Free The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas Page A

me, was researching the ecological control of the tsetse fly, which spread sleeping sickness in humans. I was left confused, not knowing what to say, thinking of people I’d known who behaved just as though they had been bitten by that deadly fly.
    Afterward, leaving the vicinity of the Fridericianum, I thought again of Eva Braun’s perfume bottle and ended up going off on the subject of guilt. That question came back to me like flies returning to an infected person in order to infect them twice as much. In my home country—a nation especially famous for its macabre civil war—guilt barely existed; that vulgarity was left to the ingenuous Germans. Nobody in Spain wasted time regretting having been a Nazi, or pro-Franco, or even a Catalan collaborator with the dictator in Madrid, an accomplice himself to the assassins of the Third Reich. In my country, we have always lived with our backs to the drama of Europe’s demise, possibly because—as we didn’t directly take part in either of the two world wars—all that was seen as other people’s business. Perhaps also it is because at bottom we’ve almost always lived in our own decline; we are so sunk in it, we don’t even recognize it.
    You are in Germany, an inner voice seemed to want to repeat to me, reminding me somehow of the voice running through
Europa,
that Lars von Trier film that speaks to us, powerfully and obsessively, of the brutal ruination of the old continent.
    “You are in Europa” was heard insistently in that film, and what the cameras showed us was a continent turned into a vast, infinite hospital.
    As I came out of the Fridericianum, the voice telling me I was in Germany became unrelenting, and I felt it was likely that I had now finally, really landed. If that were so, I was in a country famous for combining intelligence and barbarism, one deeply familiar with remorse, which had spent years hesitating between feeling great pain for its sins and trying to feel a lesser regret; in short, a country whose citizens tried to find a reasonable balance between going overboard and placing too little emphasis on it, perhaps aware, on the one hand, that without memory they ran the risk of turning monstrous again, but also with too much memory, the risk was that they’d remain firmly stuck in the horror of the past.
    17
     
    I was in Germany wondering all the while whether I was really in Germany. When María Boston and I left the Fridericianum and headed straight down Königsstrasse in a southerly direction toward the Hotel Hessenland, I began to ask myself what sort of relationship there could be between avant-garde art and the bottle of perfume that had belonged to Eva Braun.
    To put it succinctly, it pained me to see that war criminals and contemporary art could be related, even if it was only through art. I was turning this question over in my mind. Almost without realizing it, I drifted off not just mentally, but physically, and was on the verge of losing my balance and crashing—fortunately María Boston didn’t notice—into the window of a large department store.
    A minute later—in the instant when, not without understandable concern over what had happened, I managed to peel myself away from the wretched window—I was dazzled to see in the store’s plate glass the false glitter of an utterly improbable summer light, and I realized that, contrary to what I’d thought, I still couldn’t say with complete certainty that I’d landed in Kassel or anywhere else.
    That was when, to feel more as though I was in Germany, I started to pretend—just to myself, of course—that I felt a certain nostalgia for the starry nights of this country: for the deep blues of the wide German sky, the gently curved sickle of the Aryan moon, and the somber whisper of the pine trees in all the forests of that mighty land.
    The moon isn’t Aryan, I corrected myself at once. And then I told myself that too many things had got muddled up in my head, and all the