Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  Neue Wache, Unter den Linden, East Berlin, May 23, 1990

  The history of the Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat from 1946 to 1961 is on display in the different rooms and no one has so much as knocked askew a hammer or a pair of compasses. I remember walking around here in December when someone wrote in the guestbook that this exhibition should always be kept as it was, a museum within a museum, camera in camera. So that advice has been followed; we are still seeing what the ancien régime wanted us to see, their conception of the enemy, their mighty achievements, their cult of personality, their heroic leadership. This takes the form of Otto Grotewohl’s glasses, keys and wallet, and Wilhelm Pieck’s measuring rod and pincers: sacred objects intended to demonstrate their noble working-class origins, the familiar and foolish things that gain extra significance when placed under glass, as though they have been dug up from prehistoric graves. All that is missing is the anonymous skeleton lying alongside. These workers did not want to be among the nameless of history, they wanted to be preserved, and if no one else did it for them, they would do it for themselves: “The government of the D.D.R., in recognition of my outstanding political, cultural and economic contributions to the construction of socialism, asked me to be the first to wear the Order of Karl Marx. After examining the recommendation of the government of the D.D.R., I have decided to accept the Order of Karl Marx on the 135th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, 5.5.53. Wilhelm Pieck.” And there are other things to learn here too, even if only how bad that other Germany, the Western one, was. In the first Bundestag, there were sixty factory and bank directors, 132 senior officials, thirty-five major farmers, five major landowners, nineteen wholesalers, twelve farmers of medium-sized farms, eighteen laborers, sixty-two employees, four tradesmen, thirty intellectuals, twenty housewives and five “others.” A double bass with women’s tights (and here I am referring to a musical instrument in the exhibition, its hollow belly stuffed with nylon stockings) demonstrates the unscrupulous nature of “speculators,” das Junkerland muß in Bauernhand, squires’ lands into farmers’ hands, and there is a large photograph of Ernest Bevin displaying “malicious glee” at the U.S.A.-inspired decision to found a West German separatist state. Durch das Volk, mit dem Volk, für das Volk:1 only the people no longer wanted it. On the day 1,846 people fled via Hungary to the Bundesrepublik, there were twenty-eight pictures of Erich Honecker in just one issue of Neues Deutschland. Great dreams really cannot fizzle out in a more dismal way, and anyone who feels a sense of Schadenfreude has not grasped the dimensions of the misery.

  On the other hand, anyone who claims that there is much to regret about the demise of this republic must feel great disdain for humanity. Some West German intellectuals seem to be considerably more excited at the thought of Unity for Germany than they are about the idea of millions of their fellow citizens being liberated from a system imposed on them by force. It seems morbid to summon specters of the past and mock those who have just been liberated because they like to eat capitalist bananas and show inclinations to appreciate things that have seemed perfectly ordinary to us for decades. These shrill purists, who have nothing to offer but their shrillness, believe that the citizens of the D.D.R. must immediately tuck into their new utopia, as if they were not still struggling to digest the previous one. And who are they supposed to be doing it for? For the people in this Germany who always stand on the sidelines, saying that the world stinks and pretending they cannot smell the stench that is still wafting up from their moldering paradise? A betrayed, ragged, rotten utopia is not a pleasant sight. It is riddled with deceit, with a mould that will proliferate in the years to come. We are sure to hear lots more about it. Forty years after fascism, Europe still is not done with it, and the same will happen here, where not one but two pasts need to be taken into account, the past from ’33 to ’45, and the past from then until now. For some people, the state treaty came too quickly, with almost indecent haste. I do not agree. Slowing the process down would not have solved anything, but only exacerbated the dissonance and conflicts. The problems that exist will not simply go away, and no matter how much bitterness is involved in their resolution, it is better to battle within a framework that is acceptable to the majority, so that the structure will at least remain standing. When you imagine the confusion, resentment, fury and fear that any hesitant policy would have resulted in, you can only agree with this government for acting quickly. Electoral motives are sure to be involved, as they are when the opposition attempts to delay the process, which seems far more dangerous to me. The “told you so” that Lafontaine already has written all over his face is not related to the power of prediction that is part and parcel of statecraft, but to the small change of party politics, which is going to come in handy as the bitterness in the West and the fear in the East increase: bitterness about the money that it is going to cost; fear of the loss of work and security.

