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This Beautiful Place
Fiction. Stories by Tankred Dorst with Ursula Ehler. Translated from the German by Anne Posten. "Despite its great importance and influence on German theater and letters, Dorst's work is still relatively unknown in America. This is particularly ironic...given the strong influence of American culture, not to mention the country itself, on both his writing and personal history. At the age of 17, Dorst was conscripted into the German army but was soon captured...and sent to an internment camp up the Hudson River. There, he became fascinated by American culture, which has continued to influence his work, particularly the episodic film style of directors like Robert Altman, so American readers have a chance to experience American culture through German eyes. His work has also been linked to such writers a Ionesco, Beckett and Giraudoux. THIS BEAUTIFUL PLACE is Dorst's only novella and the only work of his currently available in English."--Anne Posten
91 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2004
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About the author
Tankred Dorst
80 books7 followersTankred Dörst was a German playwright and storyteller. He was known for his plays, which included I, Feuerbach and Merlin oder das wüste Land, and his work as a screenwriter for film and television. Dorst's writing style was influenced by the theatre of the absurd and writers like Ionesco, Giraudoux, and Beckett. He received the Georg Büchner Prize and the Grimme Award.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 2, 2012
http://philadelphiareviewofbooks.com/...
Interior, the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1979.
IKE (Chuckling nervously) We were downstairs at the Castelli Gallery. We saw the photography exhibition. Incredible, absolutely incredible.
TRACY Oh, it’s really good.
MARY Really, you like that?
IKE The-the photographs downstairs…
MARY Yes, downstairs.
IKE (Overlapping) …Castelli Gallery … great, absolutely great. (Pausing) Mm-hm, did you?
MARY Huh? No, I – I really felt it was very derivative. To me, it looked like it was straight out of Diane Arbus, but it had none of the wit. It was –
IKE (Interrupting) Really? Well, you know, we – we didn’t like ‘em as much as the – the Plexiglas sculpture, that I will admit. I mean, it –
MARY (Interrupting) Really, you like the Plexiglas, huh?
IKE You didn’t like the Plexiglas sculpture either?
MARY (Sighing) Oh, it’s interesting. (Shrugging) Nah, I – uh, I, uh, tsch.
IKE It-it was a hell of a lot better than that – that steel cube. Did you see the steel cube?
TRACY (Overlapping) Oh, yeah, that was the weirdest.
MARY Now, that was brilliant to me, absolutely brilliant.
IKE The steel cube was brilliant.
MARY Yes. Uh, to me, it was – it was very textural. You know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated and it had a-a-a marvelous kind of negative capability. The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit.
Outside the museum, on the sidewalk.
YALE Mary and I have invented the, uh, Academy of the Overrated.
MARY (Interrupting) That’s right. (Laughing)
YALE – for, uh, such notables as…
MARY (Overlapping) Such people as, uh…
YALE (Laughing) Gustav Mahler.
MARY And Isak Dinesen and Carl Jung…
YALE …Scott Fitzgerald and… (Chuckling) uh –
MARY (Interrupting) Lenny Bruce. We can’t forget Lenny Bruce – now, can we?
YALE (Laughing) Lenny Bruce.
MARY And how about Norman Mailer and Walt Whitman and –
IKE (Interrupting) I think those people are all terrific, everyone that you mentioned.
MARY What? What?
YALE Who’s that guy you had? You had a great one last week.
IKE Hey, what about Mozart? You guys don’t wanna leave out Mozart – I mean, while you’re trashing people.
MARY Oh, well, how about Vincent Van Goch…or Ingmar Bergman?
IKE (Overlapping) Van Goch? (Aside, to Tracy) Did she say “Van Goch”?
