Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  “Socialism with a future—S.E.D.”

  “Nobel Peace Prize for Gorbachev,” S.E.D. demonstration, East Berlin, November 10, 1989

  There is still a queue at Checkpoint Charlie. Foreigners can leave by a separate exit and do not have to wait. The same border guards as this morning, their faces exhausted, pale, tense. I exit as an East Berliner, because a young woman offers me chewing gum and a boy hands me a pamphlet about Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit—unity, justice and freedom—and the Wall having to come down and reunification being inevitable, and McDonald’s would like to treat me to “1 small drink, Voucher valid until 12.11.89.” So I too am welcomed as a home-comer. In the U-Bahn station at Kochstraße, the thousands wait for a train, offering no resistance as they are pushed through, into the West. When I finally reach Kurfürstendamm, Berlin is one big party. Cars can no longer get through, and the city has descended into madness. The people have become one whirling body, a creature with thousands of heads, undulating, rippling, flowing through the city, no longer knowing whether it is moving or being moved, and I flow along with it, having become crowd, news picture, nobody. News bulletins appear on the wall of a building on the Ku’damm, in lines that quickly fade, as though the news might catch up with them, but nothing can catch up with this crowd, because it is making the news itself. The crowd knows that, and it feels like a mass shiver. They themselves caused what they are reading here, they are the people; after them will come the politicians with their words, but for now those words seem to have the aim of calming, pacifying, more than anything else. No one will ever really know the entire story, but in the past few weeks the people on these streets have turned a page of history, and not only the Krenzes, but also the Kohls, the Gorbachevs, the Mitterrands and the Thatchers will have to wait and see what is written on the next pages, and who will appear on them. Millions of Europeans from the East have caught up with the signatures of Yalta and overtaken them, and we did not assist them.

  A Mauerspecht (wall woodpecker) pecking away. Potsdamer Platz, West Berlin, November 12, 1989

  Thirty-three years ago, I stood in Budapest in a different crowd, one that felt betrayed and abandoned by us. That was history too, the black mirror image of the day I am experiencing now. I watched the Russian army surround the city and wrote my first piece for a newspaper, which ended with the words, “Russians, go home.” I can laugh at my own ignorance now, but how loud should my laughter be?

  Schlesische Straße / Puschkinallee, West Berlin, November 11, 1989

  There are still Russians in the D.D.R., just as there are Americans in the Bundesrepublik. They are two different countries and the Wall is still there, even though there are holes in it. But the people from that Other Country are walking along these streets for the first time in thirty years, and when I look out of the window, I can see them.

  November 18, 1989

  Checkpoint Charlie, West Berlin, November 10, 1989

  1 Between 1970 and December 29, 1989, each visitor from the D.D.R. to West Germany was entitled to Begrüßungsgeld, a financial gift from the government. After the fall of the Wall demand grew so high that it was abolished.

  2 On this spot, the inhumanity of National Socialism destroyed the best works of German and world literature.

  3 Lenin worked here in the year 1898.

  4 A municipality to the north of Berlin, home to many top East German functionaries.

  VII

  Bild, black, yellow, red and gruesome, but with the best headlines, sums it up as though in a song: “GESTÜRZT, VERHAFTET, VERSTOSSEN, GEJAGT” (overthrown, arrested, expelled, hunted)—and, between those words, pictures of the deposed leaders, the same size as the letters of the headline. And above it all, in the colors of the German flag: “DAS VOLK BEFREIT SICH” (the people free themselves). It is Monday morning, misty and grey, and this week has burst apart at the seams. I have seen Kohl in his attempt to get ahead of the rest of the world; Krenz before, during and after his fall; Golo Mann in the role of Clausewitz; the simultaneity of photographs and history; two female writers; a people embracing itself; a restive people grumbling and muttering. I have to send myself telegrams in an attempt to bring some order to it all.

