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

by Wolf, Christa

  All right, listen, Peter Gutman said. It’s really very simple. You wanted to be loved. You wanted the authorities to love you too.

  That very early childhood fear of the thick snake lying under your bed at night, so that you couldn’t get out of bed under any circumstances without stepping on the repulsive snake and getting bitten. But what did that snake have to do with your fear of lies, or of being discovered, or of your mother, who had drummed this fear into you—the worst thing anyone could do in the world was lie to their mother, “God sees everything”—the story about the man whose hand reached up out of the grave was all it took to bring you into contact with the primordial lie, the lie to the mother, that was where horror was implanted within you, bad conscience, fears (“If I did anything wrong today / Then, dear God, please look away”), self-doubt as the breeding ground for new fears and new offshoots of fear, and also the longing or need to be whole and irreproachable and in harmony with those in charge. To be loved by them. To avoid the deepest fear, of losing the mother’s love.

  So, Madame, he said. You weren’t the only one. By the way, you have now crawled your way rather deeply into the overcoat of Dr. Freud.

  * * *

  On an evening not long after that came the exciting trip up to Karl’s house, a bird’s nest in the hills directly under the giant letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign set up in front of the cliffs, the city’s trademark. You could see it, shockingly close, from out Karl’s windows: it took your breath away, just like the view from the other wall of windows, of the whole gigantic shimmering city of Los Angeles by night down below. And Karl, a photographer of German origin, had built this intricate little house himself, around the initial cell of a single room, adding on a basement and a wooden porch. It was a little miracle. Bob Rice had brought me; the others there were Allan, Bob’s boyfriend, an American of Japanese descent, and an older Jewish married couple, John the lawyer and his wife, a university professor, along with their daughter. We drank gin and tonics and then sat crowded around a table in one of the small rooms that all opened into each other and whose walls were covered with photographs Karl had taken. He and Allan had cooked and “Japanese flair” was promised; we felt a level of trust and closeness as though we had all known each other a long time. I was surprised again and again how warmly people treated me, even though they must all have read the article in The New York Times painting a portrait of me that horrified me. John, the lawyer, quietly said to me that I should simply picture Americans as creating every country and every person in their own image—lots of people would think it was “great” for a major newspaper to devote so much space to me, irrespective of what the article said.

  Bob asked Allan to tell us about the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor: his parents, and he himself as a one-year-old child, were among them. Allan didn’t want to say much about it, only that it was very hard for them to find their footing again in everyday American life after their release; they were met on all sides with hostility and general mistrust. He worked for Universal Studios as a set designer, by the way—if I wanted, he could show me around the studio.

  John had read a lot about the events of the fall of 1989. He turned the conversation to the question of which English word would be the best translation for the German word “Aufbruch”—we thought of “uprising” but that wasn’t entirely right, we would have to consult our dictionaries.

  So what was it, then? What were those weeks, a few months, for which it is so difficult to find the right name? They crept up on you slowly, almost imperceptibly, along various paths, one of which ended in a parish garden after a reading in a church, with a couple dozen people standing around arguing loudly—it was early summer, the election results had been falsified, it was documented with eyewitness accounts from the polling places. I still remember how you said: They can’t be doing that again! Feelings surged up inside you—mixed feelings, absolutely, you felt worry along with the anger and outrage and amazement—where was this going to end if the leaders were still, even now, yet again, unwilling or unable to look reality in the face, see the mood of the people in the country, and react to it?

  DIALOGUE! was the first demand of the first protesters. But the leaders imposed one stupid measure after another, finally even banning Sputnik magazine, from Moscow, which had taken the “New Thinking” spilling over you from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and spread it, unchecked, in your own country. You were there when, in one of the critical plays the theaters were scrambling to put on, an actor in the middle of a scene took a whole stack of these magazines and threw them onto the stage, and the audience jumped up and cheered, applauding wildly. The manifestos of various groups were still being passed around in secret, and the blunt, open discussions were still taking place in apartments, but the pace of events was increasing and could not be stopped.