*
Woody Allen revisited this type, the pedantic bore lording good taste and erudition over everyone else, thirty years later in his most successful film in – well, thirty years – Midnight in Paris. Paul, Inez’s old college fling, runs into Inez and Gil, Woody’s surrogate played by Owen Wilson, at a bistro in Paris and Inez drafts the unwilling Gil into days and days of impromptu lecture tours by Paul. In the earlier Manhattan, Ike merely realizes the simplicity of his relationship with the teenager Tracy provides much more warmth than his fling with the neurotic Mary. He never comprehends how insufferable Mary is, how she talks about everything as if no one has ever had a conversation about it in the history of the world, how pretension hides vapidity. But in Midnight in Paris, Allen allows Gil to start from a greater awareness of Paul’s pseudo-intellectuality and this makes Inez look even more ridiculous when she fawns over Paul’s knowledge (most of it mistaken) of the architectural history of Versailles, the bouquet of certain ’59 and ’61 French vintages and the names of Auguste Rodin’s wife and mistress.
Gil even lies to defend a French tour guide from Paul’s insistent misinformation.
“She’s right, I recently read a two-volume biography of Rodin, and Rose was the wife, Camille the mistress.” This bit of bullshit strikes us as genuine in the face of Paul’s soliloquies.
In Tankred Dorst’s novella, This Beautiful Place, recently translated by Anne Posten for Hanging Loose Press, the tension between bullshit and sincerity finds a more dire expression. Lisa, a caterer and hanger-on of the art scene in a city in what we can assume is Germany, is misunderstood by everyone around her. In fact, everyone misunderstands everyone else, in this brief book of terse vignettes set in a blank slate of apartment buildings and white-walled art galleries. Without any exposition of the setting, the establishing shots of Woody Allen’s best films, This Beautiful Place turns out to be less about place and more about predator and prey dancing across a soundstage.
Lisa has two suitors, though by the way her paranoid mother reads the situation, she has many, many more. Enough men visit Lisa’s room across the hall, her mother suspects she’s raised a prostitute. Bonsack, a successful artist or writer or professor – who cares really – and Albrecht, a struggling novelist who Lisa helps by typing his work and taking dictation, don’t so much as fight for her attention as sit together in waiting for her to become the aggresor. Lisa finds her mother’s accusations so galling, she moves into a friend Dagmar’s apartment temporarily. After she hosts a party there, where the intelligentsia and cultural movers of the city drink and eat and gossip until just before midnight, but nothing more interesting results than a wine-stained couch, someone breaks in and murders Lisa. With her innocent perspective removed from the narrative, during a visit to the galleries of the Escorial in Madrid, Bonsack spreads his bullshit for the benefit of his wife Anne and Dagmar. His erudition and attempt at intellectual honesty hurt much more than any of Allen’s bores.
“-There’s nothing less erotic to me than women’s aging skin, says Bonsack. He flips hastily through the illustrated book that Anna has pressed in his hand. It almost disgusts me. He looks at both his companions, from Anna to Dagmar.
“-I realize, naturally, that it’s really quite immoral, sexist, yes, yes, but it has nothing to do with intelligence or reason…it’s completely unconsidered, physical.
“-You put up with that? Dagmar retorts so fiercely that it frightens Anna. Then she forces herself to smile. Dagmar, with yet more agitation:
“-He means you, you know!”
Albrecht, on the other hand, like Gil in Paris, falls for something he finds in the Escorial he’d never find anywhere else. Little Lilly, a German urchin and runaway, tries to steal a portrait of the King of Spain from the wall. She thinks the man in the painting is her father. Albrecht, who can speak Spanish, interrogates Lilly and translates for the gallery’s security captain.
“-Tell me something. How you live, what you do, who your friends are.
“With three fingers Albrecht tries to turn the little girl’s averted head toward him, but she shakes herself free.
“-You don’t need to tell me lies, just tell me how it is.
“-Nothing special. I’m totally normal.
“-Normal! Albrecht cheers, I’m going to write that down. She rebukes him angrily:
“-You are not going to write that down!
“He’s warmed up now, hungry for conversation.
“-Look, I have a little red notebook here, I always keep it with me. And when I encounter something special or when I have an interesting thought, I make a note of it.”
Albrecht’s genuine interest in Lilly, even if it’s just as fodder for his work as a writer, makes Bonsack’s coldness absurd, and his defense of this strange little girl from angry Spanish tourists is the one moment of tenderness in this otherwise cold little book. If not for this final contrast, one would wonder whether the vignettes here are like the paintings at Bonsack’s exhibition back in Germany (and the photographs in the Castelli Gallery and the Plexiglas sculpture and the steel cube at MOMA), interesting only momentarily, and easily eclipsed by more human matters.
