An Obituary for Dietrich Bronner, As Published In the Neue Reich Daily Register

A friend of mine once told me that the only poem she thought she could write about grief would be a nearly blank page. A name at the top, and then all that white space beneath, like a headstone, or a funeral shroud. The felt absence made visible there on the paper. I think this is the best poem that you can write about grief, but I’m not a poet, and I have never been able to bear an empty space— all my life I’ve been obligated to fill them. It’s a useless endeavor, but what else can I do? 

Dietrich Bronner used to tell me to stop and consider my words before I wrote them down. He’d mark huge scratches of red ink across whatever I gave him to look at: “Next time, Rome, before you hand me anything, cut its length in half. You already know what I’m going to tell you to do, so don’t make me say it. I don’t love to hear myself talk enough to want to repeat myself.”

His philosophy was that an artist’s job was to distill life down to its most essential elements, and maybe not even that much: to leave things to implication and to trust that the audience would find themselves in those empty spaces that the art left behind. That was his gift as an artist, and as a person. I was drawn to him because he always said just enough to make the listener feel understood. He gave the impression that he understood everything, and he hated to ever drop the ruse, let anyone know that he was just a man like the rest of us.

I can’t decide if he’d think dying is a kind of weakness that way, or if he’d see it as finally gaining an invulnerable mythological status, perfected by memory and time. I should have asked him, but I doubt he would have answered. His art would outlive him, and that’s all that he would say mattered. Perhaps he would hope that the memory of him as a man would be lost completely, that only those things of his that approached perfection would remain. 

I think that was why he left the world of the theater in the second half of his career, and started fresh in filmmaking. A play is an ephemeral thing, with life breathed into it only while the actors are on the stage. The audience may remember, or they may forget, but the moment will be over as the final bows conclude. A film can be played over and over, fixed and unchanging.

I met Dietrich in that strange moment in his life: when he was in the throes of the transition between stage and screen. He had taken a year to work as an artist in residence on Phezzan, teaching a graduate seminar class that I weaseled my way into without any right. I was an engineering undergraduate, age twenty, and the class was on playwriting. Other people would have killed to get one of the seats, but I managed to waltz in without much effort, aside from cornering him before the first class and asking him to sign the requisite paperwork. Up to that point in my life, I had never written anything worth mentioning, and it would be a lie to say that his class sparked some creative brilliance within me. The one act play I turned in at the end of the semester was a mountain of overambition that failed to materialize into anything coherent, a disaster unfit to see the light of day, let alone a stage. But nevertheless, and I don’t know how, I think Dietrich saw in me something of a kindred spirit, and he let me know that I should be free to continue a personal correspondence with him when he returned to Heinessen.

I did.

I won’t mention what we said to each other during those letters, a decade’s worth, and I’ll speak even less of what we said to each other in person, in the few happy occasions we’ve had to meet in the intervening years. His estate has sealed his correspondence, to be released a hundred years from now. That’s for my sake, and others, if no longer for his. I have half a mind to release what of his I have anyway, but he would have despised me for doing that. It surprises me that he didn’t have all his remaining unpublished material destroyed for good— but he always was a man who loved a surprise.

Dietrich was a complicated man, and difficult to know, and it was one of the greatest blessings of my life to be one of the few people who did know him for our short walk together in this universe. You might have read his recent review of my latest work in the Heinessen Register , in which he (perhaps rightly) savaged parts of it— he was angry with me, I’m sure, though his criticism is fair enough regardless. He was a professional first, and everything else second. 

It’s one thing for me to imagine myself lifting the curtain, revealing the small fears and loves of the men of the past, but it is quite another to do that to the living. I understand. And I’m sure that he, too, understood that I did it out of love, because I wanted other people to know him the way I knew him, to see him the way I’ve seen him.

I’ve heard it said that if you know someone completely, there’s no way you can escape loving them— no way you can hide from it. My mother would say that this is the way that God loves us (painfully), and Dietrich would say that I love playing God when I write.

Somehow, without my being able to do anything about it, he’s stopped being a living man who can scold me for loving him, and he’s become one of those men of the past— someone who can no longer speak to me, nor hear me shouting. I wish I had been able to talk with him sometime in the past few weeks, but I was unsure if he wanted me to, and, furthermore, what could I say that he didn’t already know?

Dietrich once told me that every story only has one way it can end, and unless you’re marching towards that inevitable conclusion, you’re not being true to the work. He always knew how the story ended, and God, I wish that he could tell me how it does. I wish he could have lived to see it, and told me if I was being true to the work, and to him.

He wouldn’t have told me, even if I had begged for it, so I’m already wishing for things from the dead that I would have never expected from the living. It’s strange, how that happens.

Who was Dietrich Bronner? He was someone I looked up to immensely, someone whose shadow I often felt overwhelmed by, someone whose work eclipsed his self almost completely. It was impossible to know him as anything else. But despite that, he was my mentor, and my friend, and a man whom I deeply, deeply loved.

Dietrich Bronner is dead, and all that’s left is the empty page, the unfinished work, the eulogy, the tombstone. But that’s always the way the story ends— he always knew that, and, maybe, so did I.

— Nat Rome