WARNING: Below is the terrifying 16th century painting that drove me to write the Berlin thriller Hauenstein. Do NOT scroll down is you wish to avoid seeing it!
Every story has a backstory. Therefore, where a story begins might be considered to be arbitrary, and that’s certainly a debatable point. However, every great story starts with (an) incident(s) so decisive there’s no doubt about it / their importance. It / they thrust(s) the central character(s) into the story, in this instance myself into the events that compelled me to write the scripts for the Berlin thriller Hauenstein.
There was a decisive moment that resonated with other moments in my past and continues to resonate to this day. Between September 1984 to July 1986 I was a student of cultural history at the Royal College of Art in London. One grey day, 40 years ago, I was in the college library researching something for my master’s degree thesis. For a couple of hours I’d worked systematically, but then, feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere, I changed tack.
Some weeks earlier my professor, Christopher Frayling, had introduced me to the idea of researching by serendipity, or “random” discovery. According to his method I went to the nearest shelf unit and randomly pulled out a book, then opened it equally randomly. In front of me was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. If you don’t already know it, then please ask yourself if you are prepared for the shock of seeing Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death (1562, today hanging in the Museo Prado in Madrid). The name already says a great deal, but the painting itself is a bottomless well of terror.
Although I had already seen some ugly things in horror movies and in war photography, nothing touched me like Bruegel’s painting. Suddenly, I was dizzy, trembled and thought I was going to throw up, but they were mere symptoms of my suffering: I felt as if my very existence was in doubt. Since then, every time I look at The Triumph of Death I feel that again, though much less intensely than the first time. At these moments it is as if the intervening years, decades, are dissolved and I’m transported back to that moment. That’s what I mean by resonating. HERE is the painting:
In a great story, the inciting incident that initiates the action has a deep connection to the backstory, but also points forwards like an arrow flying towards the turning point (roughly half way through the story) and onward to the conclusion. So it is my case too, though many of these connections did not became clear to me until quite recently.
Let me start with the backstory to my moment of grim revelation. My mother, now 90 years old, says that I was a happy child, though an introspective and introverted one. All the photographs of me as a small child confirm this, but that was my waking life. Aged six I started having a recurring nightmare about the end of the world. It began in a landscape where I was extremely fragile, like a stick that could easily be snapped. Then, catastrophe came, the sky falling like the most gigantic mountain imaginable, crushing me and pulverizing the entire world. I always awoke at that point in a state of complete terror. I think it’s important to point out that I grew up in an anti-religious family and a profoundly materialistic society.
For my seventh birthday my parents gave me a lavishly illustrated book about the animal world. I vividly remember my delight when I unwrapped it and a puma with glowing eyes in a forest at night stared out at me from the cover. Accepting the invitation of his gaze, I flicked through the pages with great delight, until that feeling suddenly turned to horror. An extremely detailed image of an ant colony covered a double page spread and for a long moment it gripped me, then I snapped the book too and didn’t open it again for several years. Although my feelings about ants have changed completely it is still hard to look at those pages. Now the similarity of this panoramic landscape filled with crawling figures to Bruegel’s painting is obvious to me.
When I was nine years old my family moved from one London suburb to another and I lost all my friends. Shortly afterwards, I also discovered the truth about nuclear weapons from a handbook on rockets and missiles. In a detached and technical manner it described how different nuclear-armed missiles would totally destroy towns and cities of varying sizes. I found all of this fascinating, although the book made it clear to me that given the location of our home we would almost certainly die immediately in any nuclear strike on London. My death, our deaths and those millions of others had been planned, and this mass execution was only delayed. Of course, I hope that this delay continues.
Everything I’ve learned about atomic weapons since then only confirmed their intrinsically genocidal purpose to me. Nuclear destruction is fundamentally indiscriminate. It enables the kind of mass murder perpetrated by various nations during the Second World War through what most people call “carpet bombing” to be undertaken more quickly, easily and cheaply. This was, and is, the reason for the development, manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons. We all live in their long shadows. Those people directly involved with them are members of a vast cult of death that also reminds me of Bruegel’s painting.
When I started at Langley Park School for Boys in the London suburb of Beckenham in September 1971 aged 11 I was suddenly thrown into a pit of violence from which it seemed there was no escape. Worse than the actual violence – often arbitrary and nearly always perpetrated by other kids – was the pervasive threat of violence that hung in the air the whole time. One day at school in the summer of 1974 I saw how a particularly vicious boy held another boy out of a top floor window by his ankles. The psychopathic thug responsible threatened to drop his victim head first, and it was clear that doing so would have given him a big thrill. Although he then pulled his victim back in through the window (to avoid being caught?) in that moment murder became something very real for me.
Mass murder became real one day shortly after when my parents and I were watching a documentary on the television about the Second World War. The subject turned to Auschwitz and the other death camps where six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust / Shoah. Black and white archive footage showed piles of emaciated dead bodies and my father burst into tears. It was the only time I can remember him crying like that.
In November 1981 John Stezaker, my art history tutor at St. Martins School of Art in London and a great artist, recommended I read Elias Canetti’s book Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht in the original German, first published in 1962). It’s analyses human behaviour as a group phenomenon. From the first sentence I was hooked, and I continue rereading it.
It might seem unconnected to Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, but in the section titled The Survivor Canetti describes how paranoid leaders try to deflect death from themselves by killing others; each time surviving their victims increases their sense of inviolability. This has a relevance that goes far beyond Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, etc. Who never wanted more life, or hoped somehow to cheat death? The greatness of Bruegel’s painting is the visceral manner in which it confronts us with the complete impossibility of doing so. The paranoid leader’s experience of survival is at most a delay of the inevitable, and his sense of inviolability is a sham, yet he almost never considers that this might be true, even for a moment.
In the summer of 1982 I attended a lecture given by my fellow art student Paul Hedge (today a director of Hales Gallery in London and New York) on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the 8th August, 1945. Paul read at length from several accounts of survivors, including from John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, originally published in The New Yorker Magazine on the 31st August, 1946 when it filled the entire issue. Some of the scenes it describes are highly reminiscent of Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. As the lecture proceeded my dread turned to nausea, then to overwhelming sorrow. I feel all that again now writing these lines.
The events of autumn 1983, when American cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads arrived in Britain etched themselves deeply into me. I remember feeling a deep sense of foreboding watching the TV news the day that the warheads arrived in a military transport aircraft. During the NATO exercise Able Archer in November 1983 the leaders of several member countries, including Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, practiced giving the codes that would launch nuclear-armed missiles. Later, it came out that some members of the Soviet Politburo were unsure if this was an exercise or real preparations for a nuclear first strike. It was the last high point of tension during the Cold War, but it did not feel like it was one of the final chapters at the time. We were right in it. Soon after this I would discover that nuclear-armed Thor missiles had been stationed in Britain during my first years of life in the early 1960s. History was repeating itself.
All of this was in the back of my mind when I “randomly” pulled that book off the shelf, then “randomly” opened it and first saw Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. No doubt all of these experiences shaped my reaction. The story of what followed from that moment stretches 40 years to the present moment, and beyond it into a future that once again looks deeply uncertain.