Reparatur

I am sitting at the table, looking at a plate. The table is set with fine starched linens, old family silverware, and an array of glass. The plate is of fine porcelain, elegant in its proportion and grace. Running through the plate is a ribbon of golden metal. The plate is cracked into two uneven pieces, yet it is still too beautiful to be discarded, too useful to waste. The plate has been repaired with the ribbon of metal, held together by the physical force of glue and the metal clasps on its underside. The plate is the work of Ingo Kratisch, the setting on the table the work of Jutta Sartory.

Other dishes and glasses are similarly reconstructed. A closer inspection reveals not only the craftsman’s skill, but a curious esthetic touch as well. And when thinking about the quality of the reconstructions on the table and at the same moment, the films of Ingo Kratisch and Jutta Sartory, one cannot help but remark that it is precisely this tendency toward repair and order that mark their film work as well.

Those of us who grew up with a post-war consciousness have had to confront almost daily our own relationship to things whole and broken. Broken lives, broken histories, broken families, broken spirits… Trummer und Leid. My father, who in many ways exemplified the un-broken spirit of that time, was always searching the streets for old furniture, discarded wood and hardware that he would manage to put together into some bizarre concoction. These strange new objects would have some unique purpose in our house—an old television set, with its picture tube and electronics removed, was transformed into a liquor cabinet. Of course no one in our house everdrank liquor. But the idea of creating something from nothing was too compelling to allow the opportunity to pass.

Ingo once told me that his father’s desire was to own a junkyard, to be a Schrotthändler.

Our fathers were forever collecting things with the thought that at some future moment they would be transformed into something useful. Through the Midas-touch of labor they would metamorphose into gold.

We have inherited some of our fathers’ tendencies, or so it seems. But the need to make things whole, to put things back together, is perhaps older and deeper than our own time.

But one’s time provides the specific materials, the specific images, for transformation.

I return to the image of the plate, of the seam of metal running through it, and think of a divided Berlin, the city and subject of many of Ingo’s and Jutta’s films, with its own seam running through it, a seam of concrete and metal that tore the city apart, rather than holding it together.  In O Logischer Garten that seam disappears, and magically, a whole city is reconstructed. The future once again becomes possible. The two parts of a divided city are unified through film, through the proximity of images, through what is left out.

The idea of the whole—a whole plate, a whole city, a whole culture, seems to drive their labor.

History too is something to be reconstructed.

For so many years I was repelled by the ability of the Germans of my generation to deny their own responsibility to history. Cutting themselves off from the time before the war, thinking of it as someone else’s history, someone else’s problem, left me to deal with the experiences of my mother and father alone, with other Jewish sons and daughters. I couldn’t so easily rebel against the reverberant pain of my parents’ experiences as did the children of Germans who could openly lie saying, “We didn’t know.”

But like it or not, we have much in common. All of us were recipients of a history we didn’t ask for and problems we didn’t create. What unifies us is that we must use the same strategies to work towards our own wholeness, towards a moral as well as spiritual health.

Something has changed. I have seen, along with neo-fascism, skinheads, Gewalt gegen Ausländer and Rechtsradikalismus, an understanding by some that you cannot deny your own history. And what that ultimately means is that you take responsibility for it; working towards a reintegration of the past and the present. This is not accomplished passively. Instead one takes active steps towards a reconciliation: learning about Jewish culture, actively cultivating connections with those who remain, fostering a more secure relationship between the German and the Other, whatever that other may be.

In my own country this is hardly fashionable, in German culture it is often considered suspect and aberrant.

When I first saw Das Gleiche Wollen und Das Gleiche Nicht Wollen (Wanting and Not Wanting the Same) I thought that the makers of the film must be Jewish. The kind of understanding—the expression of doubt, contradiction, and frustration of being a Jew in Germany—could only be articulated by someone who was in fact Jewish, or so I thought.

I was of course even more interested when I found out that both Sartory and Kratisch were not Jewish.

