Free The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas

sought further information. With the intention of discovering more about that rotunda, I asked additional questions. I soon found out, for example, that Braun’s perfume bottle—undoubtedly the object that most caught my attention—had made it to our day in one piece because it had been found in April 1945 by the American war correspondent and artist Lee Miller in the dictator’s bathroom, in the apartment Hitler and Braun occupied on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich.
    In a vitrine in the Fridericianum there was also a bath towel monogrammed with Adolf Hitler’s initials. Towel and perfume had been carried off by Lee Miller to her Munich hotel, and one could never know whether she ended up using those peculiar, possibly fetishistic, trophies of war in her daily life. Did it matter? Not much, in fact not at all. In any case, I thought if I’d found the towel, I wouldn’t have even touched it, it would have utterly repelled me. But that was me. In the same display case as the perfume and the towel with the initials A. H. were four photos of Lee Miller cheerfully immersed in Hitler’s bathtub. Apparently, the images had been judged frivolous and created a certain amount of polemic when they were published in the
New York Times
at the end of the war. I’d never seen those pictures before or even heard about them. They might be frivolous, I thought, but that wasn’t something that was overly obvious. What
was
very clear was that the bathtub was far more modern than any I’d ever had in all the different houses in my life. That is what I thought. It seemed a trifling detail, but maybe not. That bathtub was more modern than any bathtub of mine.
    Soon afterward—as if I were ashamed of having thought that—I rubbed my face like I was trying to forget what had gone before. After that rubbing, I looked behind me toward the invisible breeze, as if it might be seen, and little by little a sinking feeling came over me. My sense of loss was the same as a person feels when, along the way, he turns back and sees the stretch he’s covered: the indifferent path is visible, its unbending trajectory expressing the irreversibility of time.
    In the end that’s all that’s left, I thought, the backward glance perceiving nothingness. Perhaps that’s why I suddenly wanted, desperately, to look forward. But what I encountered was what I was running away from: the bad vibe Braun’s perfume bottle gave me and, of course, the same irreversible past that I had thought I left behind, including my steps around the
brain
that was preserved in that rotunda in the Fridericianum.
    I was in Germany; it was the first time during the whole trip that I started to feel somewhat conscious of being there. We recognize that in journeys to countries by plane, we take time to truly land where we’ve set ourselves down. In my case, it wasn’t until I came upon A.H.’s towel and Braun’s perfume that I had the feeling for the first time that perhaps I had now landed on German soil. The Nazi artifacts and the presence of the irreversible past succeeded in making me come down to earth all at once, with a bump. There was the old horror, the giant stigma of interminable Nazi guilt. But did that constitute a landing? Perhaps I hadn’t completely set down and I should keep asking myself whether I was in Germany.
    Shortly before leaving the Fridericianum, María Boston insisted on taking me to a separate room to see
Sleeping Sickness
, the strange work of a Thai artist, Pratchaya Phinthong. At first, what I thought I saw was a black smudge caught at the center of a large sheet of glass on top of a large table. But when I got closer I saw it wasn’t a little smudge. According to what was written on a small plaque, it was two tsetse flies, a fertile female and her sterile consort. In that instant—later on I would see more oddities—the work seemed extremely weird to me, very far from my idealized concept of avant-garde art.
    Pratchaya Phinthong, Boston told