City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel

by Wolf, Christa

  I headed to the CENTER and crossed the lobby. How are you doing today? Great, thank you. Oh good. Four elevators, two on one side and two on the other. I imagined that they were transparent and I saw the glass booths float up and down, keeping the circulatory system of the office skyscraper running, saw the mouths of the people in the booths move in response to always the same questions, always the same answers, saw the elevators stop at the various floors and the young women with their stacks of paper carry their important messages into every cell, every corner of the large building: We’re doing great, wonderful, incredible. Couldn’t be better. And the same thing all across the country. And my assumption, that smiling all the time must be stressful, was wrong, as I had learned by then. Normal behavior is not stressful.

  Now there were letters from the city in my mailbox more and more often, including invitations, a sign that more and more people and institutions had learned of my presence here. One West Berlin colleague, for instance, had apparently flown across the ocean so that here, where no one knew him or his past, he could rail in an article called “Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly” against those of his colleagues who had not publicly forsworn their leftist errors, as he himself had recently done. He even added that he was certain that his colleagues under the regime in the East could not have led a meaningful life.

  I did not know the man personally and wanted to avoid being unfair to him. But I still had to wonder whether he—one of the leftest of the left!—didn’t at least know his Adorno: Did he not know that the sentence from Minima Moralia he had used as his title, which was now being used throughout the media to bludgeon East German intellectuals, came from the end of the eighteenth chapter, “Refuge for the Homeless,” and expressed the impossibility of living rightly under “false”—that is, capitalist—property relations? Whatever the sentence originally meant, it turned out to be an irresistibly handy formulation in this new context.

  I sat down at my little machine and wrote:

  So what would a right life lived in the right circumstances look like? If our caravan of fugitives at the end of the war had been lucky enough to make it across the Elbe, which we were, after all, trying to use the last strength of our draft horse to reach? Would I have been a different person under the other property relations, the right ones? Smarter, better, guilt free? But why is it impossible for me to want to trade my life for that easier, better one, even now?

  Then I had to run away, away from my patient, terrorizing little machine, out of my quiet apartment, a cell with the walls closing in on me—had to escape from the constant monologue in my head to the spot on Ocean Park Promenade with the best view of the Pacific Ocean.

  I could hardly believe, and barely endure, that all these people walking past me on Ocean Park Promenade could be innocent, guiltless—that there were such people, the Japanese couple who first took their own pictures in various poses using a timer and then asked me to take one of them trying to hug the trunk of a giant eucalyptus tree, the big Mexican family who had dragged two benches together and were eating hamburgers and hot dogs out of recyclable fast-food containers, innocent, all of them, from the woman dressed in bright Indian colors to the newborn brown-skinned baby. They were guiltless even if some members of their clan might have crossed the border illegally. It wasn’t about that. The young people jogging alone or in pairs, some attached to pulse monitors or pedometers, what did I know, some carrying dumbbells just to make things more difficult. One sweaty T-shirt said in black letters DO YOU LIKE ME and there could be no other possible answer but Yes and once again Yes.

  Or the group of Russian emigrants that even from afar, from the observation post of my bench, I recognized as Russian: even they were guiltless too. I tried to pick up something of their language when they walked past me, the Russian that my first Russian teacher, a Baltic German woman, had urgently recommended we learn—we graduates from every possible corner of the defeated Greater German Reich brought to a Thuringian small town for no other reason than to learn the language of the victors: Learn it, children, learn it, once the Russian is somewhere he never leaves again. I picked up a few words and did not have the courage to ask them which of the various waves of emigration this family group belonged to. The children, I noticed, shouted words at each other in English.

  A wave of memories flooded over me, unleashed by the language, the word “Moscow.” The memory of my last trip to Moscow, in October 1989, which left me seriously depressed over the grim news I got from friends about their country’s condition.

  Before the return flight, at Sheremetyevo Airport, a young woman came up to you and started talking to you in the purest Saxon German. They, the members of a madrigal choir from Halle, had been on tour in Central Asia for weeks, cut off from all news of the GDR: she wanted to know if you knew anything about the most recent Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, there were rumors of deaths among the protesters in clashes with the security forces, they were worried about their friends and relatives, could you tell them anything. Yes indeed, you certainly could. The previous Monday, October 9, 1989, you had arrived in Moscow in the afternoon and called home that night, full of anxiety about the fate of the protesters in Leipzig, and you heard what you could now relay: There were hundreds of thousands on the street and nothing happened. And then you felt the same happiness again, the same as this young woman now felt, as she hugged you and passed on the good news to the other members of her choir.

