Homecoming Homecoming Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  I took breakfast at a hotel two blocks away. I would walk along the buffet, plate in hand, picking up a roll here, a piece of sausage there, a slice of cheese, some butter and jam. Then I showed the plate to the cashier, who told me how much it came to: seventy-three or ninety-seven pfennigs or, if I had felt like splurging, one D-mark thirty-six.

  Dr. Römer came with me on the first Tuesday morning. He had knocked on my door the evening before, introduced himself, and launched into a conversation that grew ever more embarrassing. When I stemmed the tide by saying I still had some preparation to do, he suggested we meet for breakfast.

  He found it demeaning to have to show his plate and be charged for every bite. It was all so petty; it put him under the outrageous suspicion of taking more than his share; it made him feel someone was peering over his shoulder. The cashier was clearly working for the State Security, the Stasi. And, he added sardonically, hadn't Marx promised, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”?

  When I defended the buffet, he took it as a defense of the Stasi. He had written his dissertation on the Nazi interpretation of the Civil Code and saw parallels with the socialist interpretation. He maintained that the cowardice of the judges and law professors in the Third Reich willing to twist the law for their careers' sake was the same as the cowardice of the judges and law professors in East Germany, that it had been possible to show courage and put up resistance under both systems. “We must never make the mistake our parents made,” he said, laying his hand on my arm. “If history hasn't taught us the lesson of resistance, then history is nothing but one long aimless, senseless bloodbath.” He squeezed my arm. “That is our historical mission. That is why we are here.”

  For the first time I took a good look at his round, friendly, selfsatisfied face, his pudgy hands, his ample body. I could not say what got to me in what he said; I only knew I did not like the way he looked, the way he sat there with his hand on my arm. “Resistance? Do you propose to stand up to the cashier?” I did not say it to get rid of him, but when he rose and left the room without a word, I was only too happy to see him go.

  In the beginning I had thirty or forty students in my lecture class, but the number increased from week to week. They did not come because I was such a good speaker but because from week to week it became clearer that the German Democratic Republic was on its way out and that entry into the Federal Republic, reunification with it, was imminent. All male students were officers in the National People's Army, all female students skilled workers; they were mature young people, many with families, for whom the future had meant lives as lawyers and judges in the GDR. Reluctant but determined, they set about adapting: they studied the new legal system as if it were a foreign language, the language of a country where one finds oneself out of professional necessity rather than preference. In neither the lectures nor the seminar did they ask questions or express opinions, and they treated my questions as annoying interruptions. When I asked them to write critical accounts of decisions or articles, they gave me only the briefest, barest plot summary. Once hearing a student mutter to himself, “He can't believe that,” I engaged him in a conversation about it. I soon realized that what threw him off was not that I was saying something I did not believe but that I wanted to make him believe I believed what I was saying.

  My relationship to my colleagues in the department also changed from week to week. When we were introduced, they saw me as a suppliant seeking their acceptance, but with time I became the messenger of a world making ever greater inroads into theirs, a world that would radically alter, even destroy theirs. But as often as I met with open disapproval, cool formality, and sarcastic jibes, I also experienced genuine interest in an exchange of views over our differences, enthusiasm for a common future, and a combination of courage and anxiety vis-à-vis the coming challenges.

  One colleague took me to a meeting of departmental Party members. They were discussing a recent Gorbachev speech. The man chairing the meeting of twenty to thirty people started with a few sentences about the occasion and topic of the speech and then opened the floor for comments.

  It was a gray Berlin winter day. By four it would be dark, and the meeting room, which doubled as the dean's office, was lit only by a small desk lamp. Like all rooms in East Berlin it was overheated, and in the long silence following the man's introduction I could sense eyelids growing heavy and feel myself battling to keep awake. Then somebody I did not know took the floor. At first I listened with only half an ear, but in the end I was fascinated: he spoke without saying anything. The sentences followed one another logically enough, and each one had a beginning, middle, and end; the Marx and Lenin quotations had a certain ring to them, and the references he made, the issues he brought up seemed substantive. But there was no thesis, no idea behind what he said: it was neither approving nor critical. He assiduously avoided any statement, any pronouncement he might later be called to task for, he might later have to recant. It was a brand of speech that, obeying its own strict laws, had evolved into an art form. A theater of the absurd. I would not have shed a tear to see it go under with the world that gave it birth, yet I was sorry that art can go under like that.

  5

  ONE DAY I CAME HOME to find a letter from East Berlin. Was I still interested in Volker Vonlanden? A woman named Rosa Habe had only now seen my request: some West German friends had crumpled up some newsprint as padding for a package they were sending her, and it included the page with the ad.

  I phoned her immediately, and she invited me to come and see her in Pankow that Sunday morning. I brought her flowers, the finest bouquet I could muster in the East Berlin flower shop. Although it looked for all the world like the feathers of an ailing brood hen, she accepted it all smiles. She was a sprightly old soul who spoke in a soft, clear voice and moved with grace. She served me tea on her glassed-in balcony.

