I hadn’t thought about what it might mean—what it might signify—that I braided my hair that morning. My hair had only recently grown long enough to do that; still dripping from the shower, I combed and braided it so that, braided while wet, it would turn wavy once it dried. In the end, though, it wasn’t so much the waves as the braids themselves that entered my rather limited styling vocabulary, German and austere as it is.
I hadn’t thought about what those braids might mean that morning until I saw a photograph of myself later: with a serious expression, I stood in front of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, also known as the Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro—or, more aptly, the Colosseo Quadrato. I had placed myself symmetrically in the middle of the six arches: three arches to my right, three to my left. And then: on either side, the two equally serious-looking Neoclassical statues made of cream-colored marble, far larger than life. They evoke workers’ monuments just as much as they echo ancient Roman sculptures.
Only afterwards do I realize: Neoclassicism, as a style, is particularly absurd in Rome, the cradle of actual Classicism.
I hadn’t thought about the fact that the number of arches of this rectangular palazzo could be translated into writing. The Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro, or the Colosseo Quadrato (otherwise known as the Square Colosseum) was inaugurated in 1940, along with the entire district surrounding it. EUR was originally designed and intended to open as part of the World Exhibition “Expo” 1942. The Second World War intervened.
I thought: EUR—OPA?
An intended celebration marking twenty years of Italian fascism, EUR stands for Esposizione Universale di Roma. The number of arches corresponds to the number of letters of the long-standing prime minister’s first and last name: six horizontal arches for BENITO, nine vertical arches for MUSSOLINI.
Written at the top of the sixty-eight meter high building, in Neoclassical script, are the words:
“Un popolo di poeti di artisti di eroi di santi di pensatori di scienziati di navigatori di trasmigratori”
“A people of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of thinkers, of scientists, of navigators, of migrants.”
A direct quote from Mussolini’s October 1935 speech, in which he declared war on Ethiopia. It has as dominating a presence when you look up to read it as when you consider its origin.
I hadn’t thought about the possibility that symmetry might, in itself, carry a fascist tendency. As a pathological obsessive-compulsive, symmetry usually brings me a sense of relief, with the illusion of “completeness,” of “closure.” My behavioral therapist once told me about the so-called Zeigarnik effect: A circle that is fully closed is a quickly forgotten thought, whereas an open-ended and incomplete task remains in the memory, causing a feeling of persistent nervousness—stuck in its own unfinishedness.
They say that fashion models often have symmetrical faces, news anchors asymmetrical ones. Symmetrical faces are pleasant to look at; asymmetrical faces are pleasant to listen to. I had never thought about it until someone pointed it out to me.
My friend A. said: Strange—you get nervous when the circle is open. I get nervous when it’s closed.
I remember: Mark Twain wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
Alexander Kluge mentioned in a lecture that it is the grammatical form of the future perfectthat turns us into political, into historical subjects. Who will I have been? Where—and how—will I have stood? With whom? And against who? On the right- or the wrong side of history? Even in the face of the anticipated future perfect, it remains impossible not to experience the present as universal.
This claim to universality becomes particularly evident in the context of fashion. “Fashion is war,” writes Lisa Robertson; it is a permanent struggle over territories, over class, over categories such as high or low, last season or the next, yesterday or tomorrow, over exposure, over inclusion and exclusion. The language of fashion renews itself constantly, reinforcing the fact that it is only spoken by those who design it, establish it, shape it, and abolish it again. Even if others try to pick up its rhetoric, intonations, and subtleties of dialect, there are still new and different codes to encode.
I repeat: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” wrote Mark Twain. And perhaps in fashion—as in art and architectural history—it is similar. There is never a full circle; the cycle of references remains an open system.
I repeat: Lisa Robertson writes, “Fashion is war.”
It is surely no coincidence that the Colosseo Quadrato has been the headquarters of the Italian fashion house FENDI since 2015. The logo—the two interlocking F’s—appear on the Fendi Baguette bags: a prime example of symmetry. F for… Fa…Fendi. Of course.
