It was us, after all, the East Germans, who had had to join the side of the eastern peoples after the war—the very people who had suffered the most under us, I said.
I cannot forget how, at the banquet for a delegation from the GDR at a Soviet collective farm, around a table piled high with food, between high-spirited toasts repeated over and over again to your health and happiness and welfare, never accusatory, the conversation was about the son who had been shot as a partisan by the Germans, the brother who had died in the war, the family next door that had been wiped out. And how the leader of your delegation—an old Communist who had acquired his uncompromising loyalty in the class struggle of the twenties and proven it in illegal activities and in jail, and who had meanwhile become a high-ranking, irredeemably narrow-minded functionary—how he burst out in an uncontrollable fit of tears when it was his turn to respond to the toasts of the Russians.
It was that scene which later made it hard for you to endure his rage and his opposition when it was time to speak out against him, sharply and thoroughly. Your petit-bourgeois upbringing has caught up to you, he allowed himself to shriek in your face; you were indulging in idiocy about humanity in place of the proper, class-struggle viewpoint, he was bitterly disappointed in you, you should expect no mercy from him. You thought about his time as a resistance fighter and your own time in the Hitler Youth and wished very much that your opposite views of what would be useful for “us” had not driven you farther and farther apart. You were standing in his enormous office, where you had been admitted with a permit and only after a thorough check by armed guards who followed you with alert eyes all the way to the paternoster elevator and whose comrades, likewise armed, were already waiting for you upstairs, so that they could check your ID against the permit yet again and then point the way through the endless, empty hallways and a series of anterooms that had their intended effect on you. Why did they need all that? Where did this fear, this paranoia, come from? Fear of a population that had done so much to them and whose smaller portion they now ruled. Now had to rule, without being able to rid themselves of their suspicion of this people. A cold fear came over you; you would not have been able to put it into words, not yet.
At the time, the issue was a book you had written whose publication the high-ranking comrade wanted to prevent because he considered it damaging. The book was important to you, it was a test of whether you could continue to live in this country or not. Then he shrieked at you. It went deeper than just this book and you both knew it. You parted, unreconciled, on the long walk to the door you fainted, and when you came to, his frightened face was above you.
I knew that Lutz had not lived through such scenes, and that I would not be able to make them comprehensible to him, even to him.
* * *
Doctor Kim did not let up, he asked me with a sanctimonious smile: Can you cut down on your eating? and I said yes, I said yes to everything Doctor Kim recommended, but I was not determined to follow all of his reasonable suggestions the way I had been at first, I wanted to be rid of him, I didn’t want to restrict myself anymore, I wanted to live how I was used to and how I liked, and I also didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking or feeling, but then he got me again after all by asking how my relationship with my mother had been: Did you love her? Again I said yes, that she had been a strong woman, I had loved her. Doctor Kim, with his dark face under a black head of hair, in his blue tracksuit, smiled as though he already knew everything I could tell him, and he stuck his needles in my back, hips, and legs. Relax! He turned off the light and left me to the stream of memories and thoughts flooding over me.
Mother’s life. A strong woman, the strongest in the family, who unconsciously inculcated the message that nature had designed things so that women took charge and directed affairs in times of crisis. She always needed to know exactly which way the wind was blowing and to say it too. You did not grow up with a model for feminine submissiveness, I thought in my warm dark cell. Instead I saw that strength does not exclude goodness, but it goes with severity, against oneself too: not being weak, not revealing your weak points to anyone, adhering to self-mastery to the point of self-destruction. Not telling anyone about the tumor in her breast she had discovered until the family celebration was over, because she did not want to disturb it. Later, you could not help but imagine the growth of the tumor during those lost weeks, again and again, while Mother lay in the hospital, still self-controlled, or while she gave off a strange smell after radiation treatment. When you told her one day, distraught and flustered, that soldiers from the Warsaw Pact states had crushed the Prague Spring, she answered—she who was dying: “There are more important things.” But it was important to you, maybe too important, maybe the truly important things hadn’t been important enough to you for a long time. I was very tired, I heard the sound of the sea, was I by the sea?
Were you sleeping? Doctor Kim had turned on the light. My face was streaming with tears and Doctor Kim wordlessly handed me a tissue. Don’t worry, he said. Be careful. While I was getting dressed I heard, from very far away, the sound of the sea. A recording. Something Doctor Kim used to help his patients relax.
