Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  Walhalla seems more like Atlantis, but then the rain stops. The last part has to be walked and climbed; these heights will not allow themselves to be conquered easily. In the distance below, the low landscape gleams, with the towers of Regensburg, the river lying like a broad strip of flat iron, the marble of yet another royal dream, shining through the bare trees. The king and his architect—Hitler must have had similar thoughts when he stood with Speer at night, leaning over the drawing board. After the Glyptothek in Munich, this is the second building by those two gentlemen that I have visited this week.

  It was 1807, and the king was not yet king. His father had sided with Napoleon in the Confederation of the Rhine. The emperor had conquered Prussia and whipped his way across Europe. Four kings and thirty princes were required to pay homage to him in Erfurt—the same Erfurt in the D.D.R. where Willy Brandt met Willi Stoph in 1970, so laying the first public brick for his policy of Wandel durch Annäherung, change through rapprochement, the Ostpolitik whose consequences have been so much more far-reaching than anyone could have envisaged, and also the same Erfurt where the old visionary was allowed to return this week to address his new, old party. German unity also shone through in the dreams of the Bavarian prince. This German temple had to be big, “not only colossal in terms of space. Greatness must also be in the design, extreme simplicity, combined with splendour.” And who, given the lack of gods, was supposed to live in this Walhalla? “Walhalla’s fellows should be of German tongue . . . laudable and distinguished Germans.” And so, when I enter, in a state of awe, I encounter a noble company of faces turned to stone: a gaunt Kant, and a youthful, somewhat bloated-looking Goethe, who looks like a movie producer, all double chin and Gorgon locks. Row upon row, the white busts occupy Klenze’s light and lofty space, staring with blind eyes at their shuffling descendants. In his mind, the royal founder had already annexed the Netherlands, because I encounter Boerhaave, William of Orange, Hugo Grotius and Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp in the company of Bach and Leibniz, of Mozart and Paracelsus, of remembered generals and forgotten Kurfürsten. Up at the very top float the faceless heroes and saints, their memory consisting solely of letters: Eginhard, Horsa, Marbod, Hengist, Teutelinde and Ulfila. I do not know who they are, but I can imagine the most wonderful musical accompaniment for them, made in Bayreuth. The king himself sits there, as relaxed as marble will allow, crowned with laurel, bare feet in sandals, his robes wrapped casually around him, a Roman senator flanked by winged lions. Lola Montez and the 1848 revolution forced him to give up the throne, but his Walhalla remained. Outside, 358 marble steps lead back down, and it is easy to see why Hitler did not like Walhalla: there was nowhere for a crowd of people to congregate, nowhere to make a dramatic entrance. You came to this marble tomb when you had done everything you had to do, not when you still had so much ahead of you. Once you were in Walhalla, there was no escape.

  Walhalla, Regensburg

  Walhalla, Regensburg

  Hitler went about things differently. I once saw some black-and-white films of the Reichsparteitage in Nuremberg, atavistic rituals already darkened by time. There is no need to describe them; they belong to our eternal sorrow. Of course, now that I am in this part of the world, I have to go there and, of course, once I am standing there I have the greatest difficulty picturing anything at all. Everyone else has already left—it is that kind of feeling. Empty places, the leader departed, vanished, but his image is still there if you call it to mind, along with the memory of his voice. One voice screaming, a voice with a name, and all those other nameless voices screaming back, an ancient chorus with a limited script. I am old, but I can still hear it. It is a sound that came from Bakelite radios; the adults turned it off, but it always went on playing somewhere else, the shouts fading away and swelling again, in an orgy of rhetoric. I did not understand it because I was a child, but it was associated with doom, and also excitement. Nothing remains of it on this rainy day. I am there alone, the others are dead, or old. A quarter of a million people used to gather in this place, a cathedral of light was built around them, and they were together, and that made them happier. Flags; cohorts, twelve men wide; banners; a cult designed to charm fate. I can imagine this empty field full again, populate the cracked, broken, dirty tribunes with the ghosts of the past, and wait with those others for that one man, that perfectly orchestrated moment, the ejaculation, the orgasm of the world-giant.

