Iron... Iron! The characteristics that have been ascribed to this chemical element, the fourth most common primordial element in the earth’s crust with the modest atomic number 26, are manifold: durability, indestructibility, the magic of invincibility and, in the hands of heroes, power and glory.
Prehistorians have even named a period that lasted an entire millennium after it. Seen as one of the most desirable items of his time, an iron dagger was placed in the sarcophagus of the crippled child Pharaoh Tutankhamun, who in life was worshipped like a god, and thus accompanied him on his journey down the Nile to eternity. And even the mass murderers from an empire that they claimed had lasted a thousand years decorated themselves with iron crosses as a sign that their reign would endure for aeons to come – although it was swept away in firestorms after only a few years of terror.
In more peaceful times, the drapes of iron curtains in theatres and opera houses are not only meant to withstand fires; they also serve to divide reality from the play, song from the spoken word of everyday life and the dazzling stage lights from the darkness of the auditorium.
But even this role seems to contradict the true nature of iron, for which transience, elasticity and reactivity fit much better than its much-vaunted permanence. In its pure chemical form, this soft, malleable element that gleams like silver can be combined with more than 80 other elements to create alloys, just as the whispering in the stalls blends with the arias and hymns, or the brilliant stage lighting merges with the light reflected off the glasses of an audience moved to tears, or as the iron crosses of the mass murderers are linked with symbols of salvation.
However, what makes this metal truly precious is not the characteristics assigned to it by humans, but rather its heavenly provenance. Long ago, long before we started mining it from drifts and veins and smelting ore acquired in that way, iron could only be obtained from meteorites, gifts from the far corners of the universe that rained down in a streak of fire. At the impact sites where these gifts came to land, ritual objects and religious tableware were forged, links in a chain connecting the earth with the world of gods and demons, but no weapons. No tools. And no badges of honour steeped in blood.
It was only when traders, warriors and manufacturers with their mines started to get hold of this metal that could be used to manufacture weaponry that the children of a new age turned iron into a deadly instrument, and ultimately into a symbol representing the bloodlust of a depraved era of man. And after the mythical golden and silver ages of lost paradises, an age of iron dawned, for now the last and most savage period in human history.
Anselm Kiefer has disguised the iron curtain in a palace used as the State Opera with a painting juxtaposing the, in literary terms, generally rather modest libretti of the world of opera with a staggering cosmic narrative. The painting, inspired by a novel by the masterful Polish author Stanislaw Lem, shares its title with the book: Solaris.
According to Lem’s story, Solaris is an exoplanet, tracing its elliptical orbit around two suns thousands of light years away in the distant future, that poses an insoluble puzzle for Terran scientists, even though they uncovered the last secrets of quantum physics generations ago.
The reason is that Solaris appears to have just one inhabitant, weighing many billions of tonnes and covering most of the planet’s surface in the form of an ocean flowing around islands and archipelagos. Sometimes gleaming like glass, at others billowing and roaring beneath an unusual fog, next gelatinous or a glowing viscous mass like lava, the ocean shifts into symmetrical or asymmetrical shapes, rising and solidifying in clouds or sinking back like a swell of quicksilver. Sometimes it takes on forms that are monstrous and rise miles high; at other times the shapes are relatively small, like a hippopotamus or a mammoth. Distorted images and caricatures from human history.
Their attempts at researching it having failed, the astronauts who travelled light years through the gaping abyss of space in sleep pods to reach Solaris have to accept that this ocean embodies a silent intellect that may be infinitely superior to human consciousness, or one that may simply be inaccessible to humans, because the ocean uses its stormy or calm, gleaming surface to imitate shapes and forms from the astronauts’ consciousness in all different sizes. It even creates a kind of sculpture garden in front of the bullseye where the landing craft are to set down:
Homesickness, dreams, fears and hopes, even loved ones from the store of grief and memory take on shape and assume real form. Among the rich wealth of shapes created by the ocean, much-missed people appear and start to talk and act, eventually making the travellers forget the iron curtain that separates this world from the next with its sunstorms. Caught up in the whirl of oceanic creations, there is no longer a past and a future, only the current moment, which expunges everything that has gone before and everything that is to come.
And this ocean, which can swallow up whole worlds and spit them out again, which is so monstrous and so omniscient that it can recreate and imitate everything that humans can achieve and seems to have the ability to remember everything, this very ocean is now rolling in long waves out of Kiefer’s painting into the dark rows filled by an audience that came here expecting just to see an opera.