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The Kant Walks by
Joachim Koester
"The life story of Immanuel Kant is hard to describe, for he
had neither a life nor a story", writes the poet Heinrich Heine.
In some respects this observation bears out. Throughout his life
Kant stayed in Königsberg, the city where he was born. Never
straying more than a few miles from town, he devoted himself to
the pursuit of philosophical truths in complex and extensive writings,
a task so monumental that he had to organize his days rigorously
to secure the necessary time. In contrast, Kant was largely silent
about himself. He kept no journal; the details about his life are
sparse and must be gleaned from what he accidentally let slip through.
Most stories of Kant come only from people who knew him or observed
him directly. Of the few daily activities Kant engaged in, his walks
have been imbued with the most significance.
Kant found an unlikely biographer in Thomas De Quincey, "the
grandfather of drug literature" and explorer of the opiated
hallucinations of waking life and saturated dreams. Not surprisingly,
De Quincey dwells on the afflictions of the late Kant, who, towards
the end of his life, was haunted by nightmares "so profound
as to stretch far into his waking hours". The increasingly
mentally frail Kant developed idiosyncratic distractions. According
to De Quincey, by this time, the elderly Kant "accounted for
everything by electricity", and theorized about a connection
between a particular configuration of clouds and the "singular
mortality among the cats of Vienna, Basel and Copenhagen".
Also suffering from insomnia, Kant was prone to "unseasonable
dozings" which exposed him to danger, as he "fell repeatedly,
whilst reading, with his head into the candles; a cotton nightcap
which he wore was instantly in a blaze, and flaming about his head".
Thomas De Quincey's biography could be dismissed as inappropriate,
a prying into the decay of an outstanding intellectual - if it wasn't
for its prophetic vision. A city is a "state of mind"
and Kant's plunge into darkness was later followed by the downfall
of the city for which he was emblematic: Königsberg.
The history of the former German town of Königsberg began with
bloodshed in 1255, when, in a matter of a few years, Teutonic knights
completely annihilated the Prussian Tribes that inhabited the area,
built the Königsberg castle and established the city. More
recently, in 1945, the Germans were in turn annihilated by RAF bombings
and Soviet troops, who conquered Königsberg and renamed it
Kaliningrad. But one could date the real fall of Königsberg
several years prior. Königsberg's existence as a cosmopolitan,
racially diverse city was abruptly halted on November 9, 1938, when
Nazis unleashed a particularly brutal "Kristallnacht".
The citizens of the town that once housed Germany's biggest bookstore
engaged in book burnings, beatings and killings, and the destruction
of the cities main synagogue. - Like Kant's dozing head, knowledge
was engulfed in flames.
The historic accounts for Kant's daily walk are plentiful yet contradictory.
Whether Kant had one, two or even more preferred routes is not clear.
Furthermore one has to place two maps on top of each other, that
of Königsberg and that of Kaliningrad, to find the locations
today. Maybe this is why Kant's walk is often invoked but rarely
specified. A walk is like a manual, a way to engage a space, a recipe
to follow but also to improvise with, allowing for drifting, losing
oneself. De Quincey writes that Kant preferred to walk alone for
a very particular reason: "he wished to breathe exclusively
through his nostrils; which he could not do if he were obliged continually
to open his mouth in conversation", and by doing this he was
better able to pursue his meditations - De Quincey, like Kant, most
certainly knew about the "subtle realms" revealed to the
attentive wanderer.
My pursuit of Kant's walk led me to a battered high-rise in the
Leninsky Prospect. On a late November afternoon I climbed the stairway
to the flat of Professor Kalinikov, who had kindly agreed to meet
me on a short notice. Kalinikov led me through the apartment to
his study, a small room crowded with books and piles of handwritten
manuscripts, all of them on Kant. Here, Kalinikov added to my map
of Kaliningrad two small crosses, one for each of Kant's two houses,
and from there two circles. These were the Kant Walks. Kalinikov
explained that Kant liked circles. From the professor's window I
could see all the way down to Kaliningrad's vacant center - flattened
by British bombs and never rebuilt - and further away, an enormous
construction, which curiously, in the fading light, resembled a
stylized skull. The edifice was a cultural center, built on the
ruins of Königsberg Castle in the early 1970s, but never used.
The building's grounds had proved treacherous; the tunnels and subterranean
chambers of the former castle made the new structure sink immediately
after its completion. As a result, the center was left to deteriorate,
slowly, as an anarchitectural monument to suspended indeterminacy.
My next days in Kaliningrad were spent on foot, following Kalinikov's
walks, or Kant's - I was never sure. Drifting through the "subtle
realms", the 'psychogeography' of a city that officially, for
more than forty years, had no past - in Soviet text and guidebooks
Kant was born in Kaliningrad. Paradoxically, I found that the concealment
of the city's history, made it appear even more distinct, exactly
because the past was not compartmentalized as such, but seemed to
turn up as 'blind spots'. Detours, dead ends, overgrown streets,
a small castle lost in an industrial quarter, evoked history as
a chaos, a dormant presence far more potential than tidy linear
narratives used to explain past events. Nowhere in Europe are the
traces after World War Two more visible than in Kaliningrad. Hauntings
from a war that shaped lives and destinies for generations to come.
Including my own - like many, affected by the "third generation
syndrome", I have always felt as if I was pulled towards an
empty space: "that which has not been said".
Kaliningrad was named after Michael Kalinin, a close associate of
Stalin and known as a "man of little vision but great staying
power". Hardly qualities to commend. Kantgrad has been suggested
as a new name, a proposal that points to Kant's walks, with all
their uncertainties, as an approach to history - walks for remembering
and losing oneself, manuals to engage past and present spaces, a
sort of recipe, something to follow, stray or produce from.
Joachim Koester,
2005
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