Friends with Inge

It must have been around the year 1974 when I first met Inge and Grahame King. Our family with its four children had recently returned from a sabbatical year in Germany. Not long after, I was asked to give a public lecture on Franz Kafka whose writings were the subject of my PhD dissertation. I had chosen to work on Kafka because I was convinced I knew how his works should be read and why there was so much controversy about their interpretation. But I then found it impossible to turn this idea into a dissertation and somehow changed the emphasis in a way I never felt quite comfortable with. So when I was asked to give that lecture I jumped at the opportunity to revert to my original idea, namely that Kafka’s stories and novels were like complex Rorschach tests that readers invariably interpreted “their way”. It explained the extraordinary range of religious and philosophical and psychological and political and Jewish and Christian and Existentialist readings of which the ever vaster secondary literature gave evidence. Like a work of abstract expressionism, Kafka’s writings made readers free and creative by introducing them to the depths of their own minds. What these works achieved seemed to me at the time like some kind of redemption. If people had access to their inner truth, dogmas and ideologies could no longer assail them. Up to now, few of my students had shown much interest but the mature audience before whom I spoke that night seemed quite impressed. A number of people would mention the talk to me years later. Inge and Grahame were in the audience and until last year Inge was still trying to persuade her reading group to invite me for a guest lecture on a Kafka topic.

In those distant days more than forty years ago Inge had asked the recently appointed Director of the Goethe Institute and his wife, Manfred and Gisela Triesch, whom we had both met, to introduce us. So we were invited to dinner together one night. There was actually another point of contact. One of the Kings’ daughters had been in my German literature tutorial that year. It happened to be an exceptional group with one highly intelligent mature age student just out from Germany and a second gifted and intuitive young woman with a Hungarian background. Though the first could perhaps be seen to have an advantage, there was no question that the top marks had to be reserved for these two students. Inge, who had taken an interest in her daughter’s studies, was surprised that her marks had not been higher. She also wondered whether the standard might have been unreasonably demanding for a normal school leaver. I had to admit she had a point; it was a recurring dilemma but at university in those days we were looking to identify and further the exceptional student. Jo later excelled in Japanese Studies.

Among other things, I remember a conversation with Grahame that night. I mentioned how our ten-year-old son had experimentally melted some plastic and become very excited about the wonderful shapes the molten substance formed. Grahame was delighted with this evidence of the power of abstract beauty and told me something about his work. In the following years we then went to most of the Kings’ exhibitions.

Some time after this dinner the marriage of the Trieschs broke apart; our marriage could have followed suit for similar reasons. Whereas Gisela decided on divorce and took her three daughters back to Germany, I made the less courageous decision to persist with my marriage. That necessitated, among other things, withdrawing from public commitments. We had four children who would miss their father and I also knew I was suffering from a mysterious and worsening illness which no doctor had been able to identify and treat as yet. I had to conserve my energies. So I simply disappeared from the social scene. Gisela, for her part, found she had taken on a gargantuan struggle which would cause her great heartache. In those difficult years, Inge and Grahame were a great reservoir of kindness and support for her.

Gisela and I remained friends and when she was over from Germany I was sometimes invited to meet up with her for dinner at the Kings’ place where she usually stayed.  Theirs was a modest house in bushland on the edge of Warrandyte, but its Robin Boyd design made it memorable and it contained a fascinating treasure of beautiful objects and art works collected in many places. On my visits I would be shown through the studios too. Grahame’s work, more than Inge’s, had a deep appeal for me; its images and colors were suggestive, often, it seemed, hovering on the edge of some illumination, nudging the viewer to keep searching. Years later when my finances improved I bought some of his prints and they still challenge and nourish me more than most of the other works on my walls.