Anne Posten has rendered Dorst’s prose into fluid bursts of interior monologue, dialogue and description, blurring the lines between the stage directions and speech of Dorst’s dramatic work. Furthermore, Posten also adds a wonderful post-script, comparing the novella, Dorst’s only work available in English, to the dark fragments of Robert Altman’s best work, evoking a desolation wholly American. However, in Dorst’s work, maybe because he is not American or we are not German, “we do not get a straightforward reflection.” But we can easily see the scared little girl with her iron grip on the King of Spain.
Interior, the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1979.
IKE (Chuckling nervously) We were downstairs at the Castelli Gallery. We saw the photography exhibition. Incredible, absolutely incredible.
TRACY Oh, it’s really good.
MARY Really, you like that?
IKE The-the photographs downstairs…
MARY Yes, downstairs.
IKE (Overlapping) …Castelli Gallery … great, absolutely great. (Pausing) Mm-hm, did you?
MARY Huh? No, I – I really felt it was very derivative. To me, it looked like it was straight out of Diane Arbus, but it had none of the wit. It was –
IKE (Interrupting) Really? Well, you know, we – we didn’t like ‘em as much as the – the Plexiglas sculpture, that I will admit. I mean, it –
MARY (Interrupting) Really, you like the Plexiglas, huh?
IKE You didn’t like the Plexiglas sculpture either?
MARY (Sighing) Oh, it’s interesting. (Shrugging) Nah, I – uh, I, uh, tsch.
IKE It-it was a hell of a lot better than that – that steel cube. Did you see the steel cube?
TRACY (Overlapping) Oh, yeah, that was the weirdest.
MARY Now, that was brilliant to me, absolutely brilliant.
IKE The steel cube was brilliant.
MARY Yes. Uh, to me, it was – it was very textural. You know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated and it had a-a-a marvelous kind of negative capability. The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit.
Outside the museum, on the sidewalk.
YALE Mary and I have invented the, uh, Academy of the Overrated.
MARY (Interrupting) That’s right. (Laughing)
YALE – for, uh, such notables as…
MARY (Overlapping) Such people as, uh…
YALE (Laughing) Gustav Mahler.
MARY And Isak Dinesen and Carl Jung…
YALE …Scott Fitzgerald and… (Chuckling) uh –
MARY (Interrupting) Lenny Bruce. We can’t forget Lenny Bruce – now, can we?
YALE (Laughing) Lenny Bruce.
MARY And how about Norman Mailer and Walt Whitman and –
IKE (Interrupting) I think those people are all terrific, everyone that you mentioned.
MARY What? What?
YALE Who’s that guy you had? You had a great one last week.
IKE Hey, what about Mozart? You guys don’t wanna leave out Mozart – I mean, while you’re trashing people.
MARY Oh, well, how about Vincent Van Goch…or Ingmar Bergman?
IKE (Overlapping) Van Goch? (Aside, to Tracy) Did she say “Van Goch”?
*
Woody Allen revisited this type, the pedantic bore lording good taste and erudition over everyone else, thirty years later in his most successful film in – well, thirty years – Midnight in Paris. Paul, Inez’s old college fling, runs into Inez and Gil, Woody’s surrogate played by Owen Wilson, at a bistro in Paris and Inez drafts the unwilling Gil into days and days of impromptu lecture tours by Paul. In the earlier Manhattan, Ike merely realizes the simplicity of his relationship with the teenager Tracy provides much more warmth than his fling with the neurotic Mary. He never comprehends how insufferable Mary is, how she talks about everything as if no one has ever had a conversation about it in the history of the world, how pretension hides vapidity. But in Midnight in Paris, Allen allows Gil to start from a greater awareness of Paul’s pseudo-intellectuality and this makes Inez look even more ridiculous when she fawns over Paul’s knowledge (most of it mistaken) of the architectural history of Versailles, the bouquet of certain ’59 and ’61 French vintages and the names of Auguste Rodin’s wife and mistress.
Gil even lies to defend a French tour guide from Paul’s insistent misinformation.
