I started working in the field that has meanwhile acquired an academic name of its own – “Remembrance Culture”. The name raises questions I won’t begin to answer now. Suffice it to say that a historian or museum curator can make a respectable career in the field in many countries nowadays. One of the most discerning critics of present forms of commemoration is the German-American literary scholar Ruth Klüger, who survived the Holocaust as a child. She has often voiced her doubts about the kind of museum culture growing up around the remembrance of the Holocaust. Ruth Klüger’s works include a superbly written memoir of her childhood in the Nazi era, and her regular literary column for a German newspaper is a rare treat. Here are a few translated excerpts from an excellent article she published for Holocaust Remembrance Day this year: .

Is That the Place for Beautiful Literature?

When I talk about “Holocaust aesthetics”, I’m not just trying to sound provocative, I also mean it that way — because, as you might rightly ask, what could possibly be aesthetic about the Holocaust? More than any other literary subject, the Shoah as an event destroys our expectation of artistic enjoyment. At the same time we all believe that literature offers an opportunity to process our life experiences and make sense of memories of the past.

I would like to illustrate this dilemma with two personal anecdotes. Recently a young woman asked me to sign my autobiography, which is about my childhood in Nazi Europe. Smiling fervently, she said to me, “I love the Holocaust.” I responded with a horrified expression, although she obviously didn’t mean she was enthusiastic about the terrible catastrophe that happened to the Jews, but that she liked reading books about it. Still, her naïve, undisguised pleasure in reading raised the question: is it morally right for her to get so much fun out of Holocaust literature? Or can we say, in her defence, that every work of art, even a tragedy, contains a stimulus to joy? And again, from the opposite standpoint, shouldn’t we be ashamed of thinking and feeling positively, even under the mantle of such lofty ideas as catharsis or consciousness-raising, if the subject is the annihilation of a people? My impulse was to tell this reader, “Stop reading these books, including mine, if you like them so much.”

In direct contrast is an argument with a colleague in my field. He was in the Hitler Youth as a boy and in the Wehrmacht as a young man. He openly admits he was a convinced Nazi back then. I got to know him many years later, and he became a good friend to whom I owe a certain amount and with whom I agree on many issues. He says, “The Nazi era was only an episode in Germany’s history, twelve years in a history of twelve hundred years. “For you,” he adds patronisingly, “it was more, of course. It’s a question of perspective.”  What he means is that his perspective is the right one because it covers more years.

I want to tell him, “No, no, this rationalisation isn’t right. We have use every means at our disposal to serve remembrance, including literature, the field we both work in. What counts here is the crime and not how long it took to commit it. Otherwise it would be as if the murderer tried to excuse himself by saying, “I’ve been alive for forty years and I only spent half a day killing my family and neighbours. The rest of my life, before and afterwards, I was innocent.”

Isn’t the Holocaust a central event of German history, regardless of how long Hitler was in power? – And so it goes on, back and forth. There is no logical conclusion and I’m not happy about my own lack of consistency.

(…)

We have all heard Adorno’s famous dictum that after Auschwitz poems are barbaric, and we may also know that he revised it later in various ways. The reason his statement is still so well known and often quoted is precisely the unresolved question I have raised here: whether beautiful literature is an appropriate medium for the collective remembrance of mass murder. Adorno did not mean that [Paul] Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) was a bad poem. Maybe he was shocked himself by the profound aesthetic reaction the poem evoked in its readers and which he presumably shared. He probably mistrusted the poem and similar works for precisely that reason, and felt such enjoyment was morally reprehensible.

Still, the dilemma remains. How much remembrance do we need, and what should it look like?

These questions are not new in the history of literature but they have never been posed with the emotional intensity with which the generations after the Shoah necessarily have to pose them. Literary criticism and literary studies can gain from this by finding new approaches to judging all works of literature, sharper criteria, and along with this, an answer to the question being asked everywhere today: what will remain when the last of the concentration camp survivors have died?  What will remain, as it has always done, is the word written and interpreted by humans.

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The original German version of the whole article is available at:

http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/literatur/article113147957/Was-soll-da-schoene-Literatur.html Ruth Klüger is a literary scholar, writer and newspaper columnist. In 1942, at the age of eleven, she was deported with her mother to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and then to Auschwitz and Christianstadt, a satellite camp of Groß­Rosen concentration camp. Her memoir, weiter leben, appeared in 1992 (Wallstein and dtv, Germany). The English version is Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (The Feminist Press 2001). .

The world is the place for beauty. Nice, 25 January 2013

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Text, translation and photos © Karen Margolis 2013

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Beauty has the last word – Nice, 25 January 2013

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obsolescent e-book authoress#obsolescent e-book authoress#obsolescent e-book 

Water, water, after thought

“Life on earth is no more than a night in a cheap hotel.”

— St. Theresa of Avila (1515-1582)

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Maybe it was the feeling induced by an entire weekend of rain that led me mysteriously to the visions of St. Teresa of Avila. Maybe it was the need to escape the evil shadow of 20th century history that seems to haunt me wherever I go.

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Whatever the reason, St. Teresa has a lot to offer. Aside from the exemplary life in a nunnery that earned her the saint’s halo, she is one of only two female doctors of the Catholic Church – theologians who have contributed outstandingly to religious knowledge. (The other is St. Catherine of Siena.)

With her Renaissance masterpiece, The Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila established the idea of the life of mystic prayer, which she often compared to watering a garden.

So perhaps there’s the connection I’m looking for:  the poems I’ve been working on recently all mention water in some way, and there’s a nexus of ideas to do with flowing, blockage, stasis and the like that’s trying to break through and find expression.

Sometimes it seems that whatever direction you start in you end on a similar path. Imaginary flight from concentration camps led me to St. Teresa — and straight to the Spanish Inquisition. She was a refugee of faith herself. Her paternal grandfather was a Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity, and much of Teresa’s early life can be seen as an attempt to be holier than the “true” Christians around her, to eradicate the taint of Judaism and prove she belonged.  Significantly, she spent much time later working to help converted Jews become sincere believers in Christ.

But I’m digressing because, along with the pain, misery, and fundamental despair of existence, the life she described had its share of wondrous coincidences and associations… and Teresa’s writings give us intriguing clues to the passions she experienced as she tossed and turned between the sheets.

Here’s her famous account of being assaulted by a cherub with a spear:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it…

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It was this vision that inspired one of the Italian artist Bernini’s greatest mature works, a marble sculpture that can still be admired in a church in Rome:

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The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

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Suitably uplifted by St. Teresa’s visions, I can return with renewed vigour to the 21st century sweatshop, where you’re likely to find me pounding the laptop keys at very unsocial hours. But never mind, poems and other delicacies are sweetening the coffee breaks.

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The e-book authoress as an obsolescent model Met my dream man at the Frankfurt Book Fair he rode me to paradise in a pink rocking chair my seamless black stockings got ripped on the way — . well, you can’t make a novel without some type defacing the page . © Karen Margolis 2013 . crossing the river now crossing the river now I see only your mouth full and ripe from sucking blood . and red & round from telling lies . crossing the border then I learned to love your language from your lips . cross my heart I knew man eating woman bites off more than he can chew . © Karen Margolis 2013 .

National Gallery Berlin, 2012

. After thought (damp version) text to my self: our next meeting shouldn’t happen in a public place unless I knot my hands behind my back cross my feet tightly under the table and wear a scarf to keep my mouth well hid . no body can tell me to stop the fountain of a spring so many years ago rising and peaking to overflow . swamping my domestic nettle patch and drenching your comfort zone . it was a rainy day. Some things don’t dry out even after weeks of lukewarm towelling and self-doubt. . © Karen Margolis 2013 .

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age@song of age@song of age@song of age@song

Pink lipstick, red square, orange stickers

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Sometimes life goes slowly, and art follows behind. As with Song of Age, the poem cycle that’s already been several years in the making and seems likely to continue for a while to come. Still, as somebody said recently, we’re going to live to be a hundred, so there’s no hurry.

Let’s leave the deadlines aside (whose dead lines are they anyway?) and enjoy the time & space we make just for our selves.

Song of Age, I can assure you, is progressing by leaps and bounds. It’s just that right now it’s experiencing such throes of passion the poems of the moment can’t be printed without sparks flying.

So we’ll have to be content with some bare bones and I’ll leave my readers to imagine the rest (or hunt for clues in my back pages).

The following four poems are, roughly in this order, the prologue, a note to Lou Reed in my 60th year, a tree located in the middle of the Brandenburg March, and the epilogue. They have been polished by time and effort till they’re as cool as stones lying on the bed of a mountain stream. No detonation alarms here.

The accompanying pictures are new year offerings.

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SONG OF AGE

Prologue:

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Half-century symphony in the New Age of Sobriety

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Overture

a pearl-studded sandcastle

dissolving at the meeting of oceans

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1st movement

colours splashing on the rocks of music

riot waves & wishful revolutions

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2nd movement

regenerative ebbs and flows

tidal energy & urgency

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Interlude

after walls crumble and fall

comparisons pale, and fail

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3rd movement

taking stock I stumble

on stones scattered by memory

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4th movement

the dark chill interior

after the garden on a summer’s day

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Coda

I might seem nicer to other people

but I don’t like myself as much

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© Karen Margolis           2013

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Red Square hot lips

 

on Lou Reed’s 70th birthday

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bought me a lipstick called Red Square

thinking of you, Lou Reed,

walking there

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no longer stalking down the wild side

no more lonesome cowboys

nowhere to run & hide

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underground flirtations gone

in high & mighty corridors

with onetime dissenters

heroin orgies at abandoned factories

the media mixes alter egos

what’s it all about

turn it all around

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Berlin on your birthday

riding the U-Bahn

pneumatically lifted

come sit beside me

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eyes up to onboard tv:

King Kong premiere

New York, 2 March 1933

—Germany notes the year—

cover versions followed intermittently

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urban commemoration

before lyrical deconstruction

took the rhymes and rhythms

out of poetic endeavour

leaving word scraps floating in gutters

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Lou Reed is 70

Putin rules the Kremlin

the ghost of an era

howls in Berlin

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© Karen Margolis  Berlin, 2 March 2012

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A silver birch, me

“Lately life for Karen has not been all that kind / She’s reached the outer suburbs of her inner city mind.”

— Johny Brown, from album ‘Love never fails’

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beyond the city ring, familiar streets

drift into towering monotony

blurs of mottled brown & grey

smokeless chimneys of empty factories

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blending out architectural misery

I count the motorway exits

through the Brandenburg March

till the yellow blaze of rapeseed fields

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city outskirts are wild country

maps turned in circles don’t help my bearings

nature and local spirits

aren’t friendly to intruders

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out of bounds I can’t belong here

buzzing insects disturb my mental traffic roar

panic withdrawal attacks

conjure mirages of espresso bars

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metamorphosis a metaphor

of escape. Across the other side

of the line a little boy drew in the dust

behind the derelict cottage

a silvery-white pillar, me

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slender in a trembling coat of leaves

dappled by passing shadows

temporarily reconciled

to this northern habitat

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the storks are readying for take-off

on the Cape Town flight via Istanbul

they tell me I’ll have to move on again

before winter’s stripdown

© Karen Margolis 2013

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After life request

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Please don’t put any coins

over my lifeless eyes

the place I’m bound for

demands no entrance charge

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and please burn me slowly.

Give my bones time to enjoy

the warmth I missed

in all the winters of my yearning

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© Karen Margolis 2013

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And in case you’re wondering, the lip stickers can be found on Spanish navel oranges in French supermarkets. I saved them for grey January Sundays like this one.

 Karen Margolis © 13.1.13 

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Brodsky my idol/Brodsky my idol/ Brodsky my idol

“no one’s legs rest on my shoulders…”

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A confession of love for a dead poet

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You should be grateful. You’re about to be spared embarrassing disclosures about juvenile crushes on the Fab Four with the funky accents, or wet dreams about tousle-haired youths with idiot grins from American tv series. My teenage years were populated with young men who played chess in smoky corner cafés, wore bellbottoms before their time and read Sartre and Camus on the toilet. Hip was today’s cool and hip girls were contraceptive pill pioneers, looked sexy smoking big joints and didn’t have crushes on pop stars at all. Or if they did, they wouldn’t confess.

There were some memorable exceptions. My enormous admiration for Bob Dylan led to my learning all the lyrics of his first albums (including the doubles) by heart. As with some other romantic episodes in my life, the imaginary Dylan one evaporated when his marriage broke down and he became theoretically available. I listened to his sorrow at the split on Blood on the Tracks nonstop for three months till the record got scratched, and never looked back. From then on, all my lovers were more or less hands-on accessible.

Until the Brodsky passion.

One of the abiding regrets of my life is that I never encountered Brodsky in person, never heard him read, never saw him smile. Worse still, I never even read him while he was alive. Shame on me!

Death cheated me and the world of Brodsky tragically early. Born in 1940 in the Soviet Union, he was exiled in 1972 and spent most of his remaining life in the USA and Venice. He died in 1996, aged only 55. The 17th anniversary of his death comes up later this month, on 28 January. The longer he is dead, the more my love and admiration for him grow.

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What makes Brodsky so special? – For a start, he was brave. His bravery as a Soviet citizen facing monolithic despotism made him a legend long before he became widely known as a poet. The following excerpts are from the excellent obituary on Brodsky by Robert D. McFadden in the New York Times of January 29, 1996:

‘He was first denounced in 1963 by a Leningrad newspaper, which called his poetry “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” He was interrogated, his papers were seized, and he was twice put in a mental institution. Finally he was arrested and brought to trial. (…)’

The obituary goes on to quote from a transcript of the 1964 trial smuggled out to the West:

‘Judge: What is your profession? Brodsky: Translator and poet. Judge: Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets? Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?’ Here, in this courtroom exchange from the year 1964, you can detect the seeds of a multitude of dissident protests that would culminate nearly fifty years later in the protest performance by the punk band Pussy Riot in a Moscow church. There is a strong, durable thread running from the Soviet Gulag dissidents of the twentieth century to the modern-day women’s band members convicted in Russia and serving penal sentences in Putin’s prisons today. It’s not even about democracy, it’s about something as basic as the drive for free expression of humanity. To return to Brodsky’s trial, the Soviet judiciary, unable to convict him for his poetry, indicted him for “parasitism”. They insulted him as “a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers”. (Note the enduring importance of dress style in the process of moral condemnation.) The NY Times obituary continued, ‘Found guilty and given a sentence of five years, Mr. Brodsky was sent to a labor camp near Arkhangelsk, where he chopped wood, hauled manure and crushed rocks for 18 months. At night, in his bunk, he read an anthology of English and American poetry.’

Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, he was forced to leave his parents behind, and Marina Basmanova, the lover to whom he had dedicated many of his best poems, the mother of their son. Brodsky was quickly adopted by the poetry community in the west, led by W.H. Auden, who championed his work and (according to Brodsky’s affectionate account) introduced him into the mondaine world of English country cottages and dry Martinis from breakfast till bedtime.

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“I sit at the window.”

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As you can see, I’m suffering from a serious case of unrequited love: I could enthuse about Brodsky to my heart’s desire, and it’s hard for me to let his poems speak for themselves. One poem in particular seems so close to me that I carry a copy of it wherever I go. In fact, I always take a spare copy as well. This can come in useful on occasions like the day last summer when I sat writing on a balcony in Budapest and a breeze swept away the folded poem from the pages of my notebook where it was tucked in, and draped it over a branch of a huge old sycamore tree with roots in the garden below. And there it stayed, hanging on that branch for a whole day until I left, grateful for my spare copy.

The poem is called, “I sit at the window”. The title reminds me of all the wonderful paintings of people (particularly women) sitting or standing at glass doors or windows. Please first read the poem all the way through, get immersed in its atmosphere, drink in its flavour, and then I’ll reveal what’s so special about it for me:

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  I Sit By The Window I said fate plays a game without a score, and who needs fish if you’ve got caviar? The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass and turn you on — no need for coke, or grass. I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen. When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn’t often. I said the forest’s only part of a tree. Who needs the whole girl if you’ve got her knee? Sick of the dust raised by the modern era, the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire. I sit by the window. The dishes are done. I was happy here. But I won’t be again. I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear, and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer- o Euclid thought the vanishing point became wasn’t math — it was the nothingness of Time. I sit by the window. And while I sit my youth comes back. Sometimes I’d smile. Or spit. I said that the leaf may destroy the bud; what’s fertile falls in fallow soil — a dud; that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain nature spills the seeds of trees in vain. I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees. My heavy shadow’s my squat company. My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked, but at least no chorus can ever sing it back. That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders no one — no one’s legs rest on my shoulders. I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express, the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash. A loyal subject of these second-rate years, I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, and may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation. I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out. Joseph Brodsky   . There are so many ideas packed in these lines it would take almost a poetic lifetime to explore them; but what hits me most are the repeated references to knees and legs. This encapsulates the essence of poetry and why I always carry this poem around to remind me what real poetry is.

At first you can’t even put the meaning to the feeling those repeated references to knees and legs evoke:

“… Who needs the whole girl if you’ve got her knee?”

and again:

“I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees. My heavy shadow’s my squat company. “

and finally:

“no one’s legs rest on my shoulders.”

Here he is, the poet as body, not just mind, the poet who sees and feels the world in the knees and legs of a woman, not just any woman, a particular woman, the woman he made love to, because what is he describing when he describes the knees over his shoulder? — and yet, even as we think we’ve understood, we rediscover the ambiguity of poetry, that turns a statement into a suggestion and back again. For the knees over the shoulder of a man could be the knees of the woman whose body he is buried in, but could also be the knees of a child straddled on his shoulders, legs dangling forward, enjoying the tall view from up there behind his head.

“No one’s legs rest on my shoulders.”

Read and feel regret. Yearning. Loss. Sadness. Loss of love, of country, of youth, of a child, of the child in himself, of a lost childhood.

Sometimes Brodsky’s naked honesty is almost too painful to bear. Here’s the key to the poem, muttered, barely spoken, almost thrown away:

“When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn’t often.”

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In 1989, Brodsky wrote his last poem to “M.B.,” his lost lover Marina Basmanova. He reminisced about their life in Leningrad:

Your voice, your body, your name mean nothing to me now. No one destroyed them. It’s just that, in order to forget one life, a person needs to live at least one other life. And I have served that portion.”

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That was a man of passion, who understood living and loving. Joseph Brodsky. A  poet to fall for.

© Karen Margolis 2013

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“… life is a topless ladder / with a snake on every rung…”

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COME 2013    THE DOOR IS OPEN

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. Some of us reached a special age in 2012 and are looking forward to the coming year with extra pleasure. . In many parts of the world the old year is giving way to the new. But the year of the dragon still has some weeks left to run. For now, let’s slide down the snake, enjoy the pleasures of temptation and celebrate the simple message of yolo: you only live once! In Tune with the Ages No longer wishful like at thirty or forty Not yet fragile as at seventy or eighty Life’s not bad at all when you’re fifty or sixty if you take it easy and your conscience is clear. The rat race for fame and money is over; old age’s odd habits are still far away. . As healthy as ever I visit the countryside, enjoy music, and relax with a drink if I feel in the mood. When I get tipsy I remember poetry and murmur old verses to myself, softly. My friends, I can tell you: The sixties are not to be scorned. Bo Juyi, 831 . English translation: © Karen Margolis 2012 Based on the German version translated from the original Chinese © by Thomas Höllmann . This is just one of the many poems that eminent German Sinologist Thomas Höllmann has translated from ancient and medieval Chinese scrolls over the years. A selection is due to appear in German in 2013. . As I don’t read Chinese, it’s a pleasure and a surprise to read his beautifully crafted versions and discover that people so far away in time and space had feelings we can share today through their writings . Bo Juyi’s poem is particularly appealing with its mix of pride, self-persuasion and the genuine determination to enjoy life to the full. . It seems the right poem for the transition to the new year if we want to write HOPE and COURAGE big on our calendar for 2013. . Im Einklang mit dem Lauf der Dinge Nicht mehr begierig wie mit dreißig oder vierzig, noch nicht gebrechlich wie mit siebzig oder achtzig. Gar nicht so schlecht fügt sich’s mit fünfzig oder sechzig, wenn man entspannt ist und mit sich im Reinen: vorbei die Jagd nach Ruhm und Geld; die Altersmacken noch in weiter Ferne. . Stets gut bei Kräften erkund’ ich die Natur, genieße die Musik und hebe zwanglos manchen Becher. Im Rausch entsinn’ ich mich der Poesie, murmle die alten Verse leise vor mich hin. Freunde, ich sage Euch: Die Sechziger sind gar nicht zu verachten. (Bo Juyi, 831) .

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Footnote: Thomas Höllmann’s bestselling cultural history of Chinese cuisine is due to appear in English translation in 2013.

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© Karen Margolis 2012

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/Christmas Riviera-style/Christmas Riviera-style/ Christmas Riviera-style/

PÈRE NOËL on the CÔTE D’AZUR

Children in Nice know where to go to contact Santa Claus at Christmas time. All through Advent, bright red mailboxes at intervals along the Promenade des Anglais invite them to post notes and letters with their gift wishes. Our roving reporter picked up the story with the aid of her red pocket Canon camera and a few friendly Niçois. . I did wonder what those strange objects were when they first appeared on the Promenade at the beginning of December. Particularly when I saw the workmen from the city council taking away the rows of blue rent-a-bikes to make space for them. .

Is it a Tardis washed up from a 20th century shipwreck?

………………

…or maybe another example of local modern art like the weird white figures crouching on top of poles at Place Masséna?

. . . . . . No, look closer: the red pillar with the bobble on top has a slot! – It must be a mailbox! (Or postbox, if you learned your English that way.) ..

Look – a slot!

And if you hang around long enough, enjoying the sunshine on this pleasant pre-Christmas weekend, you might be lucky enough to catch the postman on his collection round. .

 

Here he is, big & little kids: the man we’ve been waiting for, the one on the direct line to Santa himself.

. He reminds me of the men on bicycles who used to deliver work manuscripts in the old century before the days of e-mail: like the one from Berlin’s Academy of Arts who once merited a mention in a poem: Mercury on a bicycle / meaty thighs… Our Xmas messenger is  handsome enough, but certainly doesn’t look like a postman. Maybe he dates back to a medieval Niçois tradition (like the noisy, smelly geese at the live animal Nativity crèche in the old city). Or maybe he strayed out of a mountain myth from the Alpes Maritimes. Anyway, he does his job seriously, like a good postman should. And isn’t the least bit camera shy. . . .

