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

by Wolf, Christa

  Obviously, Ruth said, steering her car through an area I knew, obviously she understood exactly the tragic situation her parents were in at the time. My head understands everything, you know, she said. But in her deepest core, the wound that her parents’ repudiation had inflicted upon her had never healed, she could never forget it and never forgive it. Never forgive her own parents, Ruth said, with tears running down her face. She blames them instead of cursing the Germans who did it to them. It would not have taken much, Ruth said, for her to go crazy from the upside-down world in her head. At first she couldn’t accept her own child, her son, she said. Did I have any idea what that meant? Only after a long course of therapy—from a woman who had emigrated from Germany, by the way, who had become her close friend but then sadly died a few years ago—only with her help had she learned to understand what was going on inside her. Now she was a psychologist herself.

  Back at the apartment, the first thing I did was reach for the red folder. Never before, it seemed to me, had I so deeply regretted never having met L. I imagined very precisely how she would have looked: striking features showing little effect of age, gray hair combed back, medium-tall at most in stature, not thin and not fat, always in motion. Classically dressed in good fabrics and muted colors, unlike Emma, who cared little about her appearance. Emma must have brought up L.’s predilection for nice clothes in one of her letters, must have called it a “bourgeois relic.” L. replied in her letter of February 1949—a month when I was preparing for my final exams in a small town in Thuringia—by asking if Emma had forgotten that her dear gentleman valued that way of dressing in women. “And why,” she went on:

  And why wouldn’t I give him this little thing when there were other things I had to refuse him? For example, I went to Spain during the Civil War even though my dear gentleman was strictly against it—not because he thought the struggle against Franco wasn’t good and right and necessary, but because I shouldn’t put myself in danger, he thought, I wasn’t made for a “heroic attitude.”

  He did not risk a break with me and I went to Spain as a journalist. Then, of course, he greedily read the articles I wrote and collected every one. Later I saw that he had worked my reports into his reflections on the sources of inhumanity in our culture, a topic he was obsessed with and that always dragged him down into hopelessness, more and more, a hopelessness I couldn’t share with him and didn’t want to.

  We lived in great poverty in Paris, by the way, like most émigrés. My dear gentleman lived off his wife, as he so often did later too. She had a job as a cleaning lady for a rich French family and gave German lessons to their sons. Dora is a very remarkable woman, in all those years she never swerved for a second from her conviction that it was her task to keep this man alive. And in all these years she has never once shown the slightest trace of petty jealousy about our relationship. My dear gentleman is bound tightly to Dora, he will never leave her, and I would never want him to.

  It was one of the longer letters L. wrote to Emma, typed in faint ink on American-size white paper, rather less hastily, it seemed to me, than many of her other letters. Not for the first time, I now tried, at my long dining table in my California apartment, to read between this woman’s lines and pick up a trace of the worry, self-denial, and constant renunciation that love must have imposed on her too. And I tried to imagine the content of those decades-long conversations between her and her “dear gentleman.”

  And me? Wasn’t I, barely twenty years old, already firm in the conviction I had recently taken from certain writings of classic authors? Obviously my conviction was: REVOLUTION. Revolution was the only way to liberate mankind. Your math and physics teacher, a refugee from the east who was stranded in that Thuringian small town just like you—deeply intelligent, somewhat inscrutable, but for that very reason an especially fascinating man, who stood out from the other, fossilized teachers there—had recommended those revolutionary writings to you and noticed, not without satisfaction, how they made you see that the world must be not only interpreted but fundamentally changed. He had accepted citizenship without hesitation, while you decided to join the Party that had just this fundamental change as part of its platform. And then, to make it a typical story of those early years: it turned out later that this teacher, who had been promoted to principal by then due to his incontrovertible abilities, had earlier worked in Goebbels’s ministry. He had kept it secret. He was demoted and transferred to a small country school. But even though the news hit you hard, you did not imagine for a moment that he had betrayed his students, had betrayed you, by not believing the doctrine he recommended to you, nor did you think that he had ever believed the insane doctrines of his former masters. He was too smart for that, you thought.