  Goethe, Walhalla, Regensburg

  Nothing remains but the place itself, intended to demonstrate absence. It is a pitiful genius loci that occupies this site. I climb over a broken fence and make my way up the steps where they sat and stood. Beer cans, sodden copies of Bild-Zeitung like filthy old rags, covered in blood and snot as their ink runs. The Walter Mitty in me cannot resist climbing up to the tribune, to the dilapidated bronze door, on which someone has scratched “Nero,” and then down the few steps to the small rostrum where he once stood. My audience, my people, consists of my beloved and two lorry drivers who are unhooking a trailer. They are pottering around on the wet tarmac and have forgotten to pay attention to me. Nothing else, just grey clouds, bare trees, the secrets of the soul, chimaeras.

  I return to the town center, to the real Middle Ages, recover from history within an older history. The churches lie at the heart of the city like boats that once sailed on a long-gone sea and are now stranded in a world that can no longer read their icons. Who nowadays knows the identity of the female figures in the portals of the Frauenkirche? The inwardly focused piety of those faces excludes them from the surrounding world; they have not heard the cries of the market traders for centuries. They have faces as we do, but they do something different with theirs. They are remote and self-absorbed, like female Buddhas, which is how the tumult of time has passed them by. Frauenkirche, Sebalduskirche, Lorentzkirche: over and over again that lofty Gothic space that draws my thoughts upwards to the ogival arches, the spandrels, the ribbed vaults, the keystones—all those elevated things that my body cannot reach because Newton has declared that it must remain down below. And against the pillars, beneath the arches, in the windows, in the niches, the stone nation of statues that lives alongside us, in parallel, not hearing us or seeing us, the stained-glass evangelists in their animal forms, bishops resting on their tombs, the panopticon of martyrdom and Judas kiss, of mythical creatures and crowned heads, tyrants and winged people: a language that speaks to itself because hardly anyone listens anymore.

  Tribune, Nazi party rally grounds, Nuremberg

  I wonder what kind of heathen Glyptothek these images might reside in one day, and I receive my answer that same afternoon from the statues of saints and the tombstones in the Germanisches Museum. They stand there helplessly, deprived of their context, obsolete, art. I am back where I started, because the museum is showing an exhibition about entartete Musik. My brain does not wish to make that leap twice in one day—I can feel it baulking—but the earnest faces of the schoolchildren and students around me make me stay, and I look at them as they look at the evil in the world, at the wretched injustice. This is not something that can be shared: we must all look, read, process it on our own, and this happens in silence. Like me, they read that despicable letter from Wagner to Meyerbeer in which he offers himself as the other man’s slave, and later, when he no longer needs him, his equally despicable anti-Semitic statements about that same Meyerbeer and about Mendelssohn in his essay “Das Judentum in der Musik,” an essay that will stink for all eternity, along with the name of Wagner. No, it is not a happy experience. The photographs of Schönberg and Adorno, Weill and Eisler, the awful caricatures, the paranoid regulations, the obsessively bigoted mindset that believed it needed to destroy in order to survive. Nothing remains of it now, only sorrow, death, emptiness, division and, of course, row upon row of display cabinets. You stand in front of them in order to understand, but still you cannot grasp it. Why is evil so much more difficult to understand than goodness? How could the Strauss of the Vier letzte Lieder stand next t
o Hitler? Why did Wagner’s notes become poisonous and discordant as soon as he wrote that grim nonsense? I do not know, and the girl standing beside me at the display cabinet does not know either; I can tell by the way she is standing. And I am certainly not in the mood for Rococo tableware, hoop skirts, suits of armor and dolls’ houses. I drive to Bamberg, sleep in a hotel beside the fast-flowing river, listen to all those bells in the night, walk through the rain and the silence, watch the Kohls and the Modrows on television, and know that I have to return to the demanding present. I say farewell to the Bamberger Reiter, a serious young horseman looking into the twentieth century with a troubled expression, and head back to the D.D.R.