I left. On Wilshire Boulevard I noticed that I was pain-free, praised be Doctor Kim. I crossed the street to the enormous, conspicuous drugstore I had noticed for a long time and now finally wanted to investigate. I appreciatively strolled past the kilometer-long aisles between shelves filled with dozens of cleaning supplies for every imaginable purpose and some unimaginable ones too, all there to make our bathrooms and kitchens and stairwells and floors gleam with germ-freedom. I wandered up and down the narrow aisles lined with perfumes, creams, soaps, deodorants, shower gels, leg and body lotions, shampoos, and hair dyes, again in countless varieties—who in the world was supposed to wash, cleanse, and perfume with all of this stuff and beautify with all these foundations, lipsticks, and mascaras? I thought the contents of all the little bottles and jars and packets in all these drugstores would be enough to cover the entire globe with lather and then, cleansed, thoroughly rinsed with ocean water, there would be enough creams and lotions to make it ready for a party. Maybe the especially numerous anti-aging products would smooth the deep wrinkles and furrows of our old planet, I thought. But first things first: the products to care for our sensitive furniture, detergent for our clothes and linens. I couldn’t help think about how parsley and vinegar, Ata, laundry soap, and soft soap had been enough for my grandmother, a cleanly woman. She washed herself with Palmolive and never in her life had a bathroom. I can still see her, standing in the steam of the laundry room: how she scrubbed the whole family’s laundry on a board while Grandfather slaved away over the hot water in a large cauldron over the fire, with an old-fashioned implement that does not exist anymore.
I had asked too much from my joints, of course; I got back into the bus, which had to wait while a big motorcycle rally thundered past in front of us, young riders in black leather outfits, the black woman on the seat next to me shook her head in disapproval, what was the English word for “Rücksicht”? no, these young people showed no consideration on their mighty machines, but why should they? Why shouldn’t they show off their strength and superiority to everyone?
I rode down Wilshire Boulevard, straight as an arrow, toward the Pacific, exhilarated as always by the light that I never, never wanted to forget and that now, even so, I can call up only a pale reflection of. I remembered a large official gathering in one of the grand new cultural offices built next to the big nationalized companies. It must have been in the early sixties. A high-ranking business functionary had given a speech on basic principles and mentioned in his speech that young people were complaining about the shortage of motorcycles, and he had prophetically cried out that you, comrades, you too would very soon be able to supply your youth with motorcycles built in your very own factories! But you, as usual, had to be clever, you had to make yourself jump up and ask for the floor and march to the podium to contradict him: Surely this
cannot be our goal, comrades! Surely you do not want to overtake the capitalist countries in the production of trivial consumer goods! You should focus on other values, redirect the desires of the youth toward more important goals. I see, the speaker said, good-humoredly, so you’re scared to ride a motorcycle? You crept back to your seat amid the laughter of the auditorium.
I could not help but think about the masses of people, my countrymen and countrywomen, who, in the early days after the opening of the Wall, picked up their welcome money and returned happy from their first visits to the West, with bags and pockets and boxes full of purchases that had been utterly out of reach until then. That was what really mattered, at the core. But what did I know back then?
The lounge slowly filled up, one person after another came in, took some tea, started talking to the people sitting next to them. Even Peter Gutman was there, with his long skull hidden behind a copy of the Times and not taking part in the general discussion of electoral predictions until I spoke to him directly and got him to express his conviction that it didn’t matter who won since nothing would change the underlying social relations and most people didn’t even want them to change: not the members of the ruling and possessing class, from a natural and well-developed instinct of self-preservation, and not the others, since they had successfully been convinced that they already lived in the best of all possible worlds. Or didn’t.
At that we all fell silent, until Pintus, of all people—our young Swiss man—hesitantly put forward that he was not a stranger to radical ways of thinking, not at all, he himself had been a member of a Maoist group in Zurich in his youth, but since then he had decided once and for all in favor of more differentiated views. For example, he thought that even incremental change could have an effect. Peter Gutman politely turned to him and asked: What effect? Yes, well, Pintus reflected—his short, spiky hair was sticking straight up as always, and he was wearing his usual jeans and jeans jacket—in any case, new and hitherto unused forces were coming into play that dared to scratch away at the privileges of the elite. Younger critical spirits, he said in German, with his thick Swiss accent, would get a chance. Really? Peter Gutman said. And how long would that last? Until they acquired the same privileges themselves?
He really knew how to kill a conversation. Nor did he return to the topic when we walked back to the MS. VICTORIA together. Suddenly he started talking about how anxious he had been not to let a single word of German escape him in school, even though he spoke German at home with his mother. Who was, by the way, the only member of the family who showed something like homesickness.
What does that have to do with the election results? I asked, as we walked into the MS. VICTORIA past the three alert raccoons and waved to Mr. Enrico, who was extremely happy to see us. Think about it, Peter Gutman said, as we climbed the stairs. He said goodbye at my door; no, no drink today. He seemed to be very tired, and I felt a stir of bad conscience without understanding why.
The Enterprise hurtled forth into the unknown universe once again, and I could not understand why I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much as usual. Two hours later, Peter Gutman phoned. It seemed to me he had been drinking. Am I bothering you? —No. He said: What did we actually mean by those “Western values” of ours that other cultures were supposed to admire and respect us for? I was taken by surprise and said nothing. Peter Gutman said: Think about it, Madame. But that night there was nothing I wanted to do less.
