Perhaps the reason I was already getting so absorbed with the question of “residence”—when I hadn’t even begun to work out the basic geography of the city—had to do with the book I was reading right now. With the blowing snow and the cold keeping me largely indoors, I spent much of the first few days in my room, listening to jazz on some local station and enveloped in a Christa Wolf novel, The Quest for Christa T. What intrigued me most about it was that—though the author was a much celebrated and sanctioned writer in the GDR—the novel was in no way an “official” East German text. Rather, that this tale of an essentially decent, commonplace woman living a decent, commonplace life in East Germany was mired in quiet desperation. As such it was a novel in which so much was left unsaid. As you read it you could begin to discern its subtext: the fact that it spoke about the oppressiveness of uniformity in a society that demanded absolute obedience. Its theme was the subjugation of the individual. But the way it stated its theme, by never stating its theme, both fascinated and unnerved me. Because it made me wonder: Will I ever get a handle on this place? Have I arrived in a landscape where everything is not what it seems, where the divisions, the isolation, the geopolitical schizophrenia, run so deep and are so multilayered that I will never be able to penetrate its many skins, the cloaks behind which it veils itself?
In this sense I was suffering from a writerly form of stage fright. Doubt—that great monolith that frequently positions itself in front of all of us—had arrived. Though I knew there was an irrational aspect to such doubt—that I was panicking even before I had begun to really nose around the city—it was only years (and five books) later that I came to discover this was all part of the process by which one of my travel books was written. So, on these first days in Berlin, I began the daily grind of keeping a journal. I’d arrived here with eight old-style school notebooks—the ones with laminated black-and-white cardboard covers. I’d written in them throughout prep school and college. They also came with me to Egypt. I so liked writing in these books. They brought me back to hours spent in home rooms and lecture theaters, doodling my own thoughts as I listened to some professorial type spouting off. As a result, they became an essential part of what little I packed with me whenever I traveled. I was just a little obsessive when it came to guarding their safety. My notebooks never left the hotel or the room where I was billeted at a given time. Anytime I was outside said room, I had a small pocket-sized jotter with me. Whenever I returned back to the place I was sleeping I would immediately begin to write down, in narrative form, all that happened to me that day—including as much dialogue as I could remember.
This tedious task became an essential discipline. I simply had to keep writing. For I worried often that if I didn’t keep up with the story it would slip away from me.
My first two indoor days in Berlin didn’t give me much in the way of material. And I decided, on the third night, that I would ignore all the advice given me by Frau Weisse to stay off the frostbite-inducing streets. So I did venture out that evening, daring to walk the two miles from Savignyplatz to Potsdamer Platz and the Philharmonie. The snow that had blanketed the city for the past seventy-two hours had stopped, but the wind remained polar. After traversing the bright lights of the Kurfürstendamm—with its illuminated department stores and modern office buildings, its air of mercantile buzz—I began to regret my decision to sludge through the ferocious cold, especially as I was heading to the Philharmonie ticketless. The concert was long since sold out. Even Frau Weisse, who seemed to have connections everywhere, couldn’t pull the necessary strings to get me a single seat.
“This is always a problem when von Karajan is conducting. But maybe if you get there early there will be a return.”
It took me almost an hour to wend my way to the Philharmonie. But before I got there I walked around what was left of Potsdamer Platz—it so looked like an abandoned no-man’s-land—and got my first hard look at The Wall. Touching it with my gloved hand only seemed to magnify its hardness, its impregnability, its profound ugliness. In the distance I could see, on the Western side, the bright lights of a vertiginous office building, defiantly profit-oriented and looming. Axel Springer’s publishing empire was based here. Looking up at what appeared to be a newsroom on a high floor, all I could think was: the people on the other side of the divide were able to stare up at journalists at work in a country not their own, and to which they were forbidden to travel. Meanwhile, the journalists working above them in the West had, no doubt, a clear view over the no-man’s-land that separated The Wall from the actual streets of East Berlin. Were they able to see the trip wires, the guard dogs, the armed sentries who were under orders to shoot to kill if the fleeing citizen didn’t give himself up? Or did they come to regard this high-rise view as uninteresting? Was that the inherent dichotomy of an infamous structure like this one? To the newcomer like myself, its blank, solidified reality gripped my imagination. As a child of the Cold War I also couldn’t help but think: I’m actually staring at the Berlin Wall! But if you lived and worked by it, did you come to regard it as just part of the urban scenery, a prosaic fact of life?
