Wolfgang Schlüter By the gallows Seven steps - Impressions of -

Written after spending February to April 2000 as Writer-In-Residence in Calw.

At the Hermann-Hesse-Museum in Calw, there is a photograph taken in 1895. It shows the splintered pines of the northern , reduced to nothing more than cracked stumps rising up out of the ground following a terrible storm. An equally devastating storm blew in from France on Boxing Day 1999, damaging the Black Forest as severely as if it had been hit by a meteorite. From the windows of this taxi, which takes me, via , to Calw from the main railway station in in the evening of February 1, I see for the first time the destruction wrought on the plant world by the atmospheric world, hitherto known to me only from hearsay. As if in a giant game of spillikins, the long trunks lie strewn under, over and across each other in confused disarray. The hurricane gouged out storm aisles and entire storm glades but what is perhaps most frightening is the arbitrary nature, the random manner - barely comprehensible in aerodynamic terms - in which the gale-force winds mercifully preserved in one particular spot what, in another just nearby, they razed to the ground, tore down, flattened, twisted, and caused to rend, split and break asunder with quite inconceivable violence. In the case of physical, i.e. also meteorological, phenomena, we are used to seeing regular laws assert themselves. Here, however, there was nothing to be discerned but wilfully berserk acts, the madness of the elements, nature running amok against itself.

When, near Heumaden, the road began to dip, the cab driver gestured with his left hand to the coniferous forests, already heavy with evening shadow, up above Calw, saying: “Up there is the gallows.”

Those wishing to discover a town properly should set foot in it for the first time in darkness. That, at least, is what I believed, and, having first dropped off my few belongings in the flat for the writer-in-residence, I set off in the direction that led past the town hall up into Salzgasse. It was already dark, the street lamps not all that bright; a cool breeze, the scent of pine, and the cries of owls from up on high serving as pledge for the proximity of the forest. All the more marvellous, since completely unanticipated, was what then rose up above me so breathtakingly: a sandstone building brightly lit on the second floor, as massive as it was elegant, with a remarkably beautiful steeply sloping roof broken at intervals by dormer windows. A compact building from ’s Gründerzeit period at the latter part of the 19th century, flanked at each corner by a statue in a niche, whose stylish monumentality had an almost exotic feel to it amid the cramped, confined and squat nature of the half-timbered town, as if a generous trading magnate from afar had come to set a landmark serving as symbol for that cultivated form of prosperity which was no longer to exist after the 19th century. “Georgenäum” is the name of the house that is built in the same way as the Ankerstein kits, or those “Faller-Häuser” I used to glue together as a kid to provide the backdrop for my model railway. It is houses of this kind that appear to us in dreams yet refuse to grant us admittance - here in Calw, one would he able to enter it and finally see what it looks like on the inside.

I developed an immediate fondness for this house. Another time, I was passing it one afternoon when, from an upstairs window, I heard a children’s choir singing, to a piano accompaniment, from the “Magic Flute.” On that first evening in Calw, however, everything - apart from the constant humming of the road down in the valley and the hooting of the owls in the forest - was quiet. I walked uphill, marvelling at the luxury of a partly stepped, partly asphalted path apparently branching up into the wilderness of the forest, a trail which nobody apart from me seemed to use, allowing myself to bask in the bright glow of arc lights, following the path up through all its twists and turns - and was disappointed or, rather, confused when it did not, as expected, lose itself somewhere in some dark place distant from humanity but had only seemingly led away from the town, terminating in an estate set a little higher up, by the name of Wimberg. It was there that I decided to turn back. And I found consolation in the comforting light glowing up from the depths below in the Georgenäum, which projected out into the city woods like an outpost of civilization on the fringes of barbarism.

The next day, I went looking for the same path again, followed it for a while, yet soon, obeying the sign pointing to Zavelstein, took the left fork and steadily - first crossing a little wooden bridge and then a series of stone steps rising up out of the forest floor at irregular intervals - ascended to the Gimpelstein ledge, a rocky overhang consisting of several mighty stone slabs, the uppermost of which forms a plafond shaped like the outline of an almost equilateral triangle. I found the regularity of this plateau rock striking. It appeared as if the stone had been artificially hewn with a view to giving it a form that would make the passer-by want to step up on it, to take up a position on it and - be it in majestic or in contemplative pose - to rest on their staff and gaze down into the valley. There are landscapes, I thought to myself, that were shaped millions of years ago by volcanism, erosion, shifts and fissures in the surface of the earth, glacial melting, or whatever, for the sole purpose of later - around the year 1900 or so, say, on our modern-day calendar - serving as a motif for a coloured postcard on which is stamped “Genuine Photograph,” and this triangular slab of rock on the Gimpelstein - votive site and picturesque vantage point in one - is definitely one of them. However, the only thing is that anyone forever listening down into the valley will not, as was once the case, hear the roar of the river but the incessant drone of traffic on the busy 463 highway, which is amplified by the steep slopes of the surrounding hills, which act like the bell of a musical instrument, reflecting the sound up to even the highest woodland elevations. Indeed, nowhere on my many later walks through the did I manage to completely escape this drone of traffic, which is sometimes nearer, sometimes more distant. The affluence that the automotive industry has brought to the state of Baden-Württemberg has been achieved at the expense of the possibility of finding any one spot where one is, with the dignity due to us humans, still able to be entirely on one’s own.