  “Your ad mentions places and articles in connection with Volker Vonlanden, but you don't say what makes him historically interesting.”

  “I myself don't know. Sometimes the clues I find seem to lead somewhere; sometimes they don't.”

  She gave me a skeptical but not unfriendly look. “All that expense for clues?”

  I laughed and told her the story of my grandparents, the homecoming novel, the Kleinmeyerstrasse house, the war articles, and the Hanke connection. “I'm no historian. I posed as one because I wanted people to take the ad seriously. But yours was the first serious response I received.”

  “You could have had it without such elaborate lies.” She shook her head. “Oh, those skeletons. Still in the closet. For us he was Walter Scholler, and when a man once went up to him and addressed him as Volker Vonlanden he dismissed him with such amiability and aplomb that those of us who were with him then were not the least bit taken aback and the man who had spoken to him was no longer sure of himself. Then one day he vanished, poof, without saying goodbye.”

  “And yet you remember his Volker Vonlanden identity. Was it because you suspected something behind it?”

  “Suspected something? No, I didn't suspect anything.” But she did not go on to tell me what had caused her to remember him, and I did not pursue the matter. “Without saying goodbye.” That could mean they were close.

  “What did he do, this Walter Scholler?”

  “Up to the autumn of forty-six he edited the art section of a minor popular daily called the Nacht-Express. He did some writing too: theater and book reviews, essays, stories. We had the impression he was in with the major from the Soviet military administration who was the power behind the throne, a round, clever little Jew from Leningrad. He really ran things, while Scholler was the nominal editor in chief of what was nominally a politically independent tabloid.”

  “Not a bad career for a nobody from nowhere.”

  “What are you talking about. He was a Viennese Jew who'd hidden in his parents' house in the Alps until a neighbor turned him in during the winter of 1944–45. He knew names and fa
ces, by which I mean the names and faces of the Communists the Nazis murdered at the last minute in Auschwitz. And he had a number tattooed on his arm.”

  “Impossible!”

  “I knew the number by heart until”—she blushed—“until I had my stroke two years ago. You see, I had taken him under my wing. Like the others of his kind he was homeless: they could never be at home again in their former world and despite our best intentions never quite fit into ours. That's why our wonderful poet Becher took a fancy to him: they shared similar fates.”

  “What did he say became of his parents?”

  “They were rounded up right after Anschluss. His father was a politically active lawyer, his mother a psychoanalyst. He never saw them again.”

  “Do you know whether there actually was a lawyer by the name of Scholler in Vienna? Or by the name of Vonlanden?”

  She sat there, tense, her hands in her lap, her eyes on the floor. “I didn't snoop. He was here one day and gone the next. He wasn't the only one. It was the times.”

  “But now that you know . . .”

  She gave me a hostile look. “I don't know a thing. You're not trying to tell me that Walter Scholler deceived me like the awful man who addressed him as Volker Vonlanden.”

  “Do you know who that awful man was?”

  “No, I don't. Maybe he wasn't an awful man; maybe he just made a mistake; maybe he'd been looking for Vonlanden for so long that he started seeing him in everything and everybody. You of all people should understand that.” The look was now defiant.

  “And I do,” I said, nodding.

  She stood. “How nice of you to have come to see me. My son lives in Rostock, my daughter in Dresden, and now that my job at the ministry—” She broke off. “Why am I going on like this? What do you care about my children and my career?” She looked down at the floor again. “I liked his Viennese accent. It was only the hint of an accent, but it was a greeting from another world, the world of the waltz, of balls and coffeehouses, of stone steps leading from one street to the next, like Paris . . .” She looked up at me again. “Do you know Vienna?” But she expected no answer. She was on her way to the door to see me out.

  Within a few days I had ascertained that the Viennese telephone books of the thirties listed no lawyer-psychiatrist couple by the name Scholler and no couple at all by the name of Vonlanden.

  6

  THE SEMESTER CAME TO AN END. Although I had been invited back, I would not be returning for the following semester: Dr. Römer bore me a grudge and would work out who I was sooner or later, and that would be embarrassing not only for me but also for my colleagues, who were trying to turn the department into a reputable facsimile of its Western counterparts. To say nothing of the fact that keeping track of the myriad petty lies I was forced to spin to keep the big lie plausible was more than debilitating; it was humiliating. It made me think of a man with a mistress whom his wife knew nothing about and who might not even know about his wife, of unofficial Stasi collaborators who spied on their colleagues and friends, of bookkeepers who amassed a fortune by stealing petty sums through the years. I did not particularly condemn them; I just didn't see how anyone could live like that, constantly in fear, constantly on the lookout, constantly playing someone one is not. Perhaps it helped to have a major objective in mind. I had none.

