Even the way from the train station to the city is literature – albeit in a completely different way than expected. I had come to Halberstadt to visit the Gleimhaus, one of the oldest literature museums in Germany, which is committed to both the era and the spirit of the German Enlightenment like no other. But first I walk, with the historic station building behind me, down a long street towards the city center, lined on both sides with dreary post-war architecture.
And already, completely unplanned, Alexander Kluge creeps into my head. As a 13-year-old, he experienced the day when Halberstadt became a field of rubble. On a spring Sunday, April 8, 1945, 215 B17 long-range bombers dropped 504 tons of high-explosive bombs over the city, destroying over 80 percent of the historic center. Almost 2000 people died. After the end of the war, which was already within reach, new living space had to be built in no time at all – as is the case here.
Much later, Alexander Kluge, whose parents’ house also fell victim to the bombs, would break down the monstrousness of that one day in “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on April 8, 1945” into many scenes and sequences and use them to revolve around the untold. There was the Capitol cinema: “The wooden paneling of the boxes, the balcony, the parquet floor are in ivory, red velvet seats.” Theater director Ms. Schrader has to interrupt the matinee performance when she suddenly saw “a piece of smokey sky” through the ceiling. The wedding guests at the wedding on horseback “chatted through the door, down the hallway, down the beige-painted basement stairs…” and were buried and dead twelve minutes later.
US bombers in World War IIVernon Lewis Gallery/imago
Frederick L. Anderson, 8th Air Force, “who ‘led’ the attack at a senior level,” later told a reporter: The attack could not be “messed up.” “We see: main connecting roads, arterial roads. Where it really burns.”
Before April 8, 1945, Halberstadt was a thriving city
Individual city villas now come into view on the right and left, houses from the time before April 8, 45. The church towers point the way, several of them, high, tapering to a point, connected in a row. Eight of the once thirteen churches still exist. There is the Martini Church with a high and a half-high tower, which somehow does not seem to have grown with it.
Halberstadt around 1935File/imagination
Before April 8, 1945, Halberstadt was a thriving city with a wealthy bourgeoisie, with a metal industry and mechanical engineering and a center of magnificent upper-class half-timbered houses. Today, one approaches the historic old town from behind, so to speak, starting from the rear of the mighty cathedral.
In the Gleimhaus directly next to it – old half-timbered house on the left, a modern extension on the right, elegantly connected with an asymmetrical glass construction – the before and after of April 8, 45 have remained visible. Ute Pott, director of the Gleimhaus, tells what happened back then: employee Ludwig Frischmeyer managed to organize the last fire swatter that was still working and thus to stop the approaching fire on the wall. A deed that saved the home of the writer and important “networker” of the Enlightenment, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719-1803).
This April 8th has also inscribed itself in the Gleimhaus, eaten into it. It has become an image of destruction and rescue at the same time, the place of activity of that man who “made Halberstadt a significant place in German literary history,” as Ute Pott describes it.
I am now traveling back there, to this time, 270 years later, after leaving the glass-covered foyer behind me and standing on the old tiled floor, walking up creaking stairs and trying to orient myself in the winding house.
The historic Gleimhaus with its modern extensionAlimdi/imago
In 1747, the 28-year-old Ludwig Gleim came to Halberstadt to take up a position as cathedral secretary and take care of the administration of the cathedral chapter. He had left his life in Berlin, especially his friends there, behind. And as a person who was particularly gifted in making friends, Gleim chose an artistic way to have his loved ones around during this time before cars and telephones, not to mention cell phones – he had them paint.
In this “temple of friendship” I am now standing, centuries-old floorboards under my feet, amidst the densely placed oil paintings, of which an Ewald von Kleist throws a cheerful glance, Enlightenment Nicolai looks boldly and philosopher Sulzer stands out sympathetically and somewhat disheveled amidst the well-coiffed wigs .
The Gleimhaus in Halberstadt: “Boring, boring,” judged Sarah Kirsch
“Well, better than nothing”, 200 years later, the Halberstadt student Sarah Bernstein – later Kirsch – will find, who had to visit the Gleimhaus at least twice with school in the 1940s, but found it “boring, boring”, this one “Temple of friendship, and always only portraits of powder wigs”, as she later wrote in her booklet “Cuckoo’s Light Carnations”.
There are also quite a few women among the powder wigs, there are Anna Louisa Karsch next to Sophie von La Roche or the Duchess Anna Amalia. In short: you are also standing in the largest portrait painting gallery of 18th-century women poets.
But above all, says Ute Pott, one can recognize the idealistic humanist Gleim particularly well in this room, who gathered people of the spirit around him and connected them with one another; who collected texts, such as those of “Karschin”, for example, which can be discovered today as the first German professional writer, primarily thanks to his diligence.