The head-quarter of FENDI: Quadrato. A squared head. FENDI became known in the 1920s for fur and leather goods but as they fell out of fashion throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the brand had to consistently reinvent itself. Starting with adding a new chief designer from 1965 until his death in 2019: the German Karl Lagerfeld—resulting in the longest collaboration in fashion history.
I wonder: Did Hugo Boss actually design SS uniforms, or “only” produce them?
I notice: In the winter of 2025, at least every second woman in Rome is wearing a fur coat or at least a fur stole.
The streets in EUR are actually too wide for the body—connecting to the idea of boulevards within representative districts across different class or political systems of the twentieth century. These are streets that are not meant to be filled with subjectivity, not with consumption, not with bustle. Instead, they can only be filled with ideology. Body-hostile, elevating, religious-like architecture found in a monument. Similar to a church, designed to make you feel tiny within it, only now you stand outside beside it, unable to avoid it.
I hadn’t thought about what it meant when D. said, immediately upon our arrival in EUR: “I can smell the sea.” From that moment on, we all felt as if we could sense the gentle breeze. We wondered whether, instead of visiting the Vatican Museums that afternoon, we should rather see the ocean. We had even brought our bathing suits and towels.
We were certain it must be just around the corner. So, for about five minutes we walked across the highway toward the anticipated “beach.” Then, we gave up and asked our phones for the right direction. We looked at the map.
The wide road we were standing on—Via Cristoforo Colombo—actually does indeed lead directly to the sea, to the Lido di Ostia. Built in 1937 by Mussolini as the Via Imperiale, the highway is an unwalkable twenty-seven kilometers long. Even if we were to take a bus from here, from its beginning (or is it its end?), it would still take an hour and a half to reach the Lido. We surmise, then, that the Via Imperiale was meant to be traversed by car.
Is it a coincidence that the Manifesto of Futurism (1909) declared, “We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.”
I had never thought about the correlation between the highway and Italian Fascism before. In Germany, that correlation goes without saying.
I remember doing a TOEFL test, an English exam, a few years before. When I was asked by an ancient computer what my home country's “biggest achievement” was, I couldn’t think of anything but the highway. Still, I left the question unanswered. I passed the test, but my score was rather low.
***
So it is impossible that D. actually smelled the beach while we were standing in front of the Square Colosseum. Yet, the monumentality of EUR made him feel the presence of the Lido. The road leads directly to the beach—such a structurally imperial gesture. Even international waters were meant to be annexed by the regime.
Alexander Kluge—the philosopher who talked about the future present tense (Futur II)—also described in that same lecture that temporal layers do not only lie next to each other chronologically, linearly, but also vertically on top of one another. Like in Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne. Layer upon layer. Kluge was in his mid nineties. I believe it must have been a consoling thought for him, that in his own time measurement, he wasn’t in old age. But at the time of writing this, he’s only just passed away.
I remember how my friend, an archaeologist, said: Historical layers do not exist, per se. They are produced afterwards by archaeologists so that history can be written in the way it wants to be told.
I think: It’s always only about the narrative.
In 1949, George Orwell wrote in the novel 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
I think: It’s always only about power.
B. said: A scientific study claims that men, on average, think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. Or is it just a TikTok phenomenon?
The Manifesto of Futurism declared, “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and recklessness.”
And also, “Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”
I think: It feels wrong to repeat their message without commenting on it.
Whenever I am close to the monumental ancient ruins here in Rome, I feel anall-encompassing fatigue that weighs me down to my knees. It’s not their age, but the megalomania that makes me tired. In the eclectic architecture of Berlin, somewhere between Gründerzeit, post-war episodes of East and West and just a lot of randomness, I feel calm and never intimidated.
I am sitting in what seems to be the only café in EUR, Caffè Palombini. I order a maritozzo. I speak with my mother on the phone and begin to cry—it feels ridiculous. The reason: she tells me a joke. It is the joke by a theatre director who was important to me at a young age, who died last year. Ja, nichts ist ok (Yes, Nothing Is Ok), was his final theater production; I think of how the joke must have been among the last words he ever wrote.
I think: Yes, nothing is ok.
