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

by Wolf, Christa

  * * *

  I want to understand, I have always wanted to understand sentences like that, I now think, years later, years in which absolutely everything has gone against these sentences. The dream I had last night comes to mind: I am with my whole family in a kind of cave and a giant tower, made of iron along the lines of the Eiffel Tower, rises up in an open field before us and slowly tips over to the right, a horrifying sight, and then folds up at two hinges like a pocket knife. We flee in panic, in a crowd of many people doing the same thing, I realize my grandmother isn’t there so I run back, the cave has meanwhile turned into a small, rather nice restaurant, my grandmother is sitting there in her wheelchair and looking at me. I think: September 11! and wake up screaming. The start of a new era, I hear a voice say.

  The last time I woke up screaming, I remember, was the night after my visit to the small, modest Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles. Two rooms. In one, photos on the walls of Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust. Family pictures. Documents of the annihilation of the European Jews. Photographs from survivors … The second room was empty except for a railroad car, built to look like the cattle cars that took people to the death camps.

  I sat down in a nearby café with the museum director, a short, unobtrusive man, still young, with a businesslike look. I knew what he would ask me before he said a word, he too had seen the pictures from Germany in the papers, of course. I beat him to it and said that I couldn’t explain the riots against asylum seekers in Germany either. I said that the young people, especially in East Germany, had learned in recent years how hard it is to be weak. He said: But they are weak, and they have to learn not to be violent anyway. I thought I perceived in him too the belief that Germans were infected with an incurable sickness, a virus that in better times could pupate or hibernate so that Germany seemed normal like any other country, but which every crisis brought back to life so that it burst out and turned aggressive. The name of this virus was Contempt For Humanity. For a long time I thought it had been defeated in the part of the country where I lived, defeated by Enlightenment. When I spoke that word, I thought I saw in my Jewish interlocutor’s eyes something like a sad amusement. Enlightenment! he drawled. Yes, well. This tendency to fool oneself. We were familiar with it too.

  Being put on the spot and asked to stand in for and speak for all of Germany was new to me, and I felt how strongly I resisted it. Most of Germany was foreign to me, and not just in a geographical sense. He let me talk, get tangled up, look for arguments, utter protestations. Finally I fell silent. And then, at the end, this unbelievable question again: So you really want to go back there? And my quick answer: Yes, of course. No question about it. What else should I do?

  And after we said goodbye and I was sitting on the bus again, I could not get free of the feeling that I had forgotten to say something crucially important. I couldn’t think of what it might have been.

  I did not go back to the CENTER that day. I sat at my little machine and wrote:

  How can the survivors live with it? How can we Germans live with it? It is a burden that gets heavier year by year. There is nothing to work through, nothing to resolve, no sense to find in it. There is nothing but crimes that burst all bounds on our side and suffering that bursts all bounds on their side.

  And how long it took us to say “our,” our crime. And we clung for such a long time—I clung for such a long time—to the promise held out to us that we were totally different, the absolute opposite of those crimes: Communism, the society fit for human existence, not Fascism.

  The exploiters call it a crime.

  But we know:

  It is the end of crime.

  The telephone. Peter Gutman. Night had fallen. Could he read me something? A quote.

  Please do. If it’s not too long and complicated.

  He read: “The storyteller is the man” (my apologies, Madame!) “who can let the wick of his life be completely consumed by the gentle flame of his story.”

  Hmm. A wonderful sentence.

  But?

  But I would replace “the gentle flame” with “the scorching flame.”

  But then, Peter Gutman said, the wick of life would not be consumed, it would probably be charred.

  Exactly, I said.

  Aha, Peter Gutman said. I understand. Sleep well, Madame.

  People will say about our times:

  They had old iron and little courage

  since they had little strength left after their defeat.

  People will say about our times:

  Their hearts were full of bitter blood.

  And their life ran on worn-out tracks,

  they will say—

  and they will stand on their glass terraces—

  And point to the bridges—

  And point out the gardens—

  And they will see the new city lying at their feet.