  The crowds that went out onto the streets last year in Dresden and Leipzig did not consider any of this. They were giving voice to a storm. Now that the storm has died down, that crowd looks simply like what it chose to transform itself into: voters at a polling station, all with their own desires and interests, while the people they elected look like politicians signing a state treaty. And that is how we see them: the large, heavy man we already know, who, according to Der Spiegel, lives “in einem Rausch der Eile,” a frenzy of haste, and that other, smaller man, the one we had never heard of a few months ago, with the guarded expression and the inward smile. It is too easy to say that their physiques express something about the new Germany, but it is tempting to do so. The C.D.U. of the East is not the C.D.U. of the West; people in the East equate the party far less with ownership and conservatism. Where there is not so much ownership, or not yet at least, there is also little to conserve. In terms of numbers, the East-C.D.U. will of course form a minority in the one party that is soon to come, and the same will apply to the Eastern socialists. And yet the process will transform those two large national parties into different parties, because no matter how great the West’s financial and political dominance may be, the movement from the East to the West remains an unknown quantity for now—and that too is a reason not to delay actual unification for party-political motives. Not only the Germans, but also the other Europeans want to know where they stand: there are still almost 400,000 Russians stationed in the D.D.R., and they are there for a reason. The glacis that Golo Mann mentioned a few months ago is still intact, as a reminder of the old laws of Gleichgewicht, equilibrium, and the waves of attraction and repulsion between Germany and the East that have so often determined the moods of the past. Why should that change overnight?

  Behind Brecht’s house on Chausseestraße is a small French graveyard. I think that Brecht is buried there, so I wander in through an iron gate in the brick wall. Bucolic—that is the right word, a village churchyard in the Île-de-France: old trees, rickety wooden benches, decaying graves, shadows with the sunlight rippling through them, peace. I walk around, suddenly outside the world, noting the moss on the tombs, the musical names of long-gone Huguenots, lilies, hydrangeas. In the proximity of death, summer is always so much more dense, more vigorous, as though it thrives better here than in the world of the living. But Brecht is not here; he is on the other side of the wall, with Fichte and Hegel and two Dutch Countess Schimmelpennincks, neither of whom reached the age of thirty. I find shade there too, and sun and an immeasurable silence that entirely disregards the city around it. A map on the wall helps visitors to locate the illustrious dead: Brecht occupies the first grave, together with his wife Helene Weigel. A Star of David is daubed on it, and profanities, the usual ones. There is no need for me to be shocked now: I already saw the pictures in the newspaper that morning. Later I ask the guard why they have not been removed, and he says it is because there is going to be a protest at the grave on Saturday. I watch that later on television too: artists with sad faces, no one from the government. It is truly hateful, the words and signs scratched into the black,
a message from the realm of evil, anonymous, a reminder that the source of horror will never run dry, not here, not anywhere. And nearby, the graves of Fichte and Hegel with their ladies: quiet graves, unquiet thoughts.

  Whatever questions I might want to ask the bushes and the stone, no answer would be forthcoming. Everything has already been said, and everyone has done as they pleased; the thoughts and mindsets of these two men have seeped into brains both fair and foul: Fichte’s fiery speeches about the nation-state, Hegel’s eternally restless Weltgeist dragging anonymous humanity through an ocean of conflicts on the way to a reconciliation of all oppositions, the religious moment of absolute knowledge, when every unspeakable horror is finally legitimized by the sacred aim, which, as in all religions, is an invisible one. “Periods of happiness are blank pages in the history of the world,” the mortal human being, and his unimportant fate, caught up in the unfathomable machinery of that ever-elusive world spirit; the individual, surrendering himself to the state, with his name and his soul, and the state, whose right to exist depends on its ability to stand its ground. Then the horrifying encounter between Cortés and Montezuma is no longer some insane coincidence, but a form of rightness. In that kind of system, everything is right, meant to be; the system can accommodate everything. It is simultaneously a form of contempt for others and a consolation, but chiefly for the person who came up with the idea. Alongside this unbearable optimism, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is a blessing, if only because it sees evil as meaningless; wickedness is unmasked as itself, not disguised as a necessary phase on the way to something higher. Auschwitz is impossible to stomach in Hegel, just as it is in Christianity. In Schopenhauer, however, it can remain what it is: the manifestation of evil in the world, carried out by humans, originating in the abyss of humans and inflicted upon humans. Any suggestion that the suffering served some purpose is blasphemy.

