“A dead hare appears, just like in a fairy tale…”
—Joseph Beuys

You might know me as Joseph Beuys’s Dead Hare but I belong to no particular man or woman or child or conception or idea or myth, though in myth, my, my, I’ve taken many forms. None of them entirely untrue or absolutely accurate, though, because we’re equal parts mischief as wish-granters, us hares, destroyers of sages and sodden dreams. Furry confidante, I’m mauler of cherished beliefs, no less Manichean, if it smells right, than the Antichrist some other night.

Hares skip freer than ever when we’re dead.

Hans, I’m here, your Dead Hare. Listen, Hans, let’s go back, to when as a child you first saw me in Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf, November 1965

Your sister says vampires are at home in Düsseldorf. “Don’t even hide after dark,” she says. “They’re very much at home here.”

Hans agog. Ute likes seeing her little brother bugged.

Goaded on by the sight of a tear bulging in your eye, she says, “Monsters shop just like mother at Kupferspiess.” She says vampires crawl nightwide from basements and bunkers across the city, congregating at Altstadt, where they consort in crypts under the Art Academy beer cellar until dusk.

You listen.

Cargoes of rats almost landed at the docks; would’ve caused the next great plague. She likes to watch you go slack with fear.

She says Düsseldorf’s vampires fertilise their dead in Lohhausen. See them Saturday nights parked outside the youth centre, waiting for kids to swarm Nordpark in the dark. Vampires breeze up and down Shadowstraße, all night long.

You believe, shaking with belief.

“Don’t think it’s like in movies,” she says. “They don’t have to bite you, Hans, their venom’s heavy in Düsseldorf air, so you might just breathe it in.” She marvels at her yarn’s finer threads. “Before you were born, Hans,” she says, “I witnessed long caravans of vampires arrive at night in glowing convoys of Opels and VWs from all over Germany, closing in on Drakeplatz HQ, where Chancellor of Vampires Joseph Beuys”—she brandishes his photo in Der Spiegel—“here reigns.” “Multiplying headlights flaring,” she whispers, “burning the edges of Düsseldorf bright white.” She holds Beuys’s face close to yours so you can’t unsee it.

What she would do if she saw you coming home, hopscotching puddles of light trying to outrun the night. Saw you running hard from Heine-Gymnasium on Herzogstraße to your piano lesson with Mr. Kren in Königsallee, you dreading the late sprint home in the dark to Lacomblestraße, after all she’d told you, you dodging loiterers, runners, men in parked cars with an aura of immortality—all the way sprinting. She’d have liked to see you sprint fast, fearing and believing, skirting the Altstadt.

Hearing voices echo off Kommödchen, you pause, listen—but Ute never said how vampires sound. What you hear isn’t the usual rowdy cabaret crowds or Ratinger mobs. No, this is roused muttering, chittering in a different key.

Doesn’t Hans think about turning back? You run, propelled up Kommödchen to see a crowd in the street, staring into a bright gallery window. ZDF television crew mount a camera onto a car roof. People bulge forward to see. Hans wedges himself between two smokers, presses his face against the glass and sees, as if Ute knew you’d come this way today. You see me, Dead Hare, see Chancellor of Vampires Joseph Beuys whispering in my ear.

“What are we looking at?” one smoker asks; and the other says, “Beuys.”

You listen, resist the urge to push away from the glass and run home.

“What’s he doing to that hare?” he asks.

“Whispering in its ear. Giving it the kiss of life.”

“Whispering what?”

“Who knows?”

You feel safe in this crowd, shored along the pavement. Safely hemmed in by tumbling voices and blinking lights, smiling faces jarred by the weirdness of their own attraction. Safe en masse, elbowing and clambering on shoulders at the back. Safely hidden in a meshwork of hats and scarves, greatcoats and turtlenecks, glowing white faces above cotton, leather, denim, and seersucker, veteran boozers bunched up with musicians, grubby after backroom rehearsals, cabaret performers, racetrack faces, senior marketers caught short on their way home to Oberkassel, troops of clerks, cleaners, junior admen in small packs, holed-up mouldering hippies, drawn bleary-eyed from Ratinger Hof. No vampires but him behind the glass, whispering in my ear.

You won’t hear, Hans. You won’t hear, however hard you press your ear to the glass. You can’t hear what he’s whispering, while he dabs my paw to a painting on the wall.

What’s this? they keep asking, new arrivals, shoving to the front to see.