  Sunday, 26 November. Café Adler by Checkpoint Charlie. On the other side of the street, a windowless wall with large letters that were once electrified: Neue Zeit. Appropriate words. I was on my way to a meeting in the East, but the queue at passport control was so long that I realized I would never make it. This city is still divided. Instead, I stay on this side and visit an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. It is raining on the frozen snow, making ice-cold mud. Mitteleuropa. The exhibition is about Jewish sports clubs after Jews were excluded from the “other” sports clubs. The pictures have that awkward look of sports photographs from fifty years ago; you can almost tell just by looking at them that people will be able to run faster in the future. What makes the images so poignant is everything we know now. I read the names, look at the faces. Lili Sara Henoch, multiple champion, deported to Riga with her mother, disappeared without a trace. The list of her final possessions, the eagle she was once permitted to wear on her chest. Alfred Flatow, author of the Handbuch für Weltturner, the handbook for international gymnasts, former champion, ejected from the gymnastics association after forty-seven years. In his letter of farewell to the association, he wrote, “Please permit me to remain silent about my own thoughts and feelings.” He was born in 1869, but the life he lived after sending that letter was a short one. In 1941, he became an enemy of the Reich; in ’42, he was sent to the old-age ghetto in Theresienstadt; by the end of that year, “death from exhaustion.” Edmund Neuendorff writes to his “dear fellow gymnast” Naumann (they were both committee members) that he must stand firm on these expulsions; this is first and foremost about Germany. There can be no exceptions. Germany has suffered so much in recent decades; German culture, German society and morality have been “so badly damaged by the Jews, German politics have been so hideously abused by them, that we must at all costs draw a thick line under the past. What we have experienced must never happen again.” I look at the robust gymnast in his old-fashioned sports clothes and notice a small sign beside the picture: “The view through the window in front of you is of the foundations of the Gestapo Headquarters and the remains of the torture chamber.” Obediently, I look: a field, a mound, a few bare, black bushes, footprints in the snow, nothing.

  Downstairs in the museum, another past is on display: the present. There is something perverse about this contradiction and it takes time to think it through. It is an exhibition of photographs and banners from the demonstrations of recent weeks. After the main demonstration, people were asked to hand in their placards and banners at the history museum (East), which has now loaned them for this exhibition in the West, just as paintings might be loaned. I look at the items hanging there a little foolishly on the plastered wall, the photographs of the familiar scenes, those same slogans held high above the heads of the people. Maybe this is postmodern: making history and knowing that you will be in a museum that very same week, and then going there to see for yourself. The comments in the visitors’ book are mainly from East Berliners: “We want our democracy, not your rubbish!” “The middle class in the D.D.R. only came crawling out of their consumer caves when there was nothing left to fear.” “Anything but reunification.” “The fear of being embraced by brothers and sisters.” So the story is far from over, in spite of Kohl’s ten-point plan. On my way home, I walk by Polenmarkt. Hundreds of freezing people standing in the viciously cold mud, at their feet the pitiful wares that attract the poor and the Turks, ice-cold rain, bargaining and haggling, the underbelly of two worlds.

  Neue Zeit, East Berlin, as seen from Café Adler, West Berlin, November 1989

  Checkpoint Charlie, West Berlin, November 10, 1989

  Potsdamer Platz, West Berlin, November 12, 1989

  Monday evening. Hilde Domin is reading at Wolff’s Bücherei. Poems, sketches from her l
ife. A long life: she is nearly eighty, with the ruthless indomitability of people who have lived through all sorts of things. Small, fragile, without her spectacles, a voice like glass. Fled Germany in 1933, earned a doctorate in Florence with a thesis on a predecessor of Machiavelli, a rosary of exile, Italy, driven away again, England, Santo Domingo, a life of poems, poverty, endless different houses, nothing could break her. In the book she signs for me, Aber die Hoffnung, she underlines the word Aber three times. She reads from her poems:

  Taube,

  wenn mein Haus verbrennt

  wenn ich wieder verstoßen werde

  wenn ich alles verliere

  dich nehme ich mit,

  Taube aus wurmstichigen Holz,

  wegen des sanften Schwungs

  deines einzigen ungebrochenen Flügels. 1

  Wednesday. I am still thinking about the photographs in the museum. It feels like watching yourself doing something in the mirror. Forms of meta-history. The narcissistic element perhaps lessens the impact. On the other hand, we are confronted every day with a multitude of moving images that, when paused, become illustrations in a history book. But maybe that is just it—perhaps we should not pause them yet. Our obsession with looking never ends. The sinister hunting lodges of the party bigwigs, tasteless, dull imitations of feudal nobility, fat armchairs beneath rows of antlers; you can picture them sitting there with pints of beer in their hands, the marquises of the exploited East in the settings of the class enemy, the accumulated jealousies of the petty bourgeoisie. Meanwhile Krenz is fighting for his life. Every evening, he hangs his big head on the icon that is D.D.R. television, in department stores, factories, on street corners, beseeching, arguing. But the workers and housewives give as good as they get: they do not have to go to the West, they will stay right where they are, but they do not want any more of the mess that he and his kind have made of things. On the television on this side, Golo Mann, who is the image of his father, a reincarnation, a sequence of genes shaken and reassembled; it is a wonderful thing to see. He speaks like Clausewitz about the “glacis” of East Germany, the line of defence that Russia will never want to lose, while also holding forth about the erosion of words, the meanderings through meaning that words such as “communism,” “socialism,” “democracy” have followed since the end of the eighteenth century. And other images form around these in my mind, images of the falling East: Zhivkov, watching, vacant and open-mouthed, as his statue melts; Ceauşescu, arguing neurotically, a village idiot in an empty palace. It is just a matter of time now—the Maltese handshake of Gorbachev and Bush even had an impact on Castro’s biography. And, almost overshadowed by all of those other scenes, there is Dubček on the balcony in Prague, as the ghost of Husák prepares to go in search of Dante’s inferno, and the icon of Christ in a Vatican room, averting its eyes as two men without interpreters converse in Russian. Extra omnes!

  Polenmarkt, West Berlin, December 1989

  Thursday. A young East German writer, Kerstin Hensel, reads poetry and prose in the Buchhändlerkeller in West Berlin. Small, severe, clean-cut clothing, hair like Brecht’s, the shorn head of a nun, born in 1961. Her book of stories is called Hallimasch, which is the name of a fungus, the honey fungus, a parasite that lives on conifers, but an edible one, a means of survival in difficult times. Her version of Hansel and Gretel ends with a bitter twist: “‘Home,’ said the boy, and then the girl looked at him for the first time, for the first time in years, and said, ‘How fat you’ve become, Hansel,’ and Hansel saw it too and he said, ‘How stupid you’ve become, Gretel,’ and then they started walking, but they did not know where they were going.” The next day, I tried to buy her poems in East Berlin, but they were no longer available. “Vergriffen,” I was told. Out of print.

  Friday. This time I take the car; I want to go deeper into the city. Right at the border, the engine of my ancient American automobile starts to boil. “Ist das normal?” the border guard asks, and I admit that it is not. “Nothing’s normal these days,” I want to add, but he helps me to pour a bottle of water into the engine, so I can continue on my way. There is a strange beauty about the ugliness. I drive down Karl-Marx-Allee and Karl-Liebknecht-Straße—evaporated dreams—and then to bleaker neighborhoods. The smog mixes with the mist, the air tastes of Trabant and brown coal; it still feels a bit like after the war. The sun sifts the horrors like an old sous-chef: lumps of tall residential blocks, railway yards. I drive away from the center, along the Wall, which the River Spree must flow behind, the Wall that I so often see on the opposite bank, on the other side of the water. So this is where they live, I think, without thinking too hard about it. But it is true: this is where they live, the people from the demonstrations, the people who watch the same television as me in the evening. They live here, in bare tenement buildings, on wide avenues that dwarf the pedestrians who choose to cross.

