The historical imperative is a religious idea that I am unable to believe in. There are always too many imponderables, too many irrationalities, fanatics, starry-eyed idealists, rabid dogs darting out of their kennels. They operate within a specific territory, but no one can be certain of anything in a world that, intellectually and materially, is no longer in synch, where the power of destruction is already almost within the reach of individuals, and the death of as many other people as possible has become one of the cheapest commodities. At the end of a saeculum horribilis, the prevailing mood is one of disquiet, not unlike the mood at the end of the first millennium, as described in the writings of the Benedictine monk Raoul Glauber, a tale of plague and famine and cannibalism that makes the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch look like happy fantasies. When you read his words, you feel inclined to think that we have made progress over the past one thousand years, and that, of course, is true. And yet, there is poison gas hidden in Iraq, throats cut in Algeria, mass slaughter in Rwanda and in Europe (so much closer to home), and landmines in Cambodia. None of this seems like a world that has learned its lesson from the wars that began on this continent in this century and which, as Václav Havel recently calculated for us, have cost over two hundred million lives. It is these absent ones who haunt the space around us. Their names, at least the ones we know, are on monuments from Sicily to Stavanger, from Athens to Kaliningrad, but the world seems able to live with their absence. Maybe this is the only way, but it also means that the world could probably manage just as well without us too.
Once again, no, twice again, to Berlin. After 1989, I went away and came back again. I added to my notes on Berlin, and travelled through East and West, which made my notes more like notes on Germany, rather than just Berlin. I read about the history, which meant reading lots of things I had not known about before, and made new friends, which is not so easy at my age. In short, I felt comfortable in Berlin and I frequently returned in the following years. And yet there were still things that surprised me. I may not believe in the historical imperative, but I do believe in a vague notion of the relative density of countries and a certain natural way of the world. It seemed “natural,” for example, that Germany should once again become one country—just as it seemed natural that this would require a great deal of effort. It seemed equally natural that Berlin would become the capital city of that one country, and that the united Germany, which had developed into a modern European democracy over the past fifty years and which, as evidenced by the never-ending stream of publications, had focused on its ill-fated past by means of increasingly intense commemoration, would now take up its place among the other countries of Europe. But in Germany itself I heard different voices, voices that ridiculed the new German citizens, who of course had something to say in response, and voices that attempted to resist the relative density of their own country by refusing to send soldiers on European and other peace missions. This reluctance elicited the following comment from one of my more bitter compatriots: “It’s always the same with them—when you don’t invite them, they come anyway, but when you ask them to take part, they don’t turn up.”
East Berlin, 1990
Meanwhile, in Germany I was held responsible for tomato growing in the Netherlands, for the behavior of our Dutch football fans, who clearly represent the most intelligent element of every nation, and for every survey in which yet more half-baked sociologists secured their positions for the next few years by asking a bunch of teenagers what they thought about Germans, while in my own country—which has never entirely come to terms with its colonial past—I was suddenly nominated as an expert on Germany. That meant that I was required to debate on television whenever something happened in Germany that also happens in other European countries, but which has a different impact there, because of the country’s difficult past and also because of the laziness of the media.
It was a Dutch friend—Willem Leonard Brugsma—who took me to Germany for the first time. Brugsma was arrested by the Gestapo as a young member of the Resistance in Paris, and was interned in Natzweiler and in Dachau for a number of years. He died a few weeks ago, and at his funeral I recalled memories of the past, of that emotionally charged first trip to Germany, which had been so astounding for me because he harbored no resentment. The same man who could tell horrific tales about his time in the camps, a big man who weighed only forty-five kilos when he was liberated, was a passionate advocate of German Unity, not, as people sometimes cynically say, in order to render Germany harmless by tying it to Europe, but because he believed that one Germany belonged in one Europe. I am mentioning this now because such voices appear to be increasingly rare in Germany. Lately, all we seem to have heard from that country are sounds of infinite fatigue, lamentation and defeatist complaint emanating from the depths of the sacred piggy bank.