  I paged through Thomas Mann’s diaries and found the entry I was looking for: March 31, 1949, near the date of L.’s letter. “In the afternoon, an hour-long speech from Churchill in Boston, embarrassing in its falsehood, gross flattery of America’s sense of noble victimhood, glorification of the Cold War, trite propaganda against the Russians … The whole thing depressing, even if it is exactly as it must be.”

  I wondered if you had heard the term “Cold War” back in the spring of 1949; I didn’t remember. You stayed up late in your basement room, whose window gave you a view of the high thin church tower of the little town and the overwhelming starry sky, working on an essay for a contest. The topic: “Revolutions: Necessity or Historical Excess?” You made the case for “Necessity” and won a prize, and were allowed to go to Weimar for the Goethe Youth Festival, where you saw Lothar Müthel as Mephistopheles and heard Grotewohl, the future prime minister, give a speech under the slogan: “You must rise or fall / Suffer or triumph / Be the anvil or the hammer.”

  Jena. The old university from whose lecture halls you could look out at the paths Goethe and Schiller used to stroll down together. Your docents traced out the lines of thought from the edifices of these two down to you: Progress and reaction, they have always faced off in the struggle against each other. You can still see yourself sitting with the others around the square table in the seminar room, surrounded by bookshelves, you can hear the young docent talk enthusiastically about Georg Lukács, whose theories made you see that what mattered was Realism, what else was there, and you and the class enthusiastically drank in his arguments and could not imagine how anyone could judge literature differently.

  You and G. read Remarque’s Arch of Triumph at night—this book, of all books, was the first of the hundreds you have read together since. You had borrowed it for a few days, you both gulped it down and forgot to categorize it as Progressive or maybe a little Reactionary after all, it was deep in the heart of winter, the two of you walked down ice-cold, badly lit streets late at night across the Saale bridge, the wind whistled in your faces, the moon hung low in the sky above the chain of hills, you ran into hardly anyone, you talked about Remarque.

  I sat in my apartment in the MS. VICTORIA, there was a movie on TV about two formidable women who had devoted themselves to studying chimpanzees and gorillas, I followed their patient attempts to get close to a troop of gorillas, and another train of thought took me into other seminar rooms where, forty years earlier, your docent, who had had to leave Germany in the thirties as a Communist and a Jew and had returned there, to you, to work with you, was so alive and convincing that I never forgot her class on the so-called Sturm und Drang movement, an early-bourgeois antifeudal movement. You identified with the young men of back then who rejected the demands of absolutism, their watchwords were Nature! Freedom! and they cunningly defended themselves against censorship, for example, the young Goethe had had his “Prometheus” bound into his volume of poetry in such a way that they could remove the poem, if the censor insisted, without damaging the rest of the book. “I know of nothing poorer under the sun than you, you Gods”—ha, that atheist! that loather of princes! this Goethe was your man, and your blossoming dreams grew ripe. Yes, said the docent you worshipped, maybe he wasn’t q
uite a revolutionary, our Goethe, but still, he had always exerted a little pressure on a faraway end of the lever—he said so himself. You, though, in your advanced era of progress, held the lever in both hands and would never let it go.

  This docent, who had opened your eyes to the fact that even the most delicate love poem was embedded in a social fabric—thirty years later, when she had grown old and was teaching in another city, she had her students draw up a resolution in which you were accused of ideological capitulation. You could not brush that one aside as easily as some of the others.

  Eventually, after a long time, both of these women researching and getting to know the behavior of chimpanzees and gorillas on opposite sides of the world were trusted enough by the respective primate groups that they could get very close to them without producing a flight response or aggressive reaction. I watched them sympathetically, almost with envy.

  In the other train of thought that continued to run without stopping, I saw the exhibition in the Weimar Castle, “Society and Culture in the Age of Goethe,” that you used to lead groups of visitors through during school holidays. I saw you and G. sitting in the assemblies, I heard the speakers, who said that the class struggle was intensifying, you had to prepare to face critical situations. However much we hated the war, he said, pacifism was practically suicidal nowadays; your readiness to defend the Republic must not be mere lip service; in short: you had to learn how to use a gun. Suddenly it was totally silent in the room.