You watch Beuys on his knees walk “his” dead hare across tiled floors, lift the tip of my ear between his lips to whisper, people asking, “What’s he whispering?”

Hare’s ears only.

Waves of camaraderie tinted with outrage fills the crowd, searching among themselves for hints of how to feel about me, Dead Hare. Huddled and amused. Milling and moving in patterns of shock-and-release. Knots of aggravated spectators rock a car and the cameraman shouts—clear a space. A man tries pulling his girlfriend away to the Zur Uel bar but she won’t leave. Pulling herself free, she tells him to go and he walks off alone, flicks his cigarette at the window on his way outside the perimeter of bright lights beaming crossways from the window and camera crew, creating an auxiliary audience of expressionist shadows on Das Kommödchen walls, spread on the road, pavement, and buildings opposite, where people raise themselves up on steps or hang off drainpipes to get a better view—and here’s our Hans still up front, holding their own.

Balanced on a high ledge, a young couple take turns explaining. You couldn’t have heard. I listened.

“Hares mean fertility,” she says.

“Aren’t there hare-head goddesses in Egyptian mythology?” he says. “Honey: product, substance. Substance of ideas. What Marx said about bees.”

“Gold is greed,” she says, clicking her fingers, and nearly fell.

“Or gold: exchange, commodity,” he says. “Fluid into solid, right?”

“I can’t see—what’s that on his foot?”

“What would you say to it? Think he already knew what he’d say to the hare?”

“What would you say?”

“Sorry.”

“I’d take it dancing at Ratinger.”

“Gold and honey transform.”

“I’m feeling transformed,” she says, squeezing him.

“Change,” he says. “Basically, it’s all about change.”

“What’s under the stool?”

“Fabric and metal tied to his shoes. Under the stool a bone?”

“Makes a difference what material and metal,” he says. “Makes all the difference. Copper, iron, nylon, felt, cotton?”

“Hard to tell. Will it make a difference?”

“I’m going down.”

“You won’t be able to tell.”

“I might. Don’t move,” he says then jumps down.

By my hind legs Beuys dangles me.

You hold your forehead against cold glass. Ignoring a big middle-aged woman in furs trying to coax you away from us depravities, until she gets swallowed in thrusts of half jeering, half enchanted bodies.

A man muttering under a crushed fedora jabs you in the ribs, remember?

“How does it end?” he wants desperately to know.

Timidly, a woman taps the glass, the act followed by a boy who bangs with both fists before he gets yanked away.

Beuys cradles me and whispers, touches my dead nose to a painting, walks to the other side of the room and waves my paw.

“What do we do with this,” someone asks. “What’s the use?”

“What’s the use of use?” yells a voice to scattershot laughter. “Incoherence is truth!”

“Art’s the point!”

“You’re an artist.”

“She’s art!”

“She’s an ass!” More laughter.

Base characters come alive. Torn from routine tram routes and humourless drinks, exhausted office affairs and TV schedules. Combustible combinations of Düsseldorfers who usually lived and worked at frictional distances, find themselves together in front of Galerie Schmela’s window watching me carried and plunged. Calculating depths of their comprehension, feeling, patience, and repellence towards Beuys and me and each other. Uneasy thoughts about transpersonal gatherings float in mists of TV light and cold breath. Conflicted receptors dowse the night air for meaning.

Listening.

“Copper and felt,” the man says to the woman.

“Let’s get warm.”

“Conductivity, insulation, yes.”

“Yes. Let’s conduct.”

“I’m beginning now to think it’s important.”

“There will be a thousand theses, re-enactments, movies—and who plays Beuys? I don’t think anyone can play Beuys.”

“Aren’t you feeling?”

“Phenomenal?”

“Maybe. Yes.”

“I’m feeling the moment, it’s promise.”

You, Hans, stay jammed to the glass. Others stand around in shapeless waiting, heaving and needing an ending.

Beuys points me at a detail in a painting, whispering into my right ear.

A cameraman shrieks when a student gets shoved onto the car bonnet.

“So, necrophilia?” someone says, shoving. “Bestiality—that’s art?” More students laugh. “Clouting Beuys is the only human thing to do!” he says and charges, swings when they laugh harder; and in the tribal scuffle, you are cleaved from the window and swept to the back of the crowd, where if you’d listened you might have heard the couple, and when the frenzy died down you couldn’t see an opening.

The boy who’d banged on the glass tunnels through the crowd to pull Hans out says he had something to show you, manoeuvring you out of Kommödchen into an alleyway.