“She’s right, I recently read a two-volume biography of Rodin, and Rose was the wife, Camille the mistress.” This bit of bullshit strikes us as genuine in the face of Paul’s soliloquies.
In Tankred Dorst’s novella, This Beautiful Place, recently translated by Anne Posten for Hanging Loose Press, the tension between bullshit and sincerity finds a more dire expression. Lisa, a caterer and hanger-on of the art scene in a city in what we can assume is Germany, is misunderstood by everyone around her. In fact, everyone misunderstands everyone else, in this brief book of terse vignettes set in a blank slate of apartment buildings and white-walled art galleries. Without any exposition of the setting, the establishing shots of Woody Allen’s best films, This Beautiful Place turns out to be less about place and more about predator and prey dancing across a soundstage.
Lisa has two suitors, though by the way her paranoid mother reads the situation, she has many, many more. Enough men visit Lisa’s room across the hall, her mother suspects she’s raised a prostitute. Bonsack, a successful artist or writer or professor – who cares really – and Albrecht, a struggling novelist who Lisa helps by typing his work and taking dictation, don’t so much as fight for her attention as sit together in waiting for her to become the aggresor. Lisa finds her mother’s accusations so galling, she moves into a friend Dagmar’s apartment temporarily. After she hosts a party there, where the intelligentsia and cultural movers of the city drink and eat and gossip until just before midnight, but nothing more interesting results than a wine-stained couch, someone breaks in and murders Lisa. With her innocent perspective removed from the narrative, during a visit to the galleries of the Escorial in Madrid, Bonsack spreads his bullshit for the benefit of his wife Anne and Dagmar. His erudition and attempt at intellectual honesty hurt much more than any of Allen’s bores.
“-There’s nothing less erotic to me than women’s aging skin, says Bonsack. He flips hastily through the illustrated book that Anna has pressed in his hand. It almost disgusts me. He looks at both his companions, from Anna to Dagmar.
“-I realize, naturally, that it’s really quite immoral, sexist, yes, yes, but it has nothing to do with intelligence or reason…it’s completely unconsidered, physical.
“-You put up with that? Dagmar retorts so fiercely that it frightens Anna. Then she forces herself to smile. Dagmar, with yet more agitation:
“-He means you, you know!”
Albrecht, on the other hand, like Gil in Paris, falls for something he finds in the Escorial he’d never find anywhere else. Little Lilly, a German urchin and runaway, tries to steal a portrait of the King of Spain from the wall. She thinks the man in the painting is her father. Albrecht, who can speak Spanish, interrogates Lilly and translates for the gallery’s security captain.
“-Tell me something. How you live, what you do, who your friends are.
“With three fingers Albrecht tries to turn the little girl’s averted head toward him, but she shakes herself free.
“-You don’t need to tell me lies, just tell me how it is.
“-Nothing special. I’m totally normal.
“-Normal! Albrecht cheers, I’m going to write that down. She rebukes him angrily:
“-You are not going to write that down!
“He’s warmed up now, hungry for conversation.
“-Look, I have a little red notebook here, I always keep it with me. And when I encounter something special or when I have an interesting thought, I make a note of it.”
Albrecht’s genuine interest in Lilly, even if it’s just as fodder for his work as a writer, makes Bonsack’s coldness absurd, and his defense of this strange little girl from angry Spanish tourists is the one moment of tenderness in this otherwise cold little book. If not for this final contrast, one would wonder whether the vignettes here are like the paintings at Bonsack’s exhibition back in Germany (and the photographs in the Castelli Gallery and the Plexiglas sculpture and the steel cube at MOMA), interesting only momentarily, and easily eclipsed by more human matters.
Anne Posten has rendered Dorst’s prose into fluid bursts of interior monologue, dialogue and description, blurring the lines between the stage directions and speech of Dorst’s dramatic work. Furthermore, Posten also adds a wonderful post-script, comparing the novella, Dorst’s only work available in English, to the dark fragments of Robert Altman’s best work, evoking a desolation wholly American. However, in Dorst’s work, maybe because he is not American or we are not German, “we do not get a straightforward reflection.” But we can easily see the scared little girl with her iron grip on the King of Spain.
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