And what about the West, where the privileged people live? They are unhappy, sometimes even malicious; I will come back to them later. And they keep themselves to themselves. In fact, it feels as though, after the initial euphoria, the Wall has returned. If you have no business being in the other part, East or West, you stay at home. Too expensive for one, too shabby for the other: “The people in the East have a sergeant-major mentality. There’s no talking to them.” “The people in the West are arrogant. They want to colonize us.” “They put up with that system for forty years. What does that say about them? One person in six was a member of the Stasi. Can you imagine that mentality? That’s all we need!” “Money, money, money, it’s all those Wessis1 think about. They think we’re all beggars. They were just lucky. Coming over here for a nice little tour in their great big Mercedes, seeing if they can find an old house of theirs still standing.”
“Don’t you think it’s all changed?” friends ask me. You don’t want to say so, but you think that perhaps they are the ones who have changed; you are amazed at their bitterness. They go on and on about rising crime rates, but I come from a city with its own problems, so I am not impressed. The long lines of Poles outside the cheap supermarkets and electronics shops on Kantstraße that they were complaining about so much last year have not returned, in spite of the new visa freedom. Most of the Trabants are staying in their dens or their owners have bought Western cars. The petrol is a better quality, so the stench has gone. The West of the city is once again its former, park-like self. House prices are rising daily and in every respect this is the most peaceful metropolis I know; even the May Day riots were less violent this year than tradition dictates. Anything else? Just people living, and waiting. They are waiting for better roads and a decision about whether Berlin will be the capital city, waiting for a balanced budget and for new buildings on Potsdamer Platz, for the Mielke trial and for new immigrants, for work and for revelations, for investments and bankruptcies. The entire city is sitting in the waiting room of history, and while everything that happens here is very real, there is still a sense of unreality about the streets and squares, as though this world might not be real, as though something completely different might yet happen and nobody knows what, but whatever it is, it will have something to do with the idea of history. This city cannot escape history and perhaps that is the issue here, or one of the issues.
History should be something that has already happened, not something that is happening now. Anyone who believes he is making history cannot keep his mind focused on reality, but a city that is saturated with signs of the past, with planned statues and chance bullet holes, with damaged columns alongside intact ones, a city that reads like one large memory in stone, a city that is reminded every day of its role from before and even before that, is not free to move in the present. History is invisible because it happens so slowly; only very rarely does it allow itself to be hurried along. One such moment was that day in November 1989, but the consequences of that day are moving with the slow deliberation of a chess move, and the city’s inhabitants are the people who will have to make the next move, and they will also have to wait for the results—and there is more evidence of waiting than doing. They while away their time in the waiting room by talking, complaining, arguing, blaming, investigating, remembering, condemning, asking. The pages in this history book are as heavy as the lead in Kiefer’s books: you can turn over only one page a year at most.
But do you really think, you peculiar Outsider, that the Berliners you can see sitting in the weak spring sunshine on a bench behind Schloss Charlottenburg, or their distant fellow citizens who are looking with a mixture of embarrassment and bewilderment at the pale and pimply faces of the Hare Krishnas bouncing up and down on Alexanderplatz to the east, are that bothered about the idea of history?
“Jein,” I would have to answer, like a true Berliner: both ja and nein, because how can you not think about history at such a time? Historic: the word pops out of politicians’ mouths on a regular basis (“If we miss out on this historic opportunity . . .”) and strides through the editorials and television commentaries. Monuments still testify to history: the days of your own lifetime can turn to stone and take the form of a ruin, a half-demolished Wall, a facade full of bullet holes or a colossal statue of a grieving mother with a fallen son in her arms. And there is another way in which almost everyone here is affected by history—even the youngest citizens of the former D.D.R. were members of the F.D.J. If you go further back in time, you encounter all kinds of different combinations: people who, under Hitler, were on the wrong side and after him were nothing, people who were on the wrong side twice, people who were heroes during the Nazi era, and then joined the Stasi, and all shades in between, from fanaticism to indifference. You meet them and you do not know who they were; they carry their invisible pasts with them in this transitory present. This much is certain: twice in the lifetimes of some of these people, once in the lifetime of nearly all of them, something was over, finished, history took a turn, made a move or a feint that made it seem as though they could start afresh, all over again, which of course is never really true. But that is at least how it seemed. German National Socialism was destroyed in 1945; East German Communism went bankrupt in 1989. Democracies are organized differently. They may have a beginning but, all being well, they have no end, and this explains some of that strange feeling of temporariness and unreality that is hanging over Berlin and East Germany. In a sense, they have landed in utopia, because that was their reason for going out onto the streets: freedom, democracy, the right to have a say, everything they did not have. But now that they have it, it does not look like a utopia, except for the fact that, as with any utopia, there is no end in sight. If all goes well, this history will not be “over” in their lifetimes, not complete, and that brings it into conflict with our human dimensions. Utopias belong in paradise, where, as we all know, it is impossible to live. Now that utopia has to happen here, it is actually proving to be something of a disappointment.
