Vol. 6: Ghosts and Monsters of Dessau
I.
In the beautifully unsettling 2017 book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, editors Anna Tsing et al. propose a brilliant framework for navigating the blurred estuaries where humanity intersects with ecology: the eponymous ghosts and monsters.
On ghosts: “Our era of human destruction has trained our eyes only on the immediate promises of power and profits. This refusal of the past, and even the present, will condemn us to continue fouling our own nests. How can we get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly? We call this return to multiple pasts, human and not human, “ghosts.” Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life.
[…]
Haunting is quite properly eerie: the presence of the past often can be felt only indirectly, and so we extend our senses beyond their comfort zones. Human-made radiocesium has this uncanny quality: it travels in water and soil; it gets inside plants and animals; we cannot see it even as we learn to find its traces. It disturbs us in its indeterminacy; this is a quality of ghosts.” (p. G2)
On monsters: “Monsters are useful figures with which to think the Anthropocene […] Monsters are the wonders of symbiosis and the threats of ecological disruption. Modern human activities have unleashed new and terrifying threats: from invasive predators such as jellyfish to virulent new pathogens to out-of-control chemical processes. Modern human activities have also exposed the crucial and ancient forms of monstrosity that modernity tried to extinguish: the multispecies entanglements that make life across the earth, as in the coral reef, flourish. The monsters in this book, then, have a double meaning: on one hand, they help us pay attention to ancient chimeric entanglements; on the other, they point us toward the monstrosities of modern Man. Monsters ask us to consider the wonders and terrors of symbiotic entanglement in the Anthropocene.” (p. M2)
On ghosts and monsters: “Against the fable of Progress, ghosts guide us through haunted lives and landscapes. Against the conceit of the Individual, monsters highlght symbiosis, the enfolding of bodies within bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche.“ (pp. M2-M3)
II.
Dessau is a little city of 70,000 or so, about two hours southwest of Berlin by train. It has an unfortunate history of struggle. The site of a pivotal battle in the bloody Thirty Years War, Dessau was rebuilt in the 18th century as a celebrated model of Enlightenment principles; the majority of these buildings and gardens were erased by heavy allied bombing at the end of World War II, destroying up to 85% of the city and killing hundreds of civilians.
Rebuilt again by the Deutsche Demokratische Republik as an industrial center, today Dessau is scarred by abandoned factories, rail lines, and collapsing houses. As residents leave to more prosperous regions and the birthrate plummets, the demographic prognosis is bleak: the population declines by up to 1,000 residents per year. So dramatic is the loss that it has become ground zero for rewilding projects and ongoing plans to account for now-unused space in the heart of the city.
Early 20th-century apartments with pretty flower boxes share the street with ivy-covered ruins and empty East German Plattenbauten, even as tourism signs coax visitors to the modernist icon Bauhaus—or perhaps to a nice 18th-century palace, painted lemon yellow.
III.
I joked to myself that I had come to Dessau to chase the ghost of Friedrich Wilhelm Rust, who once walked these streets. His grave is a short jaunt from where I’m staying.
But in this scarred landscape, the ghosts aren’t of individuals like Rust and Co.; they’re the broken and decayed collective remnants of industry, warfare, and political upheaval. Dessau isn’t the abstracted historical city referred to by books about Rust or Walter Gropius. Like exposed sinew and muscle, past glories and sorrows glisten in the open pits of the city’s surface. Among all the infinitely more engaging minutiae of daily life in Dessau (like anywhere), the host of my accommodation has never even heard of Friedrich Wilhelm Rust.
Rust’s house, apart from its commemorative plaque, is mute. So are his bones. How many of us have—admittedly or otherwise—felt the anticlimax of visiting an icon’s grave or house, only to find it silent, regular, mundane?
IV.
If not a ghost, then Rust—like Bach, and Beethoven, and other long-dead composers—is perhaps a monster. Here, I consider a monstrousness extended from Tsing et al.’s more explicitly ecological vision: a kind of cultural monstrosity, layered out of assemblages of glosses, interpretations, and uses the composer never conceived of. Rust-As-Monster is a chimera: partly constructed from “objective” evidence like spidery-inked remnants of ephemeral sounds, but thereafter molded, animated, and puppeteered by all the other people who have interfered with those remnants.
Even as I have drawn myself physically closer to the tangible sites of Rust’s remains, his streets, his house, I’ve also drawn myself into the monstrous assemblage. As I write and perform, I also fold myself into the Rust-As-Monster.
V.
A couple of blocks away as I write, Rust sleeps—peacefully, I like to think. He is unaware that Dessau’s Ruststraße was named in his honour before being (mostly) abandoned. He is unaware that black locust trees, always quick to move in when humans disturb the soil, are blooming fragrant white flowers from the churned earth where Ruststraße’s buildings once stood. He is innocent of the ghosts and monsters that prowl the empty streets.