Time went by and Grahame aged first. At exhibitions he took to apologizing that he could no longer remember names and faces. But for two events I attended he still managed to speak coherently, interestingly and with warmth and humor. The Kings once came to lunch at my place and once I drove with Gisela to their holiday house on Phillip Island. There I also met their children and grandchildren. Then Grahame had a stroke; his dream to end his life at home could not be fulfilled and sadly he died not comprehending why this would have been impossible. So he felt betrayed by the woman he had loved so deeply and supported so unstintingly. When Inge invited Gisela and me to stay with her at Phillip Island for a few days in 2009 – she was now 95 – she was still deeply distressed by this parting. But she had already decided that she would make up for any failures by having Grahame’s voluminous and mostly unsorted work properly catalogued and preserved, where possible exhibited, and eventually placed in galleries. From now on she would also insist that he be represented in her own exhibitions as her most significant influence. She would work to keep him alive.

I had a great deal of admiration for my friend Gisela. As the one-time wife of the Director of a “Goethe Institute for the Promotion of German Culture Abroad”, she had spent years hosting celebrities with her winning mixture of supportive sisterly friendliness, excellent cultural knowledge and precise organizational skills. Many became life-long friends. She seemed to have read every book that was ever published and been to every major international exhibition. I appreciated Inge’s respect for her. Gisela had also always gone out of her way to promote Inge’s work; and the friendship between her and the Kings had now existed for three decades. So we were both a little surprised when during that Phillip Island visit Inge seemed to be unashamedly courting me rather than paying attention to her.

I for my part had always felt awkward with celebrities. Though I admired their achievements, I tended to be more interested in people who were only just discovering their creativity and vision: children, students, amateurs. At times when I myself felt the need for creative expression I had purposely turned to unconventional and unspectacular media. Before our year in Germany I had, for instance, produced a textile series, mainly at the beach while my children looked on or played around me: embroidered, appliqued, crocheted, knitted or woven patches suitable for being bundled into a suitcase and taken overseas with us to ward off homesickness. They alluded to things like the sparkle of rough water, the multicolored layering of a cliff face, dwarf galleries formed by fossilized roots, worm holes in the sand, bubble chains of seaweed, the white lace of foam on receding water, or bare thorn bushes with their bright red berries. Inge’s monumental public steel and bronze works and my improvised tiny, floppy, essentially private family pieces were from too different an inspiration ever to be mentioned in the same context. I had come along to Cowes as chauffeur and as a support person for Gisela.

  

But I enjoyed the stay and became interested in the Phillip Island site Grahame and Inge had chosen for their holiday house. Though it was right on the shoreline, the high gum trees around the house had been left standing and were still hiding the bay from view. And the view when one broke through to the water’s edge was tidal flats with their changeable, untidy, glistening and dull surface, not the wild ocean and spectacularly contoured collapsing cliffs of Sorrento to which our family had been drawn. One day when Inge took us on a slow and quite unspectacular bush circuit we saw perhaps half a dozen poisonous tiger snakes at different spots, all quietly sunning themselves just off the edges of the path. I had never seen so many snakes. This landscape had a surprisingly different aesthetic to that of our choice.

Some time after we got home again Inge rang one day to say that she wanted to give me one of her sculptures. Her gallery had sent back two birds they had not been able to sell. I picked Inge up from the elegant, hotel-like nursing home to which she had recently moved and drove down to Warrandyte with her. The two black bronze birds, each perhaps a foot in height, were quite different from each other. One seemed to have two sets of wings spread ready for flight, the other, as I now remember it, was calm and sleek, just waiting, no wings discernible. I chose the first, hardly noticing that one of the bird’s legs had not quite connected with its foot. Perhaps this was the reason nobody had bought it. Later one of my daughters was sure this broken connection indicated the kind of fractured image one often sees through water. Inge wanted me to have a second look before making a final choice; she sent me back to make quite sure. I did not change my mind but I remained puzzled why she was giving me a sculpture at all.