Anybody else got a wish for reindeer land before I set off again?

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Three days till Christmas Eve and this lucky man’s already got what he wanted. Well, he’s old enough to get things for himself.

. One hopeful little girl explored the slot just after the messenger drove off. .

Sorry, dear. No presents in there. You’ll have to write a letter and put it in the slot for the next collection. Don’t worry, there’s still time.

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Jump for joy! Christmas post on the Côte d’Azur!

. The following day, the last Sunday before Xmas, we followed another Niçois tradition on the Promenade des Anglais  - the sale of fir trees and other seasonal decorations. Preparing for the winter solstice festival between the sea and the palm trees.  The contrast with the wintry central European pre-Christmas scenes in Berlin, where I’ve lived for many years, never ceases to amaze me. .

This friendly vendor wanted his photo taken.

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“Hey, honey, I think I’ve found the right one…”

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Mistletoe and holly on sale (the backdrop view of the Mediterranean is free).

. Never mind the holly and the ivy – downstairs at the beach restaurant, the tables are set for lunch. . . And look! Another Père Noel postbox opportunity! With tourist train in foreground (not for free). . . The great thing about Christmas is that it’s fun even if you don’t really celebrate it. . And with the new year already on the horizon, it’s good to have time to look back at one of my most beautiful moments of the last month — sunrise over the Alps. Here’a just a glimpse from the photo sequence from a recent flight. . . . . . HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL MY READERS AND FRIENDS! . Text & photos © Karen Margolis 2012 . ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ************************************************************* !!!FREE PUSSY RIOT!!!FREE PUSSY RIOT!!! FREE PUSSY RIOT!!!

                            PUSSY v. Kremlin & Patriarchy

. . 2013 had better be different. Let’s make some new year resolutions even before Xmas has come and gone.  2013 has to be the year when we the people start tackling the poverty trap, the income gap, the sorrows and illnesses of the world. And the legal injustices. To start from where we are: For people working in the arts, it means fighting censorship and expanding freedom of speech. There’s one big step we can take on a seemingly small issue that will make a big difference: FREE PUSSY RIOT!!! Five brave women (“clever, committed and courageous,” as the Guardian put it), dared to defy the might of the Kremlin and the Russian Church (and Putin’s sceptre and the Moscow Patriarch’s mitre are fairly mighty) and staged musical protests in forbidden places that made “pussy” a word of the year in 2012. For that alone, the five punk heroines deserve global medals. Instead, three are outcasts and two are prisoners of the gulag. Maybe we can help change that if we try. 2013 could be the year we help to FREE PUSSY RIOT and strike a blow for lots of different freedoms the world over. Enjoy your partying and maybe spare a thought for Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in the penal colonies. Pussy Riot is important for us all. . . “Art has become only more complicated. Now it’s done internationally, and it has great political potential. An artist is a person who is constantly analysing critical thoughts, always working out an independent opinion regarding everything. That is why art gives a breath of fresh air and a different way to protest.” Yekaterina Samutsevich in a Rolling Stone interview, 2012 These and other words of wisdom and information about the five women who created Pussy Riot and the meaning of their music, protest, and punishment can be found in this excellent & timely article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/dec/20/pussy-riot-activists-not-pin-ups .

FREE PUSSY RIOT NOW!!! LIBERATE PUNK PUSSY CULTURE EVERYWHERE!!!

Way to go, Countryside Service, England

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© Karen Margolis 2012

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safe=secrets=lips=sealed=secrets=safe=sealed=lips=secrets=safe

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My Secret Room

Remembering Christina Rossetti

Much was new in our first winter in London. The permanent damp cold. The stinking paraffin heater that was our only source of warmth in the draughty flat with the high ceilings.

And at school, the novelty of Christmas rituals as they were celebrated at a Church of England primary school in the 1960s. We had to learn carols after first overcoming the astonishment of our schoolmates who couldn’t believe anybody was born not being able to sing Silent Night or Little Town of Bethlehem. I didn’t feel I’d missed anything. The music and lyrics sounded banal to my ears, and besides, we had other songs in our repertoire.

The only carol that appealed to me was a mournful dirge the other pupils called the “Big Groan” because of its tune. But the lyrics were definitely a cut above the rest.

“In the deep midwinter

Frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron

Water like a stone… “

That rang true — it was an evocative description of my despair in my first English winter.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNdqF9XfMD0

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Nobody told us this was one of the very few carols with lyrics written by a woman. Nobody thought to tell us we were singing the words of one of the greatest female poets in the English language.

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Portrait of Christina Rossetti by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Christina Rossetti was a 19th-century poetess who came from a family of gifted writers and artists. She lived among the pre-Raphaelites and never married, though she refused at least three respectable suitors.  She delved into religious mysticism, suffered depression and several crises of belief.

Christina Rossetti wrote vivid, erotic poetry under the guise of fairy tales and dreams, and her book, Goblin Market and other Poems, was a bestseller for children in its time.

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Illustration for the cover of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Religious thinking and melancholy often go together, and so it was that Christina wrote many poems about death and the transience of human life. Today we may appreciate them less for their metaphysical quality than their psychological power. More than a century after her death we can still feel the force of a woman thinking deeply about life’s big questions. She wasn’t always happy about the answers, either.

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When I am dead, my dearest

When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.

1862

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My favourite lines from Christina Rossetti are about something most precious, even sacred, perhaps particularly for a woman in society: a holy trinity of privacy, secrecy, memory.

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I have a room whereinto no one enters Save I myself alone: There sits a blessed memory on a throne, There my life centres.

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As long as that room with its sacred memory, its precious secret, remains intact, we can keep returning to it to find our real self.

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She knew whereof she spoke:

Truly a person born and died in the deep midwinter.

Christina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894)

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More about Christina Rossetti: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti

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year.of.the.water.dragon.year.of.the.water.dragon.year.of.the.water.dragon.

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              .

                      all the photos in this post…

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                                    … were taken in December 2012…

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                                   … at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild…

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Bring out my dragon.

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leave your unicorn lying in the laps of damsels

chase your chimaeras home to the land of the brave

watch the centaurs march past with their flagtails waving

and smile at the sphinx till her facemask cracks

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there are beauties in the bestiary

I’ve had my term in purgatory

the moon fills out the equinox

the dragon stirs inside me

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bring out my dragon!

bring out my dragon

(1990)

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                         … one of Europe’s most beautiful museums…

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                             … on the Côte d’Azur near St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

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© Karen Margolis 2012

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yoloyoloyoloyoloyoloyoloyoloyoloyoloyoloyolo

           yolo

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Place Massena, Nice
December 2012

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2012 is nearing its end.

Time of the year for books of the year, sports stars of the year,

films of the year, apps of the year… and so it goes on.

The one that caught my eye is yolo.

yolo: you only live once

According to a source I saw in passing and have since forgotten

yolo

is youth word of the year

You probably have to be under 25 to text it

and yolo users certainly don’t have capital letters on their radar

yolo followers have swiped away dire Mayan predictions of

last call for humankind

and are opting for radical existentialism

or hedonist here-and-now parties

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yolo – you only live once

(could be the title of the next 007 remake)

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yolo – youth at its cultmost

I joined the yolo prophets long ago

with love poems for one time lifers

and I’m jumping on that yolo wagon once again

this time for good, better or worse

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souvenir Lake Balaton

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Here’s a yolo poetic puzzle piece from then:

               V

If you want to win me

you could:

Ring my bell at midnight

warm my toes

bring me a single rose.

feed me fresh food

translate my book

send me postcards from afar,

hold me close when I come

then do it again. And kiss

the tip of my nose when we part.

But I still wouldn’t give you my heart

unless

you also made me laugh.

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 from Love Poem in Eight Songs

(you can read the whole poem in the series

THE LOVE ARTIST at www.parisiana.com)

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… and here’s a fragment from now,

from that eternal work in progress

– even yolo can’t predict the final cut:

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from Song of Age 2012

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Plan for a rendezvous with an old lover

In a place you never knew

catch a weekend free from life

where nobody will find you

(remember: pack the Opinel knife)

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cut the days in question

out of your iCal

and paste them in a space

marked ‘magical’

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Let the evening grow shadows

pour a cocktail of champagne

flesh and forgetting

for now. then. once. again

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decades dissolve in showers

never ending

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© Karen Margolis 2012

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????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? shopping+sharing=shopping+sharing=shopping+sharing

Banking up food

Shopping & giving

Volunteers for the French Banque Alimentaires (Food Bank) could be seen outside supermarkets throughout France this past weekend. The two action days reminded consumers at the start of the Christmas rush to think of less fortunate people while wheeling their trolleys through supermarkets full of well-stocked shelves.

http://www.banquealimentaire.org/

Banque Alimentaire France: action days 23/24 November 2012

Food banks and similar donor projects have been in the news lately since the Occupy movement and Hurricane Sandy in the USA, but the concept originally goes back to 1967. Here’s a link to more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank

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Shopping and sharing on the Côte d’Azur

Two helpers brandishing specially printed plastic bags approached me for food donations outside a big supermarket in the city centre of Nice on Saturday morning. Thanking me for joining in, they explained what I should buy alongside my own purchases: sugar, oil and condiments, packaged foods, fresh fruit, chocolate, breakfast foods and biscuits. Those were the preferences. Anything else would be gratefully accepted, of course.

“Milk?” a sturdy middle-aged woman asked. “Surely the children need milk?”

“Well, it does tend to go off too quickly,” the helper replied. “But go ahead and buy milk if you want to – we’re grateful for anything.”

The would-be milk donor took a carrier bag and went into the store. The helpers then descended on a tall man in a grey suit, but he waved them away. Judging by the half-hour I spent watching, men were generally not eager to shop along for those in need. In fact, they tended to try and sneak past while the helpers were looking the other way or handing out bags to female shoppers, who proved far more amenable.

Inside, the usual supermarket atmosphere of dazed somnabulists steering trolleys between stacks of cans, jars and packets was considerably livened by the shopping donors, easily identifiable by their Banque Alimentaire bags, greeting each other with friendly faces. A shop assistant walked past with an armful of slightly battered looking cereal packets. “What do you think? Frosties would be good, wouldn’t they?” She stooped to gather up a couple of budget chocolate bars from a bottom shelf. “And these as well. The boss said I could just pick out some stuff. It’s so nice to be giving for a change… ”  The camaraderie was an uncalculated bonus.

The piles of donor bags in the trolleys outside the shop grew slowly.

Around the corner, the branch of the giant Monoprix chain on Nice’s main shopping boulevard displayed a poster for the food donor action at its main entrance. It was almost a pathetic contrast to the lavish display of goods inside.

Monoprix, Nice: “A little bit of your shopping could rescue a family.”

Yes, it’s no remedy for a system built on inequality. You only have to participate in the food bank once to realise how little it changes in practice for those who get, or those who give.

But it has a meaning in the realm where pleasing and sharing counts.

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This post is dedicated to my friend Elke Brüns, with thanks for her inspiring website: Gespenst der Armut (Spectre of Poverty):

http://www.gespenst-der-armut.org/

(also accessible via permanent link from this website)

© Karen Margolis 2012

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for breakfast I toasted my toes. for breakfast I toasted my toes….

It’s so hard / to be avant-garde

On the subject of feet, there’s a famous painting by Frida Kahlo called Lo Que el Agua Me Dio (“What the Water Gave Me”), dated 1938. It shows what Frida K. saw as she lay in the bath with her feet up, splayed on either side of the circular overflow cover. The viewer’s eyes are first drawn to the feet with their red-painted toenails. It’s only afterwards you notice all kinds of significant objects floating in the water. Now, many things have been written about this picture, and for good reason. All those deep psychic pointers and chains of association (water / womb / amniotic and other bodily fluids / baby bath times / infantile sexuality, nudity & masturbation / drowning / submarine life / scarlet women / mirror images / red nail varnish-lipstick-strawberries-blood / etc. etc.) — all just begging for interpretation. It’s tempting to delve into the murky psychoanalytic depths of the Freudian trends of Frida K.’s era to see this as a comment on her early accident trauma, medical odyssey and unhappy marriage to the unfaithful painter Diego Riviera, or to follow the posthumous gossip machine that links the painting with her lover, the Hungarian photographer Nikolas Muray.

What the water gave me, Frida Kahlo, 1938

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“A ribbon about a bomb” Yet the picture is greater than all this. It stands alone as witness to the genius and daring of a woman who tried to convey what her mind’s eye saw. Frida K. was an original sub-realist, who portrayed the stuff of dreams as the fabric of daily life. André Breton, self-appointed maître of the Surrealists, admired Frida K. so much that he invited her to a group show in Paris. “The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon about a bomb,” he wrote. The feeling wasn’t exactly mutual. Hayden Herrera, Kahlo’s best-known biographer, quotes her as saying: “… they thought I was surrealist, but I was not. I never painted my dreams, I only painted my own reality.” She was less polite in a letter to Nikolas Muray:

Frida Kahlo, Letter to Niklas Murray

Written in American Hospital, New York

February 16, 1939

[A] few days ago Breton told me that the associated of Pierre Colle, an old bastard and son of a bitch, saw my paintings and found that only two were possible to be shown, because the rest are too “shocking” fir the public!! I could of kill that guy and eat it afterwards, but I am so sick and tired of the whole affair that I have decided to send everything to hell, scram from this rotten Paris before I get nuts myself.

You have no idea the kind of bitches these people are. (…) They are so damn “intelectual” and rotten that I can’t stand them any more. It is really too much for my character- I rather sit and sell tortillas, than to have any thing to do with those “Artistic” bitches of Paris. They sit for hours on the “cafés” warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about “culture” “art” “revolution” and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true. Next morning they don’t have anything to eat in their house because none of them work and they live as parasites of the bunch of rich bitches who admire their “genius” of “Artists” (…)

I never seen Diego or you wasting their time on stupid gossip and “intelectual” discussions. That is why you are real men and not lousy “artists”- Gee weez! It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people – good for nothing – are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis. I bet you my life I will hate this place and its people as long as I live. There is something so false and unreal about them that they drive me nuts.

(Bold: my emphasis)

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Frida Kahlo

. Frida K’s dissociation from the surrealists wasn’t just revulsion against what she saw as the decadence and decay of a whole society reflected in its artists. It was also a comment on the resultant impotence of the artists against the onward march of fascism. Elsewhere she described the surrealists as lacking in guts and blood, and contrasted European over-cultivation with the pulsating life force of the indigenous peoples of her home country, Mexico. Actually she was struggling with the conflict of her own personal dichotomy: her father was a Hungarian Jew, and her mother a native Mexican with Mestize roots. Own reality Unlike Frida K., I’m not going to dismiss surrealist painting out of hand, even if the painters in person were hard to take. The interesting question is why the paintings were far more successful than the poetry. The answer probably lies in the visual, non-verbal fascination of dreams. What makes Frida Kahlo special – and different – is the counterposition of surrealism (the artistic language of dreams) and her “own reality”.

“Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself,” she once wrote. She painted what she saw. The picture of her feet in the bathtub is unforgettable because it’s a compression of many, many bath times in many different ages and phases of life. She painted what SHE saw, not what a camera would see. She painted what she saw from a multitude of perspectives, with the naked eye, with eyes half shut, eyes misted over with bathtub steam, eyes blurred by drops of sweat and water, eyes shut to the world but open to the mind. She painted what she saw with the outward eye and the mind’s eye. That’s what makes a work of visual art. The artist’s own reality. That what makes poetry, too. The poet’s own reality.

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Frida K. identified the basic opposition between the contemplative life of the male artist (or scholar, or religious practitioner) and the woman rooted to the here and now, even when she’s dreamily relaxing in the bathtub. The tension between dream and reality generates a wonderful space for creation. Men and women use it in very different ways.

Own reality poetry is an exciting genre for a woman exploring the subconscious.

Here’s the own reality poem I wrote that might have been a subliminal association with Frida K.’s painting “What the Water gave Me”:

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        appetite regained

for breakfast I toasted my toes

with melted butter they tasted

delicious         1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9

the tenth I left resting on the plate

to be polite

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(the coffee of ground pubic hair

was by contrast a trifle weak)

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lunchtime found me less than hungry

I contented myself

with a mouthful of earlobe

chewed fifty times

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supper was a gourmet delight:

grilled buttock with eyelash sauce

and elbow pudding to follow

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the best I saved for tomorrow —

breasts in puff pastry

garnished with hipjoint parsley

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and the oyster

washed down with underarm wine

                          © Karen Margolis

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Another own reality was the church clock in a French village that chimed midnight twice, and inspired this dream poem:

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my seven elves and selves

my seven elves and selves

came in the night to visit me.

one stroked my foot, another my cheek

one sat on my mound

surveying the landscape of my belly

one climbed the hills of my breast

one nuzzled into my armpit

and fell asleep, nose twitching.

one hung a hammock

in the crack between my buttocks

that left two to carry me

through the Atlantic caves

slaloming between the stalagmites

pausing to dip in the sunken baths

and pick a nectarine in the hanging gardens.

then up the spiral stairway

and beyond the cloud shaped like a brontosaur

skipping Avalon, Nirvana, Valhalla and Elysium

to reach the trysting place

where midnight strikes twice

 © Karen Margolis 1994/2012

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A wish is a dream 2012

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A wish is a dream

                    for  G.

everyone naked on the street

(weather permitting)

otherwise in padded silk

smelling of themselves

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and the night

a dream cocktail

slowly, so slowly

with a long straw

        © Karen Margolis 1991/2012

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What did they see? (Nice, Nov. 2012)

  PS.     Freud said, “A dream is a wish.” PPS.  Watch out! – There’s a poem getting cold feet: .

There’s a poem in the fridge

There’s a poem in the fridge lying just below the icebox

I put it there to cool off

three weeks past      now

the one-eyed mackerel is reading it sideways

and the fifth line is suffering from frostbite

                         © Karen Margolis 1991 / 2012

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LOOKING.FOR.FEELINGS.ON.MY LAPTOP@LOOKING.FOR.FEELINGS.ON.MY.LAPTOP

Attention! – cyberspionage / Vorsicht – netzspionage / Watch out for spyware

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Cigarette ad poster, Robert Bereny, Hungary 1927

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Looking for feelings on my laptop

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long past bedtime

still awake, all alone

looking for feelings on my laptop

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there’s comfort in clicking,

illusion of activity

in virtual contact with the ether

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power in my fingertips

over a digital universe out there

wrapped in a web of news and views

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sounds, colours, flashing images

tickle the synapses

but don’t touch the senses

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and often jangle the nerves

with pop-ups or downloads

(never mind that ugly word ‘blog’)

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voyeurs are watching

from hidden windows while pincodes

vanish down memory holes

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later, after hours of online trawling

the emptiness beyond logout

an end without conclusion.

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Millions of women, pollsters say

prefer online surfing to sex

personally I like my climaxes live

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but tonight I’ve worked too long

in my electronic office

the 21st century sweatshop

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alone at my laptop I surrender

to the pleasure of chasing links

until numbed by a hundred hits

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How long does it take for the mind

to reject mass pacification

and make its own connections?

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When the feeling finally comes

it’s anger. It’s real

and it shouts for revolution

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© Karen Margolis 2008/2012

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Béla Uitz, stage design for play, The Monster, by Paul Vaillant-Couturier, 1925

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Dada poster, Slovo, Berlin 1923

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Shut down that laptop. Swap to another addictive 21st century activity – from barely rewarded production to scarcely fulfilling consumption.

Go shopping. You can hardly guess what surprises await you in your local supermarket.

Signs and omens in the vegetable section.

I DIDN’T BUY THIS CARROT TO EAT.

I didn’t buy this carrot to eat

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© Karen Margolis November 2012

“”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"

…november’s good & bad…november’s good & bad…november’s good & bad…

NOVEMBER REVISITED

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After anti-racist protest at local town hall, Berlin-Neukölln, November 2010

Some poems don’t age. Unlike anniversaries, which get tiresome if they’re celebrated too loudly for too long. (Germans recovering from the 9th November commemorations may agree here.)

This November was written 21 years ago and has earned its coming of age. It appeared in several anthologies.

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This November 

November full of promise

the fog hides our secrets well

the rain falls mainly at night

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in the dark afternoons

masses gather in squares

with empty spaces where the idols stood

the faces hostile, right hands

raised to heaven calling up the demons

that lurk behind the chimney-stacks

and crawl in beds of trodden leaves

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November full of hate and fear

the wind bites ears on shaven heads

the sun kills memories of the past July

the stars shade their light

the moon has trouble getting out of bed

the nights are colder, she shivers on rising

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November full of heavy hope

hedgehogs in holes hugging

bodies lying iced on winter’s slab

awaiting nature’s equinoctal sacrifice

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in the inner temple of the century’s tomb

two leopards lick blood from shallow stone dishes

men and women dissolve with desire

into the carved womb, its walls

a globe from within, sheltering the scorpion

the mountain goat, the snail, lizards, sea turtles

& snakes coiled in cold blood

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we climb the spiral staircase. From the roof

of the world we see the smoke of November

vanish up its own dark hole

leaving only a wisp of stardust

to sprinkle on the cities’ sunless balconies

and the wavetips at the gusty eastern shores

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November, true season of the north

breeds brown conspiracies

behind embroidered tapestries

a wild despair strangles the day at birth

at dusk we eat chocolate heart cakes

relight the tiled stove; practise hoping

.

November smells of musk and caraway

and tastes of nutmeg roughly grated

and promises small comforts

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Poem © Karen Margolis 1991/2012

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SOME WAYS TO PICTURE NOVEMBER

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Frozen vegetable garden, Max Liebermann’s house, Berlin-Wannsee November 2010

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Interior view of garden, Max Liebermann’s house, November 2010

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Max Liebermann painted many pictures of his Wannsee garden…

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… and in November he could look back fondly to the summer boats on the Wannsee.

. Meanwhile, back in Berlin’s city centre, November is the time for setting up the traditional Christmas market at Gendarmenmarkt: Glühwein and seasonal kitsch on one of Europe’s most beautiful squares.

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Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin November 2011

. … and your roving reporter just spotted the fairy lights on the palm trunks on the Côte d’Azur, already! .

