On April 3, 1945, the advancing American army shells the historic town of Lohenfelde, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm museum. Within the museum's vaults, Heinrich Hoffer is hiding from the bombardment, and trying to keep a priceless Van Gogh from falling into the hands of a rogue Nazi. After the shelling, an American corporal, Neal Parry, finds a beautiful eighteenth-century oil painting in the rubble, and must confront both its beauty, and the morality of stealing it. The stories of Herr Hoffer, Parry, and their paintings unfold simultaneously in this gripping, brilliantly structured novel about art and war.
On April 3, 1945, the advancing American army shells the historic town of Lohenfelde, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm museum. Within the museum's vaults, Heinrich Hoffer is hiding from the bombardment, and trying to keep a priceless Van Gogh from falling into the hands of a rogue Nazi. After the shelling, an American corporal, Neal Parry, finds a beautiful eighteenth-century oil painting in the rubble, and must confront both its beauty, and the morality of stealing it. The stories of Herr Hoffer, Parry, and their paintings unfold simultaneously in this gripping, brilliantly structured novel about art and war.
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Overview
On April 3, 1945, the advancing American army shells the historic town of Lohenfelde, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm museum. Within the museum's vaults, Heinrich Hoffer is hiding from the bombardment, and trying to keep a priceless Van Gogh from falling into the hands of a rogue Nazi. After the shelling, an American corporal, Neal Parry, finds a beautiful eighteenth-century oil painting in the rubble, and must confront both its beauty, and the morality of stealing it. The stories of Herr Hoffer, Parry, and their paintings unfold simultaneously in this gripping, brilliantly structured novel about art and war.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312426583 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2007 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Adam Thorpe, a poet and novelist, is the author of five novels including Ulverton; his most recent poetry collection is Nine Lessons from the Dark.
Read an Excerpt
The Rules of Perspective
A Novel
By Adam Thorpe
Picador
Copyright © 2005 Adam ThorpeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-42658-3
CHAPTER 1
Do I know myself? Am I who I am? What is this shadow that passes for me? I am wood, I am dust, I am darkness. I am a single point in the universe but the universe does not know me. I am the creak of a floorboard and must extinguish myself. Yet I must live, or the universe will die.
1
Just before eleven o'clock, during the daylight bombardment that preceded the final armored assault on Lohenfelde by units of the 346th Infantry Regiment on April 3, 1945, the city's art museum received a direct hit from a phosphorus shell and caught fire. The solid walls of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum now encased flame. Gallery after gallery was filled with smoke that flashed and spat into flame. Flames crawled up the walls and writhed across the ceilings. Great balls of twisting flame burst through the double doors that Herr Wolmer the limping janitor would close carefully behind him each evening and whose round brass handles the head cleaner, Frau Blumen, would polish with enjoyment to a shine every Monday morning. Now, like a small color television thirty years before its time, each brass knob mirrored the glare of flame in perfect focus. The rooms, happily emptied of their last precious artworks over a year before, waited in turn for the flames to enter them. The dull thudding of the bombardment outside was obscured by the roaring and crashing within the walls of the museum itself, though in the gallery wings not yet touched this internal business seemed as far away and faint as the sea. The odd large sculpture, too heavy to remove — mostly modern works by (or in the style of) Arno Breker, Wackerle, Klimsch — grim, heroic figures with wrestlers' chests, their abdominal muscles chiseled squarely in crude imitation of Hellenic models, leaning their weight on the left leg, relaxing the right, holding vast Teutonic swords or Olympian torches, dumb and brutal rather than Hellenically lithe (almost pornographic in the case of the one female nude, Dawn, her nipples like bullets, her back arched ... a piece the youngish sculptor had hoped might bring him to the attention of the Führer) — these large works waited like the remnants of a greedy god's praetorian guard for the flames to arrive. When the flames did step over the threshold, they seemed to occupy each room swiftly, almost hastily, the stone or bronze figures vanishing and then reappearing in gouts of gold streaked with black (smoke, or the shadows the fire made upon itself as it