  While all of you—a large number of travelers, including many West German tourists—had to wait in the departure hall, someone spoke some soft instructions behind you and the choir assembled and started to sing: “O Täler weit, o Höhen,” in many voices, so pure, so clear, so heartfelt. You were the only listener who knew why they were singing and you had to look away and you could not put a name to the feeling in your aching heart. It was not only a farewell from Moscow that was taking place here. And later, in the new era, interrogated over and over again as though for a capital offense about what there was about that washed-up country worth shedding a single tear over, for heaven’s sake—what did it have to contribute to the big, rich, free Germany besides scrap metal and secret police files?—you sometimes had to think back to those few minutes at the airport in Moscow. We sang that song for you. And had to think back to the surprised, displeased faces of the West German travelers who whispered the place where this choir came from among themselves and eventually, in the end, applauded enthusiastically. They had liked the song, unable to perceive the painfully joyful undertone in it, and so you kept your silence when people started pestering you with questions and accusations.

  At some point, the sentence formed: We loved this country. An impossible sentence that would have earned you nothing but mocking jeers if you had spoken it out loud. But you didn’t. You kept it to yourself, the way you were keeping so much to yourself now.

  It tires you out, I sometimes had to let it all go and walk back to my apartment and lie down. I started reading Thomas Mann’s diaries, which he had written as an émigré here, only a few miles from the MS. VICTORIA, but the book soon slipped from my hands and I fell asleep. We are driving to Berlin on the autobahn, I have the road atlas open on my knees again and I’m looking for the country, the city, we can emigrate to, my companion is talking about speed traps, he knows where they are located, the traffic police have never once caught him speeding, and I say: But it’s not the same police anymore, and he says: Yes it is, they’ve only changed their uniforms, and the new speed limit signs are a trick, in reality we have to obey the old speed limit of 100 km/hr., anything else will be punished. In the left lane, the West German cars race past us as always, they are allowed to, he says, because there are other laws for them. Suddenly we are sitting with our daughters and sons-in-law at Café Kranzler on the Ku’damm in West Berlin, I can already tell what the older daughter is going to tell us, and she says: So, we’ve decided to leave, why should we stay and put up with this gray life of shortages and cramped apartments.
I nod and have the tormenting feeling that there’s something wrong with her decision, I can’t figure out what it is, and our second son-in-law says, distressed: Well, now you’ll probably leave too, and I say: No, that’s not necessary. We all have gigantic bowls of ice cream in front of us and we are sad, now it’s caught up to us too, I thought when I woke up, and it took me a long time to realize why it was no longer necessary, in fact no longer possible, to leave.

  Peter Gutman came by, not for the first time at just the right moment. You seem to have antenna for when you should show up here, I said. He asked what was going on.

  I have discovered, I said, that my emotional state is often inadequate to historical events.

  An example, please, if you don’t mind?

  Certainly. The fall of the Wall was a day of celebration, as you know. That’s how it will be described forever in the history books.

  Yes?

  This is how I experienced it: We went to the movies that night, to the premiere of a film about the “coming out” of a homosexual teacher in East Germany—a theme that had never been handled publicly before. The audience was very moved and applauded the filmmakers for minutes on end. In those days, the events in our country were stirring up everyone’s emotions. Afterward we went to visit our daughter. Our son-in-law met us at the door and said: Have you heard? The Wall is open.—And what did I say back, totally spontaneously? I said: In that case the Central Committee needs to wave the white flag.

  So? Peter Gutman said. Was that the wrong thing to say?

  Not wrong. Inadequate. I should have thrown my arms around my son-in-law’s neck and screamed: Unbelievable! I should have burst out in tears of joy!

  Yes, well, Peter Gutman said.

  ALWAYS THESE AMBIVALENT FEELINGS

  Ambivalent feelings? I thought. Were my feelings ambivalent when we were stuck for ages in our car on the drive home, at the intersection of Schönhauser and Bornholmer Streets, because the stream of Trabis and Wartburgs pouring toward the Bornholm border crossing did not let up? What did I feel, actually? Happiness? Triumph? Relief? No. Something like fear. Something like shame. Something like depression. And resignation. It was over. I had understood.

  If only we always knew what would happen next, I said.

  What you are describing, Peter Gutman said, are harmless cases of mistaken feelings. There are worse ones. Fatal ones. My father, for example. Senior postal clerk in Bromberg. What did he feel when Hitler came to power: Disgust? Fear? Nothing of the sort. He felt carefree. Turned a deaf ear to warnings. Until the Gestapo locked him up for a week. Then he understood and brought his feelings around to the way things actually were. He sent his two sons to England the first chance he got and made arrangements for himself and my mother, who wasn’t my mother yet since I wasn’t born yet. They got out and survived. How many others went to their deaths with their false feelings, their trusting natures.

  I said: My mother was born in Bromberg. My grandfather punched tickets for the railroad there. He liked to drink one too many.

  So, you see, Peter Gutman said, as though that were some kind of consolation. We both had to laugh.

  Later he called me: By the way (that is how most of the things he had to say started)—by the way, my philosopher also expressed his views on the incongruity between objective occurrence and subjective feeling.

  I said: I’m sure he did. What did he have to say?

  He said that the facts are not always right when confronted with feelings.