Suddenly it is no longer about ideas, but only about money; not about one of the greatest adventures in European history, but about fear of the neighbors who have been buying things on credit from the grocer; not about the Europe of Erasmus and Voltaire, of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, of Rembrandt and Botticelli, of Hegel and Hume. No, it is about much greater faceless figures, like 3 point 0, 3 point 1, and the satanic 3 point 2, which the politicians hide behind, since for reasons of their own they do not want Europe, or not yet, or not ever. Any child can understand, and certainly in this city every child understands, that there have to be criteria, but taking the whole idea of Europe, a subject about which many of the same people have waxed lyrical for years, and reducing it to abstractions following a decimal point, has meant employing the demagogy of common sense to bury the citizens’ enthusiasm under ashes. Ash is not a vital principle, but it fits very well with the lamentation I just mentioned. This has always been a dangerous continent. It has long been after its own blood, because of land, because of dynasties, because of religion and because of colonies. All by itself, it came up with both of the ideologies that made this century the most disastrous in history, a twin ideological catastrophe from which America rescued us not once, but twice. Perhaps we should not count on a third time. I know that the Europe of the single currency is a massive, extremely complex political and economic maneuver that scares many people. I also know that political unification is limping behind like an unhappy child, hampered by multiple languages, ineradicable national ambitions and a parliament that is pampered, impotent and often invisible. But that is precisely the challenge. Once, for better or for worse, this continent discovered the rest of the world. If the Europeans back then had spent as much time ruminating as these Europeans now seem to require, everyone would have stayed at home. But then there never would have been a piece of the Wall standing in Los Angeles either.
December 1997
Potsdamer Platz, 1997
1 May the ancient and beautiful melodies of German women, German constancy, German wine and German song resonate throughout the world.
PART III
September. Berlin twenty years ago, Berlin ten years ago, Berlin now. The first time, I was invited by the D.A.A.D.; the second time, I invited myself; the third time, it was the government of Nordrhein-Westfalen. During that first visit, I had started my notes on Berlin in all innocence: a writer lives in a foreign city and makes notes about what he experiences, what he sees and reads. A concert by Mauricio Kagel, a walk in Charlottenburg, a visit to Lübars, which was just inside the Wall. All of it normal, except Berlin was no normal city, and for anyone living there in that eventful year of 1989 it will never be normal again. I will never be rid of it, that double line of separation, the line running between two political systems, the line between two eras. Long before 1989, I had seen the bare, snowy space of Potsdamer Platz from the windows of the Hotel Esplanade, with the obscene bulge of the Führerbunker in the distance and, so much closer, the geometric lines of the chevaux-de-frise, dark pieces of metal, angled upwards, designed to thwart any escape attempt.
That is not something you would wish to discuss again. It is in the
past, just as the photographs of the same square in 1929, full of old-fashioned cars and crowds rushing or strolling past, were already part of the past back then. Later, during my first return, I saw the foundations of what were obviously going to be enormous buildings being rammed into the sandy ground, which looked like some immense mass grave. And now that the buildings are there, you have to crane your neck to take in their entire height, Babylonian temples, which have crushed the past beneath them. I look for the Hotel Esplanade, but when I finally find it I recognize nothing. A section of the former Kaisersaal is preserved behind glass, but it is like the double death of butterflies pinned inside a display case; they should have perished long ago, but they are still here, although they will never fly again. I wander among the big buildings for a while, a homunculus in a giant architectural model, but this is not a model; it is real. Do I miss anything? The Berlin of the past? No. I am simply unable to delete the past from my system in such places; the only option would be to go and live there again. In that sense, my three months in Westphalia are perfect practice. I shall surrender myself to the city once again, a visitor from a small European country in the capital of a large European country that shares some of its past with the small country. I can read the drama of my first farewell in my own book. I wanted to know what would become of Germany “when it is big.” As I read those lines again, I detect a sense of pathos, but that sensation is never entirely absent in the vicinity of the Reichstag and the Brandenburger Tor. Such buildings are out of keeping with the introspection of Bach or the intellectuality of Schönberg; if they could sing, they would produce a different kind of music, heavy and dramatic. Wagner is the most German of all composers, the generals around the Grosser Stern could be taken for heroes from an opera, given the poses they are striking, and for someone who comes from a small city with narrow streets and quiet canals, the open spaces and wide avenues of Berlin, with their imposing buildings and statues flanked by heraldic lions and eagles, seem like an expression of power. Memories of Prussia, film images of parades, never entirely forgotten, of heroic music drifting on the wind . . . and then that other pathos of the two living Russian statues planting the flag of victory, and therefore defeat, on the Reichstag: damage and destruction, division and reunification, a Wall and an airlift, a city pushed to and fro like a chess piece on the board of history. Try acting normally after all of that. But there lies the miracle: the Germans have managed to do so. Germany has succeeded, as far as such a thing is possible, in coming to terms with one past through grief and understanding, by realizing that it will never entirely disappear. Not only that, the country has also internalized, again as far as it is possible, that other past and, without wiping it out (you can never do that to a past), has transformed it, through accountability, habituation, wear and tear, into a present that looks like today.