twisted and spun), their faces in the cube-shaped heads taking on a dazed, cretinous look rather than one of heroic defiance. Perhaps if they had been genuine works of the Hellenic school, or fine Roman copies of the Greek, their expressions would have yielded an infinite sadness as the holocaust did its work around them; but they were not. They were, in fact, vulgar imitations that muddled the plastic ideal of abstraction with surface realism; the nude Dawn showed swollen veins in the crook of her elbow and on her ankles, but this labored detailing wriggled about on a crudely realized geometry of perfection. The result was something cheaply pretending to be flesh, but flesh unanimated by the breath of humanity and vulnerability — as, say, the Aphrodite of Cyrene breathes, for all its idealization of a certain form of beauty. Yet how many visitors had greatly admired the Kaiser Wilhelm Dawn, set at the top of the sweeping staircase as if on the landing of a brothel, their hearts swelling with pride at the manifold achievements of the Reich? Now, as the blaze mounted the staircase like a lithe athlete, three steps at a time, Dawn looked like a common bawd waiting for a client. The flames licked her cold body, hugged her in their spiraling vortex, enfolded her so completely that it was as if she had never been. Then the ceiling above collapsed, weakened by the initial impact of the shell. A beam struck her head and, broken at the neck, the head rolled down the stone stairs until the staircase gave way in a jet of sparks, the supporting girders buckling in the heat; part of the iron balustrade, however, remaining suspended in its usual position. A fine porcelain milkmaid from the Allach factory in Dachau, set in an oyster-shaped depression halfway up the stairs, remained untouched — the kind of freak marvel that often happens in fires. Similarly, the janitor's folded newspaper on his table was still there when the American soldiers arrived, picking their way over the smoking rubble while an old woman in black with a cane watched from the road, hand to her mouth, crying softly. The table stood in a sea of destruction, quite intact, with the newspaper folded on top and unmarked under its coat of ash and soot; while plump, chain-smoking Herr Wolmer, janitor for thirty-one years, friendly once you got to know him, the position of every painting in the museum fixed in his head, who had a secret passion for the reclining Dawn and had once pledged himself stickily to her in the silence of the night hours, lay like a charred log beside the table, indistinguishable from the blackened sculptures scattered in the rubble beyond.
Listen: voices. Voices below. When you have no voice, you are a book without words or pictures. I have no voice. Those voices belong to others, and are come to tear me to shreds.
2
Most of the paintings, the sculptures, the elaborate church carvings in worm- eaten wood and the precious old books lavishly bound in pigskin and vellum, as well as a small but important collection of Renaissance globes that showed Iceland but not America, were deep down in a salt mine some thirty kilometers from Lohenfelde. They had been placed there some months after the firebombing of Hamburg, which disaster had persuaded the curators (encouraged by an order from the Propagandaministerium) that the contents of the museum were in danger, despite the relative unimportance of Lohenfelde as an industrial or strategic center. An inventory was made and, as soon as the salt mine was sufficiently prepared, the works were transported to safety through the Thuringian woods on a foggy March day in 1944.
Few of these works were ever recovered. Of the 480 paintings in the picture galleries, for instance, 431 were lost — some of them no doubt looted before the salt-mine depot was destroyed during fierce fighting between American troops and a contingent of the Waffen-SS on April 5, 1945.
A certain number of works had been discreetly concealed in the vaults of the museum itself. These hundred or so paintings — not necessarily the most valuable — had remained hidden in the vaults throughout the last years of the war, a fact known to very few.
I must keep the shape of time. But time does not exist outside myself. My blood is time. I can hear it, beating. Blood is not a shape, it is sound. Maybe I must keep the sound of time.
3
A photograph taken in 1901, on the occasion of the unveiling of an illustrious burgher's memorial, shows a fence behind the gathered crowd — the uneven planks covered in torn posters — and a few thin trees peeping over. This was the site of the museum, which had previously been "a castle, a tanner's shed, a wine store, a potash factory, a wasteground on which Gypsies' tents had been pulled down in 1799, and a pine-walled school for orphans that was burned to the ground in 1863" (Werner Oberst, A History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Lohenfelde, 1935).