  The grey stone does not respond to my questions. Then Hegel should not have spent his time writing and thinking, I think to myself, but because I am not so good at thinking, and also because I can hear someone raking the path and realize that it sounds like a kind of music, thin, metallic, but not without charm, an inner switch flicks and my mental archive presents me with an image of the philosopher in Frankfurt, playing Rossini on the flute for an hour, probably badly, before tucking into his double meal at the Frankfurter Hof. The world is malevolent, that morning’s words have been written, the poodle is asleep, the bachelor in his lonely room is playing the melodies of the Italian composer who liked to eat foie gras with his steak: the story of chance and necessity writes itself and is written.

  When I turn around at Hegel’s grave to look in Brecht’s direction, I see someone standing there, writing, my mirror image. We know there is nothing inside graves, and yet, if that is true, there is no reason to visit them. So there must be something in there after all, but what? Is it their oeuvre, everything they carved into the world until they made it a different place? Suddenly I feel as though all those words are literally lying beneath my feet, a gigantic, interwoven construction, a mine full of songs and paragraphs, the words of one, so much more accessible, dancing around the granite system of the other, a dual kingdom running rampant beneath the other graves, where Surabaya Johnny rules together with the World Spirit, Mack the Knife dances in Bill’s Tanzhaus in Bilbao with Phänomenologie in his arms, and a ship with eight sails steals dialectics away to a coast where soldiers are changing the guard for the last time and marching to the beat of the state.

  June 2, 1990

  1 By the people, with the people, for the people.

  XV

  Newspapers, voices, notes—these three things have taken over my house. My eighteen months in Berlin are at an end. The household is being dismantled and I feel that I should walk backwards down the three flights of stairs out of some kind of need for symmetry, recreating the moment of arrival, the lack of knowledge. A man receives a grant to work in Berlin, a man wants to write a book, a man is overtaken by events and suddenly finds himself at the center of a vortex. That is how it is here, and that is how it was. My books and clippings disappear into boxes, the voices of radio and television keep on talking to me, I still read the newspapers, but this farewell is a final one. I am leaving, yet I feel that it is not actually possible, that I cannot really do it, that I have become so enmeshed in these events that I can no longer extricate myself, that I must keep watching and writing. What happens in this city in the coming years will continue to interest me, but when you are not there, you no longer belong. You drop out of the ongoing conversation, the options, the constant regrouping of possibilities, memories, expectations. I became part of it, even though I was, and still am, an outsider. I have never forgotten that this is not my country and yet I shared in those events.

