This was in 1974, and the light had that granular diffusion, the colours muzzy and polaroid-bright. I took Route 1 north along the coast towards Fort Bragg; Nixon was on the radio, and bombs in England and Italy, and massacres in Israel. All the way, the hired car hot above the blaze of the ocean, I was thinking about the question I would ask. When I caught sight of the house, glittering, unexpected between the squat darkness of the trees, nervous fear clenched my gut and I wanted to turn the car and go back.
The house itself was not what I’d expected. A rectangle of concrete and glass, it seemed to shrug away the insult of time. I’d wanted something different, feared something darker and older, something of Europe: a Schwarzwald hut of hand-hewn wood, lifted and set down on the coast of northern California, a fairytale cottage, witch-haunted, uncannily beckoning. The house vanished as I neared the gates, hidden by solid hedges and tall steel fencing, then appeared again as I turned into the drive. At the gate was a cabin with a perspex window, a uniformed man inside. The security too was unexpected.
“You the magazine journalist?” he asked me through the screen. “Miss April Lindsay?”
“Ms Lindsay, yes.” He gave me a slow look: the denim, the hair cropped and jet black. The armour of righteousness and cool contempt I wore in those days.
“Yep,” he said.
There was a visitors’ book, and I signed my name – just a flourish of the pen while I held his gaze. I should have looked more closely at the page. Which other names were there, inked above my own? What other visitors had made this strange pilgrimage? Everything about the place forbade contact. It had taken my editor six weeks just to get an agreement for the interview.
Inside the house the shadow was tall and cool and without smell. I waited in the front hall or atrium, blinking the sun from my eyes and fanning myself with my notepad. There was a servant or porter, young and neutrally American, possibly gay. He asked if I’d like a drink – mint tea, or coffee.
“Just water, thanks,” I told him.
Silent, he left me and went into a kitchen off the hall. I could see him pouring the water into a glass – bottled water, which was unusual then. I recalled reading somewhere that Marlene Drechsler distrusted tap water. Something about toxins. It made me smile, but then I thought of the steel fences and the uniformed gatekeeper.
Quickly, I ran through the list of rules. Miss Drechsler will speak only about her work since arriving in the USA. Miss Drechsler will not answer questions about her earlier life. Miss Drechsler’s privacy will be respected. Any infractions will result in the immediate termination of the interview. I had signed my name to all this, promised to behave myself; the opportunity was too valuable for a small-circulation arts magazine. I could not refuse.
The water was pure and cold in a clear glass. As I drank, the young man ushered me politely forwards into the further gloom of the atrium. There were pictures here, framed prints, and as my eyes adjusted so the images appeared.
“These are some of Miss Drechsler’s recent photographs,” the man said, breathing the words. “She thought, perhaps, you might like to see them before you speak?”
I’d seen them, I wanted to say. Of course I’d seen them, in the exhibitions and the large-format books. I was not a casual visitor – but he seemed not to register my annoyance. I was to spend time here, I realised. I was to be allowed in only gradually.
Moving around the atrium, sipping the aching-cold water, I looked at the photographs. All the same size, identically framed; none of them were more than a decade old. They were taken during Drechsler’s visits to India, Burma and Thailand. Here were the temples and the ruins, the tall gorgeous stupas, and again and again the face of the great image, the Buddha immaculate in stone and brass and gold. It seemed strange, at first, that they should have been exhibited in such a poorly lit space, but as I looked at them I began to think that the dimness was deliberate. On the shadowed white wall, the black-framed images seemed to resonate in monochrome, to take on a mysterious depth and vibrancy. They were perfect, of course – formally brilliant, but utterly static. Nothing there to grab the eye, just the long slow draw of symmetry and calm reflection, the action of light on metal and stone, the tranquility of balance and proportion.
This was why they loved her now, all those other writers and critics, all those new devotees. To have found this, they said, must be a redemption: for Marlene Drechsler, with her background, with her history, to have revealed for us this purity of peace, this stilled and meditative beauty in our battered and raging world. This was something genuine, and valuable. For a while, waiting there in the atrium, I was almost taken in myself.