I listen in on conversations and make notes. Nothing in the following comments is invented:
The Polish professor: “What they haven’t understood here in West Germany is that capitalism has not conquered socialism, but that capitalism will be socialized from the East. There’s a slower movement going from East to West and it’s much more difficult to see. Incidentally, did you realize that Kohl, despite his recent defeat, is actually still in power thanks to the Länder of the former D.D.R.?”
The well-known feminist: “I don’t care about the taxes, just as long as they rebuild the Wall. They’re different people over there, nothing to do with us. It was so different, the way they grew up. This is never going to work, not in our lifetimes.”
The journalist: “You should keep an eye open, see how many pairs of green trousers you spot in East Berlin. They may well be wearing Italian jackets, but they’re wearing them with green trousers. Army issue. They can’t wear the jackets, but they don’t want to throw out the trousers. And if you notice that they seem to be walking a little oddly in their Adidas trainers, that’s the same thing: they’ve been wearing army boots all their lives.”
The property owner: “We didn’t ever expect this to happen. Our family still owned a building in Erfurt. It was part of an inheritance for me and my sister. It was all managed very well. We had to pay a bill of 1028 Marks, but then it was ours. The estate duty had already been paid. It’s estimated at almost a million. There are about fifty people living there. I should get them all to line up and submit to an inspection. No, not really. Only joking.”
The feminist: “If at least they’d liberated themselves, the way we feminists did . . . But no, even that had to come from Russia.”
The student from the East: “My dad’s brother left for the other side early on, when you still could. My dad didn’t—he wanted to stay. We had a small family business and he tried to keep it going. Once a year, my uncle would come to visit us in his big Opel. And he
always laughed at us because of all the things we didn’t have. I hated it when he visited.”
The bookseller from the East: “I don’t need to tell you all the things that weren’t allowed. But there were also loads of things that were allowed. Just look at the lists of titles published by Volk und Welt, or Reclam. And now everything’s allowed, but nothing’s possible, because my shop’s been bought up by a chain. Everything I know, everything I’ve learned, it’s all become useless. You don’t need to have read Updike or Goethe to sell books about sex or travel guides. And the only alternative is the door.”
The student of Dutch from Leipzig: “Before, I wasn’t allowed to go to the Netherlands, and now I can’t go to the Netherlands, because it’s too expensive. Of course I’m happy the Wende happened, but it still hurts when you hear people over there saying we’ve got no initiative. We’ve got plenty of initiative, but where’s that going to get you? My dad’s been laid off—he’ll never get another job. And it’s the same everywhere. People are frightened.”
The translator from the West: “All they know how to do is complain. It has to happen right now, it has to happen today. We didn’t get things handed to us on a plate after the war either. We couldn’t just head off to Majorca. They act as though we fought that war on our own. Like it was nothing to do with them. The fascists all lived in the West. And you should hear what they have to say about the Poles and Vietnamese. They’re giving all of Germany a bad name.”
The Hungarian writer: “My seven-year-old daughter was on a school trip with children from East and West Berlin. I asked her how it went. It was awful, she said. There were all these Scheiß-Ossis there. Scheiß-Ossis? Oh, they were just so stupid. Stupid? Why’s that? They all looked so pathetic, in their weird clothes. And what did your teachers say? Oh, our teachers never talk to their teachers.”
The photographer from Haiti: “Racism exists wherever you go, but I had a good life here in Berlin for thirty-three years. That’s over now, my friend. I don’t dare go to the East anymore, not in the daytime, and definitely not at night. People have been stabbed and thrown off the train. Dead, I mean. There were a lot of Mozambicans and Angolans living there, solidarity between the nations—you know, all that stuff. They were always invited to march past the tribune with everyone else on May Day. But they treated them like slaves even before, and now they’ve got to leave. There’s no work. They were all part of the old regime, of course. Not their fault, but that’s how people see it now. Ausländer raus, good riddance.”
In the Tageszeitung (West edition), I read something about the Museum der bedingungslosen Kapitulation, the Museum of the Unconditional Surrender. I had never heard of it, but it sounds promising. I ask a few friends, but no, they have never been there. Where is it? Fritz-Schmenkel-Straße. Oh, in the East. I decide to pay the museum a visit, pass through the visibly invisible borderline, change at Alexanderplatz. I want to stop myself from repeating yet again that it is different, but yes, it is different. The same city, only ten minutes away, and completely different. Someone looks at your raincoat, categorises you. You are from drüben, over there. So that much is established. And what do you find yourself doing? Projecting the latest survey, with its fear and negative expectations, on the waiting crowd, thinking you know at least some of the thoughts in those heads. You buy a newspaper that costs half the price of the other newspapers and hop on the S-Bahn to Erkner.
