Notes (and quotes) on and by Mieke
Unlike Ingeborg Bachmann, who died in Rome, but is not buried in Rome, Uwe Johnson died and is buried in Sheerness.
She took this photograph of his grave – a pink granite slab, with only his name carved onto its face – and it sits over Solonga’s desk. It has become her talisman.
One of the Caspian languages an object cut or engraved with a sign or character under various superstitious observances something that produces extraordinary or apparently magical or miraculous effects truth is a talisman of which the charm never fails her pride as the sort of talisman that would save her from every kind of ill
On 25 October 1973 Ingeborg Bachmann, who died in Rome on 17 October, was buried in Klagenfurt, the city where she was born on 25 June 1926. On October 29, 1973, Uwe Johnson flew to Klagenfurt, and visited her tomb.
Viewing the site of her grave from a nearby bench, Johnson remembers Bachmann again:
‘above all one cannot have grown up here and be me and then come back.’
He composed A Trip to Klagenfurt by drawing from her letters, local papers, and his notes.
His little revenge for what they did to her after her death.
He is looking for traces of the dead poet and novelist, rummaging through newspaper articles, old letters, stories, poems that are ripe for abstraction, rife for quotation, constructing a collage of statistics, schedules, cadastral extracts – a patched together requiem for a friend who has been lost . . . not only lost, she’s been displaced.
It is so hard to slow down to the pace where it is possible to explore one’s own mind.
One absolutely must be a stranger to be able to stand a place like Klagenfurt for more than an hour.
After spending some time in New York, Johnson moved to the seaside town of Sheerness, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, in 1974. He was 40. It was a decision that astonished his admirers.
Characteristically describing himself in the third person as writing things down in his notebook. People still remember him. That old German writer. Something Johnson.
One absolutely must be a stranger to be able to stand a place like Klagenfurt for more than an hour, or one must live here always.
The inside page of a pamphlet distributed by the Carinthia State Tourism Office even has a sketch showing the lay of the city in a valley between mountains and next to a lake, but it just so happens that a mountaintop blocks precisely what you’re looking for.
‘Klagenfurt – The Garden City on Lake Worthersee’ is to be recommended, since the back page has a street map and the front has a list of hotels, as well as a depiction of the landscape by E. Kucher. You behold Mt. Maria Saal to the north, but again what lies at its base is obscured by crosshatches, and the instructive street map likewise suppresses any hint that there might be a cemetery here.
I wait not for time to finish my work, but for time to indicate something one would not have expected to occur.
Process is paramount.
Someone came up with the idea of putting the airport next to the cemetery, and the people of Klagenfurt always said that this made it easy to bury the pilots who flew training flights there for a while. The pilots were never considerate enough to crash.
One absolutely must be a stranger to stand a place like Klagenfurt for more than an hour, or one must live here always, but above all, one cannot come back.
When Johnson was found in his home,
Drawn from Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Exile’:
I am a dead man who wanders
registered nowhere . . . bequeathed nothing . . .
Save wind and time and sound
he had been dead for several weeks.
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