February 2, the day on which I took this path, occurred during a strange non-season period. The winter was obviously over, the snow having melted, the cold now gone. Yet, equally, spring was still a long way off; nothing was yet blooming or coming into leaf, with bushes, branches and twigs still all bare, and rotting foliage and a damp carpet of pine needles underfoot. The muted colour scheme of the forest was dun and wan, ranging from grey through to brown and greenish violet, and bordering on the monochrome. Passing a transmission mast, I briefly traversed the saddle of the hill and then branched off, almost on the offchance, following a strange intuition (labyrinth instincts that I always like to let myself be led by when in unknown forests and unfamiliar towns, since they only rarely disappoint), taking a left fork onto a parallel path heading off towards the southwest, which was no longer widened, flattened or gravelled for commercial vehicles but reserved for pedestrians - as straight as a die but immune to boredom due to the bumpy elasticity of the surface and the slightly dreamy, curiously fleeting nature of the perspective, as if it was a narrow corridor or, rather, the side aisle of a cathedral of trees flanked by pillars of spruce and pilasters of pines, whose secluded semi-gloom with the infinitude of its sacred space was seeking to reward the stalker in generous fashion.

It was along this path, cutting though the forest like a ruler, that I thus walked - until, after a good four hundred metres, off to the left of the path, between the tree trunks, a strange type of edifice appeared. To be more precise, I should, say that it half appeared and half concealed itself, with a gesture of embarrassed inconsequentiality. To anyone who, lost in thought, had kept their gaze fixed straight ahead down towards the ground, it would easily have remained concealed, for the path did not lead towards it but tangentially, quite literally en passant, right past it. In keeping with this was the fact that, on the metal sign nailed to a tree opposite it, it said not “AM” (“AT”) but “BEIM” (“BY”) THE GALLOWS.

Assembled from coarsely hewn stone blocks, it is a rotunda, nay, a circular rostrum, on slightly downward sloping terrain, averaging one metre fifty in height, covered with a layer of needle humus, a little grass, moss, some seven paces in diameter. Seven worn-down stone steps, facing into the midday sun, lead upwards. All of it sinisterly well tended, in a way one could almost term neat, the age virtually impossible to guess from a mere visual inspection. It could just as well have been erected there three hundred years ago as it could have three decades past. A wooden bench and litter bin next to it, as if it were inviting one to stop for a relaxing break while watching an execution.

I climbed up the steps, advancing, not without my misgivings, on to the centre of the stone rostrum, wondering what else might have once been found up here on the circular platform: a wheel, a gallows, a guillotine, a scaffold? A chopping block with executioner’s sword and axe? I sought to picture how, in the last few moments of one’s life, it must be to run one’s eye over fir-cones and the tops of spruces, to have one’s eyes dazzled by a ray of sunshine flickering through the tangle of branches from the cloudy blue south. I imagined how the condemned man catches his breath for a final time and sucks in the forest air with its sharp resinous aromas, attempted to envisage what it is like when the whir and hiss of steel that sunders head from rump mingles with the chirping of a robin, the distant shriek of a jay, and the wind rustling in the treetops.

And, from a higher altitude, the “hee-ay! cry of the buzzards. Nowhere before had I seen so many common - or “mouse” - buzzards as in this region. Individually or in groups, they circle high above the valleys, or they squat, in the apples trees now stripped of their foliage, close to the road, as motionless as a sentry, only reluctantly deigning to spread their wings and fly up, groaning as if it were some kind of effort, when one gets too close to them. And the spread laid out for them on this woodland table seems to offer rich and bounteous pickings. In Zavelstein, at the “Kreuz der Spinnerin,” I discovered, in the upper layers of the grass in a field - only recently laid bare by the snow - a virtually immeasurable labyrinthine warren of mouse holes, passages, burrows, and nests, a “megalopolis” of mice, a megacity, the size of whose population I did not even dare estimate.

