“They are part of the goal. What I’ve built should last – the same goes for you. You see, at sixteen I had to help shoot down war planes. I started off at Deutsche Bank as a trainee and finished as the chairman’s assistant, I took over the factory during the first oil crisis, I was already in America before reunification, and since then I’ve been in Eastern Europe and China as well. We don’t need to grow. But although our world isn’t changing, it’s still in motion, and if we want to keep our place, we need to keep moving too. Whether my children and grandchildren can manage it…The gene pool of a family business is limited.”

“The End of History?” Schwind asked.

“History goes on. But our world doesn’t change. Nothing threatens it now, no communism, no fascism, no young people who want to turn it upside down. Since the end of the Cold War there’s no alternative to our world. Name one country that doesn’t live under the laws of capitalism – even China’s communism is capitalism now. The word of the prophet, for which the Muslims kill and die, is no alternative – it’s a task for the police and the military. You worry about the poor? As long as they have TV, and beer on the table, they’re no threat. And we can always give them that.”

23

“That sounds…” Schwind searched for the right word. “Leaden.”

“Is your art leaden?” Gundlach asked. “I don’t know much about art, but after we met…”

“After our interlude?” Schwind said ironically.

“Interlude, exactly, after which I followed your career, how you got famous and expensive. Representation, abstraction, photography as material, glass as object and image, the structures and the colours – you played with everything, like a child who sits amidst his older siblings’ games picking up one toy from one, another from the other. Everything is available to you, and you make use of everything. And there is no longer any alternative to your art.”

Irene turned to Schwind. “Is that who you are?”

Before Schwind could respond, Gundlach went on. “I’m almost done. That is who you are, because the world no longer changes. It continues to move, but the movements in business and finance and culture and politics are all repetitions, they no longer change the world. Your art is in motion too, sometimes in one and the same work. That’s why it’s beautiful. But it changes nothing.” He became earnest. “Yes, I want Irene’s painting back home with me.”

“What’s art supposed to change? I painted what I saw. Sometimes I saw things that weren’t there, but could have been there, and painted those too. I painted as well as I could. That’s all.”