He has time. If Robert Koldewey has one, then that. He sits in a window recess of his study and looks into the light. On Babylon.

He does not move. He has pains. He drank three liters of lemonade in the morning at the excavation meeting, and now he is lethargic. On his stomach lies the reference book, "The Plan of Internal Medicine," and because Koldewey believes it is responsible for the appendix, he follows the advice of the book: "Do not move!".

The archaeologist Robert Koldewey, sent from Berlin at the end of the 19th century to find promising sites for the German Orient Society, so he sits in Babylon in 1913, looks to himself and misses everything: the distance to the door, the excavation site outside, the Light, his organs. Oneself.

And Kenah Cusanit also lets Koldewey sit there for most of her debut "Babel". As for a long-term shot with an old plate camera. Even this static framework is one of the amazing things that make this novel so special. The Berliner could have written one of the most dust-dry books about excavations. The mythical Babylon, it becomes a workplace here. A place that stands for the megalomaniacal delineation of that era - and whose finds were taken to local museums.

Koldewey, the Aussitzer

Peter-Andreas Hassiepen

Kenah Cusanite

She has her archaeologist musing. On the shock in Christian Europe, that the biblical Tower of Babel really, honestly, "[d] a one would dig up and realize that something one could only believe in was fact [...]." About finding a settlement with the Ottoman Empire, about the excavation race with the French, about the philologist Delitzsch, who is already hotly waiting in Berlin for a new delivery of clay tablets in order to translate them.

Anyway, the wait: Koldewey is a Aussitzer, an anti-hero. As if he were sitting in a "play" with the title: "How to remotely move Dr. K. to do something he did not realize." The General Director of the Royal Museums in Berlin always sends a sentence: "Please submit final excavation program." The idea of ​​writing a final report in a few years' time makes him sick again. (He did it anyway.)

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Detail of the Ishtar Gate in the Berlin Pergamon Museum

With this story Kusanit wades ultimately also all the refusals of the Berlin Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation - and the government - from finally to deal in principle with a restitution of cultural assets. Many finds from that time can be found there today, for example in the Pergamon Museum. It still seems to be true, as was the case with the Kaiser, who paid Koldewey a visit in the Berlin castle (yes, that's what it is): Whoever finds it, may keep it.

A voice as precious as a piece of Babylon

At some point Koldewey is pain free. Previously, his feet in the camomile bath, although already planned, had, in case of need, been set into a wall on the north side of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. But then he sets out in light and heat, along the processional road. Getrude Bell, the photographer, has announced herself (a photo of her is also in the book). He wants to go to her and tries to look busy. How Cusanit succeeds in depicting his hesitant interest so sparingly and yet clearly enough in language is really a rarity.

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Kenah Cusanite:
Babel

Carl Hanser; 272 pages; bound; 23,00 Euro

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The debut of the anthropologist, born in 1979 (and, perhaps coincidence, but a beautiful, as Koldewey born in Blankenburg in the Harz Mountains) is pure joy. Because it's as precious as a piece of Babylon to discover such an unusual voice. And to suspect, there is more to come.

More of this letter, which itself resembles an excavation, as when it exposes layer by layer by Koldewey himself, in eternally and quietly drilled sentences. More of this unexpected, loud joke. The one in her main character (Bell asks about the height and age of the tower: "Pretty tall and probably quite old, Koldewey had answered.") Or in the correspondence excerpts, which she sometimes synonymous with each other without comment.

In the end Koldewey sits again. Now in the shade under the gate out in the heat, he waits. He sees Gertrude Bell from a distance, she misses, takes pictures. "There were cultures that reused their past, and there were cultures that exhibited their past," he says.

It seems like an unspoken idea: what if all the clay tablets, the glazed tiles, did not end up in boxes, did not travel to Berlin. But remained on site. To scan them. Every piece, from the top, bottom, all sides. To exhibit in Berlin only the photos. That would be a suggestion.