Through all this movement the castle's ancient vaults ("like two giant communal bread ovens set at right angles to each other," in Oberst's description) survived, reached by worn steps and serving at one time as the local temporary lockup.
Two years later, planning permission was granted for a museum (in the words of the local paper) "worthy of Lohenfelde's fine culture and rich history, in which the artworks now on display in three cramped rooms behind the Rathaus might be gathered together with the renowned Schmeling fossil collection as well as the older books and manuscripts of the public library in a spacious and clean environment representative of the new century."
Having been built in record time, the museum was opened by the Kaiser himself with great ceremony, to the stirring tones of the town's excellent military band, and showed an exhibition of Dürer prints which received 13,191 visitors in three months. According to one report, the visitors had to walk on planks around the laying of a mosaic by Hans Thoma (his design consisting of wide-throated flowers and naked infants) in the central hall where the main stairs rose in a magnificent sweep of marble.
The museum's most successful exhibition was "Entartete Kunst," which came to Lohenfelde as part of its German tour in March 1938. "Degenerate Art" received an astonishing total of 149,568 visitors, five times that of any previous exhibition. They filed through the cramped spaces created by the false walls of trelliswork and burlap, talking loudly and laughing a great deal, as if at a cabaret, and frequently knocking the modernist works askew with their shoulders, elbows, and bottoms. Unknown to them, the deep vaults beneath their feet had already begun to receive a certain number of the museum's permanent paintings.
I am very lucky. I can watch the light move. I hear things no one else hears.
4
The vaults burned.
The Americans found charred canvases, blackened frames with traces of gilt, and the bodies (though the Americans did not know this) of four of the staff. The heat overhead had been too great. Perhaps the four had been cooked to death, as in a bread oven; perhaps they died quickly when part of the roof caved in; perhaps (the most likely) they had been gassed by carbon dioxide as a result of the flames above — an effect noted in Hamburg. The soldiers couldn't tell and weren't interested anyway.
They were looking for liquor, not paintings. There were five of them in there, out of the eight on patrol. They were house-clearing, flushing snipers, checking out booby traps. There weren't any snipers or booby traps, not so far. It was crazy, anyway, this patrolling order — the town was crawling with their own men and with German civilians wandering around like refugees among the refugees. Otherwise they could've fired at anything that moved, like in the other places.
All of the men climbed out again, but one.
The one who hung back in there was supposed to be in charge of the patrol, but Corporal Neal Parry had taken art classes in his home state of West Virginia to help him get along in advertising and then he was surprised to find how well he was doing; he had even got the Kensitas girl in front of a waterfall. He fingered the remains of the burnt paintings, stooping in the gloom. He could see patches of oil paint on the canvases, burnt sienna and umber, the surface bubbled and split like the grease on the bottom of a pan. He found a label with the writing mostly scorched away, bar a couple of words.
MIT KANAL
He put the label in his breast pocket. His mackinaw tunic, its pouches and belts and straps, felt to him like a lunatic's straitjacket and was too thick for the first warm days of spring. When he got home he would put the label in a frame, under glass, and call it The Pity of War.
The label of the label.
The four deads were seated against the wall in their last position like the plaster deads of Pompeii; he couldn't think of them as human, despite the spectacles. They were more like rough casts, ready for smoothing off. The light was poor, but he knew their darkness was a dark purple or mauve. One had its arm around the other beside it; the happiness of the heart had burned as things do burn that are inflammable.
He sat on his heels, not wanting to join the world above, where he was never alone, where orders were given or received and somehow you were in the eye of everything. A big beam had saved this part of the vaults from the collapse of the building above, and daylight filtered through in rays picked out by the cloudy air. He wasn't even sure if it was safe to be down here. Somebody shouted for him, one of the new kids, but he ignored it. He was extremely tired. He was being a bad patrol leader, he knew that, but he was at the bottom of a curve of tiredness. Anyway, this patrol was a waste of time. So many orders were a waste of time.