It was the face that broke the spell. That same face, repeated, inscrutable. All of those images could be reduced to that face, those strangely guarded features, of the great Buddha. A face that refuses questions, that only stares back, eyes slightly hooded, with the barest flicker of a smile. These, the face said, are things you already know.
The anger was sudden, an amphetamine kick. They were playing me, leaving me to breathe in the aura, to lose my nerve and all the fire of my refusal in this dreaming hush. The blood was loud in my ears as I stood in the centre of the atrium. I had seen enough.
The young man escorted me through the house, which opened suddenly in a glass wall with the great panorama beyond. Out, into the freshness of the headland breeze, we entered the garden. Flowers that I could not name sprayed colour over the rocks between the looping gravel paths, and the heads of the mountain pines were shaggy against the deep blue of the ocean. Sweat dried on my face, but my fingers were damp as I held the notepad.
At the furthest point stood a closed glass gazebo, a conservatory or greenhouse. The air inside was pregnant with heavy scent. The man stepped aside and I moved deeper between thick leaves and orchids. Marlene Drechsler was seated in a cane chair beside a circular glass table, immaculate in the heat. I took the facing chair, conscious of its slow creak beneath me. I was wiry and ragged with anticipation.
“Ms Lindsay,” she said, “how nice of you to come. You had some difficulty finding the house?”
“No, no, not at all.” I’d heard recordings of her speaking, but her voice was different now - sharp and oddly angled, the German accent more pronounced.
“It’s a real honour to be here,” I went on. I had to say this. “I really have to thank you for granting this interview, I know you normally don’t speak to journalists…” She waved lightly, eyes closed, brushing the matter away. She was seventy-four, the same age as the century; her hair was spun silver, her skin fine and burnished as old gold leaf. Only her eyes were alive.
“I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen this magazine you write for,” she said, smiling, and took a sip of green tea. “I don’t look at the press at all these days. But I understand you’re writing something about my recent show in Los Angeles?”
“Yes, that’s right, yes.” My mouth was dry, my hands unsteady. I glanced down at the pad, and the pages were gummed with perspiration. My notes were a list of things I could not say.
“Perhaps…” I said, deliberately coy. “Perhaps I could just ask, firstly… You know, your reputation in the last ten years has just…. Really become extraordinary. You had the recent shows in Sydney and Tokyo, the…” She cut me off with a strange abrupt shrug.
“Yes, certainly, but it is America which satisfies me. The reception here in America, you know. America is my adopted home.”
Perhaps it was just her accent, but the odd stress caught me for a moment. As if she had adopted America, rather than the other way round. I tried to appear grateful. But the words were coming to me now, the formulas. All platitudes, but I was good at doing this and she seemed to appreciate it. Just enough praise, just enough enquiry.
“Your work seems to reach for a kind of universal significance, something beyond place and time – it’s been called spiritual, meditative…” Yes, yes, she was saying, nodding. I spoke and she spoke, and we were both reading from the same script, and all the while I was angling closer, building towards what I knew I must say. The questions I had promised not to ask. Only once, when I mentioned her experiences, did she quicken, her eyes gain a new and searching focus. The lapse was momentary.
“It often seems to me,” I said, tentative, “that your work presents a kind of yearning for the ideal… for perfect form and proportion, a classical purity… that perhaps runs against the grain of American culture today. Maybe something you feel we’ve lost?” I was beginning to gulp the words. My pulse was rapid. “Do you think… would you say… that there’s something particularly European in this sensibility?”
She took a moment to compose her reply, her expression unguessable. “I have always,” she said, “directed myself at what is ideal. The immortality of beauty, the purity of form. A sense of natural order. This is something, yes, that perhaps we were once able to appreciate more. Our lives now are so cluttered, so noisy and polluted! But this desire comes from my spirit, my…” she clicked her fingers, a dry snap, “my unconscious. The collective unconscious of mankind, I think, as well. I believe in natural harmony, natural idealism…”
“And would you say,” I broke in, breathless now, “that this desire is somehow particularly… German too?”