The cold forced me to move on. With my head down to the wind I walked the ten minutes to the Philharmonie. I arrived there just a few minutes before the start of the concert and got immediately lucky, as there was a woman standing out front, holding up a spare ticket. It was a very good ticket—and, at 130 deutsche marks, way beyond my budget. But there are moments when extravagance is no bad thing—such as the opportunity to hear von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic play the Ninth Symphony of Gustav Mahler. So I put aside my budgetary concerns and snapped up the ticket, rushing inside.
The house lights were fading as I fell into my seat. The concert platform was now bathed in a yellow glow, the orchestra and the audience silent, waiting. A simple sculptural object was positioned center stage—a curved steel stand. A side door opened—and the figure of Herbert von Karajan appeared. He was seventy-six at the time. Though hunched and stooped—his face granitic and stern, his hair as white and stiff as a frozen blizzard—what was so immediately apparent was his defiance in the midst of the ravages of age. Though his spine was failing him, he still insisted on comporting himself like a man who had spent his life facing the world with a ramrod-straight demeanor, and was still determined to maintain his patrician hauteur. His progress to the front of the orchestra was slow but still majestic. He acknowledged the voluminous applause from the sold-out hall, then grasped the hand of the first violinist and favored the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic with a grave, knowing nod. As he positioned himself on that sculpted stand, his back now absolutely rigid, his shoulders held high, the physical effort of simply getting onto the concert platform was now replaced by an imperial bearing. He raised his head, letting both the orchestra and the audience know that he was ready. The hall fell silent and von Karajan held the silence for a good half-minute, forcing us to divest ourselves of all peripheral white noise and simply listen to the hall’s immense quiet. Then he raised his baton and made the smallest of gestures, indicating a downbeat. One of the double basses played a low pizzicato note, underscored by a tremolo on a French horn, and then came the emergence of a theme that was so plaintive, so full of tristesse, that it felt almost like a melancholic remembrance of things past. Then again, this symphony—Mahler’s Ninth and the last one he was to complete before his shockingly premature death at the age of fifty-one—was very much an extended premonition about encroaching mortality. Over the next ninety minutes Mahler engaged us in a sort of existential summing up of what it means to have lived a life: all the aspirations, all the passions, all the setbacks, the reversals of fortunes, the love that came and went. But, most of all, there was this sense of time’s rapid diminishment, how we are helpless in the face of its relentlessness, and the way, at the end of every individual narrative, there is the fade to black that is death.
Throughout the symphony’s duration I couldn’t take my eyes off von Karajan. Whatever ab
out the curvature of his spine, once positioned on that stand, once deep into the vast musical architecture of that symphony, he was nothing less than mesmeric. Even in the symphony’s final pages—when it was clear that, through Mahler, von Karajan was also rendering a profound reflection on the inescapability of human mortality—I couldn’t help but feel that he was also letting it be known he would not surrender easily to eternal darkness. When the final strings faded away, he held the silence for a good minute—his arms aloft, his head bowed, the immensity of that final moment—the heartbeat now forever stilled—enfolding all present.
When, with great, deliberate slowness, von Karajan finally lowered his arms, the silence in the hall lingered—as if everyone there was hushed and thunderstruck by that which they had just heard. Then, as if a signal had been given, the Philharmonie erupted into convulsive applause.
Thinking back on that concert now, it remains, quite simply, one of the great musical experiences of my life: a testament to the sheer volcanic and visceral power of live performance. After multiple ovations, von Karajan finally led his musicians off the platform. The entire audience then filed out quietly. After such a profound and transcendental experience, there was something humbling about returning to our individual lives. But perhaps this is the way I now choose to remember the night in question. You only begin to grasp the import of an event—and its larger implications vis-à-vis your life—long after it has entered into that realm marked “memory.”
I left the Philharmonie. Making my way to the S-Bahn station at Anhalter Bahnhof, I decided that, with all that Mahlerian complexity still swirling around in my head, it was far too early to return back to the Pension Weisse and my pristine room. So I headed south until I reached Moritzplatz—thinking I should find my way to the place where that woman I met on the plane came over to this side of the world.
But all I could see in front of me as I emerged into Kreuzberg for the first time was swirling snow, as a new storm had erupted while I was on the U-Bahn. It was now blowing so hard that visibility was a near impossibility. I glanced at my watch. It was just after ten p.m. and part of me wanted to execute an about-face and disappear again into the subterranean depths, catching the first U-Bahn back to Savignyplatz. But there was a bar up ahead—Die schwarze Ecke (the Black Corner)—and the U-Bahn ran until three in morning, so why should a minor blizzard keep me away from a dive with a pulp fiction name?
