History meets prophecy

Jahrhundertschritt by Wolfgang Mattheuer. Potsdam, Germany. Photo credit: Jürgen Langguth (2017). Copyrighted Free Use.

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​     In Kairos (2021), Jenny Erpenbeck (translator: Michael Hofmann) writes through, and of, her character, Katharina:
     "Wolfgang Mattheuer, Sculpture, “Step of the Century.” Heil Hitler with the right, clenched-fist salute with the left, equal parts goose step and genuflection, or is the distorted figure collapsing? The center has given way, the head slumps. The giant scrawny figure takes a great leap forward and at the same time he falls back. Just as she’s feeling now." 
     I knew nothing about Step of the Century — Jahrhundertschritt by Wolfgang Mattheuer, first exhibited in Leipzig, East Germany in 1985 — until I read Katharina’s note on her visit to the Tenth Art Exhibition in Dresden. Erpenbeck’s novel, set in East Berlin in the late 80s through the fall of the Wall, courses through longing, abasement, exploitation, and beauty in the dialectic of the two main characters — Katharina, enthralled by Hans. The brilliance of the novel lies in how well Erpenbeck uses their wearying relationship as the warp on which to weave personal and social history meeting prophecy.
     This phrasing of history meeting prophecy is drawn from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) which couldn’t be more different from Kairos. They don’t even share a similar sorrow for the beauty and degradation of life. Beauty in Kairos appears despite the degradation, somewhat like the moments of grace in Wim Wenders’ (West German) film Wings of Desire (1987), in both cases tracing the persistence of living in broken, divided Berlin with its broken relationships, ruined buildings, betrayals, dead bodies, shrapnel of history, shame, desire, daily life, and aspiration to love. Erpenbeck quotes Friedrich Hölderlin* through Hans through Katharina, “once I lived, like gods, what needs there more.” Erpenbeck’s Hans, or Hans’s Erpenbeck, points out the commas to propose, “not a comparison with any idealized divine life, but the question whether being alive is what makes a god.”
     Living itself is where Berlin meets the profoundly alive environments of Kimmerer’s beloved world of complex ecologies and natural reciprocities. Mind you Kimmerer, looking to repair earth and humans, is openly aware of the dispossession and brokenness that pock the foundations of contemporary ecologies and their human societies. Her scientific and spiritual narrative seeks to restore symbiosis and reciprocity between human and non-human nature, calling for one retouching of the earth at a time, one renewed relationship at a time, one cycle of reciprocity at a time. At this time of increased strife and threat, with potential for extensive conflict and environmental damage throughout the planet, reading Sweetgrass is nourishing for me. While Kairos pushed me to question and see — judgement-no judgement-yes-no!-yes — Sweetgrass invites me to hope and to touch.
     Each book has a deep ethos of paying attention to, and valuing, non-consumerist living: in Kairos with attention to the richness of the human mind, the desires of the human body, and the complexity, even beauty, of human longing and comprehension especially as expressed in art and in Katharina’s and Hans’s relationship; in Sweetgrass with conscious recognition of and gratitude to sources, and open joy at touching what is alive. From Kimmerer I learned to touch the wood of my chair, thank the tree from which it is made, recognize that the tree gave up its life for the objects I and other humans use, and to ask myself what do I give in return. Like Kimmerer, I am a bit stymied by plastics.** Quite apart from the toxicities of the manufacture, use, and disposal of plastics, their natural provenance — which has implications for paths of reciprocity — is unclear, though Kimmerer does make an effort to see and acknowledge “the diatoms and marine invertebrates who two hundred million years ago lived well and fell to the bottom of an ancient sea, where under great pressure of a shifting earth they became oil that was pumped from the ground to a refinery where it was broken down and then polymerized to make the case of my laptop or the cap of an aspirin bottle — but being mindful in the vast network of hyper industrialized goods really gives me a headache.” A Black Ash basket provides a simpler example. She quotes John Pigeon, a Potawatomi basket-maker instructing aspiring basket-makers: “slow down — it’s thirty years of a tree’s life you’ve got in your hands there. Don’t you owe it a few minutes to think about what you’ll do with it?” Pigeon’s question gets me thinking about the two million years behind the plastic of my refillable fountain pen.
     When, earlier in this essay, I used the phrasing of “history converging with prophecy” I mentioned that I took the phrasing from Sweetgrass, and used it with reference to the agonistic 20th Century in German/European/World history as expressed in Kairos and by Step of the Century. Kimmerer uses the phrasing quite differently. Drawing on the words of Anishinaabe elder Eddie Benton-Banai, she tells us the first work of First Man Nanabozho was “to walk through the world that Skywoman had danced into life… in a such a way ‘that each step is a greeting to Mother Earth.’” She adds: 
     "In the way of linear time, you might hear Nanabozho’s stories as mythic lore of history, a recounting of the long-ago past and how things came to be. But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge — the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead…. Nanabozho did his best with the original instructions and tried to become native to his new home. His legacy is that we are still trying."
      Wolfgang Mattheuer writes about the same man, differently. Referring to Step of the Century, he says:
     "This nightmare figure, as the embodiment of absurdity, is ‘that conflict between the longing mind and the disappointing world,’ it is ‘… homesickness for unity, this fragmented universe, and the contradiction that connects both’ (Albert Camus) and which all too often erupts into aggression and destructiveness, as a centrifugal force that tears the individual apart. No attempt at self-discovery is successful anymore." (Mattheuer in Wolfgang Mattheuer (1997) Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt (ed.). Bilder als Botschaft – Die Botschaft der Bilder, as quoted and cited in the Wikipedia page — as available on February 26, 2025 — on Step of the Century)
     Contrast Mattheuer’s image, resonant in Erpenbeck’s Hans, of the agonized individual pitted against the “disappointing world” and “fragmented universe” with the fundamentally social First Man who is enjoined to live in respectful relationship with Skywoman’s creation.
    In Erpenbeck’s and Kimmerer’s works there are different ontologies — theories of being — at play: one animated by an agonistic dialectic of domination-submission-learning, as lived out in unrelenting detail in the relationship of Hans and Katharina; and the other weaving pragmatic material reciprocity with conscious attention to and gratitude for respectful and sustainable relationship, for example (even) between hunter and hunted or forager and foraged. One could suppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk are conscripts in an agonistic socio-political dialectic. Through their domination there will be change and learning, at great cost. Meanwhile, the voices of gratitude, respect, and sustainability tend to get lost in our complex anthropocene world that slips in and out of the delusions of machine learning. But we are not simply handlers of intelligent machines and to live as humans we — some of us, some parts of us — must and will return to sensing and expressing gratitude, respect, and sustainability in relationships with each other and with the non-human natural world. While recognizing the drive and pull of the agonistic, indeed not denying or shying away from it, how do we keep alive and amplify the sound of  positive mutuality? 
     We are in a time of dire change. The change will happen. We are not going back: not to the golden past of MAGA dreams; not to the old institutional stability of late 20th Century democracies, international trade, and international law; not to what we hoped might become a straightforward moral path to fairness and kindness. We will draw on the roots and lessons of the past, yes, but already we are building the future. As we push back against the excesses of the Musk-Trump-Vance government, how are we shaping what comes next?
    Kimmerer retells a story she heard from Sakokwenionkwas, also known as Tom Porter, a member of the Mohawk Bear Clan: 
     "The twin grandsons of Skywoman had long struggled over the making and unmaking of the world. Now their struggle came down to this one [gambling] game. [If one twin won] all the life that had been created would be destroyed. [If the other twin won] the beautiful earth would remain. They played and played and finally they came to the final roll. The twin who made sweetness in the world sent his thoughts out to all the living beings he had made and asked them to help, to stand on the side of life. Tom told us how in the final roll… all the members of Creation joined their voices together and gave a mighty shout for life. … The choice is always there.”
     Of course, few of us, if any, are just one twin or the other.
     And the twins are still in here and out there, playing for high stakes.
    In Trump’s and Musk’s 2025 United States, I read Katharina’s interpretation of Step of the Century as an uttering of history and prophecy — looking back from 1988 to (1920s) man staggering between left and right, looking forward from 1988 to (the present) man staggering between right and left. But, I remind myself, right and left are not just one point or a straight line. Right is a wide 180° angle and left is a wide 180° angle.
     Before closing, a comment on the number of men in this essay (that draws primarily on two books by two women). I grew up questioning the evident primacy of men as writers, speakers, and characters with agency. Though the stories and histories I grew up with were always more complicated than the apparent primacy of men, I learnt that the structures of primacy have deep linguistic roots, and draw sustenance from language. While the effects of structures of primacy are sometimes benign and even very positive for some people, we know that, unquestioned, they can become scaffolding for layers of inequity, hence this noting of the recurrence of men in this essay.
      Several times “men” show up in this essay -- especially with reference to Erpenbeck’s and Mattheuer’s work -- leaning in the direction of “toxic masculinity." Mulling “toxic masculinity,” especially today, is a rabbit hole. After trying several times to write some of the mess of my thoughts, I find myself tied up in knots that I can untie concisely only with something platitudinous like: even in Erpenbeck’s work and certainly in Kimmerer’s, men, indeed all of us, are gendered beings (and, I would add, not just binary and heterosexual!) and also human. We are all Nanabozho, we are all Skywoman, we are all taking a step, all potentially falling into a need for creativity: but differently. 
     Step of the Century is not the end of the story.
     Nanabozho kept trying. We keep trying.

*Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who, among other things, had his hopes for a new society dashed by the excesses of the French Revolution, as discussed by Erpenbeck’s Hans and his therapist. I mention this because in Erpenbeck’s book, as in Sweetgrass but differently, every narrative turn in Kairos spirals to that meeting of history and prophecy, curling into past, present and future for man, human, collectivity, life.
** While stymied by plastics, Kimmerer is defeated by Ding-dongs and Cheetos, which she calls “an ecological mystery.”