He pushed back his helmet and squeezed his eyes, which were full of smoke. They'd waited outside in the plain rolling fields while the artillery worked and the town burned; the tanks waited on the giant concrete highway in a long column, with the infantry behind, watching the black smoke rise beyond the gentle slope, and where the shells were hitting there were tints of red flushing into the smoke.
Hell, they couldn't even see the roofs of the town — only a church spire was tall enough to show over the crest of the slope — but they knew what it would be like when they got to take a walk in there.
They had done all these minor and major places, places with bridges and market squares and their very own major and minor streets, piling in the artillery when Heinie wouldn't give over, then shooting them up some until all the streets were major and entering and walking through the streets like it was a Sunday except that now and again a sniper picked off a man when you were least ready for any of that.
They had crossed the Rhine like the goddamn Romans — over two weeks ago, at Wesel. Wesel was left with only its radiators intact. And a stink of damp soot. And rubble you couldn't touch, like you couldn't touch a searchlight just extinguished. Strange, how rubble always looked the same wherever. The Germans who gave themselves up had panda eyes and were mostly too old or too young, but it made the men mad when some out there among them wanted to play rough, despite the game's being over.
He kicked at the debris, at the burnt frames and scorched canvases, and turned to climb out. Color down there caught his eye, like a patch of clear sky in storm cloud along a flooded rut.
He rooted carefully in the mess and pulled out a small painting.
Sure. He knew more about paintings than he knew about science or monkeys or riding goddamn horses.
Or poetry, although he had written poetry for a year when he was sad and fifteen or maybe sixteen.
This painting had three and a half sides left of a gilded frame that was very loose, the work no longer sat snug in the outer frame and it nearly dropped back to the floor so he had to hold the canvas from behind. He blew off flakes of something like burnt paper and took the painting to the light filtering down between the shattered beams and the picture kind of rose up to it like a shoal of colored fish.
It was landscape. He wanted to sob a little.
Trees and pools and rocks.
This is a helluva painting. He wanted to go screaming about it. This is first of all old and second worth more than I can know and it is nice as a girl is nice when you aren't being too specific.
His heart was beating a great deal, and up in his throat.
He squeezed his eyes, which had grit in them always, and looked again. The flames had closed their teeth on one side of the frame and loosened the nails that had kept the picture in place but had got no farther. Maybe if he looked too hard at it he would see blisters but right now he didn't see blisters or even pimples, although he knew that paint and heat did things chemically together that were surprising. He would've taken out his flashlight but it needed new goddamn batteries. There were snowy mountains and a golden village way back. Now he was happy after a long time.
The light was good enough to make out some letters on the scorched label of the frame — a ch and an o and maybe two nns and then Christian Vollerdt (1708–1769), Landschaft mit Ruinen. The name of the artist sounded German. It was unknown to him, but then he knew very little about German art. For the moment, he couldn't recall the name of a single German artist. OK, Dürer. It was a shame the label didn't say Dürer. Or Rembrandt or Titian or Michelangelo or Vincent van Gogh.
He held the picture in both hands, ignoring the shouts and laughter from above.
A tiny guy with a wide hat and some fallen columns in the foreground. Sheep, not bushes. It wouldn't look like this if it was van Gogh, stupid.
He knew what they thought he was doing; they thought he was answering a call of nature. In actual fact, he'd found some black bread in a pillbox outside Offenbach three days back and nothing at all was moving inside him now. Waiting in reserve for the big assault.
There was a scuffle and a cough and a cloud of dust and he turned and saw Morrison, cradling his M-1 as if nervous of what he might find down here, his face smeared with smoke out of which the eyes peered too white.
"I'll have an iced Campari, Neal. To go."
"With lemon or without?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rules of Perspective by Adam Thorpe. Copyright © 2005 Adam Thorpe. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraphs,
Begin Reading,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Adam Thorpe,
About the Author,
Copyright,