Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen
because they believe I’m confused and not in full control of my senses. I’ve been scribbling first-form variations of the alphabet on Humanitas’ exclusive letterhead stationery. Vandalising expensive handmade Swiss quality paper. That’s what I think of their instruction to write down all I can remember of my own life. As if! Would you be able to do that? I mean, how would you select the important parts, how suppress all the embarrassing and humiliating things that have happened to you? It’s impossible to do justice to one’s life simply by writing about it. Whatever we select and whatever we decide to leave out is a distortion of the facts. Or the truth, if you like. All writing is a kind of forgery. If you’re lucky, people will take it as valid currency. But that would only prove you’ve turned yourself into a work of fiction. I don’t have to tell you that in our Age of Facts fiction is equated with lies, falsehood and fabrication. Yet it is facts that have long joined the public culture of urban myths. The pollution of so-called reality shows on TV is only one example of contemporary society’s insidious infection destroying what’s left of human imagination. Those of vision, inspiration and creativity are left behind in a desert of consumerist apathy.
So, instead of doing what I’m supposed to do, I’ll talk to you for a while if you’re interested and haven’t got anything urgent to attend to. Pretend you are a ghost and I’m a writer. Speaking to a ghost makes a change from reading a ghost writing for another to pass off as his or her own. Whatever I’ll tell you will be off the record. When we talk the precious sheets I’ve been given will remain blank, virginally pure. I promise. I’ll use them only as ordered, to record parts of my life for the Medical Board of Humanitas . They don’t need to know I’ll have already told you what I remember. It’s clear they want a clinical version, unemotional, cool and detached. They shall have it, but it will be their own.
Like most children I acquired the habit of investing everything around me with special meanings I was quite sure only I could recognise. There was no doubt in my mind that the world I transformed into secret codes was mine alone. Yet soon a reverse process was taking place. Learning the alphabet, I discovered there was already a sign language I was expected to acquire. Putting the letters of my name together, I thought I would find out who I was, or at least who I was meant to be. What would my very own sequence of letters reveal about me? I wrote and read the names again and again. MANFRED JURGENSEN. It proved a frustrating and disappointing exercise. The words didn’t mean a thing. I had no idea what MANFRED JURGENSEN stood for. (But didn’t I already know who I was?) Exhausted and angry, I dismissed the alphabet as a con. Relying on letters didn’t really add up. It needed more to convince me it could tell me something I didn’t already know. I was ready never to fully trust them again.
But then Grandmother’s delicious alphabet soup revived my explorations into language. I found it deeply satisfying to swallow sweet milky spoonfuls of letters … not without first checking whether, contrary to my earlier experience, they might not after all, coincidentally or otherwise, carry a meaning, perhaps even a secret message for me. To my disappointment they never did. What I was gulping down was a meaningless conglomeration of chance. Was that the kind of reality they were preparing me for at school? Coincidence was a word often used by one of my uncles, a war veteran, who kept saying his survival was a fluke, a happy accident. I found it hard to believe that all those crippled men who’d returned to our city or came as destitute refugees had experienced a stroke of good luck.
My grandmother told me the name I was given meant ‘man of peace’. At first I thought that funny because I was born at the height of the Second World War. But then I began to realise my parents must have chosen it because, secretly, they were longing for peace, even if in company they praised the war as the historic destiny of the glorious fatherland. My given name continued to confuse me. It seemed reassuring that my parents appeared to be against the death, misery and destruction I saw around me. Yet I was told my father was ‘in the war’, heroically fighting to protect us from the Enemy. Who was he fighting for? Who was the Enemy? Why would he do that if he didn’t believe in it? Was that also just a matter of words?
And my surname meant ‘son of George’. According to my all-knowing grandmother. That was clearly untrue. My father’s name wasn’t George. I’m honestly surprised not more people complain about the names they’ve been given. Seems to me there’s a lot of falsehood and misinformation going on.
I’ve no idea why I’m telling you all this. It’s probably no more than an attempt to avoid doing what I’ve been asked to do, write about my life. And kill time. I can’t just sit here staring at blank pages, least of all in a place like this. It gets on my nerves. I wonder when they’re coming to collect my biographical notes. Without them they’re lost because they too have no idea what’s happened to me. If I weren’t a foreigner, they’d probably classify me a hopeless case along with the other demented and deserted rich patients, provided there was someone to pay for my being here.
I admit I can’t remember exactly how I came to this place, a palatial building set in the grounds of a beautifully landscaped park, complete with ornamental fountains, classical statues and manicured lawns. But this epitome of luxury I knew was in fact a tastefully disguised Swiss psychiatric clinic, a home away from home for the mentally challenged. (That description, I discovered, included undiagnosed patients from wealthy families who’d decided they could no longer look after their own.) We entered the clinic on a wide gravel road leading to a cast-iron security gate bearing the inscription Humanitas. A couple of burly guards were trying hard to authenticate their camouflage as liveried hotel doormen. After exchanging a few words with the driver of the limousine who took me there, they cast a casual glance at me and smiled. I half-expected them to salute, but with the window down their polite beam was designed to assure me I had come to the right place. Despite their brawny appearance, they spoke soothingly in calm and gentle voices, to convey that all would be well from now on. I would be very comfortable here. The driver grinned conspiratorially and closed the electric window. Almost ceremoniously we glided through the splendour of the decorative park. I listened to the grinding noise of the tyres as we approached an overpowering doorway that would have done justice to a medieval palace.
Before I was brought here I stayed at my usual, much less grandiose guesthouse in the very heart of Riehen. I’ve often stayed there before, whenever I attended the university either for a week’s conference or as a visiting professor for an entire semester. I’d come to like the small hotel, located close to the German-Swiss border. All my life I felt most comfortable in the vicinity of frontiers. Did I mention I was born in a border town? People growing up near a boundary acquire a special sensitivity. Dividing lines and limits prompt in me illusions of escape, transgression or travelling. Living close to something foreign or different has always been my kind of freedom, the assurance that there was something other than where I was. From childhood on I was spurred into restless urges to explore, to search for something new, without knowing what I’d find. I was barely five the first time I ran away from home. Today there are hardly any frontier crossings, complete with customs clearance. In a united Europe the Danish-German border, so important to me that during my adolescence I could feel it in my blood, has all but disappeared.
I suspect the excellent service offered by Humanitas is just another cover to uphold the illusion of being a luxury hotel. My suite can only be described as obscenely comfortable, lavish with its furniture, chandeliers, thick carpets and large windows overlooking a pond almost totally covered in papyrus plants and water lilies. Even nature seems to choke on its own luxurious growth. An impeccably liveried, painfully polite young man guided me to my spacious prison. As we entered the lights went on automatically. While another uniformed assistant lifted my small suitcase to the luggage rack I was shown to the marble bathroom, the gilded Louis-quinze wardrobe and a matching ornate writing desk, complete with three silver frames that bore no photographs. After that I was shown how to operate the Bang & Olufsen audiovisual. Before leaving they looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for a sign of approval that everything was in perfect working order. Or did they expect a tip? Are there rules of etiquette in this five-star asylum?
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