Promenade des Anglais, Nice, November 2012

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Wiring up the palms on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice November 2012

Text & photos © Karen Margolis 2012

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three books.three lives.drei bücher.drei leben.dreigroschenkneipe.three sisters 

THE MAGICAL NUMBER THREE

Three books for my suitcase

ONLY THREE BOOKS…

… fitted in my suitcase. It was a hard choice. Even harder than the decision about which scarves and earrings to take.

In the end the books decided for me. They lay there pleading to be taken. Their tone was almost accusing. All this time you’ve been promising to give us your undivided attention (which we deserve and demand), and we’ve waited patiently, and now you’re considering — we could almost say, threatening — to put us in storage for a while. But you can’t ignore us any longer.

WE BOOKS ALSO HAVE NEEDS!

We want to be opened and shut, and have arty bookmarks slipped between our pages. We’re longing to be stroked and caressed, or thrown down in anger and despair. We need to be touched and felt and induced to yield up the secrets of our paper’s sheen and the smell of our covers and binding. Finally, we want you to know us so well that you can capture our aura and convey it to other potential readers.

All this was very persuasive.  I just couldn’t refuse. The three books were carefully placed in padded surroundings in my suitcase, guarded over by Flopsy and Mopsy, the little Nigerian cloth voodoo dolls that accompany me on all my travels. As you can see from the photo, these books aren’t the newest, and need protection against the vagaries of air travel. One shudders to think what shocks and rough handling the contents of baggage go through on the passage from conveyor belt to trolley to cargo hold, from airports to planes and back again.

The three books arrived safely, were slowly unpacked, then photographed to confirm their presence and importance. They lie now, waiting to be read. Re-read, in fact: I’ve read them all in whole or part before. There’s so much in them, I could spend the rest of my life reading them, again and again.

The first is the red one without a title. The gold-imprinted signature on the cover simply says, “bertolt brecht”. (Note the lower case — the man started out defiantly oppositional even in orthographical matters and cultivated his idiosyncratic signature with careful attention to style.) The book is Brecht’s complete collected poems in the (3rd) Suhrkamp edition of 1984. It has 1390 pages and is printed on the kind of thin paper usually reserved for the Bible and other religious tomes, or the collected works of Shakespeare, Balzac, etc. Brecht was prolific and all the song lyrics from his operas and plays are included in there as well.

The book was given to me by a man who grew up in communist East Germany after the war and belonged to the generation who revered Brecht like the English honour Shakespeare. The man was a dissident writer who loved and hated his native land in almost equal measure, but was proud of its literary heritage. He gave me the collected edition of Brecht’s poems (from a Western publisher!) to prove the greatness of socialist culture. Sadly, he has since passed away, but the book is a constant reminder of the life of everyday propaganda we lived through in the Cold War Berlin of the 1980s. It’s also one of my much-loved treasures, offering new discoveries all the time.

The poem on page 1097 explains why this book is the first I packed in my case. It’s the famous Pirate Jenny song, “Die Seeräuber Jenny”, the theme song for the book I’m currently writing.

Here’s Lotte Lenya singing the English version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFP3x4bKpZE

(The German version from the original Dreigroschenoper premiere directed by Kurt Gerron in Berlin in 1928 is even better, much harsher and more elemental.)

Pirate Jenny is the barmaid, chambermaid and general dogsbody in a cheap harbour dive (a “threepenny pub”). She fulfils a dream by wreaking revenge on every man who downtrod and abused her. Then she vanishes on a ship with eight sails and fifty guns. The song has a haunting mythical quality, mysterious yet familiar, both ancient and modern. It could be an anthem to woman’s defiance.  Its lyrics are the thread weaving through my book.

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The second book is an old edition of some of Heinrich Heine’s writings including the epic poem, Germany: A Winter’s Tale (“Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen”), which I’ve been intermittently translating into quatrains for many years. A provisional version of one chapter is already up on this website. After many delays, I’m aiming for a finished version sometime soon. (The rhyming is hard work!)

Meanwhile I’ve been reading Heine’s “Letters from Helgoland”, in the same volume, and feel the urge to translate some of them as well. Written in July and August 1930, they reflect in a very personal way on topics like emigration, the French Revolution, and particularly on his reading of the Old Testament and his thoughts on being Jewish and his conversion to the Lutheran Church, which he comes to regret. Heine is so entertaining, at times polemical, at others melancholy and reflective, but always consciously the master of his pen and his language. A delight for poets and translators.

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“Anything may be accidentally either the cause of hope or of fear”

My third book, Spinoza’s Ethics, is the one that needs the deepest thought and utmost peace and quiet. “Spinoza — just the thing for a renegade Jewess!” my friend Ruth commented when she spotted it on the pile next to my suitcase. Of the three chosen ones, this is the only book in English, but is actually a translation from the Latin. The translator’s preface by W.H. White runs to over 80 pages of learned observations, and usefully includes more than 3 pages of parallel writings by Giordano Bruno.

More on Spinoza’s Ethics later. For the moment, for German readers, as an introduction to the great philosopher I’d like to recommend a little monograph, a reprint from the beautiful Insel collection, that appeared just after the Second World War in East Germany. “Benedict Spinoza”, by Arnold Zweig (published in 1946) is a charming nutshell biography that vividly expresses his tragic family life, inner torment and terrible social isolation.  I managed to finish reading it just before I packed the three chosen books in my suitcase. Poor Spinoza! — motherless as a young boy and at odds with his father. And yet, he overcame all that to write a masterpiece that is still occupying thinkers and sages all over the world.

“Anything may be accidentally either the cause of hope or of fear,” he wrote.

Now that’s something to set you thinking. And have you noticed that I only chose books by dead male authors? What do you read into that?

Poetry Rain, Museum Night, Berlin 28 August 2010

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Three lives, unforgettable

Three lives hath one life –

Iron, honey, gold. The gold, the honey gone – Left is the hard and cold.

Three lives, four lines. Sometimes one verse alone makes a poem immortal. The lines above are from a poem by Isaac Rosenberg. They show how the magical number 3 can encompass a whole life.

Rosenberg was one of the great English poets of the First World War. His Poems from the Trenches is a classic. Born in Latvia in November 1890, he grew up as a Jewish refugee in London’s East End. Hoping to cure his chronic bronchitis, he emigrated to join his sister in South Africa. He was there when the war broke out, and immediately began writing critical anti-war poems.

Isaac Rosenberg enlisted in the army to support his ailing mother. His war poems show prophetic awareness of the waste of lives. He was surrounded by young men destined to be cannon fodder. Sent to France, he died on the Western front at dawn on 1 April 1918.

Here is the whole poem containing the four immortal lines:

August 1914

What in our lives is burnt

In the fire of this? The heart’s dear granary? The much we shall miss?

Three lives hath one life –

Iron, honey, gold. The gold, the honey gone – Left is the hard and cold.

Iron are our lives

Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields A fair mouth’s broken tooth

Isaac Rosenberg

Trained as an engraver, Rosenberg was also a painter. You can see his self-portraits in the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain in London.

There’s a commemorative plaque to Rosenberg outside the Whitechapel Gallery in the East End of London. It was unveiled by the writer Emanuel Litvinoff, who, like Rosenberg, was of Baltic Jewish origin.

“Left is the hard and cold.”

© Karen Margolis     6 November 2012

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>>MY PEN A SWORD>>MY PEN A SWORD>>MY PEN A SWORD>>

Bird Court, Neues Kranzler Eck, Berlin Ku’damm, Sept 2012

Occasional thought of the month

– this one’s for Eddie Woods (as taster for a delicious poetic repast, currently simmering in K’s cauldron)

“Language is a weapon. Keep it well sharpened.”

                                            — Kurt Tucholsky

That’s probably not news to Eddie, a veteran — and frequent victor — of many verbal skirmishes.

The great German writer and journalist Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) wrote for the press and the revue stage and was renowned for his left-wing social criticism and satires, particularly against the Nazis. His writings were labelled “degenerate” and burned in the infamous Nazi book bonfires of 1933. Stripped of his German citizenship, he died in Sweden in 1935.

I spotted this quotation recently on a plaque for Tucholsky. It’s mounted on the wall of a house he lived in from 1920-24 in Bundesallee, a broad avenue lined with big trees in Berlin’s Friedenau district. It’s a pleasure to walk past the splendid old houses on a sunny autumn morning and discover such a tribute to one of Germany’s great literary figures of the 20th century.  Tucholsky’s words have stayed with me ever since.

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Who says Berlin isn’t beautiful? –
Bird Court, Neues Kranzler Eck, Ku’damm, Berlin Sept 2012

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© Karen Margolis     2 November 2012

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Blinkers and the Ashkenazy Hip Choir

Notes on the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012

(in no particular order)

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The most important accessory you need at the Frankfurt Book Fair is blinkers. This occurred to me when I asked Deenah for her impressions on Day 3. Deenah’s a young journalist who writes great stuff for the New Yorker among other places and was at the fair for the first time. Getting to know her and her companion Toby, a musician/songwriter, was easily the **Best Meeting** of the Buchmesse 2012 for me.

Even for the initiated, the world’s largest book fair is a trial of endurance and a simultaneous assault on all the six senses.  Deenah talked about newcomer’s confusion in terms of negotiating a maze, or carving your way through a jungle. “It took me a while to realise I had to find my own path in all this,” she said.

That’s where the blinkers come in. To be successful in business here, you must stick firmly to your appointments calendar (half-hour segments are typical). You have to don the schedule blinkers and work your way across the day, striding through the halls without looking left or right. There’s certainly enough to distract, and if you go without blinkers you’ll get bombarded by too many boring or interesting things for the normal brain or psyche to cope with.

Frankfurt isn’t the place for creative souls, people kept saying. Meaning: it’s the place for the publishing and business community that make the money out of creativity. Judging by the serious, focused looks, most of them seemed able to manoeuvre well with blinkers. For the outside world the book fair is a media event. For the trade visitors and exhibitors it’s an annual concentration of what they do anyway. It’s the place for meeting the faces behind the e-mails, as Simonetta, head of foreign rights at Adelphi Edizione Milano, explained to Deenah on Day 1.

All this personal contact and determined friendliness takes its toll, and by Day 3, the Friday, there were visible signs of wilting all over the fair. In the afternoon we visited the stand of the small Berlin house Hentrich & Hentrich, specialising in Jewish themes, where publisher Nora Pester gave us a warm welcome. Deenah received a comp copy of the freshly minted CD by Rabbi Rothschild and the Minyan Boys as an opener to her forthcoming year in Berlin researching on Jewish identity. Calling cards were handed out and e-mail addresses swapped.

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Journalist Deenah (l.) getting the Frankfurt stand welcome from publisher Nora Pester (Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin)

 

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Catering highs and lows

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Award winning Best Cafe

We took a break for coffee at the café next to the ARTE stand on the upper floor of Hall 3. Its tasteful décor, matching customers and relaxed ambience gained it my **Best Café** prize instantly.

This café even got an extra medal for the **Best View** photo opportunity of Frankfurt’s typical lowering skies that look most impressive reflected in the shiny towers erected in homage to the gods of high finance.

As the cranes testify, Euro crisis or not they’re busy building all around the trade fair grounds. Could this be a sign of business confidence and future prosperity?

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Prosperity, in the form of classy food and drink, was very much in evidence in the Gourmet Gallery in Hall 3.1. Next to the upmarket Tre Torri publishers was an exclusive restaurant with the tables partitioned off from the general crowd. They were beautifully laid. The menu looked mouth-watering. There was apfelstrudel with vanilla sauce for dessert, and a male bouncer to keep gawkers out. When I told the lady receptionist I was looking for somebody I knew, she thawed slightly. (It could have been true.) I was allowed to stand on tiptoe and survey the lucky diners. In fact, it was nearly true. I left sighing, saying I couldn’t find him.

The book fair’s official website proudly described the Gourmet Gallery as “the area for unashamed indulgence”. This could also apply to other aspects of the book fair (including the evening entertainment of thousands of executives on expense accounts away from home), but certainly not to the catering outlets scattered through the halls.

My first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair was back in 1977 when I came with a suitcase of books and single-handedly managed a stand for a small left-wing publisher. What I remember most – apart from trying to stop my precious few copies being ripped off by long-fingered German lefties) – was the standard snack. It consisted of a pair of rubbery pinkish boiled frankfurter sausages served on a white cardboard rectangle with a dab of mustard and a small dry bread roll. Baguettes have long since taken over but the culinary standards haven’t improved much.

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Sad salads and green beads

This year, at lunch in a typical fair “restaurant” with an editor from a US publisher, our attempts at healthy eating were thwarted by a heap of identically sized little balls of mozzarella and cocktail tomatoes smeared with pesto (her choice), and layers of limp, faded lettuce covered in Parmesan shreds drowned in watery whitish sauce (my choice). I resorted to munching hungrily on a white bread roll while admiring her green jersey trousers and top, and especially the matching green bead necklace.

The editor won my **Best-dressed** award with special mention for still being smart, calm and friendly on Day 3. As for the legions of ladies and gentlemen in black, they can retire to the safe havens of sartorial boredom. And they can take their expensive unisex leather briefcases with them (they’ll be out of fashion next year, anyway, along with wedge-heel bootees and this autumn’s magazine-featured combination of navy and mustard).

Hopefully the young woman in her brightly coloured costume with a tinsel crown who decorated a stand in the German publishers’ hall―and all the other workers dressed up as fairy tale characters from the fantasy book sector―got home without further incident.

 

The ubiquitous pretzel

The perennially poor catering at the fair helps explain the abiding popularity of hospitality hour, the last call of the day before the fair halls close at 6pm. The major exhibitors lock up their treasured volumes and wheel in the wine, beer and mineral water. Time for a drink. The crush and the queues show how people have been looking forward to this all day. Some things do change: peanuts & canapés are getting ever scarcer in the new age of sobriety. The staple almost everywhere is pretzels: the kind you unfreeze and bake in the microwave. If they’re chewy in the middle you get indigestion, especially if the wine is cheap. Meanwhile, budget tetrapacks of orange juice that were once discreetly poured into jugs are being openly displayed to win goody points for economising.

Souvenirs, accolades and best books

At past book fairs we used to grab all we could get for free. This year somebody remembered fondly how people would take away heavy volumes of Marx’s or Lenin’s collected works from Soviet bloc publishers who wanted to save the return postage costs. Carrying books seems pretty passé now, aside from the batch of visitors with big blue and yellow Langenscheidt freebie bags filled with weighty reading matter. I made mental notes of some interesting stuff I’ll order from Kindle or as e-books. Even the diehard paper book supporters admit the digital market is a big player now. Amazon, Google and Apple were well represented and there was keen interest in the book fair’s own “Sparks” series of live presentations on aspects of digital publishing.

The **Best Book** is the one I’ll write myself. The pink one.

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The PINK notebook: high price, high advertising waste

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It’s a fabulously costly notebook complete with squared paper, inside cover pockets, a silk ribbon bookmark and a bevy of advertising leaflets and cards that would be the despair of anybody trying to save trees. (Lucky me got it at trade price.) It will have a glorious future as the next in the series of journals I’ve kept since 1979. The notebook comes from a German firm showing in the German hall. Meanwhile, the paper marketing section of the book fair upstairs in the international hall is full of Chinese stands with representatives eagerly giving away free samples and notelets.

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“… your hips on mine make a choir…”

My personal award for **Coolest Indie Publisher (Germany)** goes to Jonas Engelmann of Ventil Verlag from Mainz. Deenah and Toby introduced us over beer and pretzels during a hospitality hour for the German indie publishing scene. Jonas gave me a book from his own list titled, “We are ugly but we have the music”. Leonard Cohen fans might spot the reference. The long subtitle announces “An unusual investigation into Jewish experience and subculture”. It’s all new to me: a radical Jewish current in the mainly musical subculture highly influenced by punk with shades of Marxism and anarchism and lots of other familiar and unknown things. Jonas’ great achievement consists not just in editing and publishing this important work, but also getting various imposing organisations such as the Jewish Community of Rhineland-Palatinate and the Mainz Institute for Social Pedagogical Research to give financial backing. That’s no mean feat for a small indie publisher.

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Book & calling card from **Coolest Indie Publisher**

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I started reading “We are ugly…” on the plane back to Berlin and could hardly put it down. Here’s a sample from the quote that heads the chapter written by Jonas himself on “Ashkenazy Tradition in Canadian Post-punk.”

“Your hands like birds in the trees

If the trees themselves were all on fire

your hips on mine make a choir

singing baruch atta adonai…”

―Sounds good to me in whatever tradition.

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Mascha, wonderful Mascha!

My last award goes to the German **Poetry Publication of the Year**. The big German paperback house dtv has produced a complete critical edition of the works of Mascha Kaléko, one of the great German poets of the 20th century. Born in Galicia in 1907, she spent probably the happiest time of her life in the expressionist milieu in Berlin of the 1920s and early ’30s before fleeing from the Nazis to the United States in 1938. After emigrating to Israel, she died in 1975 in Zurich.

The dtv edition is beautifully, lovingly produced. Mascha Kaléko deserves all the attention it will bring. It’s also time for her to reach a much bigger audience through English translations of her work, both the poems and the wonderfully expressive letters and notes that reveal the creative spirit of a great Jewish woman poet writing in German in cruel circumstances.

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Mascha Kaléko writings

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PS. For a really good perspective on the videobooks world and other parts I missed at Frankfurt (eg. the erotic boom!), read Deenah Vollmer’s blog in The New Yorker / Pageturner section:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/in-the-land-of-videobooks-a-dispatch-from-the-frankfurt-fair.html

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© Karen Margolis 2012

from the dtv website

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COMING SOON…COMING SOON…SOON…SOON…SOON…

CHOICEST FRUITS FROM THE BOOK FAIR

Mascha, lovely Mascha!

http://www.dtv.de/mascha_kaleko_saemtliche_briefe_und_werke_1251.html

Mascha Kaléko, Collected Works, just published by dtv

Mascha Kaléko – my kind of poet!

»Eine schreibende Frau mit Humor, sieh mal an!«

“Well I never! A woman writer with a sense of humour!”

Kurt Tucholsky

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»Ich habe Ihre Gedichte mit wirklicher Bewunderung gelesen. Sie haben mir solchen Eindruck gemacht wie Weniges aus unserer Zeit.«

“I read your poems with real admiration. They made an impression on me that few things written nowadays do.”

Albert Einstein in einem Brief an Mascha Kaléko /Letter from Albert Einstein to Mascha Kaléko

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Watch this space for more on Mascha, and dtv’s wonderful critical edition…

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VIEWS FROM THE FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR 2012

They’re building again in Frankfurt

. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ THE LOVE ARTIST & other poems///THE LOVE ARTIST and other poems///THE LOVE ARTIST… . GODDESSES, DOORMATS & LOVE ARTISTS . Just up on Parisiana.com… the formatting will take a little longer… http://parisiana.com/content/goddesses-doormats-and-love-artists Thanks to Eddie Woods and Einar Moos. .

Here’s a taster from The Love Artist:

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The Love Artist

You love your women

like Moselle wine

love them absently

when you have the time

fuck them expertly…

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… Read more on Parisiana.com

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© Karen Margolis 9 October 2012 .

WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING THIS WEEK, PLEASE DON’T FORGET: FREE PUSSY RIOT!!

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. PROTESTS IN THE CATHEDRAL – FREE PUSSY RIOT!!   Pussy Riot? Another cat lovers’ group on Facebook? A call for a flash mob party? Or an invitation to cybersex? ― In the beginning was confusion, and it took a while to understand why the name Pussy Riot kept appearing in news feeds and web forums, and why it was always framed by exclamation marks. There was a compelling sense of urgency. It was actually the posters that made me want to know more. Big capitals and glowing colours speak louder than words. Scores of brilliant posters woke me up to the cause, and I started following the newslinks shortly before the trial. Thousands of articles and blogs, art works and videos are dedicated to Pussy Riot, and Facebook, Twitter etc. offer feeds and updates by the minute. Sifting through them you get a message that should strike terror into the heart of anybody who loves freedom. Pussy Riot is a group of young women in Russia who make music and model themselves on the 1970s punk and women’s liberation movements in the West. But they are very consciously a product of the 21st century, of post-socialist global culture. Their cult reputation is based on wildly expressive stage shows with extravagant costumes and explosive choreography. They live up to their name with orgasmic art performed unashamedly in public. Their trademark, which has made them world famous, is the brightly coloured balaclava hoods that conceal their faces and proclaim their membership of the cultural and political underground. . .   Protest in the Cathedral – Version One (1977) True inheritors of the women’s movement of the 1970s, Pussy Riot struck a deep chord with me. Hearing their story, I dimly remembered a protest I was involved in back in 1977, when I was in my twenties, like most of the Pussy riot members. Later I wrote:

“One day in the summer of 1977, a feminist with whom I had been discussing the tactics of the National Abortion Campaign invited me to a meeting. It comprised a broad network of women, many of whom I had never met. Our meeting ran in parallel with others in London, all with the same idea: to invade the Catholic Cathedral of Westminster in protest against the Catholic lobbying for the Benyon anti-abortion bill. At the appointed hour we gathered outside the building and marched through its main door. Within minutes we were occupying the pulpit, a banner with the legend ‘Free Abortion on Demand ― a Woman’s Right to Choose’ was raised and song sheets miraculously appeared. Feminist journalists had organized press coverage, and the TV and radio dutifully arrived, to witness the priest standing helplessly by with the police, unable to demand a violent eviction from a holy place. A word-of-mouth network (secrecy was essential to avoid pre-emptive police action) had achieved what countless calls to action in the pages of the left press couldn’t do.”

Karen Margolis, “The Long and Winding Roads (Reflections on Beyond the Fragments)”, Feminist Review 5, 1980, p. 96.