  I have just found the folder labeled “1989/90,” containing the speeches and essays you wrote in those two or three months. It’s astounding, actually. Back then you were asked to write pieces. First was an appeal to those in power to finally enter into dialogue with the regime’s critics, which you wrote together with other women writers and then introduced at a large assembly where, to your stunned amazement, it passed, with seven No votes. Clearly the tide had turned. Then came interviews, commentaries, appeals broadcast over the radio and television stations you suddenly had access to. It strikes me that these texts were infused with hopes that, later, had to be recognized as illusions—you called one of the petitions “For Our Country,” obsolete by the time it appeared. But I have learned since then that a popular movement cannot exist without these hopes, without these illusions.

  The most important thing I’m trying to remember, though, is not these texts or anything that anyone wrote or broadcast: the most important thing is the condition you found yourselves in. All the crowds of people rushing through the streets, complete strangers discussing topics that had been taboo only yesterday and saying, shouting, doing what no one, including them, would have thought themselves capable of, in an intelligent and imaginative and disciplined way. Your condition was absolutely not giddy happiness, it was often a very painful experience, for example when the investigatory commission you had demanded so urgently actually met: long sessions in the Rotes Rathaus and later in a church, where the ruling powers, in the form of high-up functionaries and eventually the very highest, had to justify their abuses of power and appear before the commission in their shabby, sorry condition.

  I knew, I told Peter Gutman, that I would never live through anything like that again. We were all going through a psychological crisis.

  On TV: a documentary about Charlie Chaplin, with a strong focus on his persecution by Hoover, the head of the FBI. At the end of the show, text appeared on-screen saying how many miles of files this Hoover had left behind. By now, everyone knew, or could know if they wanted to, that the future president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, formerly an actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild labor union, had betrayed and informed on his colleagues as FBI Confidential Informant “T-10.” So what? Never mind. As Mr. Hoover himself said before the House Un-American Activities Committee: “Communism is an evil and malignant way of life. It spreads like an epidemic and, like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation.” Malignant life-forms that have not even crossed the threshold to subhuman status are supposed to be exterminated, of course, without a trace of bad conscience.

  I walked down Second Street to distract myself, and in front of the restaurant that supposedly served the best burgers in the city I ran into the friend who had come from Europe to interview me, despite his fear of flying. We had arranged that he would be left undisturbed to prepare, on this first day of his stay, but then he invited me in to join him. That was the only burger I ate in America: it was served in a little wicker basket and was extremely good. We talked about his flight, and the wine in Lufthansa’s business class, and jet lag
, and the climate in Germany, both meteorological and political, and at the end he asked: Why did you continue to stand by the flag? No, don’t say anything now.

  We said goodbye and I walked past the Indian store to buy myself a deck of tarot cards and a detailed guide to how to use it. I saw an incredible picture on the front lawn of the MS. VICTORIA: Mrs. Ascott, the manager, who forbid nothing more strictly than bringing pets into the building, was sitting at the little white table on the right, under one of the large-leafed exotic plants, wrapped in one of her flowy pastel-colored robes, with a cat on her lap. She was petting it. It was the little cat that the tall, Indian-looking man had adopted; he had since left. Isn’t it sweet, isn’t it lovely? she asked, and, to my amazement, she even knew my name. Yes, Mrs. Ascott, it is. Signs and wonders.

  On my table lay the incriminating file, the corpus delicti, that my friend from Germany had brought me. Tied with thick cord—CONFIDENTIAL! Dozens of journalists had seen it before me and discussed it at length, as allowed by law. I couldn’t open it yet. I was tired. I lay down in bed and read Thomas Mann’s diaries.

  On November 22, 1949, he had written: “Adenauer, the Chancellor, told a Frenchman that Germany does not want an army. Militaristic memories must not be reawakened. And already, no sooner has the question of disarmament been resolved to G’s benefit, the whole West German press has started calling for rearmament against Russia. Russia would respond by instating universal military service in East Germany.—Becher and Eisler had come up with a new German national anthem, all about peace and unity, designed not to offend any enemy nations.—I feel like a mayfly, outdated and absurd. Militarism for peace. But what is the right thing to do, and what has a future?”

  Good question, I thought. Why did you stand by the flag?