  And so the party a colleague invited most of the department to turned into my farewell party. I cannot recall what it started out as: his sixtieth birthday, an anniversary of his employment at the university, the finally successful purchase of a house on a lake just outside the city, a move by the administration to grant the department greater independence. I was glad Dr. Römer had not been invited.

  It was not until later that I realized that the colleague who threw the party was also celebrating his own farewell. I could never tell how much truth there was in the stories of Stasi collaboration circulating at the time about him and other colleagues. I could easily picture an internationally known, mundane-looking copyright lawyer like him getting involved in the Stasis' games, thinking he could play them by his own rules. Whether he feared the outcome of the investigations or simply didn't want to expose himself to them, he had decided not to return to the university. He later went into private practice and was soon much sought after. He was the first to go off on his own.

  The party took place in his Karl-Marx-Allee apartment. Desolate as the much-too-broad and windy thoroughfare was and depressing as the once ornamentally tiled and now hideously pockmarked façades of its buildings were, the apartment itself was a haven of comfort and hospitality. Beaming all the while, the man's wife greeted me at the door with the following: “You weren't hit by a tile, were you? Good. Here in the East we've learned how and when to duck. You'll have to learn now too.” As my stay had progressed, I felt my colleagues were treating me more and more like an officer in an occupying army; here a beautiful hostess was simply trying to put a younger, somewhat flustered guest at his ease. She took me into two large rooms connected by a sliding door and furnished Biedermeier-style and handed me a glass of Red Riding Hood Sekt, the East German excuse for champagne. “I don't need to introduce you to anybody. You know most of the people, and the others will take care of themselves.”

  I made the rounds. Dr. Fach was there, Berlin accent and all, carelessly dressed as always and as always reeking of alcohol and cigarettes. My first impression of him back in November had been of a hidebound bureaucrat, but later I heard that he had sheltered students from the niggling infantilizations of the Party. His combination of learning, simplicity, melancholy, and magnanimity made him the model of a proletarian gentleman. Dr. Weil, the woman who had invited me to take part in the meeting of the department's Party members, was there too. I had since learned that just before the Wall started coming down she had had the courage to publish an article in which she more or less reinvented the idea of the rule of law and called upon her country to institute it, an act heroic and futile, as if an Inca had invented the wheel only months before his entire culture was overrun by Spanish wheels. The speaker who had delivered the empty, long-winded oration was there. I had later come to know him as Dr. Kunkel, friend and aficionado of the arts and elegant opportunist. Dr. Blöhmer, a legal historian, gave a witty, rough-and-tumble account of his early life as a boxer and made eyes at the women. Dr. Flemm, a legal philosopher, recounted the “bourgeois aberration” that he had committed at a conference in the fifties and for which he had been banished to a tiny provincial town, the distance in time having transformed a tragic event into a comic adventure.

  The older I am the more I have to strain to understand party conversations. The ear doctor I went to gave the ailment a name: social deafness. Since it has no medical cure, I must treat it on my own, and the way I do it is to stop listening when the listening gets too hard, and put on a friendly, attentive face. I laugh when the others laugh, but think my own thoughts. I thought back to the morning after the Wall came down, my first trip to Frankfurt, my first flight to Berlin and the many trips and flights since, the days at the university and nights at the University Guesthouse. I had not gone to meetings of the civil-society movement or of the church opposition or of the new political parties, nor had I sought contact with the “social niches” or the Stasi victims—that is, I had not done what I could easily have done to get some idea of the historical situation. Instead I had let myself be dragged through an alien academic world that would soon be defunct, blissfully registering my impressions, condemning no one, exonerating no one, and thoroughly enjoying the foreign, last-gasp nature of it all.

  I likewise enjoyed the melancholy nature of the farewell party. I had a seat in history's waiting room: one train had just been shunted to an abandoned platform; the other was due in at any moment and would set off again after a brief halt. Not everyone who alighted from the first train would find a place in the second; many would remain in the waiting room, watching the snack bar close, the heating and lights go off. But as long as the old train
was still out there and the new one still on its way, the snack bar was still open and everything was warm and brightly lit.

  7

  THE PLANES WERE ALWAYS FULL. I often took the first morning flight or last evening flight and was surrounded by tense, exhausted passengers. Once, because all the overhead compartments were full, the man next to me stuffed his bags into my legroom. Then there was the time the man next to me tried to prevent the stewardess from giving me her last bottle of wine, insisting she divide it between the two of us, and the time the man next to me explained that a passenger in a row with four seats has a right to one-and-aquarter armrests and a passenger in a row with three seats a right to one and a third, and proceeded to show me what this meant in practice. Most of the passengers were men.

  Then on one of my last flights from Berlin to Frankfurt I saw Barbara. All the rest of the passengers had taken their seats when she ran on and opened and closed the jam-packed overhead compartment about ten rows ahead of me, handed her bag to the stewardess, and sat down. We both had aisle seats, and I could see a bit of her arm and, when she shifted position, a bit of her head, shoulder, and back.