  It is now possible to drive from Bamberg to Weimar on secondary roads; Coburg is the last major town before the border. I have checked to see if I am allowed to cross the border there, and according to the A.D.A.C., the German automobile club, it should not be a problem, but once I am there the border guards appear to object to the combination of a Dutch passport and residency in Berlin. They keep turning the piece of paper over, staring at me and then at my mug shot, without asking me any questions, but discussing at length with one another. For a moment, it seems as though the old days have returned, but then they let me through. After that, everything is different and everything is true. Now, for the first time, I am not driving along the Autobahn, but through the country itself, and it feels as though a veil of sadness has descended upon the car, almost as if it has a new windscreen that makes the world more faded and dilapidated. Does that even apply to the trees, great traveler? No, not to the trees, and yet, dear friend, there is something different about the roads and trees, houses and trees, a process by which those trees have surrendered a little of their immortal selves and taken on the color of their surroundings. Even in the forests? No, not in the forests. Snow, wet snow, panoramas, beauty, slate houses, few cars, Eisfeld, Saalfeld, Rudolstadt, Kahle, industry, dirty smoke, peeling paint, crows in the fields, a world without color. It is winter, I tell myself; it will all look different with the sun shining, and in a few months the trees will be green again. But the people living here do not want to have to wait even those few months.

  X

  March 9, 1990. Where I am now, every place has two names. “Oder,” I say to the water in front of me, which looks so blue today; “Odra,” says the soldier on the other side of the bridge. Neisse-Nysa, Lerida-Lleida, Mons-Bergen: the contradiction of two words for one place, the mingled whispering of languages that both want something different. Claims and bloody histories are concealed within them, nostalgia and memories. Double naming, double meaning, and always with some sense of longing or loathing. I drove out of the city through the gloomy blocks of East Berlin, a light mist veiling the worst of it. The Autobahn to Szczecin, exit at Finow, into the countryside: cobbled roads, nature, Kerkow, Felchow, Schwedt, the border, the iron bridge. I follow a path down to the river, and look at the village on the other side: Hohenkränig, Krajnik Górny. Though I am a frequent traveler to the other side, it is not possible this time; I am not permitted to travel on into the East. There is no sign of movement in the Polish village, but on this side a man is screaming out his fury at two others who look a little embarrassed at the scene he is making. There are two kinds of writers: voyeurs and auditeurs. Armando, with whom I am making this short journey, is an auditeur, and has the slightly stern, legalistic aspect that the word suggests: I can see him making an internal record of the conversation, of the fury at forty years of wasted time, the cursing, the gesticulating at the other side of the river. Odra-Nysa; a spoonful of tar can spoil a vat of honey. Jaruzelski said so this week. Viewed from the side, the bridge is a tall iron skeleton. Once there must have been ferries to transport all of those armies to the other side: French, Russian, German. Border rivers, bridges—in some places, the fate of countries takes visible form.

  The weather changes, the leaden darkness above merging with the decay below. In Stralsund, the rain whips the paper faces of Modrow, Gysi, Kohl, the promises of a new Unity. The city seems deserted, but the hotels are full; we cannot even find anywhere to eat. Through the storm, we see churches, merchants’ houses, an antiquated Lübeck, a city that was frozen in time just after the war. The power of belief: how was it possible to live surrounded by such obvious failure? At the Baltic Hotel, a helpful receptionist calls a seaside resort on the Baltic, on the island of Rügen. They have a room for us, but it is an hour’s drive, it will cost almost 300 guilders, and we will have to pay in West Marks. When I say it’s expensive, she replies, “You just wait. You’ll see. All the important people have stayed there. Honecker, Mielke . . . They practically had the place to themselves.” She is right. The hotel is surrounded by a ring of Mercedes and B.M.W.s, and all of the doors display a threatening notice: Nur für Hotelgäste. An ordinary person cannot even get a drink here, but an entire conference of people would be able to dance in the dining room, where the prices are in East German money, which means the Mercedes are once again eating for free. The storm is now a hurricane, and I know the invisible sea must be out there somewhere. I see Kohl on television looking like some immense marsupial that could easily accommodate the entire D.D.R. in its pouch, although lugging the country around might prove more difficult than he imagines.

