After-the-fact – and proof that I’m slowly reviving – greetings from an outing across the river, across time, across the pain-limit (consequence), across the pleasure-threshold (immediate), all imbued with the sweetness of motion and possibility (momentary), long awaited, planned for, and already passed into memory: Last Thursday a friend and I visited the Hannah Höch-exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, where we didn’t find the German Girl but an otherwise glorious, glorious show. Finally I saw her collages outside a book, those bold combinations of partial images, cutting through time and culture. If only I could have run a fingertip across seams and edges…
Hannah Höch was born 1889 and alive through two world wars, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich (when her work was classified as ‘degenerate’). While I lay waiting to be restored to improved if not good physical function I pondered the memory of two great-aunts of mine, contemporaries of Hannah Höch.
As I was small when they were old, and my nose was in books more often than not, my father’s maiden aunts, Tante Maja and Tante Frieda, were to me like figures sprung from fairy-tales. Tante Maja, tall and with a saintly, not-of-this world aspect, an ancient Frau Holle, ready to reward even the slightest show of goodness; Tante Frieda, small, rotund and resolute, an old crone who may have lived in a little house deep in the forest for centuries, where she commanded the broom to sweep, the kettle to boil, pots and pans to cook her frugal meals, and waited to test, try and rescue those who lost their way. It was inconceivable that they had ever been young, that they had led professional lives, taught until 1933 when they refused to join the NSDAP or any other national-socialist civil servants’ organisation, and were banned from teaching. Both had to leave behind their respective flats and independent lives in B. and K. and came to share a room with a double-bed in their brother’s/my father’s father’s house.
I cannot say if my memory of Tante Maja comes from a photograph I’ve seen, or from reality, or a composite of the two, as I see her as if posed for a camera-lens, standing still and looking straight at me. Her bespectacled face had a serene radiance, and a gold tooth blinked when she smiled. Her younger sister, Tante Frieda, I remember better. When we visited her on Sundays, after church, in the catholic old people’s home, she would sit in her armchair wearing a dress and jacket, blue hat on brillo-pad hair, and a handbag lying in her lap (although beyond going out), looking mischievous. These were the times of Sunday best and measured afternoon walks along the promenade where men would raise their hats in greeting. Writing this I wonder what age I spring from and want to wipe my words clean from nostalgia… I don’t wish to go back, no way, just hold on to my small stock of memories, and marvel that I once was a child – which seems incredulous to me at times.
Later, when Tante Frieda could no longer rise we would find her in bed with books, Readers’ Digest, said handbag, and, much of the time and thrillingly interesting to me, her dentures in a glass on the bedside table, pink and glossy, a sea-creature trapped in a tiny pool, exuding a hint of menace. (This reminds me of the Chinese paper flowers my father sometimes brought us, which swelled and opened in water and floated like beautiful wounds.)
History and the first inklings of other languages, people, worlds which existed beyond what I ‘knew’ first came to me from fairy tale books, Grimm, Andersen, Hauff, to name a few. Ice-queens, brothers in raven-form and Rumpelstiltskin seemed as real as the ruddy crumpled neighbour who was often drunk; I encountered Scotsmen with checked trousers and long sideburns, Turks and Arabs wearing fezzes and turbans, their princesses in pantaloons and pointed shoes; robbers’ inns in the Spessart; caravans and deserts and grand viziers; but also wandering apprentices, serfs, servants, slaves, hungry children, cruel punishments. Or did I see these as tall tales and was startled later to see how much was real?
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