In general: “His network of communication covered the entire north and central German area.” And so the Gleimhaus puts this confident epoch of the “sapere aude” in the light, the confidence that with the “courage to use one’s own understanding”, instead of accepting fate as given by God and King, the world would become a better place.
But did Gleim, with all his active confidence, suspect that humanity would not overcome its destructive impulse and its most striking expression, war? Towards the end of his life, addressing the end of the 18th century directly, he drew an extremely thoughtful and skeptical conclusion: “You started with wars, you end with wars / With saber wars and with feather wars / Century! All campaigns / God watched from the highest heaven! / Was it his pleasure to see wars?” No, the enlightener replies to the question he asked himself. No one is responsible but man: “No! But your souls are / created free by God the Creator. / The realm of virtues, the realm / of science lay before you, / and you chose weapons!”
John Cage’s organ project in Halberstadt – funded by donations
A few steps out of the Gleimhaus, I come to the surprisingly spacious cathedral square, surrounded by striking buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries. In one of the buildings, which stood empty after the city library moved out, the Halberstadt resident and retired university teacher Rainer Neugebauer and his wife have fulfilled their childhood dream of a huge library.
John Cage’s “Organ2 ASLSP” project in the Burchardi ChurchKlaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa
But he has been helping to shape the spiritual place of Halberstadt in another way for over 20 years: He curates John Cage’s organ project “Organ2 ASLSP”, financed exclusively by donations, to which we are now working. Stairs lead down from Toompea and into the streets of the old town, which are still adorned with some beautiful half-timbered houses, to the Burchardi Monastery on the edge of the city center, which the city donated to the Cage Foundation for one euro more than 20 years ago.
Then I enter the simple Romanesque church, raw walls, uneven floor, in which there is nothing but those six organ pipes, the harmony of which has been a single note since the beginning of February 2022 and until the change of sound in February 2024: because this is where the piece is performed with Cage’s stage direction “as slow as possible”, which means in the Halberstadt implementation: 639 years. With this period of time, since the beginning of the art project in 2001, the exact number of years has been projected into the future that points backwards to the year 1361, when one of the first large organs in the world was completed in Halberstadt Cathedral.
The sound of the organ as a symbol of what has endured over time? And what would that be? Hope? “It’s a crazy project, in the truest sense of the word,” says Neugebauer. The project takes advantage of the fact that the organ as an instrument is designed to produce endless tones. “But Cage didn’t have any symbolism in mind. For him, things mean nothing but themselves, they are their own center,” he explains, quoting the American composer: “Sound, just sound. Nothing but sound.”
And so, in the protection of the old church walls, in the total reduction, everyone experiences something different, their own, in the confrontation with this special, not silent stillness; with the radicality of the idea. I myself experience ten minutes in which life consists of nothing but a sound, distant barking dogs, the soft rustling of the wind machine and feet on cold stones. He has “learned to hear in a new way,” says Rainer Neugebauer, who then quotes John Cage again: “Why are people afraid of new things? I’m afraid of the old man.”
And where could a project that considers temporality itself fit better than Halberstadt? This place that will always be divided into a before and an after by April 8, 1945; literary permanently marked by Alexander Kluge.
Halberstadt’s before that was, for example, as Sarah Kirsch noted, that “magnificent, mangy area” of what was then the lower town, this “poor man’s area with quarters for large families”, where her grandfather rented the half-timbered house: “On one side of a little river limited, front and rear building, stable building, workshops, wash house, a battery of outhouses surrounded the large, partially paved yard, which could be barricaded by a double gate … Nazis, communists, initially Jews, train drivers, notorious liars, seafarers lived there , thieves, there was everything, and I was allowed to play in the street with their children, to my greatest pleasure. It was just a huge mysterious house, and later resettlers and refugees arrived. It was great! A social mess, a rip-off of the world.”
The mikveh house (left) is now part of the Jewish Museum in Halberstadt.Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa
Last but not least, one of the most important neo-Orthodox Jewish communities had its headquarters here, in Halberstadt’s lower town. When in the mid-1990s the descendant Raphael Nussbaum, who lived in New York, offered the city the former family property for use, a start was made, mainly by Werner Hartmann, who lived in Halberstadt advanced process that has not stood still since then. The Jewish Museum opened in 2001 and is now in two locations: Both “the Klaus”, the Jewish teaching house, and the mikveh house for the traditional bath are accessible, in the finest half-timbered houses from the 16th century. “Broken houses never scared me,” says Jutta Dick, who led the development work from 1995 to 2022, looking back with a nice understatement.
What is the special magic of Halberstadt? I ask myself on the way back to the train station after a full day. Last but not least, like John Cage’s organ sound, in something invisible: those people from Halberstadt and Neu-halberstadt who have been cultivating and developing this place, which has been marked by destruction in a particularly radical way, as a spiritual space for a long time, perhaps in the spirit and in the footsteps of the creative philanthropist Wilhelm Gleim. Or as Alexander Kluge says: Art is the answer.