  Once, I remembered, someone had explicitly called upon you to “stand by the flag.” It must have been in the seventies. In Leipzig. You were sitting—a group of authors—at breakfast in a hotel where you had stayed after an event the previous day. Then an older man unexpectedly came up to you, a former district attorney who had been removed from office when he refused to bring charges against Walter Janka and Wolfgang Harich: he had “neglected to pursue the necessary struggle against the enemies of the GDR.” Now he was head of the department of books and publishing, in other words the head censor. He put his hand on your shoulder and said: Just stand by the flag! —By what flag? you asked, baffled. And he said: The flag of humanity.

  I fell asleep. I dreamed a dream that forced its way through the defensive perimeter created by the sleeping pills, and I know it for a fact since I wrote it down—I would never invent such a transparent, easy to interpret dream. So, I dreamed I was lying on a kind of board, and in my sleep a circular saw was cutting off my limbs, slice by slice, first my legs, then my arms, finally my head, until my brain sat there by itself and then that was sawed to pieces too, and then a male voice cried: So it must be! Then my name appeared in neon lights, and finally, at the end of the dream, that went out too.

  When I woke up, I had the intense feeling: I am a danger to myself.

  I went to the phone early and called Berlin, and said: My body is leaving me. Time is leaving me too, in the same way, but probably not at the same speed. Maybe what Yuri Trifonov said is right, that the libido for writing weakens with age, I said, but in return I received only the harsh answer that that was just an excuse, I was apparently still thinking about an audience instead of what I needed to do, which was simply to try to get clarity about myself and write only for myself. As always in such cases, my first reaction was to want to contradict him, but then I surprised myself by simply saying yes, and I enjoyed admitting it. The overcoat of Dr. Freud, I said. —What? —Oh, nothing. —Did libido make you think of that? —No, but, wouldn’t that be a good title? —It depends.

  On what? —On whether the path goes all the way down to the underworld: the entrance to the underworld is a wound, I heard the voice say. One moves by slowly feeling one’s way in the dark. A tunnel feeling. I HAVE TO CLIMB BACK DOWN INTO THIS MINESHAFT. But did I really have to? Or was it only another compulsory exercise? A STRANGE PERSON LOOKS BACK AT ME FROM THERE. But is that even true?

  Why did you stand by the flag? The hotel. The interview, the anxiety, the spotlights. My answer was not ready yet but I could give a partial answer: It was hope that the people—the many people, who, I believed, thought like I did—would eventually prevail. Because it couldn’t be otherwise. Because otherwise this country and everything it embodied for us would perish. Because we had no alternative … I knew that his question would stay with me for years.

  That night we went out for Mexican food; the tension had given way to exhaustion and I couldn’t hold my tongue. I reproached my friend, who, as warned, had questioned me “mercilessly,” for acting high and mighty. He said: Now you have really insulted me. And I burst into tears.

  The next day we drove, in pouring rain at first, to Sunset Boulevard, turned onto Paseo Miramar, and drove up to Villa Aurora: Feuchtwanger’s house, which had been added on to after Marta Feuchtwanger’s death. We could stand on the terrace and look out in wonder at the ocean; I could tell my friend how it used to look inside the house, with all the valuable books. Then we sat for a while on a bench by the Malibu coast, in the sun that had come out around noon, and we felt good. My friend said: They see me as a radical leftist now but I haven’t changed at all, it’s my country that has shifted past me to the right, unbelievably quickly. And I thought: Why should they always be the ones paying attention to our problems? Why shouldn’t we also be interested in their problems for once?

  Then we drove all the way up Sunset Boulevard again and started singing. We sang “Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde” and “Wenn wir schreiten Seit an Seit” and “Spaniens Himmel breitet seine Sterne,” “Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist” and “Madrid, du Wunderbare” and “Durchs Gebirge, durch die Steppe zog unsre kühne Division” and “Wohin auch das Auge blicket, Moor und Heide nur ringsum,” my friend knew all the songs and I asked him where he’d learned them. Where do you think, he said. When I was living in Berlin before 1961, before the Wall, I always went over to your side and bought Ernst Busch records.