  These lines ran through my head as I lay in bed. The poet KuBa, Kurt Barthel, who wrote them once upon a time, believed them too and made us believe them and was furious when our belief faded, then fell apart when his own unshakable belief was repaid with mockery and jeers. I could not agree with those jeers, and still can’t. “People will say about our times…” No, KuBa, no, that is exactly what people will not say. And they also won’t say: “Mother of Gori, how great is your son.” It’s good that no one says that, I think, and I hold the thin book with the austere gray cover in my hand, flip through it, and find the lines I am looking for:

  Gori, you cruel one, lost in the gardens,

  Cradle placed in peaceful times.

  Brave humanity, sworn to peace,

  Be like the father of peace in this world.

  Head of the proletariat, brain of the educated,

  Jacket of the soldiers: Comrade Stalin.

  KuBa: Someone who died at the right time, I think. Dead and forgotten, or usable now only as the object of mocking disapproval, which he also deserves. In the little book is printed the year of its publication, 1952, and above it, written in ink, the year you and G. bought it: 1953.

  Your university days were over, there was a child to take care of, finding an apartment for your family was the most urgent task. You walked down streets of rubble to your job at the writers’ union on Friedrichstrasse, where the poet KuBa, in the name and the interest of his colleagues, occupied an entire floor of the office and gave lectures left and right to young authors, lectures you had written for him, had his driver buy him the one suit he needed for official occasions, which didn’t fit him but fit his driver and so was passed on to him. When someone had no money he reached into his pocket and gave away whatever he found there. He was proud to be a proletarian and after emigrating to England he became a Communist, unconditionally devoted to the Party, one of the truest of the true believers and at the same time most ruthless and narrow-minded. Today he is known only as the person who rebuked the rebellious East German people after the Uprising of June 17, 1953: The people had forfeited the confidence of their government. They would have to behave very well in future before their shame would be forgotten. And he is known because of Brecht’s reply: Wouldn’t it be simpler, in that case, for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?

  KuBa dedicated his little book to his friend Louis Fürnberg, his idol and patron, one of the first of the émigrés to return—one memory calls forth the next—Fürnberg invited you to Weimar. Did you know at the time that Weimar, his work at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, was what saved him? In Prague, in his homeland, the Slánský trials would have meant his death. Close comrades of his—mostly Jews like him—were judged to be “traitors”; some were shot.

  When did I learn that? And from whom? Fürnberg was curious about you young nameless writers. He told you lots of stories. I can still see him sitting at the piano in his house in Weimar, intoning songs from his agitprop group from the twenties too, songs you all learned by heart, like his poems, and could sing along with him. For example: the

  SONG OF T
HE DREAMERS

  When the dreamers take to the streets

  to undertake their dreams,

  nobody has overslept,

  no opportunity has been missed.

  Whoever changes the world in dreams

  and acts accordingly when he awakes,

  he has slept well and dreamed well,

  he is our friend.

  An ardent Communist. The long path of knowledge began for you with him. Fürnberg, the son of a German-Jewish manufacturer in Karlsbad, now impoverished, had not fled in time before the German troops marched in. They had shattered his hearing during his transport to jail by physically throwing confiscated library books at him, his wife had bribed an SS man with his grandfather’s money and bought his freedom, he and his family had spent their exile in Palestine. For you, he was the author of the youth song “You have a goal before your eyes, / So that you will not go astray in the world,” which seemed so much better to you than all the songs that dominated your childhood and adolescence, which were so hard to forget. But Fürnberg was also the author of more profound poetry, and sensitive prose, like The Mozart Novella. And today he is forgotten, or else, even worse, only mentioned when someone needs an especially absurd example of Party poetry, because he did write that too, the “Song of the Party,” which he wrote despite his doubts—but who knows?—in 1950, two years after Stalin had expelled Yugoslavia, one of the countries the Fürnbergs had fled to and one that they loved, from the international association of socialist states. “For he who fights for what is right, / He is always right, against lies and exploitation.” The song of the Party Congresses at which Comrade Stalin was chosen as honorary president, along with Comrade Mao Zedong.