Her eyes hooked mine, and we were caught. Now I saw the images, sudden and bold in clean black and white: those famous photographs, brilliant and terrible, which had propelled Marlene Drechsler to infamy decades before. They were beautiful, yes – but this was not the beauty of sublime tranquility. This was the beauty of power.
She saw them too, I know she did, in that moment, as if I had summoned them from the scented air. As if I had thrown open a door to the dark blast of history, and there it was, undeniable. A vast crowd, filling the frame of the picture, every face upturned and ecstatic, all alike in their fervour. And across the crowd, across the faces of the crowd, the stretched black shadow of a man with one arm raised. The shadow of power. This image is iconic now, and it is hers – Marlene Drechsler stood there at that moment, not amongst the crowd but high on the podium, close behind the man himself, close enough to smell the sweat of the body inside the uniform. Nuremburg, 1936. There are others – the ranks of gymnasts posed in clean sunlight, the athletes and the aviators, all in perfect composition.
She had made those pictures. Her hands, those thin dry golden fingers, had held the camera, framed and focussed the images. She had followed the troops into Poland and Russia, and her pictures showed the heroic soldiers, glowing with victory. They showed the advancing tanks, and made them the chariots of Valhalla. She took the worst that our history has yet devised and made it glorious. She showed us the chilling glamour of evil.
And now she sat across the table from me, reached for her cup of green tea. She saw the trap open before her. She knew me; she recognised her enemy, and I was fully alive for the first time since I had entered her house. Sitting upright, afraid to move, I felt a brief thrill of triumph: I alone had confronted her. I alone had refused to accept this new person she had become, this blameless and guiltless incarnation, reborn into Californian sunlight, the photographer of the passive sublime. I alone rejected the erasure and denial of the past.
For a long time – it seemed a long time – she sat in silence. She did not look at me, or acknowledge my presence, as if she was trying to will me away. She did not appear angry, or afraid, or even disappointed. My sense of victory ebbed. The words I had prepared, the taut clever phrases laid in like an arsenal, were stripped away from me now.
“You are very young, Ms Lindsay,” she said quietly.
“Ich bin vierunddreißig,” I said. I’m thirty-four. She glanced at me quickly.
“You speak German as well.”
“My mother was German.” Every word, now, had a terrible weight. “She came to America just before I was born. Her family were from Breslau. Their name was Orenstein.”
What did I want from her then? Before I arrived at her house, in all the weeks I had planned this meeting, it had seemed obvious. Too obvious, in fact, to think about. Did I want her to tell me how it felt? No, her pictures told me that. Did I, then, want her to apologise? Did I want that confession she had never given, that remorse she had never shown? They arrested her in 1945. They put her on trial, they put her in prison. I looked at her then and she seemed monumental, towering with all the force and horror of history. She did not belong in this place or this time: she was a pagan idol, some devil from the folklore of a distant forested land; she was a Norse goddess, a Valkyrie crashed to earth and age.
At last she spoke again, slowly, letting the words creak and hang.
“You are very lucky to have grown up in this great country,” she said. “There are choices which you have never had to make. If you are truly lucky, you may never have to make them.”
I remember nothing of our parting words, the tensed politeness, the young man who must have shown me to the door. Outside, on the road, I swore at myself. I swore at her, shouting into the ocean wind as I drove. This was not how it should have been. I should have spat at her, smashed things, abused her. I should have demanded an answer. But even then the question eluded me. Just north of Elk I pulled over onto the verge and stood beside the car smoking a cigarette. The ocean was before me, wide Pacific blue, and I wanted to cry at my failure. All that I could have got from her was an empty gesture, a hollow word. It wasn’t enough. But then I felt an odd punchy joyousness, a sensation of release. My notepad was a creased scrawl of frustration – there would be no interview for the magazine.
Marlene Drechsler died a few years later, and the brief fashion for her later work died with her. Even now, though, I try to summon the image of her, seated in her hothouse above the sea in her silver and gold composure. I try to make the image speak the words I wanted to hear – I try to see the shadow move across her face, the light return again. But I never quite hear what she says – those words beyond speech, the meaning beyond interpretation. These, her face is telling me, are things you already know.
Tags: Ian Breckon, writing