  That night I sat alone in my apartment and drank the Lufthansa wine my friend had left me and read in Thomas Mann’s diaries from Pacific Palisades—just a few miles away. Sunday, December 4, 1949: “Much painful longing these days, and pondering about its nature and its goals, about erotic enthusiasm in conflict with insight into its illusory nature. The highest beauty, maintained as such against a whole world—I wouldn’t want to touch it … To write openly about all that would destroy me.”

  I sat down at my machine and wrote:

  Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

  Or overcoming that fear. A young Thomas Mann today, I thought, wouldn’t need to shy away from professing his homosexual inclinations, but on the other hand they don’t seem to be his truly “innermost secret.” The curse that lies over the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose similarity to himself Mann never denied, is not to be able to love, not to be allowed to love. That is how he touched upon the innermost secret, of men unable to love, I thought, who are prepared to do monstrous things to fill their emptiness.

  Was it a good sign that I was no longer able to write? A sign of sincerity?

  I feel like the rider across Lake Constance from the Schwab poem, I told my friend in Zurich over the phone.

  You’re overreacting, he said.

  What an idiot I was back then.

  All right, fine. But that’s all there is to say about it
now.

  And how do you explain that I could have forgotten it?

  Simple: It didn’t matter to you very much.

  That may be true, but it’s not something I can say now.

  You can say anything now.

  You mean, since no one believes me anyway? By the way:

  I HADN’T STARTED WRITING YET

  This statement was true, I knew it. And its purpose was to proclaim that afterward, after I had started writing, I would no longer have been able to have these contacts of the wrong kind. There was something like a sense of relief there—the vise-grip opening, even if only a fraction of an inch.

  I remember how I allowed myself to get up late, or to start reading in bed early. My joints would be blocked either way, no treatment could rebuild a destroyed joint, wasn’t that a perfectly good reason to putter around with unnecessary chores and curse the little machine on the narrow end of the table as an unreasonable scold? I remember how I caught myself talking to myself, gruffly. How I screamed at a stuck drawer: Come on already, you bastard! How I stood in the middle of the kitchen then, the dish towel in my hand, and said out loud: It doesn’t have to be like this. Okay, then what? I knew perfectly well what. There was no sense in denying that this text was growing much more slowly as time went on, that time was in a hurry, it was always there, extending out, maybe I could use it to shake off this feeling of hopelessness that had dug its claws into me.

  I couldn’t stand to be alone anymore, I had to be around people, so I walked to the Third Street Promenade and ran across one of the giant garbage trucks that said on the side in large letters: If you don’t start recycling your trash, Santa Monica will look like the inside of this truck. I couldn’t help thinking of the enormous number of plastic bags in which even the smallest purchase here was wrapped, and that my habit of always saying No bag, please and putting my purchases into a cotton bag I brought with me was my only contribution to reducing garbage. I decided to eat another sandwich from Natural Food, where you could check off the components you wanted on a list and then, when the sandwich was ready, the young waiters would call you by your first name. There was a poster on the wall outside: In loving memory of Tony. I started reading a newspaper someone had left at the next table, the Daily Breeze, I had never seen it before, and I read the headline “OSCAR FOR TRUMBO EASES YEARS OF PAIN,” and there was a big color photograph of a woman in her seventies, sitting in a red blouse and subtly checked pants on a gray couch and holding a gold statuette resting on her knee in her right hand—the Oscar—and this was not a woman beaming with happiness into the camera, since the Oscar was actually for her late husband, the once-famous screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the famous “Hollywood Ten,” who had refused to denounce supposed Communists among their colleagues and so had ended up blacklisted along with a number of other writers, directors, and actors. With the help of a black market for blacklisted writers, he earned a little money, but he wrote, wrote, wrote, his widow said, and she bore the burden of housekeeping and raising the children since she couldn’t find a job either unless she was willing to divorce her husband and change her name; she had to get used to people standing up and leaving when she sat down next to them, and the neighbors not letting their children play with hers. Her husband spent ten months in jail for contempt of the House Un-American Activities Committee; she was furious and at the same time terrified about her family’s future. She typed up the final versions of her husband’s manuscripts that he then smuggled into a Hollywood network, under various pseudonyms; a friend agreed to front as the screenwriter for a movie that Trumbo had actually written, and won an Oscar for it.