It was a beautifully planned and executed subversive action. I can well remember emerging from the Tube at one of the five different stations from which we, the activists, descended on the Cathedral. Amazing. Everybody was there, on time, including the feminist photo-reporter and radio journalist with the camera and mikes hidden in their bags. We walked together silently till we reached the Cathedral concourse. Westminster Cathedral in the heart of Victoria is one of London’s most beautiful churches, now remodelled with a spacious plaza. It was magnificent even then. The official website tells us it was, “designed in the Early Christian Byzantine style by the Victorian architect John Francis Bentley. The foundation stone was laid in 1895 and the fabric of the building was completed eight years later.” Today, with the plaza and the restored red-and-cream striped brickwork you might imagine you had stumbled upon an undiscovered quarter of Florence. When we got to the main cathedral door at around 9 a.m. on a sunny morning, we started chanting for free abortion. We entered without encountering any opposition. The only person inside was the cleaning woman. She put down her bucket, leaned her mop against a pillar, and said, “You’re not supposed to be here.” “We just want to have a peaceful demonstration about abortion,” we told her. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, shaking her head, and went off to fetch the priest. By the time he arrived in his black cassock we were already in the pulpit with our banner, posing for photos and singing feminist songs for the benefit of several journalists who had turned up after word had spread on the street. “This is illegal entry. I’ll have to call the police,” the priest warned us. “But nothing will happen if you go quietly.” And so it was. The priest told the police he wanted no violence in his church, especially against women. We had a brief verbal skirmish about abortion also being violence against women and then we told him to tell his Pope about our protest and to stop the Church supporting the anti-abortion lobby. His answer was silence. We packed up and left. Outside on the street we were joined by scores of women who had answered the secret call. Followed by TV and press reporters, we managed to march towards Victoria Station before the police intervened. We were told, politely but firmly, that we were a traffic hindrance. We were to stop the unauthorized gathering. We left peacefully. Note the difference. Britain in the 1970s was a civilised society where people could protest peacefully for their point of view with a fair degree of tolerance from the authorities. This is a good measure of the limits of democracy. We can ask how far this has changed in today’s Britain (particularly for the working class and citizens of colour); but if we look at Putin’s Russia and the treatment of Pussy Riot for a similar action, we see a huge difference. There’s no chance for debate. The iron fist of state repression has no velvet glove to soften the blows. There’s no hint of democracy. It’s a miracle that freethinking people can breathe there at all, let alone pluck up the guts to protest. Russia is labouring under stifling consensus and forced unity imposed by Putin’s regime, where opposition is worn down by attrition, made to disappear, driven into secrecy or simply gunned down on the street. (Every time you remember Pussy Riot, spare a thought for Anna Politkovskaya, the heroic journalist shot and killed in the lift of her block of flats on 7 October 2006: another commemorative date of sadness, shame and horror for people who care about free speech.) .

Pussy Riot protest in the Moscow cathedral

. Protest in the Cathedral – Version 2 (2012) The young women of Pussy Riot dared to show open defiance. To highlight the Orthodox Church’s massive influence on Russian life, they staged a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of the Russian Orthodox Church. It lasted only a few minutes before being brutally broken up by Putin’s police. Take a few minutes to watch this clip from You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCasuaAczKY . Here are the lyrics of the song they were singing in the Cathedral, in the original Russian: PUSSY RIOT’s PUNK PRAYER    ТЕКСТ ПАНК-МОЛЕБНА: (Хор) Богородица, Дево, Путина прогони Путина прогони, Путина прогони (конец хора) Черная ряса, золотые погоны Все прихожане ползут на поклоны Призрак свободы на небесах Гей-прайд отправлен в Сибирь в кандалах Глава КГБ, их главный святой Ведет протестующих в СИЗО под конвой Чтобы Святейшего не оскорбить Женщинам нужно рожать и любить Срань, срань, срань Господня Срань, срань, срань Господня (Хор) Богородица, Дево, стань феминисткой Стань феминисткой, феминисткой стань (конец хора) Церковная хвала прогнивших воджей Крестный ход из черных лимузинов В школу к тебе собирается проповедник Иди на урок – принеси ему денег! Патриарх Гундяй верит в Путина Лучше бы в Бога, сука, верил Пояс девы не заменит митингов – На протестах с нами Приснодева Мария! (Хор) Богородица, Дево, Путина прогони Путина прогони, Путина прогони (конец хора) .          

FREE PUSSY RIOT at the Berlin Literature Festival Sept. 2012

Artwork & photo © Thomas Schliesser . And here is an English version by Guardian poetry editor Carol Rumens:   Punk Prayer, English version by Carol Rumens (Chorus) Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee! Congregations genuflect, Black robes brag gilt epaulettes, Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven, Gay Pride’s chained and in detention. KGB’s chief saint descends To guide the punks to prison vans. Don’t upset His Saintship, ladies, Stick to making love and babies. Crap, crap, this godliness crap! Crap, crap, this holiness crap! (Chorus) Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Be a feminist, we pray thee, Be a feminist, we pray thee. Bless our festering bastard-boss. Let black cars parade the Cross. The Missionary’s in class for cash. Meet him there, and pay his stash. Patriarch Gundy believes in Putin. Better believe in God, you vermin! Fight for rights, forget the rite – Join our protest, Holy Virgin. (Chorus) Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him! . © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. . And the same text one more, this time in German translation: Punk Prayer (German version) Punk-Gebet Mutter Gottes, du Jungfrau, vertreibe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! Schwarzer Priesterrock, goldene Schulterklappen –  Alle Pfarrkinder kriechen zur Vergebung. Das Gespenst der Freiheit im Himmel – Homosexuelle werden in Ketten nach Sibirien geschickt. Der KGB-Chef ist euer oberster Heiliger. Er steckt die Demonstranten ins Gefängnis. Um den Heiligsten nicht zu betrüben, müssen Frauen gebären und lieben. Göttlicher Dreck, Dreck, Dreck! Göttlicher Dreck, Dreck, Dreck! Mutter Gottes, du Jungfrau, werde Feministin, werde Feministin, werde Feministin! Kirchliche Lobesgesang für die verfaulten Führer – Kreuzzug aus schwarzen Limousinen. In die Schule kommt der Pfarrer, geh zum Unterricht – bring ihm Geld. Der Patriarch glaubt an Putin. Besser sollte er, der Hund, an Gott glauben. Der Gürtel der Seligen Jungfrau ersetzt keine Demonstrationen – Die Jungfrau Maria ist bei den Protesten mit uns! Mutter Gottes, Du Jungfrau, vertriebe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! . PEACEFUL PROTEST – DRACONIAN SENTENCES As usual ― and particularly in the age of instant mass media coverage ― repressive violence is counterproductive. The live footage of the performance being broken up only adds to its impact. Those few seconds in the Orthodox cathedral made history. And repression changes people and their aims. Pussy Riot has developed from a punk protest music group into a movement. Their political statements are cries for freedom, messages from the depths of the hell that Russia is becoming in our time. Following the age-old tactic of singling out and picking off “leaders” (and ignoring Pussy Riot’s self-declared democratic egalitarianism) the Russian regime chose to persecute three members of PUSSY RIOT in a show trial in Moscow. It only proved their point: the judge confirmed the Church as a sacred force in Russian society, and the three Pussy Riot defendants were given draconian sentences. Two years in a prison colony. Just close your eyes for a moment and try to imagine the fate of three young women in Putin’s Gulag. For two years. How much of their lives will it take to recover? Then lift up your voice and shout: FREE PUSSY RIOT!! . . The first of October 2012 is the date of Pussy Riot’s appeal. Amnesty International and the many other Pussy Riot support organisations have called for a day of global action on 1st October. Do what you can. It all counts. FREE THE THREE BRAVE WOMEN: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (aged 22) Maria Alyokhina (aged 24) and Yekaterina Samutsevich (aged 30) REPEAL THEIR SENTENCES NOW! FREE PUSSY RIOT!! .

Russian Embassy Berlin August 2012 – thanks to Sebastian Brux

. Further information: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/09/pussy-riot-asks-world-help-appeals-trial Links to main organisations http://www.freepussyriot.org http://www.amnestyusa.org/ http://www.amnesty.fr/AI-en-action/Protegeons-les-personnes/Personnes-en-danger/Actions/Les-Pussy-Riot-condamnees-la-mobilisation-doit-continuer-5979?gclid=CL7g9rGO27ICFcfKtAodJ0MABQ http://freepussyriot.org/fr/news/global-day-2-1st-october-global-day-action-freepussyriot Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Pussy-Riot/290329744373155?fref=ts https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pussy-Riot/258101530907327?fref=ts Twitter https://twitter.com/freepussyriot . © Karen Margolis, 30 September 2012 .

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PAST.IS.PAST&PASTISPAST&PAST.IS.PAST&PASTISPAST&PAST.IS.PAST

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is the time for a clean slate

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exorcise the demon

exorcise the demon

hunger fast to death

flagellate the body

to the last gasping breath

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drink the brew of witches

eat the air of want

snatch the full-blown sexes

of scavengers on the hunt

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bear the guilt of husbands

fight the hate of wives

let them suck your red, red blood

to fill their empty lives

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drain the lake of meaning

stare into its depths

muddy mirror echoes hollow

words from your cracked lips

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lay your body on a stone

let them tie you down

watch the life-juice ebb away

—  they’ll drink it when you’re gone

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play the role they write for you

starving ’gainst the stream

history flows with or without you

in space no one can hear you scream

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drive away the dybbuk

         steal his sleep at night

         break his bones

         ache his teeth

         wear out his hair

         tear out his guts

         flake off the flesh

         till the love shines through

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then the waiting sharks

         will come to devour you

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Poem and photos    © Karen Margolis 2012

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BERLINLIEST=BERLINREADS=BERLINLIEST=BERLINREADS=BERLINLIEST=BERLINREADS

ILB International Literary Festival Berlin… 4-16 September 2012

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WORD ON THE STREET for the Festival:

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Artwork & photo © Thomas Schliesser

This year Berlin’s international literary festival started a great new tradition: using Facebook and other social media to invite local writers and literature lovers to hold their own open mike poetry readings all over the city. The readings began at 4 pm on 4 September, an hour before the official festival opening ceremony. They were mostly over by 4:15 pm. In Berlin’s Schöneberg district,  a street reading was held for the three imprisoned PUSSY RIOT band members sentenced to jail in Moscow last month. An impromptu three-person group read out, in turn, three versions in different languages of the punk prayer that Pussy Riot performed in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The prayer was read first in the original Russian, then in German and English translation. The three versions are printed below. . PUSSY RIOT’s PUNK PRAYER    ТЕКСТ ПАНК-МОЛЕБНА: (Хор) Богородица, Дево, Путина прогони Путина прогони, Путина прогони (конец хора) Черная ряса, золотые погоны Все прихожане ползут на поклоны Призрак свободы на небесах Гей-прайд отправлен в Сибирь в кандалах Глава КГБ, их главный святой Ведет протестующих в СИЗО под конвой Чтобы Святейшего не оскорбить Женщинам нужно рожать и любить Срань, срань, срань Господня Срань, срань, срань Господня (Хор) Богородица, Дево, стань феминисткой Стань феминисткой, феминисткой стань (конец хора) Церковная хвала прогнивших воджей Крестный ход из черных лимузинов В школу к тебе собирается проповедник Иди на урок – принеси ему денег! Патриарх Гундяй верит в Путина Лучше бы в Бога, сука, верил Пояс девы не заменит митингов – На протестах с нами Приснодева Мария! (Хор) Богородица, Дево, Путина прогони Путина прогони, Путина прогони (конец хора)          

Punk Prayer, English version by Carol Rumens

(Chorus) Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee! Congregations genuflect, Black robes brag gilt epaulettes, Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven, Gay Pride’s chained and in detention. KGB’s chief saint descends To guide the punks to prison vans. Don’t upset His Saintship, ladies, Stick to making love and babies. Crap, crap, this godliness crap! Crap, crap, this holiness crap! (Chorus) Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Be a feminist, we pray thee, Be a feminist, we pray thee. Bless our festering bastard-boss. Let black cars parade the Cross. The Missionary’s in class for cash. Meet him there, and pay his stash. Patriarch Gundy believes in Putin. Better believe in God, you vermin! Fight for rights, forget the rite – Join our protest, Holy Virgin. (Chorus) Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him! . © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. . Punk Prayer (German version) Punk-Gebet Mutter Gottes, du Jungfrau, vertreibe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! Schwarzer Priesterrock, goldene Schulterklappen –  Alle Pfarrkinder kriechen zur Vergebung. Das Gespenst der Freiheit im Himmel – Homosexuelle werden in Ketten nach Sibirien geschickt. Der KGB-Chef ist euer oberster Heiliger. Er steckt die Demonstranten ins Gefängnis. Um den Heiligsten nicht zu betrüben, müssen Frauen gebären und lieben. Göttlicher Dreck, Dreck, Dreck! Göttlicher Dreck, Dreck, Dreck! Mutter Gottes, du Jungfrau, werde Feministin, werde Feministin, werde Feministin! Kirchliche Lobesgesang für die verfaulten Führer – Kreuzzug aus schwarzen Limousinen. In die Schule kommt der Pfarrer, geh zum Unterricht – bring ihm Geld. Der Patriarch glaubt an Putin. Besser sollte er, der Hund, an Gott glauben. Der Gürtel der Seligen Jungfrau ersetzt keine Demonstrationen – Die Jungfrau Maria ist bei den Protesten mit uns! Mutter Gottes, Du Jungfrau, vertriebe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! Vertreibe Putin! . For a recording of the live Pussy Riot performance that resulted in the convictions, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCasuaAczKY . PLEASE DON’T FORGET! As you read this, three Pussy Riot members,  Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich are in jail serving draconian sentences for speaking out against the huge influence of the Russian church over the state. For exercising the right of free speech. FREE PUSSY RIOT!! . © Karen Margolis Berlin, 4 September 2012

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GETTING WISE:GETTING WISE:GETTING WISE:GETTING WISE:GETTING WISE

Ever heard of angelicide? Or post-humanist philosophy?

Here’s where you can read about it:

Peter Sloterdijk on Contemporary Theory and Scholarship.

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THE ART OF PHILOSOPHY

Wisdom as a Practice

by Peter Sloterdijk

Translated by Karen Margolis

Columbia University Press

Published 28 August 2012

“”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”

CHANGE; CHANGE; CHANGE; CHANGE; CHANGE; CHANGE; CHANGE

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changing

change money

a prelude to spending

change a man

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change tactics

make a list

minus side longer

draw an ultimatum line

impose a fine

change trains

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change habits

hack away at them

they grow teeth   bite back

chop them off

they flourish all the more

like snakes on the gorgon’s head

pull them out at the roots

they multiply in the hand

change cigarette brand

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change hairstyle

a prelude to hoping

change heads

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change clothes

a prelude to dieting

change sizes

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change shoes

a prelude to dancing

change feet

.

change drugs

a prelude to flying

change carpets

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change homes

a prelude to moving

change routes

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change work

a prelude to retiring

change partners

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change places

a prelude to parting

change faces

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change shops

a prelude to consuming

change products

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change cases

a prelude to declining

change contents

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change colour

a prelude to blending in

change scenery

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ring the changes

a prelude to cashing in

change rings

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change choices

a prelude to deciding

change free will

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change dates

a prelude to lying

times change

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change a man

do it fast

exchange rate falling

all the time

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change money

do it fast

change gets smaller

all the time

the dime stores fuller

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change change

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© Karen Margolis        2012

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Photos: New National Gallery Berlin 5 July 2012 ???????????????????????????????????????????????? . . BIRDS&WORDS.BIRDS&WORDS.BIRDS&WORDS.BIRDS&WORDS

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Birds, the Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg and Xijun When I was a girl of 20, most of the men who impressed me were older and belonged to the New Left. They told me tales of heroism and martyrdom in the heady days of the ’68 movements, of anti-war marches on the streets of the USA, of ripping up pavestones to throw at cops in the student revolt in Paris, or watching with clenched fists as the tanks rolled in to crush the Prague spring. In the hiatus of the early 1970s, between the trip of Easy Rider and the birth of punk out of black dustbin bags, dozens of revolutionary splinter groups of all flavours of Marxism and Maoism claimed the monopoly on the true creed and the correct path to revolution. As a young girl of 20, I was deeply influenced by the tautological arguments and closed thinking systems that led inevitably to overthrow of capitalism and inexorably to revolution and a new world order as predicted by the founding fathers of communism. Of course, it was tough stuff for a young woman, and I had to confess to occasional qualms about the necessity for revolutionary violence, elimination of false consciousness and other less attractive aspects of the programme I was expected to follow. It would all be worth it in the end, they assured me. There were old proverbs about breaking eggs to make omelettes and new sayings about revolutions not being dinner parties, and it all pointed to the regrettable sacrifice without which major change on the world stage seems impossible. The parallels with religion are almost too obvious to mention. Doubts could be banished and everything could be justified in a process whose very smoothness should have made me fundamentally wonder about the explanations I was trying to bend my mind around. . . In all this, there was a man with an agile body and a winning smile who seemed to understand that my questions were simple enquiries, not hostile challenges. One day he put a little book into my hand, and told me there was another way of thinking. It was out of fashion, but might come back in time. The book was an English translation of Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letters to Sonja Liebknecht. I read it that very night, and found hope, courage, and immense admiration for its author, and have never forgotten. Years later, in the heady period towards the end of the Cold War, I found an original German version of that little book in a bookshop in Leipzig, the old literary capital of communist East Germany. . . The slim hardcover edition has a dust cover of beige and brown shadows that could be bones but could be anything else as well, and the title, “Briefe aus dem Gefängnis”, is printed in a curling, decorative old script that belies the bitterness of the content. Rosa Luxemburg wrote the letters from prison in Prussia in 1917 to Sonja, wife of her comrade in arms Karl Liebknecht, to comfort her during Karl’s imprisonment. But they express as much sorrow and anger as hope and good cheer. Most powerfully, they speak of the prisoner’s longing for freedom and her ways of making solitary confinement bearable. Birds play a special role. Over and again, Rosa uses the classic association of birds with freedom. Birds symbolise cosmopolitanism, the maximum existential space, the ability to transcend narrow boundaries and categories and touch heaven.  Writing to another correspondent in 1917, Mathilde Wurm, about whether she felt anything special in being Jewish, she said, “… I have no special corner of my heart reserved for the ghetto; I am at home wherever in the world there are clouds, birds and human tears.” . . On a real, day-to-day level, birds made her imprisonment tolerable by offering living communication. She put out food on her cell windowsill, and the birds became her family:

“Wronke, 23 May 1917

… The lilac tree is already blooming here, the first blossoms came out today. It’s so warm I had to put on my lightest muslin dress. But even with the sun and heat, my little birds have gradually stopped singing. They are obviously all very busy breeding; the females are sitting in the nest and the males have their beaks full with the job of finding food for themselves and their wives. Anyway, they’re probably nesting more in the fields or in big trees, because it’s quiet in my little garden. Now and then I can briefly hear the nightingale, or the greenfinch with its typical clacking warble, or the chaffinch belting out once or twice in the late evening. My tomtits haven’t shown up at all any more. Yesterday I only got a distant greeting from a blue tit, and that gave me quite a jolt. The blue tit isn’t resident like the great tit — it usually returns here again at the end of March. At first it stayed close by my window the whole time, came to eat with the others and busily chirped its funny call, “tzitzi bay”, but drawling so much it sounded like a naughty child’s teasing. It made me laugh every time and I had to reply in kind. It vanished with the others at the beginning of May to nest outside somewhere. I didn’t see or hear it for weeks. Then yesterday I suddenly heard it again on the other side of the wall that separates our yard from another tract of the prison: the familiar greeting, but very different, just three times in succession, very short and hurried, “Tzitzi bay, tzitzi bay, tzitzi bay,” and then it was quiet again. It made me wince because there is so much in that rapid, faraway call: a whole little bird story. In fact, the blue tit’s song was a reminder of the beautiful period of wooing just before the spring, when they sang and enticed the whole day; but now it means gathering flies and midges for himself and the family the whole day; so there’s just a short reminiscence, “I’ve got no time — ah yes, it was lovely — spring will be over soon — tzitzi bay  — tzitzi bay  — tzitzi bay  — …” Believe me, dearest Sonja, a bird call like that, with so much feeling, can move me deeply.

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.

“My mother, who thought the Bible was second only to Schiller as the pinnacle of wisdom, believed King Solomon understood the song of birds. Back then I laughed at my mother’s naivety with all the arrogance of a fifteen year old armed with the latest modern science education. Now I’m like King Solomon myself: I also understand the language of birds and all the animals. Obviously not as if they were using human words, but I understand all the different nuances and feelings they put into their sounds. Birdsong only sounds all the same to the coarse ears of indifferent people. If you love and understand animals you can find a great variety of expression, a whole “language”. Even the general silence after the noise of early spring is full of feeling, and I know if I’m still here in autumn, which seems very likely, all my friends will come back to look for food on my windowsill; I’m already looking forward to seeing one of the great tits who’s a special friend of mine.”

Rosa Luxemburg, Briefe aus dem Gefängnis,

Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1986, pp. 44-46

. . Had she been able to read ancient Chinese scrolls, Rosa Luxemburg may have found much in common with the plight of the little princess Xijun, who lived at the threshold of the 1st century B.C. Xijun, a poet and granddaughter of Emperor Wu, was a victim of the patriarchal marriage politics that wed noble girls out to “barbarian” lords. Sent to live in the steppes in an arranged marriage, she lamented her fate in a poem. In the end, like Luxemburg and so many other captives through the ages, she wished to become a bird and fly away.

“I was married out

to the place where the sky ends. […]

Now I sleep in a felt-covered tent

and feed on raw meat

and mare’s milk.

My heart is heavy —

how I long to return!

If I were a yellow crane

I would fly home right away.”

Xijun, cited in Hanshu (1151), chap. 96.

.

. Acknowledgements to Thomas Höllmann for the German translation of Xijun’s poem from his book, Schlafender Lotus, trunkenes Huhn, C.H. Beck, Munich 2010, p. 126.

© Karen Margolis

Berlin, July 2012

.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

SONGLINES.SONGLINES.SONGLINES.SONGLINES.SONGLINES.SONGLINES

… and it goes like this: there was once a beginning…

.

.

Songlines

for Ronnie

Gonna tell you a story gonna sing you a song

it’s as old as the hills but it won’t take that long

it comes from the land of the aborigine

where matildas waltz wild    dingoes run free

koalas get high munching eucalyptus leaves

and kangaroos have something up their sleeves.

.

And it goes like this:  there was once a beginning

grey sea  twilight sky  murky earth  nothing living

while beyond the west clouds in green paradise

the ageless skydwellers rolled eternal dice

.

that’s nice:  a pretty picture they painted:

hair of gold, emu’s feet, faces young & untainted  –

not like the ancients gnarled knotted & grey

who slept in earth hollows awaiting the day

when the primordial soup would finish its cooking

like the billy that boils when nobody’s looking.