  History becomes visible at moments of great upheaval, and there have been plenty of those. Travelling and reading in this part of Germany have convinced me, more than ever, of the idea of history as a continuum, with lines branching out, bifurcating, a permanently tangled web of cause, coincidence and intention. And so there is something half-hearted about my farewell; I know that this place will not let me go. The options and projections do not merely extend into the immediate present or the invisible future; the uncertainties also want to take root in the past. In this week’s Die Zeit (June 15, 1990), Rolf Steiniger speculates about the previous possibilities for unity that there have been since the war, Stalin’s proposals, Churchill’s ideas, Adenauer’s rejections. Fear played a part in all of those opposing movements, and it continues to do so: what kind of country is Germany, what is it going to do, what does it want, what alliances will it enter into, what gravitational pull will it have? Germans’ fear of Germans—was that one of the reasons why Adenauer abandoned the other part of the nation to its fate in 1955? That year, in Geneva, Bulganin and Khrushchev informed Eden that they were ready to discuss German unification, and in the November the British once more (Churchill had already given it a shot in 1952) put forward an initiative to start the dialogue with the Soviet Union. The conditions: free elections throughout the whole of Germany and freedom of action at home and abroad for the united Germany. But Adenauer was not interested that time either, just as he had dismissed Stalin’s proposal in 1952: a Germany with its own army, united, but neutral. Why did Adenauer not like this idea? His thinking was outlined in a top-secret Foreign Office document: “The bald reason was that Dr. Adenauer had no confidence in the German people. He was terrified that when he disappeared from the scene a future German Government might do a deal with Russia at the German expense. Consequently he felt that the integration of Western Germany with the West was more important than the unification of Germany.”

  Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam

  The words are written with the simplicity of a newspaper report, as though the obvious alternative would have been a different Germany, a different history, and yet we cannot imagine that, because it never existed. How would I feel as an East German if I read that piece? That would of course depend on what sort of East German I was, because they come in many different shades. The idea that forty years of a closed system had perhaps been unnecessary would make me melancholy, I think, or bitter, or resentful, as applicable. Or I would put the whole article to one side as just another of the many speculations of the Western press that were now flooding into my world, but not helping me one jot with my real problems: money, job, future, the change in mentality and the resistance to it, the pressure from another society that was penetrating deeper into my life every day. But maybe precisely because of the force with which this new world was advancing upon me, the notion of deceit and betrayal that was lurking inside me would surface at some unpredictable moment, allying itself with the thought that my part of Germany was held in contempt by that other part, with its visible poverty and neglect, and the awareness that my part had not been free since the war and, through reparations and constant occupation, had had to do penance on behalf of that other part, which was
now marching in, supreme and prosperous, as though this were some conquered territory, while loudly protesting about the money it was going to cost in the years to come, as though we had not been helping to pay off their debts and guilt for all those years, even though they continued to think, if not say, “It’s your own fault.”

  Soon there will be no Wall; soon this will be one country. But even where that Wall no longer stands, it will still be present. Given its slowness, the gradual interpenetration of the two Germanies will be far less visible than the external signs of unity: the same banknotes, advertisements, road signs, uniforms. The invisible is situated in the mind, in the lost protection offered by isolation. The refusal of the West is just as strong as the aversion of the East, and in a year’s time anyone who drives past Magdeburg on their way to Berlin will feel a vague shift in his awareness, the absence of a border, a whisper of former thoughts. He will be driving in a country that is no longer there, and yet which still exists, an invisible state with visible inhabitants, a way of thinking that will not be abolished by decree but eroded by wear and tear.

  A few weeks ago, I visited the University of Leipzig. I was there to give a talk of about an hour to a group of students of Dutch. The tutor had warned me: don’t expect much of a conversation afterwards. They are sure to have plenty of questions, she said, but they won’t dare to say anything—people here aren’t used to standing out as individuals and speaking in public. She was right. The school class, because that is what it seemed like, was nice enough. They were mostly young women, and appeared to be well prepared. I could tell that they were listening, but there were no questions, and suddenly I felt like a foreign body, what the Japanese refer to as a gaijin, an “outside person.” It felt like the dew was still upon them, and if I try to explain what I mean by that, I cannot do any better than describe it as innocence, even though I know that another person might call it naivety. They had all grown up in one world; I had grown up in another. Later that evening, in a café, the stories would come out about membership of the Freie Deutsche Jugend,1 about endless lessons in Marxism-Leninism, about the summer course in the Netherlands or Flanders that they, or their tutors, had not been permitted to attend, and no explanation was given. They were still sitting there inside their bell jars, unspoken questions hanging over their heads, anchored in a world whose vocabulary did not apply to me, and that too, I realized, would later exclude the others, the people from the West. These women, still so much like little girls, had grown up in a walled garden, and anyone who did not speak the language of that garden was a stranger.