Babelsberg

Brief Thoughts on Ernst Meister

Potsdam-Babelsberg is the name of the place where my then five-year-old daughter would go for ballet lessons. Twice a week, I took her there to the dance studio. The room, where the girls practised classical ballet steps to the accompaniment of music, had a large mirror at one end, beyond which there was a smaller, cramped room where their relatives – mostly mothers or grandmothers – sat on black chairs with green velvet cushions, anxiously watching the progress of their ballerinas. The mirror was see-through from that side. There, behind the mirror, with Tchaikovsky blaring from a cassette recorder and the dance teacher’s instructions ringing in my ears, I balanced a book on my knees: its title was Zahlen und Figuren (Numbers and Figures), one of the volumes in the Rimbaud Press’s Ernst Meister edition. In my notebook, dated 28 November, 1996, it says, ‘get hold of ernst meister’ – though there is no indication where the idea had come from. Two months later, there I was, sitting behind the mirror, by turns reading and making notes, then glancing up to watch my daughter starting sequences over and over again, her first laborious steps in the art of dance, and then I would turn back to reading Ernst Meister’s poem: ‘It is the walking, the way / and nothing more’. This is the opening of Numbers and Figures, though for some reason, at that moment, I was dipping into the book from back to front. Towards the end of the book, I had read:

And within the circle,
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