by ANDREW O’HAGAN
I opened? the window to let in some air. Hotel windows can’t always be opened. Some hotels don’t believe in fresh air, or they believe it’s too expensive, if the price of having it is accepting the risk of people smoking (or jumping). On the fourth floor of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, windows open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a historic moment. I wasn’t imagining it: the sound was coming from the Brandenburg Gate, where images from the fall of the Wall were being projected onto the façade to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of reunification.
Fresh air. Angela Merkel is a big fan of it, and says that ventilating a room – lüften – may be the saving of mankind, and the cheapest way to contain the virus. She can become quite deep on the subject – a friend of mine used to call it ‘Black Forest thinking’. Stosslüften requires that a window be opened wide at least once a day to give a room a thorough blast; querlüften needs crosscurrents of air, which means windows open at opposite ends of a room. In Germany there’s a long history of admiring fresh air and relating it to one’s existential wellbeing.
Outside, the anniversary celebrations were hotting up, and flags were fluttering. I asked a woman in a hi-vis jacket about the flags. ‘It’s Germany a hundred years ago,’ she said in English. ‘Before. I mean the time until 1910. Before all of this.’ I wasn’t sure whether her English, or mine, would stretch to a full investigation of ‘this’, but, as she snorted at the excited crowd and walked off, the word ‘EINHEIT’ (‘unity’) was projected above the columns. Whenever I see flags I think of Macbeth – ‘Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky/And fan our people cold’ – and the anniversary seemed edged with current fears. There was nationalism, on the one hand, and a foreign virus, on the other.
The next morning thirty police cars stood around Pariser Platz, where there were mini-demonstrations on behalf of Indian rape victims, the Falun Gong and the teachings of Jesus Christ. ‘Only Jesus Christ can convince alcoholics and homosexuals to change,’ one young man said. He was wearing combat trousers and a white hoodie bearing the words ‘Jesus Walks with Me’. The man in the hoodie might have referred to Psalm 62, where men, when weighed in the scales, are lighter than air, yet the virus appeared to have brought outside some of those who believe the virus is either a judgment or a conspiracy, and flags were never far away.
After leaving the Walter Reed hospital, Donald Trump was swiftly encouraging people to risk their own lives and one another’s, just as he had done. Even by his standards his tweet was dangerous and mad. Then he ripped off his mask on the White House balcony, as if in defiance – but of what, or whom? He loves an airless room. Seeking
London Review of Books for more