.

you can hear words words words

but that don’t mean nothing

those words don’t matter  –

the song’s the thing

.

mystery mythology

history anthropology

forget them  reject them

just listen to the melody

.

follow the songlines

sing each thing a name

the words they may change

but the song stays the same

.

follow the songlines

from desert to sea

to where sand wind & waves

mix in harmony

.

Now hear me well    there’s still a lot to tell

& a long way to go till the final bell:

for a start there’s the birth of the sun that burst

from inside the earth to light the universe:

.

the stars & moon followed closely behind

then the ancients’ limbs began slowly to unwind

in an excess of production, an orgy of birth

simultaneously populating sky sea & earth:

.

from the Snake Man’s navel snakes began to slither

the Cockatoo Man felt the sprouting of feathers

the Wallaby Man had a kicking in his belly

the Bumblebee Man was shitting royal jelly,

the mud fell from their thighs like placenta from a baby

(it happened like I say & I don’t mean maybe):

.

with one great cry the ancients stood up tall

each opened his mouth & began to call

I AM I AM I AM SNAKE I AM HONEY-ANT

I AM KANGAROO KOALA COCKATOO & CORYBANT

I AM THE BABY THAT IS BORN OUT OF ME

& THAT’S THE FIRST NAMING  THE MOST SACRED MYSTERY.

.

mystery mythology

history anthropology

forget them  reject them

just listen to the melody

.

follow the songlines

sing each thing a name

the words they may change

but the song stays the same

.

follow the songlines

from desert to sea

to where sand wind & waves

meet in harmony

.

Then basking in the sunlight the ancients moved onwards

naming all they saw both backwards & forwards

calling each thing into being, bestowing a purpose

& weaving their names into primeval verses.

.

They sang their way across the wide wild world

singing the rivers the saltpans the sand-dunes the humming birds;

they hunted ate, fucked, they danced & slaughtered

bathed in waterholes, bred sons & daughters;

wherever their tracks led they left a lasting trail

of music that echoed over hill & vale;

they wrapped the whole world in a fine web of song

their work was hard & the time it took was long

& when they were through & the earth was fully sung

they knew they must leave the future to the young.

.

So frozen stiff by the cold of the ages

some crawled into caves, some crept into cages

some sank in the ground where they stood chilled & numb

some returned to the waterholes whence they had come;

they all went back to the earth that bore them

swallowed by the black hole that existed before them,

.

but they’ll not be forgotten, they left a lasting legacy

a legend indestructible, a pattern of great intricacy

a system of consummate mathematical accuracy

a dreaming, a screaming a sensual sinful fantasy.

.

follow the songlines

sing each thing a name

the words they may change

but the song stays the same

.

follow the songlines

from desert to sea

to where sand wind & waves

make a harmony

.

Now my story’s done & what’s told is freely told

you can take it or leave it ’cos a songline can’t be sold

what belongs to the earth is borrowed only for a time

that’s life;  or love;  or a glimmer of moonshine

or words that hover when the speaker’s dead ’n gone:

but the music the music goes on & on & on;

.

you can follow the songlines to far eternity

go on go on go on go on   & find the infinite melody.

.

you can hear words words words

but that don’t mean nothing

those words don’t matter  –

the song’s the thing.

.

follow the songlines

sing each thing a name

the words they may change

but the song stays the same

.

follow the songlines

from desert to sea

to where sun & moon

join in harmony

.

mystery mythology

history anthropology

forget them  reject them

just listen to the melody.

© Karen Margolis 2012

.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

The e-Book Experiment:

The Floating Castle on Kindle 

A story of three generations across three continents in the 20th century:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Floating-Castle-ebook/dp/B008A661LI/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1339399190&sr=8-4

The Floating Castle
a novel by Karen Margolis

. Also available on your local Amazon sites: amazon.co.uk; amazon.de; amazon.fr; amazon.es; amazon.it

=========================================================

interrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogationinterrogation

???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???xx???

showing at the Bath Fringe Arts Festival 

from 25 May 2012

in the exhibition

WITHIN, WITHOUT YOU

Interrogation by Karen Margolis
Within Without You Bath Fringe Arts Festival 2012

.

Scroll too long to hang: Interrogation at Within Without You
Bath Fringe Arts Festival May-June 2012

INTERROGATION

.

a handwritten poem scroll by Karen Margolis

Interrogation

people ask

why I’m here

— not for the beer

.

people ask

why I stay

it’s far away

.

people ask

when I’ll go

don’t know

.

people ask

what I do

it’s not in who’s who

.

people ask

does it pay

what can I say

.

people ask

my selling price

want firm advice

.

people ask

for times and dates

can’t wait, won’t wait

.

people ask

for milk and sugar

the coffee’s bitter

.

people ask

for sympathy

it’s free it’s free

.

people ask

the time of day

light years away

.

people ask

if I’m in love

heavens above

.

people ask

persistently

drilling into me

.

people ask

what they won’t tell

just as well

.

people ask

reluctantly

on bended knee

.

people ask

but do they need

words or deeds

.

people ask

Buddha or Allah

dream of Valhalla

.

people ask

Christ or Mohammed

to bless their bed

.

people ask

to live forever

want a saviour

.

people ask

their own reflection

for protection

.

people ask

for excess

devil in the flesh

.

people ask

to get the answer

they prefer

.

people ask

insistently

rhetorically

impatiently

metaphorically

.

people ask

unhappily

inconsiderately

noncommittally

dispassionately

.

people ask

why I’m not there

an empty chair

.

people ask

all the same

what’s in a name

.

people ask

me to dance

dolphins advance

.

people ask

kiss my arse

I’ll pass

.

people ask

for final proof

the bitter truth

.

people ask

to ease the load

till they explode

.

people ask

why life is short

weather report

.

people ask

in monotones

of well-bred clones

.

people ask

again and again

here comes the train

.

people ask

mistrustfully

uncertainly

distractedly

disconcertedly

.

people ask

committedly

dementedly

wishfully

contentedly

.

people ask

impersonally

detachedly

perfunctorily

unctuously

.

people ask

courageously

what is reality

.

people ask

leading questions

in all directions

.

people ask

ask ask ask

tongues are sharp

.

people ask

a lot, too much

.

yearning to know

the human touch

.

                  © Karen Margolis Berlin 1991/2012

easy flying May 2012

.

Milano, May 2012

.

Piazza Bottini May 2012

.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

.

.

CREDIT CRUNCH.CREDIT CRUNCH.CREDIT CRUNCH.CREDIT CRUNCH

Berlin art approach (old Tagesspiegel site) 2011

by special request of Brian Gibson

in conjunction with the exhibition  WITHIN, WITHOUT YOU

Bath, England, May-June 2012

Within, Without You Draws together 20 artists from The United Kingdom, Russia, Haiti, Germany and Sweden who share an interest in what it means to be in or out of the margins. An eclectic mix of poetry, painting, photography, video and sculpture, this exhibition celebrates the creative output of the individual and is a space to think about where we are placed (and place ourselves) within any given spectrum. Curated by: Brian Robert Gibson & Patrick Narbal Boucard Web address: www.withinwithoutyou.info The Pet Store 7 Upper Borough Walls Bath, Avon BA1 1QR 25th May-10th June 2012 – 10am-6pm Private View: Fri 25th May 6-9pm

.

CREDIT CRUNCH

a poem cycle

by Karen Margolis

Berlin/Nice 2008-9

.

.

credit crunch

these days money matters

are tougher, harder & fraught with pitfalls:

I buried the envelope marked EasyCredit

in the dump bin for unsolicited mail

under the letterboxes in the dingy hall

we are the people Barclays batters

with harassment tactics

(homeworking wife has to take the calls)

.

we are the breadline trekkers

light years from the market,

next-to-nil budget artists

fallen from the middle class

dodging the poverty trap

ever wary of the grabbing claws

of the monster of the conjuncture

.

they used to call it a squeeze

(at least the comfort of a boa embrace

before submersion in the mire of debt)

.

now it’s come to the crunch

you can feel teeth chewing

on human gristle, bones

cracking in anguish, broken homes.

.

Hungry to blow up bonds

in the tunnel of conformity

thirsting after talk of liquidity

searching desperately for a bolt hole

& ignoring the stars warning me

not to live beyond my means

.

I snatch my future

from the jaws of the credit crunch

abandon the servile life in Berlin

and pawn my rotten pension

for a sunshine studio rented virtually

.

a room I don’t own, red rooftops and gulls

waves on the doorstep, shells underfoot,

at lasta lone track by water

_________________________________

Footnote for AJAR Trustees & Co.:

clutch your pounds tightly, avoid fair shares

exploit loopholes to evade the tax crunch

strive to control the will beyond the grave —

your futures a stake in a perimeter cemetery

© Karen Margolis                    Berlin 2008

.

Stranded mermaid Nice Promenade March 2011

Stillborn Poem

for Ruth

Sat down to write a poem

a man came into the room

to use the telephone

the title flew out of the open door

.

a boy came into the room

to tell me why Russia is cold

the first line fell into an ice hole

.

a postwoman came up the stairs

to hand over a registered letter

the rhythm fled with her departing footsteps

.

my mobile rang twice

the display was blank

a harsh voice shattered my rhyme.

.

The poem came out unripe

shrivelled

and aged before its time.

.

Grieving, I cut the cord

to my botched creation

and gasped for breathing space

until the next interruption.

Berlin October 2008

.

Professor Dr. Dr. Dr.

Bronze nameplate extra long

a row of titles makes a man;

description of status,

notably academic

requires the ultimate in precision

.

But please let’s not argue

about perfection in translation

language belongs to its users

& feels simply right or wrong

.

Professor Dr. Dr. Dr.

cultivates prestige & pension

in his institutional chair

pen poised over student essays

classic comment: could do better

.

bewildered by linguistic creativity

& baffled by digital technology

he takes refuge (or revenge)

in the thicket of pedantry

.

Let’s not talk of hours & weeks

spent in careful search for sense

Professor Triple Doctor, textual sleuth

is busy tracking down stray commas

& oozing scholarly authority;

.

correcting three times over

he’s satisfied at finding fault again:

a missing bracket in a bibliography.

.

Please let’s not talk about the price

of this farce.

How do you calculate the cost

of humouring an academic

with no hair left to pick the nits from?

Berlin September 2008

.

When you live with children, you live with sand

From the playground the beach the sports field

they bring it home as a seasonal offering

sand caked to mud or soft and slushy cold and gritty

mixed with salt or sunbaked fine and powdery

.

sand knocked out of shoes on doorsteps

fallen from pockets turned inside out

strewn over carpets, pillows and towels

settling in corners behind cupboards

and clogging up washing machines

.

Fresh from building castles and winning trophies

for picture book families

the children return with a bounty of sand

enough to fill a lifetime of hourglasses

ebbing away in a trickle of dry grains

to be sucked up in the connubial vacuum.

.

Out there in the virtual world

pundits discuss hedge funds & capital gains

and politicians deplore toxic debt & meltdown

.

while here on the home front

legions of female warriors

equipped from the household arsenal

battle ceaselessly against that inflationary menace

sand, the encroaching desert of domestic life

Berlin November 2008

I have skills, Nice March 2011

.

Looking for feelings on my laptop

long past bedtime

still awake, all alone

looking for feelings on my laptop

.

there’s comfort in clicking,

illusion of activity

in virtual contact with the ether

.

power in my fingertips

over a digital universe out there

wrapped in a web of news and views

.

sounds, colours, fast moving pictures

tickle the synapses

but don’t touch the senses

.

and often jangle the nerves

with pop-ups or downloads

(never mind that ugly word ‘blog’)

.

voyeurs are watching

from hidden windows while pincodes

vanish down memory holes

.

later, after hours of online trawling

the emptiness beyond logout

an end without conclusion

.

Millions of women, pollsters say

prefer online surfing to sex

personally I like my climaxes live

.

but tonight I’ve worked too long

in my electronic office

the 21st century sweatshop

.

alone at my laptop I surrender

to the pleasure of chasing links

until numbed by a hundred hits

.

How long does it take for the mind

to reject mass pacification

and make its own connections?

.

When the feeling finally comes

it’s anger. It’s real

and it shouts for revolution

         © Karen Margolis      Nice December 2008

.

The Stampede of the Wildebeest

Barely registered on the global scale

of tsunamis, terrorism and epidemics

a stray news item

retrieved again a year later

from a file marked accidents

.

Did I save it as an early premonition

of the decade’s ending in decay?

.

October 2007: 15,000 wildebeest

perished on the annual migration

between Tanzania and Kenya

.

A strong tide swept them away

panic did the rest; for most

death came by trampling

.

Had the trees still been there

they might have checked the speed

of the rushing river waters

.

Conservationists blamed deforestation;

a game reserve official took solace in percentages

not a big loss, he said, relatively speaking

millions of wildebeest are still roaming

in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem

.

The stampede, it was agreed,

would hardly affect tourism

a landscape of dead animals, in fact

can be a bonus in peak season

if you don’t mind the stench.

.

For more than a week

the carcasses lay rotting

picked over by marabou storks,

vultures, crocodiles

and other scavengers

.

visitors held handkerchiefs

to their faces

as they took snapshots

of the piled-up corpses

     Nice December 2008

.

Year’s End Wish for Caroline

Let it be May, Caroline

three times a year

.

first in its rightful place

after the frost

and before full bloom…

.

… and then again

cancelling November and December

and bypassing the hectic season

of endless cooking

and automatic giving

.

Instead, a gentle ride

above the clouds

on a carpet of marigolds

dotted with bluebell cushions

gliding lightly over

new year’s fiery baptism

before descending gradually

to join the dance of spring

.

If May came around

three times a year, Caroline

I’d send you triple birthday cards

on humming birds’ wings.

.

A wish for a dear friend

can’t alter the calendar

yet life would be bleak

without our flights of fancy

        Nice December 2008

.

Season of empty shops

A bubble of fragile truth

floating on a puddle of lies

refusing to be blown away

and trying not to burst

.

Credibility a flash game

while the present is downloaded

as a crisis scenario

on flickering displays

.

Elena, age 7, fires a question

through the baubles and tinsel

of adult illusion: “Why all the fuss

about a baby being born?”

.

A season of empty shops

dwindling faith and hollow sentiment

weighs ahead, sinking the year

we’ve already written off as loss

            Nice December 2008

.

Auguststrasse gallery weekend Berlin 2011

Credit Crunch Conjunctural Rap

                        or Hit Back with Poetry

                                   for Dmitry

.

They tell us to spend

they tell us to save

their speech has a frown

the conjuncture’s grave

.

they ask famous experts

why things went wrong

and forecast much worse

before too long

.

They bail out the culprits

and prop up the banks

convene crisis summits

and set up think tanks

they promise relief

for the poor and homeless

and donate rescue funds

for firms in distress

.

They issue new dress codes

in style with the times

grey is the colour

discreet are the lines

they tell us to swap

excess for rigour:

tightening our belts

is good for the figure

.

Who are they anyway?

The powers that be?

watching politics on stage

from seats in the gallery

.

they were there before leaders came

and still there when they went again

.

the spectre of revolution

robs their sleep of late

Marx back on book lists

Trotsky rehabilitated

.

the masters urge moderation

offer games to amuse

but deep down we serfs know

there’s nothing to lose

.

How many times

must we repeat history?

How many must suffer

the ills of society?

How long will it take

till we seize our own fate

and dispose of a system

that’s past its expiry date?

                 Nice January 2009

.

We the people are dangerous

“What is worse – to rob a bank or to found one?”

                                                               – Bertolt Brecht

.

we the people are dangerous

we are the threat from within

on our own alone a risk factor

in twos a conspiracy together

in threes a terrorist network already

(at least potentially

if thoughts roam freely)

.

phrase-coining machines

are minting new slogans

for hard times

.

if we get angry

they call us grievance-mongers

if we won’t fit the mould

we’re anti-social elements

if we march in protest

they treat us like vandals

.

the bigger their leadership deficit

the louder they praise democracy

calling in thought police

to monitor our surfing habits

planting spy cameras on lamp posts

to protect order and property

& preaching sermons that mock belief

.

we the people walk on streets

littered with trampled promises

while they sweep past blindly

rehearsing smiles and hollow speeches

in the comfort of the back seat

on the way to a pressing

historic photo opportunity

.

we the people

don’t have the time

to hang on for gloomy forecasts

or global pronouncements

.

we have an appointment

to greet the moment

our natural desire to enjoy

small gestures & simple pleasures

is dangerous

Berlin July 2009

.

Genius café Berlin 2011

.

low trust

We don’t need the man with the bow tie to tell us it’s a time of low trust.

He sounded as if it were a quote of the day, a brand new discovery

or the latest twitter message.

I’ve known it since I caught some of my nearest (undearest)

setting up a trust to swindle my inheritance

and salesmen rang the doorbell peddling afterlife insurance.

.

Meanwhile we’ve settled in to the credit crunch —

inured to globalised fraud & fake predictions

compiling lexicons of synonyms for crisis

we’ve learned to count the change twice at our friendly local supermarket.

.

Low trust, secret pacts, hidden agendas, high profits.

Wars exported in camouflaged crates

random killers shooting for instant fame

boots stamping out brains in meaningless rage.

They can’t scalp or scapegoat the gods that failed.

.

Do we really want the details? Can we trust what they tell us?

How can facts sustain their value when trust is a safety net

with the threads worn through?

.

Out of the quicksands of perpetual betrayal

the fragile sprouts of a seventh sense

reach towards a way without a compass

urging us to invest in dreams

and trust our instinct for laughter

Berlin August 2009

.

Alone & Afraid

The Great Fear in the Dark Ages

bred riots and mass migrations

freak storms & tidal waves

calves born with two heads

babies with cauls around their necks

plague and pestilence, wars

and inquisitions, visions

of the horsemen of the apocalypse

avenging angels and weeping madonnas

.

millions downed tools and left their villages

running from they knew not what

.

our age is still nameless

only a series of changing labels

fashion fads we can’t avoid

affordable fakes for one & all

the Great Fear stalks us in shopping malls

perpetually ringing cellphones

menacing headlines

tales of invading hordes & terrorist threats

screens and cameras

in public and private spaces

.

the Great Fear fills the hole

where gods or love used to be

it’s fuelled by insecurity

.

insects devoid of instinct

we scuttle into the web for safety

our virtual universe offers disembodied

signs & wonders to all & sundry

numbs the senses with the drug of choice

and leaves us lonely.

Berlin, August 2009

.

Whatever you do, don’t react

if you answer a question

you might betray feeling

.

if you raise an eyebrow

they’ll condemn you for doubting

.

if you venture a comment

it’s stored for future evidence

.

speak only when spoken to

avoid suspicion of free thinking

.

if you shout out loud

they’ll charge you for losing control

.

before going out in public

check your mask in the mirror

.

if you play it that way, my friend

you’ll soon feel the chill of success

Berlin, August 2009

.

.

depression fashion

those classic pictures of the 1930s

black-and-white, subtle undertones

depression, like any other era

has its iconic images, its music, its look & feel

(its war photos particularly striking)

.

those enduring clichés of the ’30s

the bleak images of poverty

pinched faces in soup queues

dossers asleep on heating vents

veteran beggars on crutches

children barefoot on snowy streets

.

black shirts, high boots & monumental buildings

the harsh aesthetics of tyranny

.

forget suffering, focus on lifestyle

youth claims copyright on the present

the past tastes of stale biscuits

the future will design its own costume

.

fashion cuts its cloth to suit the times

look at this season’s salute to the ’30s:

flat caps, drape suits, wasp waists, hard chic

muted colours & padded shoulders (watch for the movie tie-ins)

made in China marketed by the mafia

elegantly tailored to the new age of sobriety

Berlin August 2009

.

.

.

misery memoirs farewell

misery memoirs are out

— stow away that unfinished tale of your dismal childhood

and study current market trends —

fantasy tops the bestseller lists

wizards, vampires & goblins followed by spies

gangsters, advice manuals and sex confessions

with history retold as psychodrama

(while crime maintains its market share

with ingenious technical updates)

.

there’s misery enough in life

daily facts in gory detail

feeds for extra hungry consumers

.

mainstream literature, always a slow mover

is struggling to meet real time demands

transformed on touch screens by the minute

agents condemn writers to wander through

the labyrinth of the entertainment business

looking for hidden corners and escape routes

Berlin August 2009

.

Reza: K’s favourite Berlin café

dyddiau du*

El farto no cree al fambrento.

The well-fed doesn’t believe the starving

– Sephardic proverb

.

dyddiau du, a refrain for dark days

clouds mob the August sun

(but only now & then)

.

“Crisis? — I haven’t noticed a crisis”

she says, stirring her happy hour

margarita at the street café

dusky warmth, tourists looking skyward

to the last trails of purple

behind the temple’s golden dome

across the street the newsstand headline:

more banker bonuses

.

dyddiau du, dark images

tangled with chains of circumstance

bind me to the far side of a precipice

others sidestep with mortgage & salary

am I free or just living precariously?

.

dark days, light evenings

after supper poker at the kitchen table

winning is child’s play

if you can change the rules at will

.

dark times, eclipses in cycles

cast shadows on unsuspected planets

tomatoes shrink before ripening

sunflowers waving tall on the terrace

turn from the light to warn me trivia

translates into choked imagination

.

dyddiau du adieu, dark days are over

I’ve jettisoned the fake Ray Ban shades

and given up trying to play cool.

*dyddiau du is Welsh for “dark days”

Berlin August 2009

Inside Reza

::

CREDIT CRUNCH war & walls

.

The blame game

India accuses Pakistan

Pakistan hits the ball back

and while they’re batting

the death toll is rising

(follow the running score across the bottom of your screens)

.

Nations of millions

play the blame game

over corpses of victims

who died just being there

.

And you & I alone

in our opposite survival corners

battle to keep pace

with the rising cost of loving.

.

how can we stop hitting

our dangling hearts, the punchbags

of mutual recrimination

while watching powerless

the daily slaughter of our future?

Nice December 2008

.

Gaza

effigy of a charred baby

high on a pole

a trophy of suffering

on parades of grief

and hate

.

