The Ibero-American Institute is located in the centre of Berlin, opposite Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery, and structurally connected to the adjacent Berlin State Library. The friendly atmosphere of its modest reading room is infectious. In the bright, straightforward space, tropical-looking plants grow in elegantly hidden clay boxes – a small, exquisite rainforest in the middle of the winter-grey city of Berlin.
Libraries are among the few places in our modern cities that are freely accessible to everyone, that are truly public and not in thrall to any commercial enterprise. Hip cafés are metastasizing even in public parks, and train stations can only be distinguished from shopping centres by the distant echo of the announcements rising from the catacombs of the underground platforms. Libraries, on the other hand, resist the increasing exploitation of public space; they are refuges, whose paddle-wheeling revolving doors have successfully kept out the sharp, icy draft of capitalism since the 1950s.
I’m writing these lines within sight of an English-language study on the impoverished strata of the population living on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. It’s as if Santiago, a place I’ve never thought much about, has appeared before my eyes at its moment of crisis, when the masses of unemployed and underprivileged are streaming into the city centre to confront the armoured vehicles of the military on wide boulevards, joining up with the students protesting the increase in bus and metro fares. Churches and barricades are burning, shops are being looted, and the elite have holed up in Las Condes.
My Spanish hascooled, I can only read it with some effort, and yet I keep coming back to this library, where I can devote myself entirely to my work, surrounded by serious, quiet people. And if I hear the occasional whispered words, perhaps even a brief conversation, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because I don’t understand any more than I want to. The reading room with its dominant language is a Faraday cage against the noise of the world; the bookshelves are soundproofed walls, they swallow everything that has not been lodged in memory. Nothing from the outside gets in. I’m solitary, shielded, and yet not alone.
A library is like a city, it consists of streets and high-walled alleys, sometimes more, sometimes less busy squares, the library codes on the small metal flags that point into the narrow passageways are their discreet signage. St