  I said: You made that up just now.

  And he said: Madame! I wouldn’t dream of it.

  * * *

  Memory pictures: I was with John and Judy for the first time at the café that would become our regular café, on Seventeenth Street, where you could get a good salad for not too much money. John had written several letters to me at the CENTER, with invitations, and I had answered Yes, I would be happy to meet with him and a group of Jewish friends, “survivors” he wrote, or members of the “second generation.” They wanted to talk with me about Germany. I was afraid of this meeting, but in any case I wanted to meet John and his wife, Judy, first. John, who picked me up for dinner and “took care of everything,” as he would later too. I hope you’re doing fine, he said, as though we had known each other a long time already, and I said, surprising myself: Not really fine, John. And he said, another surprise: I know. But don’t worry. You will be fine.

  I knew we would be friends. A married couple, mid-forties, he tall and thin with medium-blond hair combed smoothly back, everything correct; she short with dark curly hair, lively. We sat across from each other for the first time and John almost immediately told me about his family, whose last surviving members he had just discovered in East Berlin, after the German unification: two cousins with wives and children on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, one an engineer and the other an editor at a publishing house, both of whom felt, as John put it, “colonized” by the unification. He spread a large sheet of paper out over the table, on top of the salad plates: his family tree that he had researched over the years and drawn himself. I heard the first of the many reports on German-Jewish life paths that I would hear: that of his parents, who were able to leave Germany at the last minute, in 1939, and ended up in the United States via England, where John was born, and got by for a long time with little jobs here and there. For the first time, I heard that descendants of Jews forced to flee Germany felt drawn to Germany. Their roots are there, after all, John said. He carefully cultivated his relationship with his newfound relatives in East Berlin and collected everything he could find about the unification of the two German states, with passionate interest: he gave me articles on the subject from the folder he carried with him at all times and always kept up-to-date. He was the first American I’d met here who didn’t expect me to make a pious face at the mention of the word “unification.”

  He and Judy had a shared appointment in the sociology department at the university; their work was on business management and they didn’t hide the fact that they found the capitalist economic system perverse, with its striving for endless economic growth, but they couldn’t go public with this opinion, they said, not yet. Not only because it would endanger their careers but above all because hardly anyone would understand them. “They” had finally managed to convince people, John said, that we do live in the best of all possible worlds, and as long as people believe that, against all the evidence before their eyes, they stay deaf to other opinions. Probably they will only be shaken awake by a catastrophe, and you can’t really hope for that. Until then, John and Judy had to use their time collecting convincing evidence, but also, if possible, developing ideas for possible alternatives.

  Oh, I know, I said.

  Oh, I knew. How many times in recent years, observing the decline of my country, did I recall what Goethe had said when he was old, the lines beginning: “We would not welcome the radical transformation that would be necessary to prepare the way for classical works of literature in Germany.” “Literary Sansculottism.”

  To have to welcome what brings destruction. To be stuck between a rock and a hard place. To learn to live without alternatives. German conditions.

  They’d think we were crazy, John said, we have moved so far to the edge of society with our views. Had I already noticed how strong the pressure was here in the States to conform, and how little the people under that pressure even realized it? That daily life in America was the norm for the rest of the world; that it was normal to live for profit and success; that the president is elected by only a third of the citizens while at the same time we are the most exemplary of democracies. That after the collapse of Communism, all of this is valid for all eternity. It would take a long time before the enormous contradictions in the system broke out into the open, but when it happened, they would be at least theoretically prepared for it.

  You poor things! I thought, I still remember, half in pity, half in envy. At least they weren’t consumed by self-doubt, that must be a great
help, I thought. You don’t know what lies ahead, I thought. But now we do know it, and we have to admit that we never could have imagined that one day more than two thousand coffins with dead American soldiers would be shipped back from Iraq to the United States without the Americans rising up against it.

  Many of the details are blurry now, I obviously can’t remember precisely the various phases of the reports from Europe anymore, but I am certain that the articles sent or faxed to me, that Kätchen put in a folder and passed along to me, struck other tones: more impatient, more ferocious, more cutting. I read the newspaper pages with letters from readers: The West German readers had had enough of the East Germans’ problems. You could see a real helplessness in them: For heaven’s sake, all this screeching about so-called values that they wanted to preserve from a state that had fallen apart, what was that supposed to mean? What can you preserve from a dictatorship?

  * * *

  Gentle, precise, and open, the nun says, typed out on my little machine: I sat for hours a day at the narrow end of my dining table and wrote, which everyone who knew about it thought was industrious hard work, except me, since I knew what hard work was, or would have been. But maybe my idleness too came under the nun’s all-forgiving comprehension.

  * * *

  Gentleness is a kind of goodness toward ourselves—I translated the nun’s lines into German—precision helps us see clearly without fear, the way a scientist is not afraid to look in the microscope; and openness is the ability to let go and open yourself up.