  Until one day, a report by Comrade Khrushchev was read out at one Congress, about the cult of personality around Stalin and giving the first hints of his “errors,” and comrades who had been in exile in the Soviet Union burst into tears and admitted that they too had lived through some things themselves, knew a lot, but kept silent, so as not to endanger the reconstruction in our country, and then it was KuBa who rushed to the lectern and said that he was grateful to his comrades for keeping such a difficult Party secret for so long. From that point on he considered Comrade Khrushchev a renegade and traitor, while Louis Fürnberg sent a jubilant letter: A thaw! At last we can write again!… The exultation betrayed the deep depression in which he and many other comrades of his generation had lived for so long. Not seeing any alternative. And keeping silent. And writing poems like:

  DIFFICULT HOURS

  Maybe we are destined to be the sacrifice

  for a greater goal; if so, we should keep silent,

  even if pain and shame bow our necks

  as we look on as spectators to this game.

  “I felt the touch of death today,” Louis Fürnberg wrote on November 23, 1953. When he died of a heart attack, in 1957, aged forty-eight, a large crowd of people joined his funeral procession in Weimar, and you were there.

  Other funeral processions rise up before my eyes—too many poets who returned to us from the emigration died within a decade, almost all from “broken hearts,” to use the old-fashioned language: their hearts had withstood the pressure for decades, but not the sudden release from the pressure. And so the processions to the Dorotheenstadt cemetery began. F. C. Weiskopf, Bertolt Brecht, and Johannes R. Becher died within four years and were laid alongside Fichte, Hegel, Schinkel, Rauch, and Schadow; Bodo Uhse and Willi Bredel followed soon after. Today flocks of tourists file past these graves, and the graves of those buried there in the decades to follow: Wieland Herzfelde, Helene Weigel, Anna Seghers, Hans Mayer, just to stay with that generation. So many names. So many stories. Who will tell them? Who would still want to hear them? They wouldn’t be especially entertaining, these stories, and definitely not without taint or blemish. Wrong turns? Oh, yes. Mistakes? Those too. Heroic deeds? Yes, those too. But not heroic stories—they wouldn’t have wanted that. And when the “great cause” fell apart before their eyes, every one of them reacted in his or her own way: with despair, defensiveness, depression, rage, silence, denial, self-deception. And some with dogmatism and insistence that they were in the right.

  After one of the stirring assemblies, Willi Bredel laid his arm around your shoulder and said: Yes, now we should probably do a bit more for you young people too. The next chance he had, when you were at a congress in Moscow, he gave you a tour through the Moscow he remembered from his émigré years: That’s the Hotel Lux, we all lived there. In the bad time, during the purges, we would call each other up at night to hear if the other person was still there, and when they answered we would hang up without a word. Some comrades weren’t “there” anymore … And here’s the Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters with the bars on the windows, from here they were sent to the camps and we never heard from some of them again … And when Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nonaggression Pact between Hitler-Germany and the Soviet Union, we émigrés had to stop our public anti-Fascist propaganda.

  You tried to imagine the loneliness they were plunged into. And then? you asked. How did you bear it? —We had no alternative, he said.

  That wouldn’t happen to you. You were young back then and you sat around together hour after hour, night after night. Your task, you thought, would be to exorcise the demon of Stalin from social life, to get through the conflicts, which were more severe than you predicted, and to not give up. A naive agenda.

  * * *

  Even the west coast of America, the sunny land of California, could be drenched in steady rains, I hadn’t known that. I stayed in the MS. VICTORIA and saw on TV whole sections of cliffs break off and wash away the coastal road, a few hundred yards away from me.