It took me a while to realize that this was a bargain to which I would wordlessly agree to be bound for the next five or six years. It was, all in all, a mutually beneficial arrangement. At a time when Inge could no longer drive herself while I, now retired, had the leisure to explore Melbourne, we would go round to gallery after gallery each week looking at the new exhibitions. Inge often knew the artists personally and could tell me about them and she knew the best roads to take and where to park. That took the hassle out of these excursions for me, the driver. Sometimes we also saw films together and occasionally we went to a concert. For me it was a valuable cultural education, which I would hardly have pursued on my own since there always seemed to be so much to do and write and read at home. For Inge this weekly routine meant that normal outings and social contacts continued and the nursing home never became a prison. We were constantly running into people who recognized her and admired her work and she was able to keep up to date with what was happening in the art world. We then usually had lunch at a restaurant before we drove back in time for her afternoon nap. Later, when both Inge’s eyesight and her hearing had all but failed, we just went out for lunch each week, eventually a somewhat precarious undertaking which Inge choreographed so well that it never felt too risky. Still later I sometimes brought oysters and sushi in, favorite foods, and we would wag lunch so Inge’s taste-buds, the most active of her remaining senses, could have some respite from nursing home meals. My last visit took place on the morning of her stroke; that day her left arm was massively swollen with a deep vein thrombosis and for the first time she had to ask me to lift her out of her chair so she could push her walker to the dining room. Thankfully, she was then granted the calm and pain-controlled death she had hoped for so fervently for so long. Inge died three days later; the extra time gave her children and grandchildren the opportunity to say a dignified good bye.

The black bird was the first of a succession of presents Inge gave me over the years. I have three heavy pipes welded together at slight angles, kindred with the red pipes later installed off the Eastlink freeway. (I regularly pass them when I visit my son’s family.) An angel that was hard to hang in its intended flying position now hovers upright beside one of Grahame’s prints, partnering it well on my wall. (I have sometimes, irrationally, wondered whether there was a blessing from Grahame within our relationship.) This angel, which Inge had shown me on an earlier occasion is actually the only piece I explicitly asked for; she had at the time chosen a golden sun-like weight for me. A linocut she gave me reminded me so uneasily of a painting I did as a girl that I handed it on to a daughter to hang. On her wall it looks harmless and good. One of Grahame’s discarded scribbles, like all his things inexplicably perfect, lives with that daughter too. Recently, at the open house exhibition in Warrandyte, I decided to buy Inge’s linoprint of a Moses-like figure in whose massive head between raised hands a jagged mountainous crown, an eye-like star and splintered fragments of mouth are scattered displaced. With its help I will remember awkward words on things religious dropped between us at times. And when Inge lent me her artist’s Book of Cut-Outs I had the idea to expand a dialogue with Gisela, who was with me at the time, into a comment; I think she may have thought it a somewhat inaccurate comment. Later, when I was away on a trip, she assembled a collage for me from the off-cuts of that book, the last of a series. In the colors black, white and red (but it is a soft red) the lowest level of the composition shows a range of three rising mountains (they could also be cupolas and spires in some city). These are covered in print that is fragmentary and also upside down. Only a featured W, reversed to a mountainous M, demands attention. Higher, in the next sphere, are two sisterly candles with leaf-like flames and on the right, leaves shaped almost like hearts seem to be rising and developing. There are still traces of left-over print at that level but this is no longer reversed. The phrase “A big” pops out, the only comprehensible words. In the highest sphere, on the left above the candles, a pure white halo stands in for the sun. By intention this collage was Inge’s very last work.  

Such gifts were perhaps of subtlest importance in our communication but over time Inge also lent me books that we talked about: the oriental voyages of brave and eccentric Victorian women was one I especially remember; and the painted life story of her friend Charlotte Salomon, recorded in the few years before she fell victim to Hitler’s henchmen, will be unforgettable for me.

