Torpor by Chris Kraus

Author:Chris Kraus [Chris Kraus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2017-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8: WHO’S PEAKED?

JEROME SPENDS the next few days running around to pick up the pieces of Second Hand Hitler . Mathias agrees to shoot some more scenes, but Reiner, the guy who played Hitler, was hospitalized for mental illness shortly after the first round of shooting and no one knows where he is. Jerome calls his acquaintance Rosa von Praunheim, a well-known independent filmmaker, to press him for ‘contacts.’ Rosa wonders what kind of contacts Jerome is seeking—for casting, for funding, for distribution? Jerome does not exactly know. He sees the amassing of contacts as a virtue in itself, a hedge against the future. But Rosa is shooting a movie—maybe Jerome would like to stop by the set to interview him? Jerome could publish the piece when the movie comes out. Since Jerome believes he might need Rosa later for contacts, he doesn’t say no.

It’s August, 1991. Except for in Charlottenburg, Nirvana’s on the radio everywhere they go. I like it I’m not gonna crack I miss you I’m not gonna crack I love you I’m not gonna crack I kill you I’m not gonna crack … Jerome has coffee meetings in Kreuzberg, lunch at the Café Einstein. At night, he meets young artists at the Jungle, a club that cultivates an interesting fusion between German hip-hop music and international techno. There was a feeling everywhere Jerome went that since the Wall had come down, Berlin would no longer be isolated. The scene was shifting now, there was no longer any notion of a ‘center.’ And anyway, New York was over. For the first time since the mid-century, Europe could be as important as New York again.

Sylvie excuses herself from most of these meetings. They do not concern her. She walks her little dog along the boulevard, buys a pair of Salamander shoes.

In the hallway on her third day in Berlin, Sylvie finally gets to meet a real Romanian. Florina Elescu is a poet. Like Jerome, she is on a Summer Fellowship from the DAAD. She lives two floors above, in an identical apartment. Florina’s noticed Sylvie and the little dog entering and leaving Jerome’s apartment. Is she Jerome’s wife? Would she like to come upstairs and have a coffee?

It’s the first time since arriving in Berlin that anyone’s actually addressed themselves to Sylvie, and she agrees eagerly.

Florina’s place was identical to Jerome’s, except that her books and papers had strayed considerably from the birch and laminate white Workbench desk, her clothes were not confined to the white closet, and her coffee cups had strayed from the white kitchen cupboards. She was working on a project that would be an encyclopedic compendium of references to her nation in “the German literature” from Teutonic fables to the present. Unlike Jerome, she seems to take her work here very seriously.

Florina boils an old metal coffeepot on the immaculate electric range-top. Did she bring this coffeepot from home? She is very interested to meet with Sylvie. Actually, she’s been trying to arrange

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