Potsdamer Platz, Sony Centre, detail
Der Löwenkämpfer by Albert Wolff, 1861, in front of Das Alte Museum, Berlin Mitte
But am I right about Wagner and Schönberg? With Schinkel, wouldn’t you be more likely to think of . . . actually, which composer would you choose if you wanted to express his architecture as music? What music did Goethe listen to? I can’t come up with an answer. The gigantic Greek columns of his museum beside the Dom call for lofty triumph, Apollonian radiance, but less than half an hour later, near the Nikolaikirche, I come across a statue of a horse and a dragon engaged in a furious fight, and that takes me back to Wagner.
How have I not noticed this statue before, even though it is not far from Zum Nussbaum, a pub I used to visit back then when I came to the East? There is nothing else for it: I shall have to get to know Berlin all over again. I begin with the humblest of lessons: I disguise myself as a tourist from Phoenix, Arizona, and I go on a boat tour. It is a glorious day in October, not yet the grey tundra weather that will reign in a month or so, and you can still sit outside, on the top deck. It is not busy, the wind is tugging a little at the words coming from the loudspeakers, at the names and the dates, but that is fine by me. I am happy to let the city glide past. Almost everything I see comes with a memory attached, but I do not want to think about that now. I want to see the city as a stranger, as someone who has never been here before.
I find the Bundeskanzleramt modest, and actually rather beautiful. Is this where the government of the third-largest economic power in the world has its seat? Is this the place that somewhat reluctantly sends soldiers, who once appeared to have returned home for good, to hostile deserts on the other side of the world, because it does not want to let down its allies? Power has a gentle face here; somewhere behind all those windows sits a person who does not believe that German savings should be handed out to all of those other Europeans who have been living on credit on such a grand scale, a person who embraces old-fashioned values and will not be forced by friend or foe to push up inflation until the dollar becomes so cheap that America can pay off its immense debts to China and the whole game can begin all over again. The world as a roulette table is not an attractive image; protectionism is not an option, nor is the state as the owner of the means of production, or Lafontaine as a reincarnation of Marx. These are confusing times. The people are grumbling, quietly for now, but their complaints may soon become louder. There is a constant stream of foreign guests here, the man from Russia and the man from China. This building may not be the center of the world, but it is an intersection that no one can avoid. The Obama who lives here is a woman, but her opposition is in the government with her. The cacophony of the media is rising; everyone knows what should be done; tables, figures, prognoses are carried into the building and back out again; press conferences, spokespeople, editorials . . . Everything whirls around this building that was not even built twenty years ago, when that other whirlwind raced through this city.
But the water of the Spree does not care. That is how rivers are, like the birds rocking on the waves made by the boat. Agitation is for humans. Seen like this, from the boat, the building rejects the drama, as though it is itself a river. It has no agitation of its own; it soothes the past, like a long, pink sedative pill. As I pass beneath the Moltkebrücke, I feel myself returning to the nineteenth century. Winged mythical creatures in reddish stone guard their lost era with anachronistic zeal. Claws, vicious beaks . . . they are prepared for the worst, but their might is deflected by the innocent restraint of this building, which refuses to express the power that resides within. Griffins have no place in the twenty-first century, and neither do the swords and trumpets of the helmeted beings along the bridge, or the hexagonal, atavistic crown above the eagle with its overlong tongue, forked and curling, on the other bridge beside Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. The iron of this giant bird is rusty. Through my binoculars I can just about make out the wings spread on either side of the chest, which carries the Prussian coat of arms (which itself features another bird and another crest). Beneath it are the orb and scepter, the symbols of royal power. Absurdly, someone has hung a modern bicycle chain around the bird’s leg, as though hoping to park the empire on the bridge until better times came along. The voice on the boat babbles on. To the right is the station where I had to pass through the border checkpoint so many times, and later I see the ruins of the Palast der Republik. Now that it is no longer there, it seems as though it was much larger than I actually remember. The stairwells are still standing, on this autumn day, towers of steps surrounded by cranes and bulldozers, the demolished church of a forgotten religion, ridiculed by the mighty shadow of the Dom behind, with its triumphant golden cap. There is something unutterably sad about buildings that have not yet been entirely demolished. Rusty iron bars protrude from the bare concrete of the walls; rubble lies on the steps that no one will ever walk on again. I can see the distant quadriga of the Brandenburger Tor between two of the towering stairwells. Sometimes I think this city does it on purpose—the constant intermingling of now and then, and the associated layers of memory—and when I look in the other direction I see the television tow
er on Alexanderplatz with that strange glass bulge at the top and the absurd red-and-white level-crossing barrier pointing into the sky. What thoughts might run through the mind of someone who once got married in this dismantled building? Someone who once governed here? Before long, the stairwells will have vanished too, and their memories will be destroyed in the demolition, and whatever remains will later be buried beneath that other form of nostalgia that wants to rebuild the Schloss of an earlier era, which has disappeared and is gone for good.
Roads to Berlin Page 28