I had first encountered some of Inge’s early works in the McClelland Sculpture Park to which we sometimes took the grandchildren for a romp. Among these were roughly welded black iron structures that looked a little like bushfire ravaged trees. But Inge had soon realized that mimicry of the untidy bush added little to our appreciation of its beauties. Contrasts would reveal its character far better, European contrasts to match the European eyes we all still had: clear, simple, persuasive shapes in strong primary colors just like those red pipes, or rings as she called them, off Eastlink. For the city, Inge produced natural shapes so plain that they could exist halfway between the stark geometry of buildings and the wavering contours of nature. Most spectacular perhaps are the huge waves of Forward Surge with their threatening, smoothly enticing and curling weight, often used as a shelter by picnickers and an exercise venue by young sportsmen (much like our beaches). They uncouple Australia’s surfing culture from the glossy brochures. The giant Sentinel figure at the Doncaster turn-off from the Eastern Freeway looks like a cross between robot and toy, perhaps encouraging us to ponder what combination of technology and human playfulness will keep guard over us in this fast moving and mechanized age. Its uncomfortable challenge is now almost obscured by trees which no one has been commissioned to prune. Inge’s family of angels are unexpectedly domesticated; they dwell under the eves and on the outside walls of her house like swallows, rather than in public churches. The mighty Rings of Saturn on the hill outside the Heide Gallery – their reflections accompany visitors as they walk up from the car park –  perhaps allude to the ancient human conviction that art is a cosmic phenomenon. And those three pipes, the Red Rings already mentioned, between the Eastlink freeway and its bike path, that look like discarded cousins of the big white pipes recently still lying about but now supporting the freeway bridges, are a decidedly cheeky challenge to conventional expectations of art. If of course, like so many Australians, we prefer not to be challenged, we are at liberty to admire Inge’s shapes and colors in the abstract. Alternately, we could show off our familiarity with European and American modernist artists who came up with vaguely similar shapes and ideas in their time, which was of course also Inge’s time. Inge was never obsessed with the spurious personal originality many artists pride themselves on, though her work is always easily identifiable nonetheless. An immigrant herself, one of her missions has been to import ideas from the old world to this remote and somewhat adolescent country, but in such a way that they can be assimilated and will have active meaning in their new surroundings. More basically, Inge has been largely responsible for making eye-catching sculpture a reality in our cities.

In the six or so years she and I went to so many exhibitions, Inge rarely talked at length about the works we were seeing or the artistic motivation or mission that might have given rise to them. Instead she preferred to chat about the artists’ lives, their behavior, their marriages, what their children had ended up doing, whether they were men who got drunk with other men, how they dealt with women. She had an extraordinary memory for such detail. Women were particularly important to her. She pointed out how certain women artists had found unexpected ways of expressing themselves by exploiting the deficits in their lives. Her assessment of whether the artist whose work we were seeing had something real to say was always unequivocal. But she was harshly dismissive only where artistic failures showed up moral failures rather than benign incompetence. Like me, Inge too was impatient with celebrities, trying her hardest to turn them back into ordinary people with whom she happened to share a profession. They had a common duty to make real contributions to our culture, and make them as real human beings. When she and I were together, Inge wanted stories about people from me too. So ours was mostly typical women’s talk. It could have turned into gossip if we had had an interest in using it to someone’s advantage or disadvantage. As it was, both of us were just endlessly interested in people and how they lived their lives. Inge often told me that if her family’s circumstances had allowed it she would have studied literature, like me, in preference to sculpture.  Her reading was extensive.

Inge was always enquiring whether I was currently writing something and she seemed pleased if I said I was; but since I was not really prepared to talk about work in progress these conversations never led to much. Early on in our relationship she had asked to read my biography of my father. His life, lived between what were now also her two countries, Germany and Australia, and in the era of the two world wars which had cut deeply into the life of both our families, remained of interest to her. I am not really sure whether she always approved of the perspectives I adopted. Later, when I went overseas for a few weeks, I also left a collection of my stories with her. Some of them, I think, made her uneasy. Perhaps she thought: It is one thing to chat about people that interest you and another to chisel out what might be their replicas. We were, of course, an uneven pair; while Inge had always worked to acclaim in the public sphere, I had withdrawn more and more into a habit of talking to myself without allowing too many others to listen in.