This is a city full of trains. You see the big Moscow–Frankfurt express and would like to change trains, but heading in the other direction. The Polish professor: “I was late, and I had to go through the Russian sleeping compartment to reach my seat in the German section. You can’t imagine the stink! They all bring food with them, because they don’t have enough money to buy any. And there’s luggage piled up in the gangway, cardboard boxes. Honestly, it was like the Third World. You could barely get through.”
I get off in Karlshorst, which used to be an exclusive residential area. The Haus der Kultur has become Restaurant Centre Ville, and there are large Cyrillic letters above the Spielbank on the corner. Fritz-Schmenkel-Straße is a quiet street. Villas, trees, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. There is something strange about it though, and before I can tell myself that it is because of all the Russians wandering around, something else occurs to me: “It’s like a ghetto.” Or something along those lines, anyway, but it is a strange kind of inversion, because the people inside this ghetto are Russian officers, walking alone or in pairs, people whose clothing separates them from the rest of the world, like Chassidic Jews in Antwerp and New York with their ringlets and their long black coats. I am in a Russian enclave. Even the children walking past are speaking Russian. I see a big white Zim or Zis with a woman in the back and a soldier at the wheel, words I cannot read, more officers with diplomatic bags. Soon they will leave these calm and comfortable avenues, depart from the houses of their former friend and, before that, their former enemy. Pages are turning in the place where they are heading, too, and they do not know what will be written on those pages. But for now they are still here, unloved, a closed community in the country that is paying eight billion for their departure.
At the end of the road is the museum commemorating their arrival, forty-six years ago. Streaming red banners and, on the other side of the trimmed lawn, trucks, a tank, a Stalinorgel. I remember that word from back then, “Stalin’s organ,” a multiple-rocket launcher. A bronze plaque announces the full name of the building: Museum der bedingungslosen Kapitulation des faschistischen Deutschland im Großen Vaterländischen Krieg 1941–1945 (Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945). I head inside. There is no one around. Later, I see a young Russian soldier. He smiles a greeting and we say hello. The wheels of time start turning again: leaflets about perestroika and glasnost lying on a low table, while a gigantic Lenin stands at the end of the room, hands in pockets. He is looking over my head and far into the distance, in the direction I came from. There is always something portentous about Soviet statues; kitsch does not cover it. It is more the suggestion of something that you yourself are not: you are not the peasant with the child in his arms, not the hero with the sword at the enemy’s gates, not the owner of that square jaw, those enormous hands, that obvious will to die for the fatherland. They are idols representing virtues that are too demanding, platonic ghosts of bronze and granite.
On the walls and in the display cabinets, polemics and pamphlets by Marx and by Engels, newspapers from the time of Lenin’s exile in Switzerland, a visit to Rosa Luxemburg, a letter to Gorky, a portrait of his sister: an iconographic Via Dolorosa whose meaning is still in flux, words and images that can never be erased and which look so different today, even though they have remained the same. I hurtle through time, no pact between Hitler and Stalin to halt me in my tracks, a pact signed by the same von Ribbentrop whom I will later see lying on his back, pale and dignified in pinstripe, with an atavistic noose around his neck, a brand-new rope. That pact never existed; in this museion all Germans are forever fascists. I walk directly to the room of the Surrender. I am alone, and I can hear that loneliness. My footsteps on the polished parquet. The furniture from Hitler’s Reichskanzlei. The empty carafes with their long necks. The silent chairs. The flags, chandeliers, blank sheets of white paper in front of every seat at the green baize tablecloth, the precise arrangement of the tables.
There are photographs here, too. Zhukov, Tedder, Spaatz, de Lattre de Tassigny, who will lose his battle eight years later at Dien Bien Phu: marshal, air chief marshal, general, another general, they all entered this room, 8 May, 24:00 hours. I look at a photograph of the German delegation on the airfield; they have just climbed out of the small Dakota. This is Keitel’s last May but one, but of course he does not know that. He is leading the group—tall, boots, a certain coded beauty, Iron Cross around his neck; behind him, von Friedeburg, Stumpff: field marshal, general admiral, senior general, land, sea, air. They are summoned inside, Kei
tel with his field marshal’s baton, the other two with their decorations. They are told to go and sit “at the table that had been designated for them, which was close to the door.” By 00:43 hours (Moscow time), it is all over. Germany has surrendered unconditionally; the Second World War is over in this part of the world. The declaration is drawn up and signed in English, Russian and German. According to point 6, only the English and Russian versions are “authentic”; the German one does not count.
Roads to Berlin Page 23