Goliath versus David

the legend perverted

masses converted

to revenge

and hate

.

endless retaliation

devouring new generations

condemned from cradle

to grave

to hate

.

the parents of war

devour their children live

before the world’s eyes

an orgy of suffering

for hate

.

truce; mourning; rubble

aid appeals follow the TV show

viewers donate

to compensate

for hate

.

who needs the carnage?

who gambles on collateral damage?

who profits from death

with the weapons of war

to feed hate?

.

we the Jews

can only lose

the Red Sea will not part for us again

no god and no book

will stop us drowning in hate.

Nice January 2009

.

Look after the pennies…

money on everybody’s mind

weapon makers, for instance

praise the cost cutting impact

of their latest invention: the DIME bomb

let me spell it out for you:

Dense-Inert-Metal-Explosion (seen in action recently in Gaza)

who rewarded the inventor

of the smart acronym?

Berlin, August 2009

.

Wall story

Once there was a wall

that stood for world war

mass slaughter, genocide

and the cynical ideological

division of a continent

.

The wall fell

people rejoiced

the world watched the party

before switching channels

.

change always looks good

garnished with handouts & promises

but tarnishes quickly

dulled by the business of living

.

the magnifying glass of history

makes dictators more fearsome

heroes braver

and walls higher

.

pending anniversaries

the past is packaged

for present consumption

concrete chips in bottles

maps of vanished border zones

memoirs of neighbourhood spies

photos of faded graffiti

obsolete car models

retro matchboxes

recipes for scarcity —

all the stuff that feeds archives

commemorative displays

& museum shops

.

nostalgia repeats itself

until remembrance

turns to depression

still, there’s no going back

.

the hole the wall left

has grown to a global chasm

with millions teetering

on the edge of existence

freedom fenced in

threats on all fronts

and devalued promises

sold as rescue packages

with the call to build new walls

.

Each of us has a wall story

a tale buried in the debris

of a time that keeps returning

© Karen Margolis         Berlin, 31 March 2009

.

Original fake Berlin Wall pieces (sculpture by Karen Margolis)

remember that summer

the Baltic shores were crawling with ladybirds

red & black carpets on golden sandy beaches

ignoring the omen, the official party newspaper

blamed it on a plague of aphids

from the Soviet Union, possibly

but didn’t mention the masses streaming westwards

socialism haemorrhaging through opened borders

.

twenty years on, the ladybirds are back in force

swarming over deckchairs of budget holiday families

the Baltic shores are crawling with neo-Nazis

& real estate sharks fat from reconstruction

.

a vanished nation haunts the whole of Germany

.

Starbucks and public viewing stand for progress

(what they used to call bread & circuses)

Rotkäppchen Sekt brings a prickle of nostalgia

comic figures on traffic lights signify remembrance

and the ladybirds? — a timely gift of coincidence

Berlin August 2009

.

Kultur in post-Wall Berlin

.

CREDIT CRUNCH love bites

.

The rising cost of loving

for Richard L.

It comes as a surprise

to realise

that prices don’t obey

the law of gravity

.

mesmerised we watch

their upward trajectory

like jet trails vanishing

into the skies:

twin tracks

of progress and destruction

.

day by day

a mounting curve

of waste and want

graphs and bar charts

illustrate our plight

without filling the gaps

where ends don’t meet

.

loving, meanwhile

isn’t getting cheaper either

if you add

the wear and tear

of fractured hopes

to the extra cost

of crisis care

patching up families

and hunting new sources of surplus energy

to warm up hearts and souls gone cold

.

the dominant mode of global discontent

and wars of attrition

drains away

the flow of passion

.

sad to report: a bunch of flowers

cheap sexy underwear

foot massages

scented candles

or a night on the town

have lost their power

to banish the prophets

of gloom and doom

.

everybody’s talking about silver linings

predicting resurgence of human values

& the probable return

of love that fled

in the hour of reckoning

when the gas bill came

.

a new language

of fabricated optimism

tells us there’s a way out

if we don’t mind the wait

.

but speechless lips

dried up from fear

and desperation

are no fun to kiss

.

the cost of loving

rises & rises

stimulated by insatiable demand

& heightened by mounting desire

to put our mouth

where money is missing

.

statistics reveal

in times of crisis

the sale of lipsticks

shoots up in the high streets

Nice February 2009

.

.

Auguststrasse Berlin 2011

Once

there was intimacy

swathed in deep colour

shimmering between them

a tropical feather

.

starved of pity

betrayed by envy

the rainbow turned grey

leaving a man enclosed

in his rubber armour

and iceberg pride

.

outside a woman is straining

to get warm again

recalling an orangerie

where tenderness met frailty

as a peacock spread his tail

Nice January 2009

.

.       

.

.

Or was it Astarte?

for H.

I saw her once

or twice, not more

watched her toss her fiery curls

shining copper through stained glass

in the late May sun and I knew, old friend

she would burn your fingers

and then your heart

.

minx with a skin

of paprika and cream

freckles in sprinkles over a pert nose

youth straining the blouse

across her breasts

a drop of lemon already souring

the corners of her mouth

.

when her eyes looked past me

— the invisible older woman —

I felt a shudder, her demon hovering

on the borderline to a wilderness I’ve never known

.

So many women I’ve seen

come and go,

guests a while in your nomad’s tent;

each time you rebuilt

the goddess temple

and worshipped the image of Eve

till the sands shifted

.

You didn’t need us

to tell you

it wouldn’t work again,

you said it yourself:

.

postcards from islands

where winters are mild

mails from the city

of hash cookies and old cheese

trying to tell a story

in a long line of ever shorter stories

the latest ending

almost in its beginning

.

Young and always love crazed

your seeds sprouted poems

now you smile at yourself

with aching lips

for letting Venus

— or was it Astarte? —

fool you again

.

doting on a razor edge

comes too close to dotage

you pulled away in time —

but left shreds of being

in her restless claws

.

Resignation is only

a face you put on

before you go out;

inside you’re nursing

hurts that won’t heal

and melting the wax for the seal

on your own will

to love and suffer freely

.

You won’t give up the quest.

Maybe the goddess will descend to meet you

halfway up the mound

or maybe you’ll rediscover

your second self reincarnated

by the pool of youthfulness

in the painted garden

of an old master

Nice / Amsterdam January-June 2009

.

.

CREDIT CRUNCH Epitaph

El mal viene a quintales, se va a miticales

Trouble comes in gallons & goes in droplets

— Sephardic proverb

.

##########################################################

I AM A HILL OF POETRY. I AM A HILL OF POETRY. I AM A HILL OF POETRY

      … like planetary orbits, some cycles last a split second and some take their time…

:::

:::

 

I AM A HILL OF POETRY

poem cycle in progress

.

The title of this cycle is taken from The Song of Amergin:

“…said to have been chanted by the chief bard of the Milesian invaders as he set foot on the soil of Ireland

in the year of the world 2376 (1268 B.C.E)”.

Written originally in Old Goidelic, the only surviving versions are in colloquial Irish translation.

The phrase ‘I am a hill of poetry’ represents knowledge and is assigned to the month of September,

which has the vine as its tree and is the month of the titmouse and the poet

“the least abashed of men as the titmouse is the least easily abashed of birds.

Both band together in companies in this month and go on circuit in search of a liberal hand; and as the titmouse climbs spirally up a tree, so the poet also spirals to immortality. And Variegated is the colour of the titmouse, and of the Master-poet’s dress.”

                          — Robert Graves, The White Goddess, pp. 205-208, p. 299

Note: This cycle of 13 poems is based on the lunar calendar Robert Graves describes in The White Goddess.

Each month is associated with specific natural/mystical characteristics and a particular tree.

The 13-poem cycle consists of a poem for each month based on a specific person’s birth date and character.

Karen Margolis

:

I am a hill of poetry

                                               for L&K

                                               b. September 1952                                            

                                              

I am a hill of poetry

my tip houses an eagle’s nest

where dreams hatch into song

my base flows into the well of life

to join the subterranean rivers

in caves that echo with the playing of a dulcimer;

my belly is filled with the runes of ages

and the hand of the bard strokes my mound

like a mother caressing the head of her infant child.

.

Precious ores run in my deepest veins

mingling with the pulsing rhythms of the earth

in lustrous ecstasy. Rhymes

flick their tongues from the mouths of lizards

lying sundrenched in my surface crannies.

In summer grass covers my gentle slopes,

in autumn the tree gods shower me with colour,

in winter my thoughts are naked, unashamed,

and when the year wakes to spring again

I’m still there, breeding lilacs and hexameters.

.

I am a hill of poetry.

Enter my gates carved by the singers of psalms

to let in the light at the winter solstice.

Crawl through the tunnel maze to my ancient mystery:

the journey is long and hard

the rebirth into poetry is spiked with pain

and promises only rediscovery

of what life takes away

each day we grow farther from childhood.

.

I am a hill of poetry.

Come inside me. All my passages spread out

like starry beams. In my hollow core

bowls of incense fill the air with perfume

a bed of feathers is waiting for your weary tune.

Lie down. Close your eyes.

Shut out straying conversations.

Drift on a tide of rapturous melancholy

down to castles hung with tapestries

where troubadors tell tales of victories;

weave the stuff that dreams are made of

with the words that flood your mind

press them between the pages of a book

that closes only at the edge of time.

.

I am a hill of poetry.

I stand here by the grace of nature.

One day the earth will open up and swallow me

into the canyons of desire.

 

                                 

.

© Karen Margolis       2012

.

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International Women’s Day=International Women’s Day=International Women’s Day

8 March 2012/8 March 2012/8 March 2012/8 March 2012/8 March 2012

Pioneering women // Mathematicians // Friends // Jewish // women

Margarete Kahn & Klara Löbenstein

A tale for Women’s Day and every day

 

.

 

.

Regular readers of these pages will know that I have a soft spot for feminists and social revolutionaries, and an abiding passion for mathematics. International Women’s Day is the perfect occasion to celebrate all this by rescuing two pioneering women from the depths of obscurity.

Margarete Kahn and Klara Löbenstein were friends, secondary school teachers – and mathematicians. Born in small towns in Germany in the 1880s, they became two of the first women in the world to receive a doctorate in mathematics.

They might have lived happy, fulfilled lives to the end were it not for the Nazis. Kahn and Löbenstein were Jewish. Like many other brilliant German Jewish scientists and scholars under Hitler’s dictatorship, their achievements were denigrated and their lives destroyed.

Their story is told in a little book (only in German, unfortunately), published recently by the Berlin house Hentrich & Hentrich, which specialises in Jewish themes, particularly German-Jewish history. It is part of the “Jüdische Miniaturen” cameo series, slim volumes that fit easily into your pocket and offer enough to satisfy general readers. They also manage to pack in sufficient solid research and references to keep academics happy as well.

The format has one main drawback. Pictures tend to be overly small and grey, as the book about Kahn and Löbenstein shows. Nora Pester, Hentrich & Hentrich’s enterprising director, also laments the lack of surviving photos of our two mathematical heroines. Personal records were lost along with lives under the Nazis.

The packed room at the launch of the book about Kahn and Löbenstein in Berlin in February 2012 is evidence of Hentrich’s success in drawing a big audience even for such a specialised theme.

The launch was really entertaining. The book’s co-author, York-Egbert König, filled in the biographical picture of two women from prosperous Jewish backgrounds who were able to take advantage of the drive for women’s rights and gender equality that began in late-19th century Germany.

.

The book launch (l to r): Christina Prauss, York-Egbert König, Iris Grötschel, Martin Grötschel, Renate Tobies

.

Kahn and Löbenstein were brave pioneers. Although women were formally allowed to study higher mathematics at universities, they had to persuade individual professors to let them attend lectures. Some were far from eager to take on the ladies.

.

Göttingen University

.

Mathematics Institute, Göttingen University (new building erected 1929)

…………………………………………………………….

Their breakthrough came when they were accepted to study in Göttingen under David Hilbert, one of the greatest mathematicians of the early 20th century. Hilbert championed women’s rights against the conservative academics who wanted to keep women out of traditionally male preserves. “Some of you gentlemen,” Hilbert wrote in his text, On Women Studying, “are not well disposed towards women studying at university. I ask, you, however, to suspend this dislike in relation to the study of mathematics.”

.

David Hilbert

.

Hilbert was known for promoting good scholars regardless of origin, creed or sex. He supervised the doctoral theses of several early female pioneers. His most famous protegée in Göttingen was another German-Jewish woman, Emmy Noether, perhaps the greatest female mathematician of the 20th century.

.

Emmy Noether

.

After the First World War, one of Hilbert’s colleagues argued that men returning from the front to study might be put off by the presence of women in the mathematics department. Hilbert parried with the remark: “A faculty is not a swimming pool.”

Still, the universities were not exactly swimming with lady mathematicians, and Kahn and Löbenstein were among the few who gained doctorates in the first decades of the 20th century. An extraordinarily large proportion of these women – 13% – were Jewish. Added to which, our two heroines were explorers: they wrote their dissertations in the relatively new field of topology. Hilbert guided them to work on difficult problems he was trying to solve and praised their achievements highly in his final reports on their doctorates. I’ll spare you the details – the book offers a fascinating account of Hilbert’s 16th problem in the topology of algebraic curves and planes, and Kahn and Löbenstein’s contributions to the discussion of this.

In those days there were very few mathematics posts in universities; doctoral graduates usually went into secondary school teaching. After passing their teaching exam in 1910, Kahn and Löbenstein continued their pioneering careers by joining the few Jewish women who became senior teachers, the highest attainable step on the career ladder. (Official discrimination made it impossible for Jews, male or female, to become department heads or head teachers in schools.) The two women kept in contact, but their lives took separate tracks as they followed their teaching careers.

Margarete Kahn eventually taught in Berlin; after the Nazis came to power she was dismissed from her job. She finally shared the terrible fate of millions of European Jews and other Holocaust victims. She was deported to Piaski in Poland in 1942 with her sister, Martha, and then murdered. Her exact place of death is unknown.

.

Rudolstädter Strasse 127, Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Grete Kahn’s last address before forcible relocation to a house for Jews

.

.

.

.

.

.

Doorway of Grete Kahn’s apartment block at Rudolstädter Strasse 127

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Klara Löbenstein was forced out of her job and returned to her home town, Hildesheim, after 1933. By then, at the school she had attended as a girl, Nazi officials were calling for “German arithmetic” to be taught instead of “Jewish mathematics”. Löbenstein managed to escape to Buenos Aires in 1941, but researchers have been unable to find any trace of her after that.

A plaque in the pavement marks the last address in Berlin where Grete Kahn lived before the Nazis forced her to move into a “Jews’ house” prior to deportation.

.

Pavement plaque for Dr. Margarete Kahn, deported 28 March 1942

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Note the date on the plaque: 28 March 1942 – almost exactly 70 years ago. The plaque is one of thousands embedded in streets all over Germany to mark the sites of deportations of Jews or Sinti and Roma by the Nazis. At the Hentrich book launch, Martin Grötschel, professor of mathematics at Berlin’s Technical University, explained that the plaque commemorating Grete Kahn was installed on the initiative of a group of Berlin mathematicians during “mathematics year” in 2008.

In the end, Nazi barbarism reduced two of Germany’s finest women scholars of the early 20th century to statistics in the lists of victims. Rescuing Margarete Kahn and Klara Löbenstein from their anonymous fate and retelling their story is a good way to assert the power of living memory – and to carry the banner of women mathematicians into the future.

.

.

Margarete Kahn / Klara Löbenstein

by York-Egbert König, Christina Prauss & Renate Tobies

Jüdische Miniaturen series, Hentrich & Hentrich Berlin,

in cooperation with Centrum Judaicum, 2012

© Karen Margolis         8 March 2012

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remembering Rosenstrasse…remembering Rosenstrasse…remembering Rosenstrasse . “Give us our men back!” The scene is Rosenstrasse, in Berlin’s city centre: 69 years ago, a group of brave women and a few men stood outside a Gestapo deportation centre for days, demanding the release of their male relatives inside. This remarkable show of civil disobedience has gone down in history as one of the rare occasions when people openly dared to defy the Nazis – and succeeded.

Avitall Gerstetter, the only woman cantor of the Jewish Community in Germany, opens the memorial event with a Hebrew song

. . The demonstration took place in the last days of February 1943 at the former Jewish Community Welfare Office in Rosenstrasse. The men were interned there following police raids on factories in Berlin where Jewish men or people of Jewish extraction were still employed doing forced labour. By then, most of Berlin’s Jews had already been deported to concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe and other parts of Germany, as part of the plan to make Berlin Judenfrei (emptied of Jews). Most of the men detained in Rosenstrasse had escaped deportation up to then because they were married to non-Jewish women or were not classified as “full Jews” on the Nazi racist scale. The men and their families had been living in fear for years. They had watched Berlin’s Jews being taken from the city in successive raids and transportation convoys. As soon as the women heard where their men were being held, they gathered in Rosenstrasse. They knew that the men faced deportation and almost certain death if they failed to get them out. During those days, almost 7,000 Jews were deported from other assembly points in Berlin to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. Starting on 27 February 1943, the women, and the small group of men supporting them, stood outside the building for days, chanting or keeping silent vigil. Give us our men back, they shouted.  Let our men go! The word spread, and more people joined the protest; the Nazis bosses held angry meetings, and to this day nobody really knows what political calculations and bribery and corruption led to the unprecedented outcome. Finally, after just over a week, on 6 March 1943, the order came for the internees’ release. On that day, Goebbels noted in his diary: “There have been some regrettable scenes outside a Jewish home for the aged, where large numbers of people gathered, and some even took the Jews’ side. I ordered the security forces not to carry on with evacuating the Jews at such a critical time.” . . These events have since become embodied in a myth about civil courage under the Nazi dictatorship, most famously in Margarethe von Trotta’s fictional film “Rosenstrasse” (2003): moving, sentimental, and pilloried by historians. But like so many myths, the grain of truth is powerful enough to resist embellishment and to keep re-seeding. Over the years, contemporary witnesses and relatives of those involved have repeatedly retold the real story until it has become canonical. Part of the reason it has endured is that it symbolises a spirit of resistance by ordinary citizens that was almost completely lacking in Nazi Germany and is seized on all the more – by Germans who don’t want to be eternal inheritors of evil, and by Jews living in Germany who want to find reason to forgive. And by anybody who wants to assert the possibility of free will and personal decision making against any dictatorship, anywhere. Late in the afternoon of 28 February 2012, over a hundred people gathered in the freezing cold in Rosenstrasse for the annual commemoration of the women’s demonstration. The building where the men were held was demolished by an Allied bomb at the end of the war, and later replaced by the trademark concrete slab housing of communist East Germany. .

Official presence (1): Barbara Loth from the Berlin Senate office for work, integration & women

Official presence (2): Christian Hanke, mayor of Berlin’s Mitte district

. . . . . . . . The remembrance ceremony was held at a small park nearby, around a memorial made in 1995 by the sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger. It shows women mourning and protesting; the chiselled inscription reads, “The strength of civil disobedience and the power of love triumph over dictatorship. Give us our men back. Women stood here, defying death. Jewish men were set free.” . .

Historian Barbara Schieb argues for the authentic version and dispels some myths

. .

Mario Offenburg, chairman of the local Adass Yisroel synagogue, was among the speakers who referred to recent revelations about neo-Nazi murders of Turkish people and members of other minorities and police failure to bring the murderers to justice

. . . . After the speeches and song, the remembrance ceremony continued at the nearby museum, Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind, where Eugen Herman-Friede, who survived the Nazi persecution in hiding, retold the story of his mother, Anja Friede, a Jewish forced labourer who was one of the few women arrested in February 1943 and interned in Rosenstrasse. Next year will be the 70th anniversary of the women’s demonstration in Rosenstrasse. A special event is being planned… . . . . Some of the authentic stories connected with the Rosenstrasse demonstrations are told in two nearby museums: Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind and the Silent Heroes Memorial Centre, both at Rosenthaler Strasse 39, (next to the Hackescher Höfe), Berlin-Mitte.   With thanks to Thomas Schliesser © Karen Margolis 2012 #####################################################

#################################################### …death of an aunt=mourning Etta…death of an aunt=mourning Etta… ::

Stray, Jerusalem, October 2011

Mourning Etta ………………………….. Teaching me to sing itsy bitsy teeny weeny / yellow polka dot bikini on Muizenberg beach or was it in the garden in Germiston? : And hey, hey galia bat harim, daughter of the mountains in Jerusalem : Let’s trace our lives of meeting sharing stories, memories and the petty squabbles of patriotism and politics and parting again across three continents : with you ending smaller sun-dried but unfaded in a city of gold turned to dust thick velvet layers of dust on the Scrabble trophies and your mother’s shabbat candlesticks tarnished legacy of Memel : mould filled the hollows where the pomegranate pips had dried out : Till death in a stone shawl edged across the naked floor and climbed into bed beside you The cats kept guard : Nothing left to steal no secrets to betray no more need to fear that they would come and take you away :::::::::::: Etta Margalit   (b. Memel 1926, d. Jerusalem 2012) :

Etta, Germiston, South Africa, 1960

Etta, Hampstead Heath, London 1966

: : :

Etta, Jerusalem, October 2011

. . .

Strays, Jerusalem, October 2011

: . . .

Farewell Etta (Jerusalem, Succoth 2011)

Etta, for you I walked around the holy city with my camera aimed at street level, taking snapshots of stray cats. The cats miss you. So do I. zolstu hoven a lichtigen gan aiden — may you have a beautiful paradise © Karen Margolis     February 2012 . . . . . .