  When I wake up, I hear a woman’s voice on the radio frantically asking, “But what’s going to happen about abortion if we join up with the B.R.D. via Article 23?” “Well, that means abortion as we know it will become illegal here, in accordance with the West German constitution,” says the man she is talking to. He goes on to list all of the other babies that will be thrown out with the bathwater: crèches, security, women’s rights. Real, harsh, capitalist society is on its way, and she is just going to have to learn to live with it. There is almost a threat in his voice, and she finds that hard to take. “Yes, but . . .” she begins, and the dilemma and the ever-increasing speed of the changes are encapsulated in those two simple words. The metaphor of a train ploughing ahead, unstoppable, has frequently been used in recent weeks, but in fact there are two trains: there is also a slow train heading from East to West. The atmosphere of love and togetherness that reigned on the ninth of November has already evaporated. People from the East are saying that people from the West want to buy up their country at bargain-basement prices, while people from the West are saying that the East is a bottomless pit into which their hard Marks will disappear, after they have sweated so much to earn them. What is actually happening is of course extraordinary. Wilhelmine Germany races into the First World War, is bloodily defeated and mercilessly and short-sightedly punished. Then comes a brief opportunity for the oppressed working classes: Weimar, with its good intentions, chaos, inflation, scheming politicians and arrogant rejection of politics by so many intellectuals, the rise of fascism, Hitler, another war. And even though that first unity only came about under Bismarck, they had been one nation all that time, one people; it was only afterwards that they split apart. And then one became rich while the other became poor, one was helped and the other exploited, one was forced to carry the mental burden of the past, and the other the material burden, with all the mutual resentment that created. To what kind of music should these two peoples, who are almost one, but not quite, dance their duet? Beneath the loud, impulsive waltz of the new Unity, that other music still plays, so much more slowly, the music of forty years of separate lives, which no one can forget, not for money and not by decree, music that suggests different, incompatible dance steps, so that the moves of the superior dance instructor no longer look quite so masterful. History is a substance that is made of itself. If you turn away from the staccato of newspaper headlines and listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of large wheels grinding exceeding slow without letting a single grain of history escape.

  Bridge over the River Oder. German–Polish border

  Ostseebad Sellin, Ostseebad Binz. I look at Armando eagerly watching the death throes of the big villas, the Kurhaus amidst them lik
e an old lady with no money left for make-up. “Dear Pensioners, Don’t give the fearmongers a chance! Say yes! For freedom and prosperity!” shouts the C.D.U. in black, red and yellow. “Into the future with optimism: 44% for the S.P.D. on Sunday,” the S.P.D. shouts back. We, the outsiders, drive through the storm in search of a mythical place in German art, the Königstuhl on the Stubbenkammer promontory on the island of Rügen, where, in 1818, Caspar David Friedrich painted his Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk cliffs on Rügen): three figures, two men and a woman, one sitting, one leaning, one on all fours, their backs to the viewer, with high chalk walls on the left and the right, looking out over the infinity of the sea. Goethe did something fiendish with that painting; he turned it upside down to create a gruesome ice cave with the three figures clinging like bats to the jagged vault. It makes me feel dizzy and I do not want to picture this scene upside down, because with Simone here, we are that group of three, and we can position ourselves in exactly the same way. I, of course, take the part of the curious fool leaning over the abyss; disapproving German voices call me back: you mustn’t do that, it’s not allowed. How should I explain? Should I say that the rail that is there now did not exist back then? Can’t they see my tall hat beside me in the grass? No, they cannot, just as they cannot see the piercing eyes of my friend the painter, or my wife’s red dress and those two white sails that, once upon a time, on that day in 1818, in that other Germany, made the sea so much larger.