Das Gleiche… represents for me a turning point. It is not a document or an essay, but an expression. And what it expresses is precisely the need to become whole once again. Not only personally, but for the city, the nation, and the society as well. When Sartory, Kratisch, and their friends repair the gravestones in the cemetery of Adass Yisroel, it is not only the Jewish community that is being repaired, but Berlin and Germany as well. Beyond acknowledging absence and loss, as does O Logischer Garten, it takes a further step in acknowledging those who live.

It also expresses an interest in others that is rare and profound. But this interest is also a reflection, because it comes not out of a desire to teach but to learn. There is no narrative voice in Das Gleiche… that tells you anything, there is no knowledge outside the film itself. In its expression of Jutta’s and Ingo’s experience of these particular people, places, and events it too is whole, generous. The film shares an experience that most haven’t the courage or ability to undertake.

And what it does is to quietly prod their own culture into the acceptance of another reality—towards integration when it is divided, towards an acknowledgment of the past when it is denied, towards finding a connection to what has been lost or cast away.

If in O Logischer Garten the appearance of Jews is through their spectral absence, in Das Gleiche… they appear in flesh and blood. In contrast, the Wall that is willed away in O Logischer Garten appears as a ghostly specter in Das Gleiche...; only as a place where it once stood. It is towards one’s knowledge that these things are addressed, no one says them directly. Perhaps here too is a quiet if powerful observation: that with the Wall gone one can confront things that were left to one side, that the new situation demands a unification of all kinds.

These things are understood slowly, through a kind of unspoken order, an order based on an intellectual discipline and curiosity. It’s a reflection of the making of the film, a reflection of the table with its settings.

In Hebrew when someone asks you how you are, one answers, “Kol Beseder” which means literally, “everything is in order.”  The idea of order as being a measure for one’s condition is perhaps derived from the fact that disorder makes one miserable.

What many see as the German penchant for order, most often and casually noted in the activity of the Third Reich, is not order at all; it is totalitarianism, fascism, fear, and a disregard for others. But order is an ideal based on logic, rational behavior, judgment, and generosity. It should not be surrendered to these other things. Our own sense of what is true is demeaned when there is no resistance to these linguistic appropriations.

When in O Logischer Garten we see the polishing of the silver and images of carefully piled plates, the cleaning of doorways and stoops, the removal of leaves from graves, we are reminded that all these things are part of the effort to create order from small daily tasks, order not as a restrictive system, but as a source of calm and reflection, an attempt to “somehow” set things right. The ordering of household objects, their care and maintenance, suggests a modest model for the re-ordering of larger confusions, perhaps even of historical tragedies.

And it is the invisible connection between the dining table and the workbench that echoes the unspoken but finely drawn connections within the films: between the individual, one’s daily life, the city, and history.

When I was growing up in New York my mother received a monthly letter from Munich, wrapped in a rice paper blue envelope with red and blue markings on the edges. The letter was from the office of a Dr. Hans Raff, Rechtsanwalt, who in my mind wore glasses, was tall and very quiet. Dr. Raff was one of the lawyers appointed by my mother and many of her friends to represent her case for war damages to the German government.

When I asked my mother what these letters were for and what they meant, she used the German word for reparation—“Wiedergutmachung”—explaining the parts of the word and how the word derives from its roots.

Wieder – Gut – Machung or literally, making good again. To return something to a former state. The denial of reality apparent in even the term for reparation was not lost on me.

But making good again was impossible when what was lost could not be recovered. At least not for my mother. In English the word reparation derives from another root—repair—which to my sensibility does not signal a return to completion but rather merely a state of reconstruction. Something broken may be repaired, but it can never become un-broken.

The German word for the activity of repair, “Reparatur”, is perhaps the more appropriate word for the real work of “Wiedergutmachung”.  It sounds like something in progress, something continuous. It is in the unspectacular workshop of daily life, and in the films of Ingo Kratisch and Jutta Sartory where much of this work is done; quietly, individually, and with a clear sense of purpose.

The text “Reparatur” was first published in Vor den Bildern, Editions Sans Pareil, 1992.
An abridged version, as well as a contemporary expansion by Daniel Eisenberg, will be published in the forthcoming booklet HaFI 022: On Ingo Kratisch. A Logic of Images. A Logic of Things (eds. Daniel Eisenberg, Clio Nicastro, Ellen Rothenberg; expected publication date: February 2025).