**************************************************************** HAPPY BIRTHDAY GERHARD RICHTER / HAPPY BIRTHDAY GERHARD RICHTER /

A Painter of Our Time

80 years old on 9 February 2012 Gerhard Richter – Panorama Retrospective – Nationalgalerie Berlin (cooperation with Tate Modern, London & Centre Pompidou, Paris) Photos from vernissage in Berlin, 11 February 2012 “Richter has… consistently explored painting’s relation to reality” (exhibition booklet) ::: Cruising through Richter’s imaginative world in Mies van der Rohe’s sea of glass and marble on a snowy night in Berlin. Lit by a crystal moon outside and a thousand ceiling stars within. ::: . . . . . In his own words, Richter’s art is “the attempt to probe the possibilities of what painting today is still capable of achieving”. . . . . . . : : : : : : : : : : : :

Richter the illusionist: play it with mirrors

::::

Richter the humorist: answer to Marcel Duchamp

::::

Night of the image

:::

see it, capture it

:::: :::::::: ::: :::

seeing isn’t believing

. . . ::: ::: ::::::: :::

Bonbons for oldies

:::

K’s favourite

:::

Through a glass mistily: some of the 4900 colours (Version 1)

::: ………………. Text & photos © Karen Margolis Berlin, February 2012 ########################

++++ Song of Age +++++ Song of Age +++++Song of Age +++++ . Two new poems for a work in progress . Writing a poem on a rainy afternoon Paper and pen I take to bed and lie with them like an invalid or a lover . © Karen Margolis 2012 . :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anything’s possible “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.” − T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land . anything’s possible she said, typing the words into the box marked reply . a finger click carried the message away . an electronic pigeon delivered it instantaneously to a mailbox, where it waited obediently for pick-up . we’re all creatures of habit clinging to old words for communication . what keeps us bound to a constellation that serves marginal ads instead of inspiration and absorbs our input into clouds? – we even have the cheek to call our electronic jottings after the song of birds . How can I tell you in a new millennium’s shorthand of a life spent working to buy time (just another word for freedom) . now we’re figures from each other’s pasts . your words waking waves of tenderness for you, and the girl I was: pure heart in her smile . I long to throw a thought in your direction and wait to see laughter spreading across your lips starting small at the corner and ending on target on the far side (the wicked side) making ripples, the lineaments of age to come . Let’s leave the Baltic to its icy winds and refugee memories anyway, the present was always our meeting point . moi, je préfère the swing of promise in my step walking away down the Rue de la Liberté to greet the gulls on the promenade crying out their messages whatever the weather . Let’s leave our masks at home and meet alone with our smiles wide open  . © Karen Margolis 2012 . :: :: :: :: Poems © Karen Margolis 2012 #######################################  +++ A Place to Remember +++

Authentic site – before unveiling

Marzahn Memorial Site, Berlin – former Nazi internment camp for Gypsies Berlin’s newest memorial exhibition fills a void in the historical picture up to now.

Young descendants of former internees helped to unveil the plaques

Introductory plaque

Situated near the north-eastern edge of the city, the permanent open-air display commemorates the victims of the Nazi internment camp for Gypsies on the site from 1936 to 1945. The camp was set up to keep German Sinti and Roma out of the way while Berlin was polishing its image for the 1936 Olympic Games. The story of the camp is told simply and movingly in ten plaques erected on part of the grounds of the original camp. Individual biographies of former camp internees are the key elements that bring to life this neglected chapter of Holocaust history. At the centre is the figure of Otto Rosenberg, who was interned in the Marzahn camp as a boy at the start of an odyssey that took him to Auschwitz and other death camps. He was the only survivor of eleven brothers and sisters.

Remembering Otto Rosenberg

In his memoirs, Otto Rosenberg recounted how the Marzahn internment camp began: “Then one morning, it could have been four or five in the morning, we were rousted out by SA and police (…) We were loaded onto a lorry. Our caravan was also taken along. (…) We were shipped to Berlin-Marzahn. Officially the place was called ‘Berlin-Marzahn Rastplatz’ [literally, ‘resting-place’]. The Lot. (…) They just unloaded us. We were detained. They said nobody is allowed to leave the lot. There were ditches everywhere. The meadows around us were fields irrigated with sewage. And wagons constantly arrived and pumped sewage into the ditches. The smell was terrible.” Otto Rosenberg, A Gypsy in Auschwitz, London 1999; German edition: Das Brennglas (with Ulrich Enzensberger), 1998.   Another major figure in the story is Gamba Franzen, who arrived at the camp as a young mother:   “We lived and suffered there under extremely degrading conditions. There were shortages of everything. (…) I gave birth to my children in Marzahn camp under the most wretched circumstances. I was only given 1/8 of a litre of skimmed milk a day for my infant children. Two of my children died of malnutrition at the ages of six and seven months.”

Remembering Camba Franzen

Many internees had to do forced labour under inhuman conditions in local factories. Others were subjected to racist persecution and Nazi genetic research. Children were excluded from the education system and isolated from their former school friends.

Child internee

Several thousand people were interned in Marzahn internment camp for Gypsies from 1936 until the deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in spring 1943. Few of the deportees survived. Camba Franzen was more fortunate. She was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, and lived with her family in Berlin until her death in February 1998. Some of her descendants, including jazz musician Tschabo Franzen, were among the guests at the official opening of the memorial site on 12 December 2011. Many German Sinti and Roma received little or no compensation as victims of Nazi persecution. Otto Rosenberg became a prominent Sinti leader and campaigned tirelessly until his death in 2001 for compensation for Gypsy Holocaust survivors – and for a worthy memorial at the authentic site of the former camp for Gypsies at Marzahn. His daughter Petra Rosenberg, who followed in his footsteps as a Sinti spokesperson, has now achieved this wish.

Petra Rosenberg – daughter of former camp internee and Auschwitz survivor Otto Rosenberg. Today she heads the Berlin-Brandenburg regional association of German Sinti and Roma

Off with the sheets: far right, exhibition director Petra Rosenberg

Roma musicians Oana Chitu and Dejan Jovanovic gave a haunting performance of singing with accordion as the plaques were unveiled mainly by young people, many of them descendants of former camp internees.

Holy water and a blessing for the new memorial site

The permanent exhibition at Marzahn Memorial Site – Otto-Rosenberg-Platz, Berlin-Marzahn was officially opened on 12 December 2011. It was conceived and written by project director Petra Rosenberg, who is chairperson of the Berlin-Brandenburg Association of German Sinti and Roma. Helga Lieser designed the site landscaping and the exhibition plaques. The exhibition is bilingual: German/English. Karen Margolis translated and edited the English version.

Much to learn in Marzahn

© Karen Margolis 22 December 2011 with thanks to Thomas Schliesser ###########################################

THE RHYME IS THE REASON

Tel Aviv, October 2011

The rhyme is the reason               für Thomas Brasch the rhyme is the reason it rings for itself whatever the season it sings for itself it lifts the lead curtain to let in the day and lights up the corners where silverfish play … the rhyme is the moment where sword crosses pen it eases the torment of love now and then it carries the words in a current so strong that their force overpowers and pulls you along … the rhyme is the fortune of poets in garrets who harvest the wild moon to stave off their debts it warms up the room with a magical glow and turns on the tap for the vision to flow … the rhyme is the purpose the end in itself it skates on the surface and turns on itself it tangos and polkas and trips off the tongue and hums in the memory after it’s done …          © Karen Margolis 1991/20011

Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem, October 2011

It is the women who bring me flowers It is the women who bring me flowers it is the women who stand full-handed before my door proud like the palms of Jericho dripping rich dark oasis dates            © Karen Margolis 2011

Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem October 2011

two cities when the plane touches down on the eastern side of the walled city and I ride the bus through another frontier, my hands will ache with winter while my heart fills with homecoming warmth even as the stares of the people turn the blood to ice. … home:  fling open the door, stand on the balcony six floors up; look down on the railway lines watch the S-Bahn rattle by under the leaden lid of sky. … today  –  shabbat  —  sitting sunning on the rough roof of the ancient walled city, hearing the wailing from the minarets, sensing the silence of the shuttered shops (a political closure, not a commercial break): staring out over the domes of gold, the spires that rise from the rock under the ageless blue sky, the light in its clarity (that light which makes miracles credible) caused my mind to unlock. … home:  push open the gate studded with bullet-holes 40 years old, sleek black bitch puppy, barking races me to the garden where the gold-green grapefruit grow; drink fragrant coffee in the afterglow. … When the plane touches down on the unholy earth of that unrepentant country, and I ride the bus through the Monday bustle, my body will echo (trembling) my heart hold close –  tight as your arms around  — the gifts you gave me: your home. your love. your city. © Karen Margolis 1988/2011

Jerusalem October 2011

Jerusalem Armenian Quarter October 2011

Jerusalem New Gate October 2011

Jerusalem New Gate October 2011

Jerusalem New Gate October 2011

Tel Aviv, October 2011

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100T poets for change+++100Tpoetsforchange+++100T poets for change

Tempelhof Park & the Seeds of Change

Poem forest Tempelhof Park 24 Sept 2011

It was a perfect day. The weather goddesses smiled on us as we entered the main gates of the old airfield at Tempelhof. Our poetry forest close to the entrance grew by inspiration and improvisation. Down the slope, the three poetic graces of Neukölln, Anna, Nina and Lucia, set up the sound system while poets and audience parked their bikes, spread rugs and jackets, unpacked their picnics and waited for the show to start. The poetry forest grew. On the site where an iconic airport rose up in the 1920s, where Hitler’s terror troops marched on parade, where Stuka dive bombers were assembled in underground tunnels for the Nazi Luftwaffe, the scene of one of the last battles of World War 2 in 1945 and the landing place of the raisin bombers of the US Air Force airlift bringing vital supplies to Berlin’s people during the Soviet blockade at the height of the Cold War in the late 1940s — there, on 24 September 2011, we decorated symbolic tree trunks with scrolls, planted poems in bright woven pots and hung out verses while poets read works and made speeches in many tongues. All in harmony and synchronisation with 100T Poets for Change, a worldwide movement started by US poet Michael Rothenberg. Our poems for the day, displayed in English and German, included Shelley’s Ozymandias – the warning against all delusions of grandeur the world over — and Heinrich Heine’s satirical epic, Deutschland – Ein Wintermärchen (Germany – A Winter’s Tale), a ballad for free thought and against state oppression written in 1844.

Planted poems: Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

  Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. P.B. Shelley, 1818     Ozymandias   Übersetzung: Ein Wandrer kam aus einem alten Land, Und sprach: „Ein riesig Trümmerbild von Stein Steht in der Wüste, rumpflos Bein an Bein, Das Haupt daneben, halb verdeckt vom Sand. Der Züge Trotz belehrt uns: wohl verstand Der Bildner, jenes eitlen Hohnes Schein Zu lesen, der in todten Stoff hinein Geprägt den Stempel seiner ehrnen Hand. Und auf dem Sockel steht die Schrift: ‚Mein Name Ist Osymandias, aller Kön’ge König: – Seht meine Werke, Mächt’ge, und erbebt!‘ Nichts weiter blieb. Ein Bild von düstrem Grame, Dehnt um die Trümmer endlos, kahl, eintönig Die Wüste sich, die den Koloß begräbt.“ (Übersetzung: Adolf Strodtmann 1866)

Blowin’ in the wind: pages of Heine’s classic ballad, “Germany: A Winter’s Tale”

Back at the mike, with a growing crowd of poetry lovers, eager readers, inline skaters, joggers, ice cream lickers, bikers, hikers and curious bystanders, Lucia declared, “War is not sustainable”, and gave a bravura performance of Spanish poems from her own pen. She was followed by a host of other poets, local and from far afield, reading in German and English. Poems intimate and personal; or angry, sorrowful and political. In the background, silhouettes of the historic airport buildings, and the green, green grass and tarmac stretching away into the distance.

“… the lone and level sands stretched far away.”

Happy birthday Anna Blume Everybody was having a good time except the men from the park authority and Ordnungsamt (public order office) who had nothing better to do on a peaceful sunny afternoon. They arrived on four wheels, dismounted and demanded to know why we were having an unlicensed gathering. We’ll give you 10 minutes to clear up and get out, they said. That’s order for you, Berlin style. But poets are inventive folks. It took less than a second for a bright spark to dream up a birthday party for Nina, one of the reading organisers, aka Anna Blume. When the men in official T-shirts came back, our skilful poetry diplomats negotiated a truce. And the show could go on.

“10 minutes to get out!” – park warden and security guard take a dim view of poetry. Thomas listens politely.

Meanwhile, back at the mike, jazz musician Paul Brody lifts his trumpet to the skies to blast an impromptu “birthday tribute” to Anna Blume. Loud and clear. The audience whoops and cheers.

Happy birthday, Anna Blume!

(Connoisseurs of German art & literature might recognise the name: “Anna Blume” is a famous dadaist poem written in 1919 by the great avantgarde artist Kurt Schwitters.) 100T poets and their Berlin sisters and brothers can’t be beat… 10 minutes later…

Smiles all round – a creative truce

… and the happy birthday girl herself – Nina aka Anna Blume: After that successful interlude, the rest was poetry party with loads of spontaneous participation from young & old.

Swahili saying – an added bonus

“It means ‘I feel as good as a banana!’”, she said. … …

Hölderlin cited by Thomas Schliesser

everybody welcome – chalks provided by 100T poets Berlin

Street poem by Karen Margolis

Street poem: THE PEN IS MIGHTY Wrote a poem to reach a man — he ran

Wrote a poem…

as afternoon shadows fall…

… Almost time to leave Tempelhof Park… But no Berlin event — and especially an international one like 100T Poets for Change — is complete without the café to round it off. Central European culture at its best and richest. Café engels, close by Tempelhof Park main entrance, welcomed us and opened its space to poets of the world for the weekend in a temporary exhibition to mark the big day of global poetry. The rest is pictures and unforgettable memories of peace, sun and poetry on a late September afternoon in Berlin.

café engels: T-shirt to go

… … …

Curator Thomas Schliesser with special creation: 100T T-shirt

…

Visiting artist Kurt Stadler from Graz, Austria, installing his specially created 100T Poets for Change T-shirt

&&&

Dmitry Sokolenko’s postPOST Mail Art (centre)

Pure poetry, art & café culture:

Poetry fan Dieter S. admires the work of his great love, Heinrich Heine (hanging beside: Chanticleer Magazine, ed. Richard Livermore)

Poetry tastes better with fresh ciabatta; left to right: art works by Thomas Feuerstein, Dmitry Sokolenko (XIX), Thomas Schliesser (Bad Bank) and Dmitry Sokolenko (Mail Art); bottom row: Wall poem (Karen Margolis, photo Holger Kulick)

All credit to Dmitry Sokolenko (XIX and postPOST Mail Art), Thomas Feuerstein (Parallel Arbeit), Richard Livermore (Chanticleer poetry magazines) and Thomas Schliesser (numerous artworks). … … … &&& &&& A big thank you to Michael Rothenberg for the grand idea, Terri Carrion especially for visual support — and our Berlin friends Cathy Saxon and Dieter Staecker. Extra thanks to Nina and Matthias and all the angels from Café engels, Neukölln. Special thanks to Thomas Schliesser for mounting the exhibition and co-organising the big day in Berlin. © Karen Margolis Berlin, 25 September 2011 ********************************************************************

Archives 2010-2011

JORGESEMPRÚNJORGESEMPRÚNJORGESEMPRÚNJORGESEMPRÚN

He remained uncompromising, even in old age. “If I were 20 years old again, I wouldn’t think twice about the Communist revolution,” he told the Spanish paper El Periódico. “I would set up a blog in Internet and spread inflammatory ideas.”

HOMAGE TO JORGE SEMPRÚN

the great Spanish writer who fought Franco’s fascism in Spain and Nazi fascism as a French Resistance member, and survived Buchenwald concentration camp.  

He died in Paris aged 87 on 7 June 2011.  

Wörlitz national park June 2011

Back to Buchenwald

  in honour of Jorge Semprún

When in the dawning light I turn the radio on
Smooth voices tell me of the crimes of former years
Each day begins with suffering that’s never gone
The evening shadows harbour numbrous fears.
A people’s eyes are turned toward the past
Their evil deeds are thrown back in their faces
Fate has entrapped them in an iron cast
The blood of millions keeps them in their places.
Today the victims speak their tragic stories
Another Sunday full of incantation
A nation bends its knee and grimly glories
In swamps of guilt and self-recrimination.

Once there was a beechwood, they took its name in vain
Besmirched its tree trunks with bad blood. It can happen again.
Once there was a beechwood, so proud in sun and rain
Why don’t they give it back to nature? Let silence heal the pain.

© Karen Margolis 2011

This poem was written in April 1995 as part of the poetry cycle “The Ballad of the Wrapped Reichstag”.  

Jorge Semprún (10 December 1923-7 June 2011)

Photos from Wörlitz National Park

(UNESCO world heritage site), Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, 31 May 2011

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MRS. COURAGE IN BERLIN

Tireless: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch reads from her memoirs in the Zionskirche, Berlin 26 May 2011

1. Overture: Bomb chaos

The event begins with a bomb. On the afternoon of 26 May, Berlin local radio announces that
a 250-kg British aerial bomb from the Second World War has been found near the
Oberbaumbrücke between the city districts of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. It used to be the
bridge where pensioners from East Germany were allowed to cross the Berlin Wall border to
visit their families. Recently it has become a place for scene parties and art happenings. And
today, a bomb site.

All through the afternoon police are busy closing roads and evacuating thousands of residents
living along the River Spree. Buses and subway trains stop running in the area. Experts from
the Berlin state police force are preparing to defuse the bomb at May-Ayim-Ufer. A few years
ago this street along the riverbank was renamed in memory of May Ayim, a Ghanaian-
German writer and poetess who committed suicide at the age of 36 in 1996. An outspoken
anti-racism campaigner, she was renowned for her pioneering work on racism and skin
colour, and fiercely criticized by conservative academics.

The historical event of the day hasn’t even begun and already we are wrapped in layer upon
layer of circumstance, an agglomeration of periods and places because the city doesn’t just
breathe and move, it continually emanates threads that weave the past into the present in an
invisible fabric that swaddles every facet of daily life.

The bomb from a British fighter plane buried in the ground for almost 70 years under a street
whose name changed how many times on a political whim was discovered on the day of Anita
Lasker-Wallfisch’s reading in Berlin. At the time the bomb was dropped, Anita Lasker-
Wallfisch was a prisoner of the Nazis, stripped of her German citizenship and
all her worldly possessions because she was Jewish. She returned to Berlin in May 2011 at the
age of 88 as a British citizen. A survivor who escaped the hell of Auschwitz and Bergen-
Belsen and came back to show the power of resistance. By just being there, in the centre of
Berlin, she was defying the spirits of destruction that caused the Holocaust. She was a living
celebration of the survival of the Jews and all the other victims of Nazi racism and
warmongering. As a purveyor of memory she was the human counterpart to the bomb that
stopped the traffic that day.

2. The Setting: Zionskirche – the Church of Zion
It is a cool, windy May evening. Blowy enough to play havoc with the hair of the people
waiting patiently in line at the church door for tickets — but most of them have little hair left
to wave in the wind. The audience is distinctly elderly, as on so many similar occasions.
Many of the people are familiar from Jewish Community and civil rights events. Two active
social groups overlap here: those concerned with Nazi fascism and its aftermath and those
interested in the history and effects of 40 years of communist rule in East Germany. Together,
they make up the regular local clientele for Berlin’s much-cited “culture of remembrance”.
Here in Zionskirche we are reminded once again that it’s just as much a culture of forgetting.
The church looks rundown and dusty. A good example of 19th-century Lutheran church
architecture, built by Kaiser Wilhelm I to raise the tone of the surrounding working-class
urban district, it has no elaborate stained glass windows with Biblical figures and scenes. The
tall windows around and behind the altar are filled with small diamond panes in yellow and
orange. The evening sun shines through like a blessing. The only thing that disturbs this
pleasant shabbiness is a huge bright cross made of heavy cloth hanging over the altar table.
It’s like a patchwork of primary colours, with a large red spot on one side of the horizontal bar
and the words, “Ich habe keine Angst” (“I am not afraid”) stitched across a blue and green
wedge on the other side. This primitive, aggressive modernism makes the peeling splendour
of the surrounding walls and gallery look almost elegant, like a faded Hollywood star from
the silent movie era.

Zionskirche feels like a poor relation in the city’s ecclesiastical family. A leaflet on the
entrance literature table titled “Zion – building site”, appeals for donations for urgent
restoration. “Zion needs refurbished windows, toilets and more heating.” By the end of the
evening our cold toes are saying amen to the heating plea. And we have heard an impassioned
speech by historian Michael Wolffsohn, a leading expert on 20th-century Germany and the
Nazi period, reminding us that this was a church of resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the
key figures in the Church resistance against Nazism, worked here in the early 1930s. Under
East German communism the church became famous as a centre for punks and other young
dropouts and outcasts. Rock concerts and alternative happenings were held on the premises,
and it was even the target of an attack by East Berlin neo-fascist skinheads. Like most East
German churches, it was left to decay by a state that wished religion would disappear in the
process of communist evolution.

“Memorial centres and sites commemorating the perpetrators are all well and good,”
Wolffsohn said. “But we should make a special effort to keep the memory of resistance alive
in places like this church.”

Still, I’m running ahead. Michael Wolffsohn said this after Anita Lasker-Wallfisch had read
from her memoirs. He had to talk about the future because after she told us her story there
was nothing anybody there could add about the past. The voice of a survivor telling her story
is unique.

3. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch reads.
She needs no introduction, and mercifully there is none aside from a brief greeting. She
begins reading without any preamble. A low, well-moderated voice tells a story of loss,
torture, destruction and extermination in a measured tone that precludes any false emotion. As
she reads, her head with its thick covering of short white hair radiates quiet pride and dignity.
Here she is, in the middle of Berlin, not far from the headquarters of the Nazi terror machine,
and she tells us she has conquered an inner refusal to come here and feels proud of that
conquest. She comes as a survivor who made a new life in another country. “The rupture
between my first and second life was too radical,” she says. She comes here from her
“second” life as a British citizen, a mother and grandmother, and yet there is so much that still
connects her to that first life as a child in a Jewish family in Breslau, now Wroclaw, in the
former German Reich.

Her family wasn’t very Jewish, she says. Later she regretted that her parents hadn’t taught her
something of Jewish tradition that she could pass on to her own children and grandchildren.
But why should they? They were assimilated, and proud to be German. Her father was
especially proud of his Iron Cross won in combat in the First World War. He and so many
other Jews. Not that it helped. Later, after all the racist laws and decrees and being forced to
hand in radios and bicycles, and seeing the wilful destruction of the Reichskristallnacht when
the streets around Jewish shops and businesses were covered in blood and glass shards, later,
after all that, and after all the futile attempts to get exit permits and visas for safe countries,
her father realized there would be no return. On the night before Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s
parents were due to be deported, her father called her to his study and told her that at 16, she
was old enough to look after herself and her younger sister, Renate. True to his German
training, he had carefully prepared all the accounts for the time after his departure. “This is for
the rent and the gas bills…”  The following morning the parents left for the assembly point.
The two daughters never saw them again.