  I walked to my bench in Ocean Park. The rain had stopped, the earth had drunk its fill, the leaves of the palm and eucalyptus trees glowed a contented green. Peter Gutman was already sitting there and he said a casual hello as though we had planned to meet there. He had also been stuck in his apartment for days, he also seemed to need some fresh air. We walked to the Huntley Hotel, went up the glass elevator, saw the coastline get smaller below us, the people on the beach shrink to tiny figures, and found a free table in the round glassed-in restaurant. Happy hour. Groups of very young people had occupied almost all the tables and were acting like they owned the place, helping themselves to countless cheap drinks and bites of food from the copious buffet, with not a glance to the landscape below them, the beautiful curve of the Malibu coastline, instead they pranced and preened for each other, yelling and creating a level of noise that made it almost impossible for us to talk. We too drank pitchers of watery margaritas and ate grilled hot dogs and stir-fried vegetables, and we looked through the enormous glass wall at the glorious sunset we hadn’t seen for days.

  I asked Peter Gutman the question: Can a person fundamentally change? Or are the psychologists right and the basic patterns are set in the first three years, and can then only be filled out, not changed?

  For example? Peter Gutman asked.

  For example, the risk of always remaining dependent on something: Authorities? So-called leaders? Ideologies?

  That, Peter Gutman said, is something my philosopher reflected very deeply on, conveniently enough. He says that we Western men and women pay the price for our life of luxury with the loss of maturity. What we drink in with our mother’s milk is the idea that whoever goes against the mainstream will be excluded from the subsistence group.

  But is any other system even thinkable?

  That’s exactly the point: they’ve made sure that even our utopias stay enclosed in this thought-space. All we can do is wish for more and more of what is. Or less. Or a more beautiful version. Or more rational.

  As opposed to what! I cried.

  Precisely, Peter Gutman said. And then we’re surprised that our proud belief in reason flips around into the worst irrationalism. And we keep moving down the same track, which we call “progress.” That’s what my philosopher says.
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br />   That’s why you can’t finish your book about him, I said. You keep running up against unthinkable things.

  You may be right, Peter Gutman said.

  The sun went down and we couldn’t keep talking while it set.

  We left the restaurant and took the glass elevator down to the darkness starting to descend on Third Street, which had come to life with passersby, artists, musicians, and performers. So is every utopia ridiculous? I asked.

  He hadn’t said that. At the moment, he found himself disagreeing with his philosopher on the question of revolutions and their function. Whether a revolution is the only way to bring about a utopia.

  I said: Maybe they’re the most effective way to fool yourself into thinking that utopias cannot be brought about.

  You would know, Madame, Peter Gutman said, and did not want to say anything more on the topic. We walked for a while in silence among the crowds of the evening street.

  I no longer know if the word “revolution” ever came up among you in 1989, but I doubt it. It would have struck you as too bombastic. The word that did come to occupy the empty space we inherited was inadequate, and intentionally obscured the nature of the “events.” The whole process, from the demonstrations to the fall of the Wall to reunification, became known as die Wende, the “Turn” or “Turning Point.” But what exactly had “turned”? Away from what? What you experienced was a people’s uprising that took the form of peaceful demonstrations and catapulted those at the bottom to the top. Assuming that that is what revolutions are intended to do, this was a revolution. When I think about it seriously, it ran strictly according to the theoretical model. Erosion of the old power structure on almost every level: suddenly the actors in the theaters were reciting critical manifestos after performances and no one was there to stop them and call the wildly applauding audience to order; suddenly, for the first time, large numbers of people did not turn out to vote, and groups of civil rights activists spread out to all the voting places, kept a close watch on the vote counters, wrote down the results themselves, compiled them in the municipal districts, compared them with the official tallies, and then told each other and everyone they knew over tapped phone lines: Election fraud! Suddenly you couldn’t find anyone who didn’t sharply criticize the social conditions, which showed that even the timid and conformist people had picked up a scent: change was in the air.