You really into this shit? Like you were glued to the glass. Come on!

Street of tiled tenement blocks, storage-unit flats, and a shuttered kiosk advertising sepia brands nobody smoked.

You walk to a block and follow him upstairs—creaky pre-war acoustics.

He says it’s his aunt’s place and he lives in Unterrath. “Stay here a minute,” he says, slipping through a door on the second floor.

BFBS and WDR radio echo faint signs of life from above and below.

“Come on!” the kid says, reappearing with an object wrapped in wax paper he drops into your arms back down on the street.

You unwrap a half-thawed skinned rabbit, slab of stiff muscle and sheered bone, dusted with salt. Folds of skin and thin limbs grow lifelike under blotchy streetlight. He says his aunt won’t miss him, all rots in her flat, and asks what you’ll give him for it, fishing in your pockets, scoops out loose change and complains it’s not much for a whole rabbit but he’s all yours.

You run toward teeming noise and neon, feeling the rabbit’s thawing deadweight slip in the crook of your arm.

Fewer people hang outside Galerie Schmela. Helpless latecomers watch TV crews dismantling equipment. Loiterers and hangabouts move through shadows. The couple is wrapped together by the window. Photographers take intimate shots of Beuys becoming human again, hoping to snap the instant he resumes earthling aspect ratios.

Beuys sits on a stool with me in his lap and lights a cigarette.

“Seeing Beuys smoke is reassuring,” the woman says.

“Did you see what brand he smokes?” he says, lighting two.

Taking one, she says, “I’m not sure if it’s part of the performance. Smoke: too many ritual attachments. Fire and again: change: this becomes that: flux.”

“Camels? Karos? Not Wests, definitely not Wests.”

Hans walks home, ready to sprint from the menacing headlights of a slowly approaching Opel Kapitän up Shadowstraße. Hans bends down pretending to tie his shoelace and waits until the car crawls past before he runs twenty minutes to the bottom of his block, knowing exactly where, in the make-and-mend-it flat, his sister sits in the armchair, pulled close to the TV, and he reads in the dimness of the window their mother is staying overnight at the hospital in Neuss. Two light sources: television and kitchen, where he’d be bolder in the parent-free flat rummaging through cupboards and drawers for honey.

Ute calls out your mother is staying in Neuss; and then she hears the door. “I’m watching a musical with Hubert von Meyernick,” she says. “Absolute shit.”

Cough syrup as honey substitute, margarine for gold, you take a transistor radio from under your bed and put them on a small chair in the bedroom with the wrapped rabbit. Spread margarine on your face then pour syrup over your head, unwrap the rabbit, fold wax paper into a square, strap it onto left foot, and tie a small paperback book to right foot with elastic bands.

Blinking margarine, you carry the rabbit to the window, prop its head up by the jaw so it sees outside. Your lips hesitate, Hans, and without quite kissing the smooth purple-pink folds it has left for ears, you whisper, “See?”

You whisper names. Subjects of books stacked on a shelf. Lifting it up by its hind legs, you whisper and point at a poster of Mount Vesuvius on the wall. Whisper what you learned at school, play left-hand piano on the windowsill humming a tune, carry the dead rabbit lengthwise, and sing the English lesson your class practised that morning:

My bonnie lies over the ocean.
My bonnie-lies over the sea.
Bring back (left orb),
Bring back (right),
Bring back my Bonnie to me.
To me.

On all fours, you move, fore following hind paw, across the floor up to the door then turn back, taking fragile steps to reach the window. At the window, you whisper, “streetlights, buildings, tree, jet contrail, train, clouds, sister.”

Ute standing in the doorway watching, her Kriminalmuseum-eyes zeroed-in on your dead rabbit being crawled across the floor and syrup, blood, and margarine smears; and you tell her this was Chancellor of Vampires Joseph Beuys and “his” dead hare.

“Maybe we got it all wrong,” the woman says.

“We don’t have to explain.”

“Who said explaining explains away?”

They walk away from Kommödchen.

“When you leave a movie and it’s like a character sometimes gets inside you or you ingest a character while you’ve been watching without realising?” he says. “Right now, I’m part Beuys and part dead hare. Nothing I’m doing—walking, talking to you, lighting this cigarette—it’s not the same.”

“Let me be the dead hare.”

“Already it’s fading, though, closer we get to the Altstadt.”

“And nothing explains everything.”

(Image: Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, November 26, 1965, at Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, Hunsrückenstraße, photographed by Ute Klophaus)