Nietzsche defines a joke as “the epigram on the death of a feeling.” I have been thinking about that ever since I read it. The German fascists built him a gigantic Neoclassical mausoleum that was never completed—like so many megalomaniac construction projects, like EUR.
While I am still sitting there crying, the waiter in his tailored uniform shoos me away because I don’t want to order anything else. So I order another maritozzo to spite him, and, when it is placed in front of me, I push my finger deep into the thick layer of cream. The maritozzo, in its appearance, is also somewhat architectural, even a bit megalomaniac. At least it’s a lot to take in, all at once. I try to stuff it in my mouth as a whole.
D. picks me up at the café. He says he feels uncomfortable in his accidental white stand-up collar. He wants to leave now.
***
In these months, I often ask myself: Is the age of metaphor—as a time of privilege, of linguistic, poetic independence or autonomy, untouchability, the safety-net of distance—over? It was always an illusion anyway.
Is the language of crisis a direct, literal one? An acting language, as Bataille describes it?
Someone said, “The language of crisis is allegory.”
I have to look up what that even means. The very fact that I need to makes me distrust the claim. Shouldn’t the language of crisis be one that everyone can understand?
Earlier, when we took the subway—from thereal, round Colosseumunlike the fake, square one—the subway station had a virtuosic mosaic mural. I immediately, instinctively associated it with Italian Futurism. There is no plaque indicating the artist.
The Manifesto of Futurism declared, “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. ”
I think: I don’t really believe in moral purity. Whatever I do or don’t do, I always feel uncomfortable. And perhaps I deserve that.
We order an Uber that picks us up in front of the Square Colosseum. As it turns into the street, I swallow my chewing gum in shock. It’s a Mercedes G-Class—a German car, as German as it gets.
The Minister of Transport recently announced that getting a driver’s license will soon become very cheap—in order to save the German automotive industry, of course. Now everyone without a license, like me, is waiting for that moment while driving schools are going bankrupt.
I think of the two words that make up the one: Führerschein. “Führer-Schein.”
Before we get into the G-Class, we quickly take a few photos with the car in front of the building. The moment is just too epic not to be captured. I can’t think of a photo of me that has ever received so much online attention as the one where I stand, with my braids intact, in front of the Square Colosseum. “So Fendi!” someone comments.
I am sure that I will still braid my hair again, for practical reasons. I don’t know what that signifies, in contemporary fashion language.
Dante said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
Others say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And then, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”
I remember at a party, we discussed our deadly sins. It’s clear: we are all going to hell.
D. says, Meine Todsünden sind Trägheit, Wollust und Völlerei. (Mine are sloth, lust, and gluttony.) I find those sympathetic, friendly sins. Mine are less so: Hochmut, Zorn und Völlerei. (Pride, wrath, and gluttony.)We do not speak about our virtues. We meet at gluttony, our favorite sin.
The G-Class takes us to a fantastic restaurant where I order mostly intestines. As a starter, I am served a delicate piece of rabbit colon, elegantly crumbled into a round form—it tastes absolutely fantastic. Then, as a main, I have Trippa, stomach. I believe it’s good for my own, easily inflamed stomach. D. gives me a piece of his rabbit. I wonder if it’s an entire one. I eat it with my hands, greedily, slightly barbarically.
I hadn’t thought about it much before, but the next day, the New Year begins. What are my resolutions? I am still thinking about it. Even in this text, the full circle is missing. I feel uncomfortable. Fortunately.
I think: “Art & Order.” Putting things in order, keeping an inventory of thoughts and memories.
I can’t stop thinking about the joke that made me cry this day:
One candle says to the other, “What are you doing tonight?” The second replies, “Going out.”.
Of course, it was told to me in my uncomfortable mother tongue:
Sagt die eine Kerze zur anderen: “Was machst du heute Abend?” Antwortet die zweite: “Ausgehen.”
I can’t stop thinking: Ja, nichts ist ok.
Olga Hohmann is a writer and performer based in Berlin. Recent readings and performances include Kunstverein München, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, and K21 Düsseldorf. Her third novel, a prose debut with Korbinian Verlag Berlin, In deinem rechten Auge wohnt der Teufel was published in 2023.