I descended the stone steps and sat down for a while on the frivolous bench. How odd to find a place of execution in such an unremarkable, out-of-the-way place, I thought. Whoever might have accompanied the wrongdoer - executioner, officers of the law, men of the cloth, ghoulish onlookers - had a long way to go, and no lack of effort to get there. Was it not, in days gone by, once a custom - with a view to defending oneself against the miscreant while setting an example to the people - to have such executions carried out in high-profile settings accessible to all: in the palace courtyard, the marketplace, in front of the town hall? The wheel and gallows were used to execute death sentences outside the walls of the city not necessarily for hygienic but for olfactory reasons: as a deterrent, the corpse was left hanging for a period of several days - yet for that, too, one preferred, for reasons of ostentation and prevention, to use places visible from a long way off, such as hills, the baulks between fields, crossroads. So why this woodland seclusion? This oppressive secrecy, the apparent inconsequentiality of the choice of location, somewhere in a no-man’s-land of spruce, on the edge of an insignificant path, en passant, in a place where, today, we would, at most expect to find piles of wood, winter feeding stations for deer, the Land Rover of a forestry department officer. Was it possible that this was, perhaps, not a place of execution but a sacred site of iniquitous provenance, a holy place of witches and clandestine rites, unspeakable cults, the sacrificial site of a heathen temple? Which priest may have presented sacrifices - and of what, for heaven’s sake - on this circular stone rostrum in order to propitiate his idols? Or was it, on the other hand, just a scaffold after all, yet for the Vehmic Tribunal from the time of the French?

The best way to escape the encircling spell of such thoughts was to turn around and, in retrograde stride, to pass what now, on my way home, no longer presented itself as a form of black romanticism but as a highly rational sequence of elementary geometric forms: from the circle (of the scaffold) through the (tangential) straight of the path, past the equilateral triangle of the rocky outcrop, through to the rectangle. or red sandstone cube, of the Georgenäum, which, now more than ever, reminded me of a Paris lycée. All that was now needed was the ellipse with its two foci.

Focus 1: In the first few weeks of my stay in Calw, I repeatedly listened to music by Hector Berlioz, most especially the 1826 overture Les Francs-Juges (“The Vehmic Tribunal”), and the fourth movement of the Symphonie fantastique of 1830, which is called the Marche au supplice (“March to the scaffold”), conducted by Pierre Boulez, who is one of the few conductors not to whip this passion infernale up to a frenetic pace, blurring its contours in the process, but genuinely marching it at a measured pace over the feverish triplets of the timpani to the grotesque counterpoint of the bassoons and the scampering shuffle of the strings, the jarring faux bourdon of the trombones, the tempo held in iron fashion, right up to the triple crash in octave complete with the final clatter of the execution drum. With his periodic asymmetries, rhythmic regularities, dull to shrill instrumentation and what might be termed hollowed-out harmonics, the Frenchman Berlioz sends out a signal that is a rallying cry for a new poetry of the characteristic - and also of the hideous. In keeping with the black literary romanticism as shaped by Gustave Doré, Gerard de Nerval and Victor Hugo, he cites the image of the place of execution under the spell of an older aesthetic of the gothic, the picturesque. I am now convinced that the Calw scaffold never had any executional function but is to be viewed as part of a larger ensemble of landscape aesthetics, a picturesque concept of LAND ART, in which the little metal plate, nailed to the tree as if to the wall of a museum, has no other function to perform than that of providing information about the title of the installation, while remaining significantly silent about the name of the artist.

Focus 2: The Christmas twister also came from France, albeit not as a storm of enlightenment. of revolution, but of apocalypse. Someone told me there are fourteen different religious denominations living in Calw. Shouldn’t they perhaps include a sect which, as in the days before the Enlightenment, saw comets as being celestial signs and tempests as the wrath of God? The devastation wrought in the northern Black Forest has left many paths impassable up to the present day, causing multimillion damage to the forestry industry, and using the bark beetle to continue the process initiated by the Egyptian locust. The Lord is thus sending devastation to chastise man for his global transgressions against nature - yet not for that alone. With storms and winds, HE is roaring “retribution” from on high. In the image of the twisted, split, sundered trunks and stumps that had been wildly tossed, higgledy-piggledy, on top of each other, the Almighty is punishing us for the abominations of a deadly justice that cannot be atoned for. “For vengeance is mine alone. and not man’s.” 1 Corinthians 16, 24. Does the photograph in the Hesse Museum not look as if it was taken just a week ago? Verily I say unto you; for as long as this blasphemous scaffold continues to stand up there, HE will, over and over again, continue to snarl storms down at us from the heavens as a sign of his ire! What I myself think of such divine judgement is not the issue here. My task was solely that of describing what I saw, and of sensibly assigning and dissecting what I perceived.