This
is the place of torture.
Life
is not easy.
Look
at your own face,
it
is lined with the worries
of
those long flown away;
their
lives,
for
what they’re worth,
lie
stretched across history,
stinking
of injustice.
This
is more agony
than
smiles.
Sip
your coffee
and
think
of
those who died making it.
Soak
up the warmth of the sunshine
in
this carcass of a town
for
we are just fleeting meat
on
the Catherine Wheel of centuries,
simply
dust
on
the sheen of the river.
That
man walking
across
the marketplace
looks
kind
but
underneath it all
he
is a murderer of insects,
an
officer
who’ll
break you on the cross
with
his sturdy provinicial mallet.
It’s
a race of rats
scurrying
past the Stiftskirche window
in
a frenzy stripped of meaning.
Do
not trust a judge,
he
will crush you
to
save his own wig and skin.
The
Law is an ass
and
lawyers are donkeys
in
fancy gowns,
feasting
on slaughter
and
leering
among
the carnival crowds.
And
don’t even think
of
trusting a crow,
it
will feed on your pathetic verse
and
hockle out the crumbs of words
into
the Lange Gasse gutter.
Can
you even board a plane
without
thinking of the dead on battlefields?
Can
you sit in an airport lounge
without
seeing the severed limbs
strewn
around you?
Is
that a swastika logo
in
McDonalds?
Helmut
Herzfeld eat your heart out
for
they are still
going
about their duties,
breaking
spirits with missiles,
hammering
the humanity
from
loving communities.
Let
me show you
the
hillside
where
they displayed the broken body
for
the world to scoff at.
Let
me remind me you
how
cruel the bastards are,
how
ugly that Nazi is at the bar.
You
know we are fragile,
passing
butterflies
in
the appalling rush hour
of
the dying day.
Please
please cling to me,
cling
on to the immense value of your own dark dreams;
instead
of a simple carnage,
think
of your complicated beauty.
That
way it wil be easier
to
walk along Wilhelmstrasse
in
the flowing rain,
to
love a girl called Catherine
for
her caring spirit
and
a refuge seeker
for
his marvellous poems.
KEITH
ARMSTRONG
The
breaking wheel, or Catherine Wheel, was a torture device used for
capital punishment in the Middle Ages and early modern times for
public execution by cudgelling to death.
It
was a crude implement of torture reserved for commoners who had
killed their families, committed murder during the course of theft,
betrayed their lords, or otherwise outraged the community with
excessive crimes. The condemned prisoner was lashed to a large stout
wagon wheel and an executioner broke all of the prisoner’s limbs
and joints with a cudgel or metal bar. The broken limbs were secured
to (or threaded through) the spokes of the wheel and the prisoner was
hoisted into the sky on top of a pole to contend with dehydration and
the birds.
In
a window on the north east side of the Stiftskirche in Tuebingen
(today
the Protestant Collegiate Church and, before that, the Catholic
Church of St. George) is the carved stone image of a man on a
breaking wheel.
Legend
says that two journeymen went on tour in the woods near Tuebingen,
but only one came back. As he had a dagger with him that the other
man had once received as a gift, he was thought to have murdered his
missing companion and the Duke of Wuerttemberg had him broken on the
wheel. When the other man turned up alive and healthy a week later,
the Duke was directed to do penance by paying for a window to
commemorate the martyrdom of St. George, which also took place on the
wheel.
The
window was used by the exiled German printmaker and photomontage
artist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld) in 1934 as a template for
one of his political photo collages - "As in the Middle Ages ...
so in the Third Reich" - against the Nazi regime.
Heartfield
(1891-1968) is now regarded as the inventor of political
photomontage.
He
skillfully adapted the swastika (itself an image adopted and misused
by the Nazis) to picture what was happening to the German people
under the guidance’ of Adolf Hitler and his cronies. Some might say
that this image of suffering is a little generous to the German
people, portraying them as the victims of Nazism, but once Hitler had
secured absolute power for himself and with no way of democratically
– or governmentally - relieving him of his position then victims is
exactly what they were.
Heartfield
employed the actor Erwin Geschonneck as a model and instructed him to
writhe naked in various poses around a specially made wooden cross.
On
the finished glued two-part assembly, you look down on the wheel and
also see a man, as in the church window, depicted as a martyr to the
swastika.
Dear Keith, your poem is a very beautiful one, we thank you very much for it. And we sent it to some of our friends! Yours Heidi and Wolfgang