  That night, you and a comrade of yours went back up the hill to the Nietzsche House, where you were living. She said: I never wanted to hold a gun in my life. Then you could see before your eyes the heaps of guns that the defeated soldiers of the German army had thrown into ditches in the streets, in April 1945, streets your fugitive caravan passed by; none of you touched any of the weapons but the concentration camp inmates who were being marched north along some of the same roads, on a death march from the Sachsenhausen camp, picked up guns they were barely strong enough to carry and took up positions on the high ground above the valleys through which you were walking.

  You said to the leader of the assembly: I have a child. He said: I know. Don’t you want to protect your child? Think carefully. You phoned your mother and said you had to hear your child’s voice even though she couldn’t talk yet. The following day, every one of you said to the leader: Yes, you would take part in the weapons training. I don’t remember if you were ever actually required to. That was in 1953. You were twenty-four years old.

  The ancient gestures of the apes, suggesting human gestures, moved me and I was gripped as I followed the story on-screen of how “Melissa,” a stray female ape with a child, tried to gain entry into the group, making the meek, submissive gestures that we, I thought, knew only too well—how she carefully touched the senior group member, the alpha male, on his shoulder after they had sat quietly together for a long time, then finally reached for his hand and brought it to her mouth several times, “kissed” it, and then, with infinite patience, sought the acceptance of the group of females too, until at last, I was touched and relieved to see, she was peacefully squatting between the others with her child on her lap.

  I called Peter Gutman, I had to ask him if he knew that apes could kiss. He said no, he had not known that. What he did know, he said, was that he had unlearned the ability to kiss. Or did I think that kisses over the phone could replace real kisses?

  No, I said, I certainly don’t, and Peter Gutman was pleased that we were in agreement. It’s not a real life, he said. And yet it’s the one we’re all forced to live. Unreal even in our private lives.

  Hello, Monsieur? I cried. Don’t go overboard. You think that some original has been lost on the long road from the apes to Homo sapiens? The original form of life? Of love?

  It seems that way sometimes, Peter Gutman said. For example: If this wonderful woman across the ocean that I talk to longingly on the phone for hours were suddenly here in front of me, would I even know what to do? Who could promise me that? Isn’t it possible that I need this absurd situation, this absurd suffering at our inability to be together, in order to keep her at arm’s length? The same way I need my insane perfectionism to keep me from finishing the book about my philosopher.

  Well, that is all rather sophisticated, Monsieur, I said, and I thought: What are we talking about here?

  Sophisticated? Peter Gutman sighed and admitted it. Otherwise I don’t talk about it at all, he said, and I asked: Why with me?

  Because you are unhappy yourself and you understand unhappiness.

  Me? Unhappy? What makes you think that? I’ve never said anything of the sort.

  Exactly, Peter Gutman said. Do you have something to drink there? Okay. Sleep well.

  I turned off the TV, then the lights. I sat in the dark and heard the MS. VICTORIA breathe. After a long time I went to the kitchen and made myself a margarita, I took it and put it on the narrow shelf next to the telephone, I did not bother to calculate the time difference since there was nothing I needed more urgently now than to hear that voice, so I dialed the Berlin number I knew so well. Of course there was no answer right away, he was asleep, but I let it ring for a long time until I heard his half-asleep “Hello?” At which I complained that he would never learn to answer with his name like you’re supposed to, and he asked if I even knew what time it was there, and I said, No, I don’t know. Five thirty in the morning, he said, and I said Oh, I was just about to go to bed. We said nothing, the ocean roared its quiet roar, then he asked, Is something wrong? and I said: No, what could be wrong? Do you hear the roar of the ocean? Did you know that the MS. VICTORIA breathes at night and rocks like a ship on the sea? —I didn’t know that, he said. But say hello to your MS. VICTORIA for me, it needs to look out for you. I asked: Are you saying you think I need looking out for? and he said: You never know. No, I said, you never do. We hung up. I felt better.