  Potsdamer Platz, “Holland greets Berlin.” West Berlin, November 12, 1989

  Suddenly I find myself outside the zoo. I can see the gates and the tall trees beyond, with their clusters of ravens, willful singers who squawk and screech at me to come in. There have been too many people this week; I want animals now. The ticket costs one Mark. Almost the only visitor, I walk tentatively down the paths of frozen snow, listening to the ravens’ short, sharp songs. Voles, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs with peevish expressions, snakes, black panthers, the calm of infinitely recurring forms. I feel the persistent nag of history fade away, and I greet everyone I see, wave at the flamingos in their steamed-up greenhouses, the Siberian bears who are behaving as though it is summertime. Evening starts to fall, casting shades of grey over the snow. The penguins are deliberating about events in the human world, while in the big cats’ house the lions are rebelling; they are roaring and clawing, making the whole building shake. Almost as a response, I find myself, half an hour later, watching the changing of the guard at the Neue Wache, as three human animals behave like machines. It is dark by then, so it all takes place by the light of tall lamp posts. These guards can do so much that ordinary animals cannot: they wear helmets and long field-grey overcoats; the soles of their boots scrape the ground as they kick their legs high in their mechanical ballet, do about-turns, raise their rifles, bayonets pointing into the light, as though there are not three men, but only one, a three-person automaton, emitting short, terrifying breaths as it disappears through a secret door. Nearby, demonstrators are gathering at the Volkskammer; the Party will be debating its own fate tomorrow and the next day. And after that the army will no longer be the army of the Party.

  Saturday. A play at the Maxim Gorki Theater: Die Übergangsgesellschaft by Volker Braun, a reworking of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. A house full of old junk, failed lives, burned illusions, fear and frustrations, and once again that desire for Moscow, because the wheel of history has turned and hope now comes from Moscow, and everyone here knows it. The play is packed with internal contradictions, psychotic scenes, allusions I do not always grasp. The audience is enthralled, laughing at every reference to recent events. It culminates in a fire in the old house and the death of the Spanish Civil War veteran, the only character for whom life has been clear and meaningful, because of his fight against fascism. All else is confusion for the living.

  Downstairs in the foyer, those photographs again, frozen movement, as though the time for reflection has already arrived, the mirror in which we see ourselves standing still. But it must be an illusion; everything is still very much in motion. On a large poster, the playwright asks whether the East must allow itself to be colonized by the West:

  Nothing has been proved yet. Where will we live? And will what comes after us be worth the effort? The Wiener Schnitzel is too small to satisfy our appetites; a dose of Hungarian predatory capitalism will bring about affluence for a third of the population at best, and the new social deprivation will force the Volksrepublik towards the West or into further social unrest. The question is whether there is a more modern option than this circus of parties, s
omething like grass-roots democracy, a democracy that aims to find solutions for everyone.

  No one should expect a simple appendage to the Bundesrepublik any time soon.

  Sunday. Half past seven in the evening. Die aktuelle Kamera, the D.D.R.’s news show, which has become essential viewing: Mielke, Mittag, Müller caught, Schalck-Golodkowski fled, Krenz deposed, the Party beheaded, Prague ’68 regretted—The End. I watch as a politician experiences his own destiny. The expression belongs in old history books, but it seems appropriate here: the people are restless. Krenz stands on the steps, a few meters away from the microphone, pale in the neon light. One after another, they step forward, argue, fulminate, and these are the members of his own party, which in their own lyrical style they refer to as “die Basis.” They pass their verdict on Krenz, and it is merciless: I have never seen anything like it. He wants to have another go and grabs the microphone, but they are shouting and jeering, a whole square full of people. He is good at shouting too and he shouts about what he wants to do, about what he has never done, about what he would have liked to do, but they just whistle and jeer. So he turns tail and disappears behind the bodies. Later they show him again, the man of a month ago, pinning a medal on Mielke, the former head of the Staatssicherheitsdienst (Stasi), who has now been arrested, a runt of a man in a cream-colored uniform, chest like a noticeboard covered in colored ribbons, to which Krenz makes a new addition, and, even more fatally, Krenz in Beijing after the student uprising. And then he is washed away, disappeared, old news, overwhelmed by a chain of his citizens stretching across the entire country, by two men on a boat, by one of those men in Brussels with Kohl, who was supposed to meet Krenz in two weeks’ time in order to lend him some semblance of the respect that has now been taken from him. Egon Bahr sums it up at the end of the evening: “This party has beheaded itself, which is the third stage of a revolution. And we all know that heads do not grow back.”