Das Los der Schwere

My journey, my literary downward spiral, began at this cylinder in Berlin-Tempelhof in late February on a cold and windy day that was already sinking into darkness. The last rays of the sunset’s dying light put a mysterious cloak on top of the ruins of this ferroconcrete giant framed by eery branches of reaching for it from naked trees. The cylindrical ruin appeared like a geometrical remnant of a violent vision of infinity in the midst of a Wagner opera or a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Upon arrival, my idea was to write a genealogy of the Tower of Babel motif during German modernity from Kant to Sloterdijk, to look at the correlation between ambition and destruction, dissect the human desire to pile higher and higher and fall deeper and deeper. This initial project was shaped by Nietzsche’s enigmatic discussion of an absolute Höhentrieb, drive to height, that he diagnosed when looking at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin shortly before he lost his mind. But another, even heavier, story was lurking here for me, at the concrete remains of fascist megalomania. Here, at the Schwerbelastungskörper, heavy load-bearing cylinder or body, I heard voices rising from the depth of the earth, stecht tiefer ins Erdreich, voices that came pouring through the cracks in the cylinder and whose bodies had been ravaged and brutally erased, waiting to have their story told, and they awakened something inside of me. A long and draining thought process began, the shadow of the giant seemed to bear upon me from this moment on. Ich zog das Los der Schwere.