In spite of the seventy and more years since she left Berlin, it seemed to me that Inge always remained the typical Berliner. She had that no nonsense approach to life, that high regard for practical skills, that Spartan willingness to accept hardship in the interests of achieving a goal deemed worth the effort, that sense of duty, that great loyalty to friends, that unpretentiousness and irreverence, that straightforwardness that could sound like rudeness, the testing power games, and those excellent organizational skills. Even on the morning of her massive stroke, that last morning I spent with her, she was giving the experienced nurse who attended her point by point instructions. Inge, as I remember her, was always completely in charge. But she could also see the weaknesses in her strengths. She explained to me more than once that it was the Germans’ sense of duty and their talent for efficient organization that had caused their persecution of the Jews, which eventually made it imperative for Inge herself to leave Germany in 1939, to be so devastatingly effective.

From a leader in the Zionist group she had joined for a while as a young girl Inge accepted an important message of advice: that you can do anything you really want to do. Thus she managed to study sculpture without any financial backing though it often meant going hungry. (She continued to value this ability to get by on very little. Even in old age she never ate more than the minimum.) What was still more amazing, she managed to study at a time when Jewish people were increasingly barred from educational institutions in Germany. But I know that no teacher can resist a gifted, determined and charismatic student.

Once in Britain and supporting herself with domestic service, Inge was appalled that most English and Scottish housewives had never learned to cook. But since they did not even have kitchens in their flats, how could they? British children, she often told me, were never as healthy as when their government supplied meals at school during the war. She sometimes talked about her rich and snobbish cousins; they had become victims of the Holocaust. Her own family, impoverished when their fortune was lost in the inflation because her father had wanted his money accessible for the dowries of his three older daughters, had learned better life skills. Two of her sisters and her mother had had the sense to flee when this became necessary; only in the tragic case of the third sister was flight not successful. Inge admired her mother - a gifted singer forced by the conventions of the time to remain an amateur - who had given birth to four daughters in spite of the disability childhood polio had inflicted. She was also deeply grateful to the two sisters who supported her till middle school. And she still felt great warmth towards her loving and loyal “Aryan” nurse Tata; during the war Tata’s sister had then taken over and gone to a deal of trouble to rescue keepsakes for Inge. Misfortune challenges people to rise to the occasion; more often than not it also offers unexpected opportunities. Wherever fate flung her, Inge found and created opportunities and made life-long friends.

Inge never allowed herself to be identified as Jewish perhaps partly because, after the war, Melbourne had developed almost a cult of the Holocaust survivor. She did not like to think of herself as a victim. She always stressed that she had been happy in Germany, loved and helped by all sorts of people. She was eventually able to flee because two months before the commencement of war a girl she had never met stopped her in the street and gave her the address of a British family willing to sponsor a refugee. Like cities all over the world, Berlin, as Inge remembered it, had any number of kind and decent folk. And the Jews, she believed, were not always entirely innocent, some like her relatives provocatively proud of their wealth and status, others intransigent about their ethnicity. When her father, on his death bed, tried to extract a promise from her sister and her that they would only ever marry a Jew, she was too young and distressed to refuse this like her older sister did. But the request and her shocked acquiescence later haunted and angered her. Grahame, the man she loved, had of course not been Jewish. One way or another, ethnic divisions always tended to lead to inhumanity and Inge steadfastly refused to contribute to schisms of this kind. When she chose me as her friend she knew I had a German background, also that the guilt imputed to our family because of our ethnicity had been corrosive during my childhood and youth. Such widespread enmity existed at the time in spite of the fact that my parents, like most other emigrants who came to Australia in those years, had been forced to leave Germany precisely because of their stand against Hitler or at the very least their horror of him and his regime. Perhaps we both felt there was something to make good towards the other, not as an acknowledgement of guilt but as an opportunity for reconciliation or, even more tentatively, a shared concern and a shared interest. As the years passed, Inge and I learned to trust and respect each other ever more fully.

Silke Hesse