"Ich weiss jetzt, was kein Engel weiss" -Damiel, The Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ film The Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, literally "The Sky [or Heaven] over Berlin," in German) takes place in Berlin, but the film's characters speak and think alternately in English, French, and German. The female lead, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), works as a trapeze artist at a run-down circus in a dusty field beneath an overpass in some abandoned corner of the city. She wears a leotard and wings in her act, a mortal sketch of the transcendent figures invisibly circling the city.

In her first scene, the ringleader tells her the circus will be closing the next day. Shaken by the sudden disappointment that tonight’s show will be her last, she retreats to her trailer and, before climbing inside, looks up at the gray sky and thinks, “Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst,” alternating between her native French and the language of the city around her. Unexpectedly earthbound, Marion is scared.

English subtitles might unhelpfully translate Marion's private lament as “Fear,” or, worse, “I’m afraid;” a more literal translation would read: “Fear. Fear, fear, fear. Fear.” But her irreducible plaint cannot be dissolved in the medium of any one language. Her fear does not transcend both French and German but is instead located in the fact of their irreconcilability, the dim space they each shadow without shaping. She does not articulate her fear as a single being, a monster or a dark wood, because her fear of leaving the circus, like her safety as a trapeze artist who is part of it, suspends her.

When I first moved out to San Francisco, when I was still looking for work and a nonsubletted apartment and had just started taking German, Marion became an important figure for me. My first attempts to write about her were in an essay on prepositions and how I found them to be the most intractable parts of my new German vocabulary.

She led me to remember an afternoon in Paris when I overheard a conversation that sounded like English while riding the Metro. I tried to follow, out of habit, and found I couldn't. I strained to catch even a single word I recognized, but none stuck out. The familiar sounds refused to fall into recognizable words. That's when I panicked. What if I had lost my fluency and would only speak now as if my mouth were full of sand, hear as if underwater, read in thickened, muddy light? What if the words never seemed themselves again? What if I were lost?

The moment passed: I realized they were speaking Dutch. But I remembered the feeling and so when Marion said, "Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst," I said, "Aha. I know this. This is the fear of no longer belonging, of being trapped between worlds."

It was many weeks before I began to see her statement as hopeful, too. The medium of Marion's art is uncertainty: she flings herself, a brief arc, into.

And becomes the very preposition she must cross over.