Rosen-Montag’s wife introduced me in English and I began. After a while, I could tell that I was failing to make much of an impression on the dozen people around the table, but at least I was getting by, as usual, getting away with it, as always, because no one cared. I was a diversion, a black American on the project. The largest print run for the huge illustrated book was in English, however.
“These photographs speak of imperium,” Rosen-Montag interrupted, in English.
Mom and Dad had a tattered bound book of souvenir portfolios of the great international exhibition held in Chicago in the Gilded Age. I must have looked at this warped book when very young, because Mom said the brown crayon attempts at boxes around the Beaux Arts domes and fountains in some of the photographs were mine. It contained black-and-white views of the White City, the fantasy town of neoclassical pavilions erected beside Lake Michigan.
“They have nothing to do with my work,” Rosen-Montag said, running his hand through his lion hair.
The Columbian Exposition opened in 1893 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of what they called the New World. Every territory and each state in the Union sent exhibits. Dozens of countries built exhibition halls made from steel, staff, and plaster. A Hawaiian volcano of electric lava stood next to Old Vienna. The furs in the Russia pavilion were for sale and so were the Krupp cannons in the German Hall. There was a Women’s Building and a Horticultural Building, an Electrical Building and a Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building with a mile-long arcade under its roof.
I clicked the button that changed the images Manfred had helped me to assemble on the carousel. He’d done most of the figuring-out that got the grainy pages of the borrowed book turned into slides. He’d wished me luck and gone off to fight with East Berlin state company representatives about a shipment of gravel and concrete. I looked at faces that had quickly made themselves replicas of Rosen-Montag’s face. By the time I completed the circuit around the long table, I’d caught a chill.
I wanted to tell them to study the derby-headed, darkly dressed masses in Mom and Dad’s old book. Against the vanilla of the pillars and parapets, the arches and façades, the tiny figures looked like fallen music notes. “In the environs of the White City, there was nothing left to wish for.” Chicago aspired to put on for the world a show of magnificence, but very few of the fairy palaces were built to survive a Chicago winter. There was nothing permanent about them.
“I understand absolutely nothing,” Rosen-Montag pleaded in German to his entourage standing behind him.
I kept talking, as though I were a recording. I talked to the tops of heads. As soon as I said that Bismarck considered international exhibitions a necessary evil, I saw all too clearly that I had taken the wrong approach. I only meant to say that Rosen-Montag’s project would be what a future generation looked back on and wished itself into. I never considered that I might be implying Lessingsdorf was as impermanent as the Chicago Exposition. It was the scene of new inventions and new styles and the Lessing Project offered the same, I’d planned on saying.
“Who has extended to the Bismarck this invitation,” Rosen-Montag demanded of his wife. I began to see what Manfred had tried to convince me of. As if daring anyone to try to shake him up and hold him accountable, Rosen-Montag was on the offensive with everyone, wherever he went, about everything. He was unhappy. He showed it to everyone. People redoubled their efforts to please him.
My German entered the space like a variety of squirrel rare in the city. I rifled through the Manfred raps in my head and tried to give his views about how in Berlin there was a tendency to build horizontally, along a west-east axis, instead of a north-south one. I turned from side to side. We had internalized the Wall. Uneasy laughter among the assistants made me think I’d said that we had eaten the Wall.
I tried to attack the skyline of my hometown, a gray specter on the water when viewed from shores of the South Side. I said something about phallic architecture, or thought I had, and got somewhat more relaxed laughs. The truth was that I never minded the skyline. But I wasn’t interested in the questions tall buildings asked. I was happy on the seventh floor around the atrium of the old Sante Fe Building. Mom and Dad’s dating stories were about places like Grand Central. He kissed her hand the day they tore it down.
Rosen-Montag maybe felt pity when I tried to speak on their level, in their language. I went 1930s Hollywood Negro. I was smiling and perspiring. I was moments away from tap-dancing. I swam back to English and the beauty of decentralization.
I clicked the carousel to the image of a divided screen: on the left side, a panoramic black-and-white view of the Chicago Exposition taken from what was called the Spectatorium; on the right, a colorful, touched-up aerial view of Lessingsdorf that Manfred had taken from the runway rooftop of one of the apartment blocks in the Hansa Quarter.
I said that Berlin’s 750th anniversary was a time to remind ourselves that the city’s history need not be dominated by the legacy of Nazi devastation. I said it was not true that East and West Berlin were two forms of government yet one city in spirit. Rosen-Montag stopped fidgeting. He’d been stroking the skin inside his shirt. He asked for a coffee. He liked departure from the conventional rhetoric of the celebrations.
Rosen-Montag said evenly in English that Paul Goodman, a prophet of decentralization, had left his world a far better place than Bismarck had his, but what was he to do with Paul Goodman at this stage.
I had nowhere to go with it. A phrase from Brecht-Weill launched into my head. O moon of Alabama. I almost sang it to Rosen-Montag because I had nothing else.
The people in the Chicago photo must have known they were at something special. But we could not see any women, and all the men were white. The important division was the border between what we had been and what we were becoming.
“To call for decentralization away from utopian centers moves no one, and not the German people, that is certain.” Rosen-Montag was asking me what this meant and I had no idea.
“Turn to the River,” I said to the hut, ditching the remainder of my presentation. “In this is the meaning of the Lessing Project. Water is the life of Berlin.”
My use of a project mantra, Turn to the River, calmed Rosen-Montag somewhat. His coffee came, borne by a willowy French girl with coal-dark eyes. He had the power to ornament his life with such creatures. The conference table asked for coffee, its mood a little deflated. There would be no sacrifice, but allowances had to be made for the black American, Rosen-Montag’s experiment, much as the eighteenth-century court of the Prince and Princess of Brunswick had to put up with their royal highnesses’ determination to send a black man, Anton Wilhelm Amo, to university to study theology in order to prove that a black man could study theology.
Throughout history, water has meant communication, I went on. There was still no wooden dock for the pleasure boat that was to take passengers from Lessingsdorf to the lakes in the west. I said Rosen-Montag was the first architect working in West Berlin in a long time to dream along a north-south axis. I got a sigh from him.
Manfred had heard that Rosen-Montag was furious that the opening of the Lessing Project was not the inaugural event of that season’s 750th anniversary celebrations. I clicked to the final images in the carousel of the Chicago Exposition as seen from Lake Michigan and then one of Rosen-Montag’s project as seen from the river. It looked its best from that view. It looked most real from that angle as well. Perception has a destiny, Emerson said.
Suddenly the table was talking generally. They were trying to come up with a summary of what I meant. I was so tense that I didn’t notice I was understanding their language, I was just understanding. I was at last living in the moment, as AA urged me to. Because my remarks had been obscure and inconclusive, so were the comments of the foundation people concerning Rosen-Montag’s book. But then, it existed. They didn’t have to have a critical opinion. They just had to hope it sold. It didn’t matter that nobody understood what I’d been trying to say about the book, since I’d not had time to mention it during my talk.