Though Jewish education may have been lacking, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is grateful to her
parents, and especially her father, for educating her in the best German tradition. After her
reading, Michael Wolffsohn complimented her on her beautiful written German, her ability to
tell a story clearly and accurately. The word he used was “Bildungsbürgertum”, the classical
tradition of German education that emphasized hard work and the disciplines of the
humanities but also prized poetry, prose and music as great achievements. Anita Lasker-
Wallfisch thanks her father to this day that he made his daughters speak French every Sunday
— although she found it tiresome at the time. The twists of fate that decide between life and
death made it possible for her to put that French to good use in forging identity papers in
Nazi-occupied France, just one of the stations in her odyssey to the death camps.

In December 1943 she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Incredible,” she exclaims. “They
actually made me sign a document saying I was going to Auschwitz voluntarily!” (Of course
“they” — the Gestapo — did. Then they could claim she had abandoned her property so they
could impound it. The Nazis robbed the Jews of millions with tricks like that.) In Auschwitz,
once again, she had reason to be grateful to her parents for that excellent education. She
remained alive in the death camp because she could play the cello. A fellow prisoner, Alma Maria Rose, niece of
the composer Gustav Mahler, told her, “You will be saved.” She was picked to play in the
“girls’ ensemble” that accompanied the prisoners going to and from work in the
camp.

“Black figures, baying hounds, the terrible stench…” – those were her first — indelible —
impressions of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Finally, after more attempted escapes and a proliferating scenery of carnage as the Allies
advanced, she was reunited with her sister and they arrived among the mountains of corpses
in Bergen-Belsen. Nearing the end of her terrible story, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s voice
quivers only slightly as she describes being ordered by the Gestapo to drag piles of bodies
towards the crematorium, and being too weak to obey. Even after they realized the guards had
abandoned the camp, she and her sister sat exhausted, propped up against the wall of a prison
hut. Suddenly she heard a loud voice over a megaphone (I quote from memory):
“THIS IS THE BRITISH ARMY. WE HAVE COME TO LIBERATE YOU. DO NOT
MOVE. THERE IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF.”

I have been weeping pretty much nonstop for the past half-hour of this reading. Since Anita
Lasker-Wallfisch’s parents were deported, in fact. Suddenly I give my eyes a final dab and sit
up straight. I’m proud. Proud to be British. Proud to be a naturalized citizen of a country that
fought fascism at great cost and liberated the concentration camps with bravery and gave
shelter to many victims of the Nazis and their families. A country that integrated refugees and
victims of political and racial persecution and made them feel proud to be British.

I only wish I could say the same about Britain today! — and Michael Wolfssohn, pointing to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s beautiful German prose that didn’t protect her from ostracism and attempted genocide, warned us to be wary of immigration policy in Germany as well.

Integration isn’t merely a question of language, it’s a way of being and feeling, of embracing while preserving difference and distance. .

4. Signing the books.
After Avitall, the cantor of Berlin’s Jewish community, has paid musical homage to Anita
Lasker-Wallfisch, saying how moved she was because many of her own family perished in
Auschwitz, the author shows her incredible stamina by signing scores of copies for eager
buyers of her book. She takes the trouble to talk to each of them. Especially the younger ones, who smile shyly in the presence of living history.  The young man on the bookstall
is beaming. A model author. A woman with a mission endowed by life. An unforgettable personality.

5. Mrs. Courage and a heap of rubble.
The streets are clear, almost empty as we drive through the city centre. The bomb was defused
without further incident at 6.30 p.m. There are still plenty more buried under the city. Large
tracts of land in the city centre, the heartland of the bomber raids, remained waste ground or
no man’s land after the war and the building of the Berlin Wall. The excavations for the
massive redevelopment after the fall of the wall uncovered masses of unexploded bombs.
According to Berlin historian Laurenz Demps, “In the period from 1 January 1991 to 31
December 2007 the firefighters of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Service defused and
salvaged a total of 7,819 bombs (including incendiary bombs) and 1,069,390 kg. of buried
explosives and war rubble. In April 2009 the newspapers reported, “3000 bombs still buried
in the ground”.* I’m reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s comment when he arrived back in Berlin in
1946 after exile from the Nazis. “Berlin? – that heap of rubble near Potsdam.”

Near Jannowitzbrücke, a bridge not far from the scene of the bomb, we drop off our friend
Simone who was with us at the reading. As she gets out of the car, she points towards the
looming the TV tower at Alexanderplatz, its facetted ball winking and blinking in the
floodlights. She has a clear view of it from her apartment window in a former communist
concrete slab block overlooking a huge expanse of wasteland. All of this — the renovated
East German tower blocks, the empty site with the rusty fence destined, no doubt, for a
glorious real estate future, the landmark TV tower, the rows of shiny new buildings along the
embankment, the lingering traces of the Cold War border, the undiscovered aerial bombs
buried under the streets… all of that and so much more in this city and its people is a direct
result of the brief period of Nazi rule that left its mark on the world indelibly, forever.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s reading in the Zionskirche
in Berlin is that she had the courage and greatness of heart to come here at all.

____________________________________
*Laurenz Demps, “Berlin and the Consequences of Nazi Tyranny”, Berlin 1933-45: Between
Propaganda and Terror, ed. Claudia Steur, Berlin 2010 (Engl. translation: Karen Margolis).

Avitall Zionskirche 26 May 2011

Coda:

The music to go with this article:

Ofra Haza: Kaddish

“For salvation – Kaddish

for redemption – Kaddish

for forgiveness – Kaddish

for health – Kaddish

for all the world’s victims – Kaddish

for all the Holocaust’s victims – Kaddish.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQ0OkcLKuE

© Karen Margolis   29 May 2011

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… sometimes it just doesn’t work out…

Wunderkammer Olbricht, Auguststr. Berlin

Stillborn Poem

for Ruth

Sat down to write a poem

a man came into the room
to use the telephone

the title flew out of the open door

a boy came into the room
to tell me why Russia is cold

the first line fell into an ice hole

a postwoman came up the stairs
to hand over a registered letter

the rhythm fled with her departing footsteps

my mobile rang twice
the display was blank

a harsh voice shattered my rhyme.

The poem came out unripe
shrivelled and aged before its time.

Grieving, I cut the cord
to my botched creation

and gasped for breathing space
until the next interruption.

© Karen Margolis  2008 / 2011

Wunderkammer Olbricht Auguststr. Berlin

Gallery Weekend, Auguststr. Berlin 30 April 2011

Wunderkammer Olbricht, Auguststr. Berlin

Wunderkammer Olbricht, Auguststr. Berlin

””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’

Berlin – city of change

changing

change money
a prelude to spending
change a man

change tactics
make a list
minus side longer
draw an ultimatum line
impose a fine
change trains

change habits
hack away at them
they grow teeth — bite back
chop them off
they flourish all the more
like snakes on the gorgon’s head
pull them out at the roots
they multiply in the hand
change cigarette brand

change hairstyle
a prelude to hoping
change heads

change clothes
a prelude to dieting
change sizes

change shoes
a prelude to dancing
change feet

change drugs
a prelude to flying
change carpets

change homes
a prelude to moving
change routes

change work
a prelude to retiring
change partners

change places
a prelude to parting
change faces

change shops
a prelude to consuming
change products

change cases
a prelude to declining
change contents

change colour
a prelude to blending in
change scenery

ring the changes
a prelude to cashing in
change rings

change choices
a prelude to deciding
change free will

change dates
a prelude to lying
times change

change a man
do it fast
exchange rate falling
all the time

change money
do it fast
change gets smaller
all the time
the dime stores fuller
change change

© Karen Margolis  2011

Tempelhof Airport is the latest setting for change in Berlin. A few years ago flights still took off and landed here and passengers walked through the old halls, footsteps echoing in the original 1930s stone halls, with the feeling of occasional glimpses of 20th century history behind the square pillars and deco moulding.  Tempelhof, the scene of some sinister and some heroic airborne missions, is now closed for flying and open for future speculation.

What to do with the world’s largest interconnected inner-city space? In the gap between temporary use licenses, urban planning resolutions and architectural competitions, the Berliners, adepts at improvising after a century of upheavals, have claimed the space as their own.

Watch this space. It’s the perfect venue for Berlin’s contribution to the international poetry event

100 Thousand Poets for Change

on 24 September 2011.

More later…

…meanwhile, here’s a look at Tempelhof Field over the Easter weekend:

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…. heard something about a wedding? ….

Picture: Thomas Schliesser / Karen Margolis 2011

Retro not Metro

The royal nuptials nostalgia show

The bride has been groomed
the groom has been briefed
they both passed the test
without coming to grief
from the dead princess’s hand
a symbolic ring
the world media rights are sold
the show can begin

They say family
it means patrician loyalty
they praise tradition and glory
it’s a nostalgia orgy

There’s gold stick-in-waiting
and silver stick, too
street liners, path liners
and licensed film crews
eight 20-foot-high trees
inside the old abbey
and a disinvited despot prince
for the sake of diplomacy

They say marriage
we see military
they say carriage
we hear cavalry

160 army horses
all along the route
eight hours of polishing
the infamous jackboots
swords, plumes, horse tack
helmets & cuirasses
1000 men-at-arms or more
and military musicians

Valiant and Brave
the trumpeters will play
a wing commander’s fanfare
composed for the big day
valiant and brave
the bride & groom must be
to get through this marathon
of pomp and ceremony

household guards, honour guards
Grenadiers, Blues & Royals
historical escort troops
for queen and bridal couple—
while to show they’re in touch
with folk of the nation
sports idols and popstars
will be at the reception

They say renaissance
we hear patriotism
they talk of values
we see militarism

The battle is on
for marketing and media
saturation bombing
with sentiment & trivia

In the master plan, after
the kiss on the balcony
two billion viewers
across the globe will see
the ghosts of the past
as vintage aircraft
the Battle of Britain
memorial flypast:
a Lancaster, a Spitfire,
a Hurricane, and then
two Typhoons & two Tornados
paired in box formation—

a royal air force in the sky
of oldtimer jets
under the enduring motto
LEST WE FORGET—

union and reunion
for an heir to the throne
a fitting initiation to
the connubial combat zone

© Karen Margolis  April 2011

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There’s a jar of gefilte fish (Hungarian-style) in the cupboard waiting with the matze boxes (family pack). Passover is on the way. This year in Berlin, next year in Jerusalem. Maybe. The preparations awaken thoughts of Pesachs long ago.

Matzes v. Trotsky

On a homeopathic cure for residual religious and political ailments, our narrator Karen tries a dose of Passover at a festive dinner in Berlin — and breaks out in a memory rash.

By the time we arrive at Middenweg, most of the guests are already seated. The synagogue has been transformed into a noisy banqueting room with two parallel tables along the length of the hall. At the centre of the head table running across the top are the rabbi and his wife, flanked by the synagogue elders and their families. The glamorous young woman sitting next to the rabbi is Ronia the cantor, wearing an embroidered prayer shawl and a decorative pillbox cap on her luxuriant blonde curls; a feminised oriental version of the ceremonial garb. We find two empty seats at the bottom end of the table near the kitchen. The rabbi’s wife waves to us. The treasurer, a small man with greying moustache, comes over to collect the dinner money. There are already around 60 people here, with more arriving all the time. The TV crew that recorded Purim is here as well, with the lady producer also in oriental style in a long glittery dress and extravagant earrings. A tall dark photographer with an enviable Nikon is hovering discreetly; he looks professional. Everybody’s talking except the boy next to me, who’s got that bored-and-scornful teenage look I remember so well: “I wouldn’t be here at all if my parents hadn’t dragged me along. Can’t wait till next year when they won’t be able to stop me going to the disco instead.”

If I were he, I wouldn’t be here either. Teenagers usually want to be among their peers. This seder company has a smattering of small children, but most of the guests look like grandparents. The chair waiting for the prophet Elijah isn’t the only empty space. There’s a big gap where the teens and twens should be; and the few 30-somethings are mostly married couples with young kids accompanying the grandparents.

The homeopathic Pesach dose is stronger than I anticipated and has instant effect. My mind goes into split screen. One part is watching the scene around me, showing Thomas the picture in the Haggadah that identifies the symbolic bits and pieces on the plate in front of each guest. This is the first time I have ever brought a non-Jew to a seder and I realise how mysterious it must seem to the uninitiated. The glaring neon lighting in the room doesn’t help; it makes the items on our plates look limp and grey compared to the bright colours in the book.

The other half of me is on fast rewind, spooling back, back, back to the last seder 25 years ago at my parents’ house in Hampstead. Every springtime after my twin sister and I left home, my mother would phone up in advance to make sure we were coming to the seder. Our Spanish flatmate Rosita, who had her own share of family duties, dubbed Passover “your Christmas dinner”.

At the age of 24 I decide to duck the roll call. When my mother phones, I tell her that on seder night there’s an important meeting of my political group, the International Marxists.

“But nothing can be more important than the family,” my mother says.

“Well, this is,” I reply firmly. “There’s a crucial vote and I have to be there.”

“Why don’t you ask for a postal vote?” my mother says with sweet reason. “I’m sure they’ll understand if you tell them it’s Pesach.”

“They won’t. Trotskyists don’t believe in all that,” I answer impatiently. “You know what Karl Marx said: religion is the opium of the masses…”

I realise my mistake as soon as I’ve said it. The mention of Marx brings out all my mother’s wrath. “That man Marx said a lot of stupid things. Just look at Russia. How they persecute the poor Jews behind the Iron Curtain.”

Now I’m hopelessly entangled. “You can’t blame it all on Marx,” I argue. “It was Stalin who betrayed the revolution — “

“— I wasn’t asking for a history lesson,” my mother interrupts. “I only phoned up to tell you that your place will be set at the seder like it is every year. Just because you lead a bohemian revolutionary life doesn’t mean you can turn your back on the family.

“And anyway — “, she pauses for the parting shot, “— your brother is looking forward to seeing you. He’s built a kind of computer he wants to show you.”

My mother knows my weak spot. I can resist anything but my younger brother. He was born when I was 11, and I can clearly remember the day when my aunt fetched my sisters and me from school with the news. We took the 24 bus from Hampstead to University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, and saw a greasy wriggling little bundle through a glass window. Perhaps it was his naked ugly perfection that made me love him wholly and unconditionally from that first moment. I can remember whispering a soothing song to comfort him eight days later for the little gauze bandage on his penis after the circumcision (to which his sisters were not invited). Friends and family arrived to admire him, commenting: “At last the family is complete.”

We three sisters looked at each other, astonished. We hadn’t realised we were incomplete.

Sitting at the seder table in March 2002 is not the time to start meditating on the irrevocable harm caused by learning at a tender age in a past century that your sex is the wrong one. I’ll only say that the hurt I had long thought healed resurfaced another springtime in Berlin almost twenty years later when I wrote the bitterness and anger into a poem.

Family History

Mother tied my hands behind my back

with the umbilical cord

Father beat me with the stick of conformity

Long-suffering sisters stuck pins of jealousy

into the moulded picture of me.

Baby brother took a long time to arrive.

Great rejoicing. A manchild:

Now, they say, the family’s complete.

On the eighth day

initiation rites

secured his place within the tribe

(His sisters were not invited)

He had a godly property

that won my mother heart and soul

I only a hole

the emptiness

I try to fill with love.

Still, life’s getting easier

since I stopped looking for my good parents.

Berlin, April 1995

I never held a grudge against my little brother. At his bar mitzvah in 1977 shortly before that last seder, I was every bit the proud older sister. (Though I did manage to annoy my elders by wearing a big Women’s Liberation badge to ward off the patriarchal spirits in the synagogue, and pointedly asked Reverend Bronsky how long it would be before girls were allowed the privilege of a bat mitzvah under his conservative ministry.)

When my brother was still in his infancy I taught him Beatles songs and his first mathematics and chess. Now he’s a computer prodigy. I don’t see enough of him. I can’t disappoint him by not coming to the seder.

At the next International Marxist meeting I tell my comrades that I won’t be at the crucial debate the following week. The chairman demands the reason. Passover, I say. I have to go to the family celebration.

“That’s not a valid reason,” he says.

“It’s the only one I’ve got,” I reply. (Stifling the impulse to fish for sympathy by invoking my little brother.)

Silence falls over the smoky back room of the pub. From the saloon bar next door you can hear the sound of billiard balls colliding, and the satisfying rattle as they fall into the side pockets of the table. There are at least three other Jewish people at the meeting. They avoid my gaze.

“Do you mean to say,” the chairman asks slowly and deliberately, “that you’re going to let your family dictate to you with their ancient superstitions?”

The sneer in his voice with its carefully cultivated Irish brogue rouses me to anger. It flashes through my mind that I could call him an ignorant Guinness addict. What dogmas did he imbibe with his mammy’s milk before he developed his taste for the harder stuff? He’s also got a weakness for IRA-style bomber fantasies. Unconditional but critical solidarity, he calls it.

This is what happens when people insult me for being Jewish: I want to hit back. A gut reaction. I’m hurt that he’s questioning my revolutionary credentials just because I can’t deny my family.

All this in the split second while I’m listening to the chairman asking the others for their opinion. Nobody knows what to say. They’re embarrassed at this religious family stuff intruding on the agenda. The chairman is proposing a vote.

“Hang on,” I say. “You can’t seriously mean you’re going to vote on whether I can go to my family for Passover? — that’s a personal decision, not a political issue. I did you the courtesy of telling you I wouldn’t be here. But I’m going anyway — whatever you decide.”

“Don’t interrupt in the middle of a vote,” the chairman snaps. “Now: hands up all those in favour of Karen having leave of absence for her… “

He pauses to pick his words, and blurts out awkwardly: “… for her family religious do.”

I get up and walk out of the room without looking back.

Afterwards I heard that the twenty-odd comrades at the meeting voted two to one in favour of my being allowed to miss the crucial meeting for Pesach. Some of my supporters kindly advised me to reconsider my priorities. The rest never mentioned the incident again; but from then on I knew I was regarded as a weak link.

That last seder 25 years ago was the moment I finally cast off the fetters of Judaism. It was also the beginning of my drift away from the Trotskyist movement. A passionate, overwhelming desire for personal freedom eventually led to my renouncing creeds and parties. They seemed to be run mainly by men and to demand exclusive loyalty. I wanted to be a free citizen of the world, not a prisoner of a family, a party, a sect or a particular nation. Let alone a prisoner of my sex.

The following year, I left the International Marxists. In my resignation letter I didn’t mention the pre-Passover meeting in the pub, but it obviously still rankled. I accused the group of being like a 19th-century school where authoritarian masters whipped the pupils into line with a principle called democratic centralism: top-heavy on centralism and ultra-light on democracy.

Since then I have been wary of organisations of any kind, political or religious. I finally tossed the legacy of patriarchy into the dustbin of history and stopped being a good girl.

© Karen Margolis 2008 / 2011

Excerpt from Chapter One of A Renegade Jewess

Germany: A Winter’s Tale

Dresden February 2011

Heinrich Heine’s epic masterpiece

Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1844)

After 12 years of exile in Paris, Heine returned to Germany in 1843 to see his aging mother. On the way, his yearning for the taste and feel of his home country turned to disgust and disappointment at its lack of freedom and intellectual and political courage.

He recorded the journey a year later in what he described as a “humorous travel epos”, a “new genre” … of “political romantic poetry”. Written entirely in quatrains, the book ran to 27  chapters. Its biting parody and exposure of hypocrisy caused a scandal on publication. It was banned in several German states and resulted in Heine being threatened and vilified as a traitor.

Dresden, Sempergalerie façade (mid-19th century)

Germany: A Winter’s Tale

Chapter III

In Aachen’s old cathedral lies

The tomb of Charlemagne —

But don’t confuse him with Major Charlie

Who lives on a Scottish farm

I wouldn’t like to be dead and buried

In Aachen cathedral as emperor

I’d much rather live as a minor poet

At Stukkert on the Neckar

In Aachen, even the dogs on the street

Are bored and panting for action

Oh stranger, give us a kick — at least

That would be some distraction

I walked around for an hour or two

Things had stayed much the same

How dull and provincial everything looked!

I saw Prussian soldiers again

Still in the same old grey coats

With the red collar worn high —

“The red is for the blood of Frenchmen,”

Sang a poet in days gone by

The same wooden pedantic nation

Every motion a rigid dance

And in their faces I could see

The same hard arrogance

Still strutting around so stiffly

Scrubbed, strait-laced and prim

As if they had swallowed whole the rod

That once was used to beat them

Indeed, the control has never let up

Deep down you sense the fetters

Although they can talk more freely now

They still defer to their betters

Their long moustache is really

The old plait in a new pose

The plait that once hung down their back

Now hangs beneath their nose

The new cavalry gear isn’t bad at all

There’s something about it I like

Especially the pickelhaube, the helmet

Topped with a pointed spike

It calls to mind the knights of old

The age of romantic chivalry

Ladies in castles at weaving looms

Proud barons and deeds of bravery

It conjures the Middle Ages so well

Squires with their pages beside

Loyalty engraved on their hearts

And a coat of arms on their hide

It recalls crusades and tourneys

Courtly love and humble piety

When faith was spread by word of mouth

Before newspapers changed society

Indeed, the helmet clearly reveals

A talent for witty design

Let’s call it a stroke of royal genius

The pointed tip is the punch line!

But watch out if a storm brews up

A spike like that can be frightening —

Your romantic heads will be at risk

From bolts of modern lightning!

If war comes you’ll have to buy

Much lighter head covering

That heavy helm from the Middle Ages

Could slow you down in running.

The post house sign at Aachen

Showed my most hated bird of prey

Its glance seemed full of poison

As it looked down on me that day

Hideous bird, I loathe you —

If I could get hold of you

I’d pluck your feathers one by one

And chop your claws off, too

Then I’d put you up on a pole

And summon far and wide

The bird hunters of the Rhineland

To shoot at you on all sides

For downing that bird I’d reward

The victor of the shooting

With sceptre, throne and fanfare

And we’d all cheer, “Long live the King.”

Procession of Princes, Dresden ca. 1870

Procession of princes, Dresden February 2011

Dresden at Frauenkirche Feb 2011

angel Münzgasse, Dresden Feb 2011

Translation © Karen Margolis, 2011