The Mirror Of Rouen: German New Realism Noir

Batch 9 - Work ID 77393: The Mirror Of Rouen

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Act I

Berlin in 1929 was a city composed of layers, like a document that had been written on, erased, written on again, and erased again, until the surface was thick with the residue of everything that had been attempted and nothing that had been completed. The streets were wide and straight, laid out in a plan that assumed a prosperity that had not yet arrived, and the buildings that lined them were a mixture of pre-war structures that had survived with varying degrees of cosmetic damage and post-war constructions that were functional and unornamented and slightly sad in the way that functionality without beauty becomes its own form of aesthetic statement.

Peter Scholz was a journalist, which in Berlin in 1929 meant he was a writer who submitted articles to newspapers that existed in a state of perpetual financial precarity and were kept alive by a combination of advertising revenue, political subsidy, and the stubborn belief of their editors that words still mattered, even when no one was reading them.

He worked from a desk in a shared apartment in Kreuzberg, a room that was six meters by four meters and contained a desk, a bed, and a wardrobe that doubled as a bookshelf and a table and, on evenings when guests arrived, a place where coats were hung in a manner that suggested the guests were staying longer than they intended and the host was hoping they would stay longer than they intended, which are two different things that sound the same in German and in English and in every language.

His desk faced a wall with one window that looked onto a street where trams passed every twelve minutes and at those twelve-minute intervals the entire apartment vibrated with a frequency that was barely perceptible but constant, the way constant things become barely perceptible. On the desk was a notebook, a pen, a glass of water that had been filled three hours ago and was now room temperature, and a stack of press cards from newspapers that might or might not publish whatever article he was currently writing.

Act II

The assignment came from his editor, Frau Weber, a woman of fifty whose face carried the particular expression of someone who has read too many bad articles and has therefore developed a permanent slight frown that she doesn't realize she's making and which her subordinates have learned to interpret as a sign of either disappointment or mild disappointment, the difference between which cannot be determined from facial expression alone and must be inferred from subsequent actions, which are themselves ambiguous.

"I want you to write about the bridge," she said, not looking up from the article she was editing, which was an article about the economic outlook that she was editing with the same precision she would have applied to a literary critique if the economic outlook had been written by a novelist with something to say.

"The bridge," Peter said. There were many bridges in Berlin. The specificity of her request was therefore meaningless, which was itself a kind of specificity, the specificity of someone who expects you to know what she means without her having to say it, which is the most common form of professional communication in a city that has been together long enough to develop shared references and not together long enough to communicate about them efficiently.

"The new bridge," Frau Weber said. "Over the Spree. In Lichtenberg. The one that was planned before the war and built after the war and opened in 1951 and has been a subject of debate ever since it was opened, which is to say the debate about the bridge is the bridge, and I want you to write that."

Peter understood. He understood that the bridge was not a bridge but a metaphor for something about Berlin itself, about a city that builds and rebuilds and debates its own reconstruction with a intensity that serves no purpose other than the intensity itself, about a population that has learned to express its anxiety through infrastructure.

Act III

Peter spent three weeks researching the bridge. He visited the construction site, which was no longer a construction site because the construction had been completed years ago, but which retained certain features of its construction phase, like a building that has finished its purpose but hasn't received the notification. There were scaffolding remnants on the pedestrian walkways, sections of chain-link fence that had been left standing after the contractors left, and a small office container on the riverbank that had served as the construction manager's temporary workspace and had been left in place because removing it would have required a decision about what to do with it, and decisions are expensive in a city where everything is already too expensive.

He interviewed the architect, a man named Klaus Heilmann who had designed the bridge in 1942, when Berlin was at the height of its imperial ambition and bridge design was a form of architectural propaganda, the kind of thing that says to the world: we build bridges not to connect two sides of a river but to demonstrate our capacity to connect things at all. Heilmann was now sixty-four years old and lived in a small apartment in Prenzlauer Berg and watched the world change with the detached interest of someone who has seen enough changes to recognize that none of them are as final as they seem when they're happening.

"The bridge," Heilmann said, sitting in his apartment with its furniture from a different era, furniture that had been bought when furniture was meant to last and was therefore heavier and more difficult to move and therefore more permanently attached to the rooms it occupied, "the bridge was supposed to be the first of many. A network of bridges connecting the districts that the war had separated and would continue to separate long after the bombs had stopped falling and the buildings had stopped burning and the people had stopped dying on the streets that the bridges were meant to connect."

"And now?"

"Now it is one bridge," Heilmann said. "One bridge over one river in one city that has decided, several times since 1945, that it is not the city it was before and therefore needs new bridges, new streets, new names for everything, but which remains, despite all the newness, fundamentally the same city, still building bridges it doesn't need over a river that is not wide enough to justify them, still debating the necessity of connections that everyone accepts but nobody uses."

Act IV

Peter wrote the article. He wrote it in the style that his editors preferred, which was the style of someone who has observed something carefully and is reporting what they observed without quite saying what it means, leaving the meaning to emerge from the accumulation of details the way meaning emerges from life itself, not through declaration but through the patient arrangement of facts that speak for themselves if you arrange them in the right order and with the right distance between them.

The article was published on a Thursday, in a newspaper that was read by approximately two thousand people, of whom perhaps fifty read Peter's article, of whom perhaps ten understood what the article was about and of whom perhaps two understood that understanding was not the same as acting on the understanding and of whom perhaps one did nothing at all, which was precisely the point.

Peter walked home that evening through the streets of Kreuzberg, past the shops that were opening for the evening, past the cafes where men sat drinking beer and talking in voices that were loud enough to be heard on the street but not loud enough to carry information to those who heard them, past the tram stop where people waited for a tram that would arrive in approximately twelve minutes, the way it always arrived, with the punctual indifference of a machine that doesn't know it is carrying people who have lives and thoughts and rooms that are six meters by four meters and desks that face walls with one window.

He crossed a bridge over the Spree, not the new bridge in Lichtenberg but an older bridge, one of the many that connected the districts that the war had separated and would continue to separate, a bridge that was functional and unornamented and slightly sad and absolutely necessary and nobody used it except the people who lived on the other side and had no choice but to use it, the way people in Berlin use everything: not because they choose to but because the city has arranged things in such a way that choice is a luxury that infrastructure cannot afford.