  I got up late, it was the weekend after all, and made a hearty breakfast. What was I singing, unconsciously, as I did it? I had learned to pay attention to that information. I was singing “I Had a Comrade Once,” the version sung by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War after Hans Beimler fell in the Battle of Madrid. “A bullet came a-flying / It came from Germany / The aim was true / The course was too / A German gun, you see.” Tears used to come to my eyes sometimes when I sang those words, that was back in the naive days when we still believed in fairy tales. A friend of mine, himself a fighter in Spain, who had recently gained access to the secret Spanish military archive, told me that the version of Hans Beimler’s death in our history books was not true either. “Happy the nation that needs no heroes.” Anyway, I realized, there had been no more songs in the German Communist movement since Spain. Its soul had been ripped from its body with sharp instruments and the pain was nothing to sing about, for a long time it was not supposed to be felt at all. Artificially transplanted substitute songs were struck up at public occasions but they did not stand the test of time. And why should songs outlive the people who sang them, I thought. “The Spanish sky spreads its stars / Above our defensive trenches…” We sang the songs of the old people, we sang “Die Moorsoldaten”: “Everywhere you cast your eye / Bog and heath lay all around.” But we also sang the new Thälmann Song, “Thälmann, Thälmann, out in front / Germany’s immortal son,” or we sang “The Roses Bloom in August” at the World Festival of Youth, but something was missing, we stopped singing those songs, they sounded wrong.

  Now what was going on here, I had to pull myself together, I said to myself, I couldn’t spend my everyday life so wrapped up in my thoughts, earlier I had forgotten to take my purchases with me at two different stalls at the wonderful vegetable market on Second Street, someone had had to come running after me with the bags. Then suddenly my shopping cart had disappeared, which I could not do without—now it’s happened, I thought, now someone’s stolen my cart with my leather jacket in it—and then there it was suddenly standing right in front of me,
blocking the aisle, people had to squeeze past it.

  My mind is elsewhere, I thought. When I went to the office that afternoon I crossed at a red light, a car had to slam on the brakes. A stack of newspaper clippings faxed from Berlin was sitting in my mailbox, I put them in a folder and stuffed the folder into my bag without looking at them, I was not up to it.

  I went back to the MS. VICTORIA, sat down at the little machine in my apartment, and wrote, to my surprise:

  In the City of Angels my skin is being peeled back. They want to know what lies beneath, and they find, as in every normal human being, muscles tendons bones veins blood heart stomach liver spleen. They are disappointed, they were hoping for the entrails of a monster.

  Really, I heard myself say to myself, don’t go overboard. I let the sentences stand.

  I called Peter Gutman. How does it happen, I asked him, that our civilization brings forth monsters?

  Thwarted life, he said. What else. Thwarted lives.

  I don’t know, I said. Maybe we’re born monsters?

  A storm is blowing from paradise, Peter Gutman said. It pushes the angel of history backward ahead of it. But it doesn’t turn him into a monster.

  But he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, I said.

  No, he doesn’t, Peter Gutman said. That’s just it: he’s blind.

  Blind to history, I said.

  Blind to horrors, if you prefer, Madame.

  Thank you very much, I said and hung up. I thought: Being blind to horrors would be a good thing, who could live keeping all the horrors in mind. There has to be something like an expelling, extruding, exorcising of horror, I thought. I remembered how you couldn’t stop picturing your cleaning woman’s young son who had gotten stuck under a raft while swimming in the Warta and drowned, and how his mother had had to watch when they pulled the dead boy out of the water, and you wondered how she could live with that, and I remembered that you, as a child, wondered how you were supposed to endure hearing about the suffering constantly inflicted on other people, and the fear of being hurt yourself, for your whole long life long, but you didn’t then know, and would not have believed, that people, without realizing it or wanting it, develop protective techniques against self-destructive sympathy.