* * *
The next day was overcast, a Sunday, and the television preacher cried, no, shrieked at his enormous congregation: Your sins are forgiven! and the congregation gave a loud groan with isolated cries of Yeah! Oh Lord! The preacher strode like a lion-tamer in front of the first row, in costume, wearing a handsome purple robe that flowed out behind him, and now he was asking the congregation: Which is the greater miracle? When Jesus says to the cripple, Stand up and walk! or when he says to us all: Your sins are forgiven! Then the famous preacher walked down the center aisle, toward the camera, and spoke to individual believers—to a black woman: What do you think, sister! and to a well-dressed white man: And you, brother, you haven’t thought about that yet, have you!—and they could all feel with every fiber of their bodies what had to come next, I felt it too, they all feverishly longed for the saving word that they were about to hear, and wanted to hear from him, since only he, the chosen preacher in his purple robe, standing up at the front again, elevated on the steps next to a giant tree with yellow flowers on the branches: only he could pronounce this word. At last, in a well-rehearsed movement, he raised the Bible up to the heavens and cried: As God is my witness! There is no greater miracle under the sun than the forgiveness of sin!
Yeah! cried the congregation with one voice, tears of emotion streaming over their faces, they burst into applause, the ritual had worked, purification had occurred. On Sunday mornings the streets of American cities are filled with purified men and women silently gliding by in their oversize cars but the real temples, the department stores and supermarkets, do not close for a minute, as though people were afraid that if consumption were interrupted for even a second, if the cycle of money into goods into money came to a halt for even the briefest possible moment, the organism that calls itself society and is on life support would immediately collapse from withdrawal.
I sat down at my little machine and wrote:
The quest for paradise has always and everywhere led to the creation of hell on earth. Is there an incontrovertible law at work here? That would be worth looking into. It would also be worthwhile to consider why the belief so prevalent here—that there is a solution to every problem, a remedy for every ailment, a relief for every suffering, a cure for every sickness—creates a feeling of unreality, even uncanniness, and can easily tip over into madness.
I reached for the red folder with L.’s letters. I realized that I always reached for that folder when I needed consolation. The letters were not separated by equal intervals of time—the third letter is dated June 1948. It is one of the longest, most detailed letters in the group, clearly answering questions and responding to opinions that Emma had sent to her old friend. L. writes that she is not surprised that she and Emma are once again puzzling over the same problems, after all, that’s how it always was before too.
Of course your experience in prison and my experience in exile are hardly comparable. But they seem to have at least one thing in common: the feeling of otherness they produced in us. However critical we were, however radically we opposed that society in earlier years, we were part of it—maybe it was especially because of our critique that we belonged to it.
But the moment my train crossed the German-French border in April 1933, this otherness descended upon me, never to leave me again, and it seems from your letter that the exact same thing happened to you when the prison gates shut behind you. We were Outside. If I read your letter correctly—the subtext too, my dear, which is often the main text with you—you too can never shake off this feeling of being a stranger to the countrymen and countrywomen who locked you away and kept their distance from you. I want to tell you right now that this is one of the reasons why I did not go back “home”: I knew that I could never be at home again among those people.
But of course you know my other reason: I could never leave this continent without my dear gentleman. I will never be able to leave him. Whatever reasons I try to come up with for why that is: that’s how it is.
Did this letter give me the consolation I was looking for? In some ways. The thought occurred to me that Emma’s loyalty to her Party, whose errors she recognized and ruthlessly expressed, had to do with her need to feel at home at least somewhere, since everywhere else had become alien to her. Was I too always alien to her?
TO LOOK INTO MY OWN OTHERNESS
was something I had avoided for a long time, until now.
A song came back to me, from a cycle of songs that accompanied you in an especially dark year. You had put on the record multiple times a day. My memor
y supplied me with the first verse, the melody too:
As a stranger I arrived
As a stranger I shall leave
It was a perfect day in May
How bright the flow’rs, how cool the breeze
The girl, she spoke of love
The mother e’en of marriage
But now the world is full of woe
The path ahead all covered in snow
A friend had sent you the record. He felt you needed it. He laconically compared the era in which Schubert had set Wilhelm Müller’s Winterreise poems to music—the restoration period after the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, the dark years before the Revolution of 1848—with the restoration period you all had ended up in, which had plunged you into a depression. He was trying to tell you: We’re not the first! But you had discovered that already, on your long walks in the area around the hospital, in the forest where both of you had been treated for your psychosomatic complaints with a lot of water and raw fruits and vegetables, but above all by being “taken out of circulation,” as the chief doctor put it. No one could imagine today how laboriously, in what tiny steps, against what inner resistance, and over how long a span of time your thoughts had had to struggle. You remember to this day the way the light fell into the sheltered pine forest you were walking past when your friend said: So, now we know: This state is a tool for domination like every other state. And this ideology is like every other ideology: false consciousness. We can’t keep our illusions about that anymore. You stopped in your tracks. You asked: What are we supposed to do? Then the two of you said nothing for a long time, and then your friend said: Behave ourselves.
City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel Page 11