My head down against the blowing snow, I negotiated the street and entered Die schwarze Ecke. It lived up to its name. The interior was painted black. A long chrome bar ran the length of the joint. The only lighting provided was glowing blue tubes that served to illuminate the Day-Glo murals that covered the otherwise black surfaces. They were all pseudo-erotic in nature—depicting a bearded biker guy and some blond biker chick in assorted sexual positions. They were beyond bad taste. But judging from the tattoos on the biceps of the biker guy behind the bar (one of which showed a woman going down on an erect penis), they were an aesthetic theme beloved by its staff members. I ordered a Hefeweizen and a shot of vodka on the side, grabbed a bar stool, and began rolling a cigarette. There was heavy metal music playing on the sound system—the usual sonic air raid of crashing guitars and percussive pyrotechnics—but it was kept at a level where conversation was possible. Not that there were many candidates for chat on this snowy night in January. Just a young punky type at the bar and an equally young woman with a small black bobby pin fastened through a pierced corner of her left nostril. The guy had spiked black hair, a wispy beard, and a permanent scowl. He was smoking Lucky Strikes and doodling in a sketchbook. When he heard me order my beer and vodka chaser, he looked up at me with disdain and asked:
“American?”
“That’s right.”
“The fuck you doing here?” he asked in English.
“Having a drink.”
“And making me talk to you in your fucking language.”
“I’m not making you do anything.”
“Fucking imperialist.”
I immediately switched into German and said:
“I am no imperialist—and I hate being labeled certain things simply by nature of my nationality. But, hey, since you obviously like nationalistic clichés, maybe I should start calling you a Jew killer . . .”
I said all that without much in the way of premeditated thought. From the wide-eyed look of the artist guy and the biker behind the bar, I now wondered if I would get out of Die schwarze Ecke with my teeth and fingers intact. But then the punky girl with the bobby pin in her nose spoke:
“You’re an asshole, Helmut,” she hissed at the artist guy. “As always, your attempts to show off simply demonstrate how stupid and limited you are.”
The artist guy favored her with a scowl. But then the bartender said:
“Sabine is right. You are a clown. And you are now going to apologize to the American.”
The artist guy kept scribbling away in his sketchbook, saying nothing. I decided it best to look away. So I tossed back my vodka, then returned my focus to the cigarette I was forming between my fingers. A very long moment passed, during which I licked the rolled cigarette paper, placed the butt between my lips, and lit it up. At which point the artist guy was standing beside me with a glass. He set it down beside me and said:
“We tend to be a little too confrontational in Berlin. No hard feelings.”
He proffered his hand. I took it and said:
“Sure. No hard feelings.”
And raising the fresh shot of vodka, I said “Prost” and threw it back.
Were this a movie, the guy would have introduced himself to me; we would have become instant and firm friends. And my guide into the complexities of Berlin. And I would have met a bevy of funky artists and writers. And we would have gone on a very Wim Wenders motorcycle trip with his girlfriend and sister around the Bundesrepublik. And his sister—let’s call her Herta—would turn out to be a gifted jazz pianist and we would fall madly in love with each other. And there would be an afternoon in Munich when I would suggest we take a side trip to Dachau. And standing there in the empty camp grounds, regarding the crematoriums as a silent snow falls, there would be a moment of shared silent understanding about the horrors that the world can . . .
But life is never a movie. Having bought me the vodka and made the demanded apology, the artist guy scooped up his sketchbook. Raising his middle finger in the direction of the bartender, he turned and headed out into the cold. The bartender uttered a low laugh, then turned to Sabine and said:
“He’ll be back tomorrow—as always.”
“He’s such a shit.”
“You’re only saying that because you used to fuck him.”
“I used to fuck you, too—and I still drink here. But maybe that’s because I got wise and it only happened once.”
To his credit, the bartender smiled. Then Sabine shouted down to me:
“Buy me a drink and I’ll fuck you.”
“Now that’s the first time I’ve ever been offered that deal,” I said.
“It’s not a deal, American. You’re here. And I have only three deutsche marks left in my pocket and want to buy cigarettes with them. So I need you to buy me a drink. Just as I need you to fuck me tonight, as I don’t want to sleep alone. You have a problem with that?”
I worked hard at masking my bemusement.
“No,” I said, “no problem at all.”
“Then come over here and buy me a drink. In fact, you can buy me many drinks.”
Sabine drank rum and Coke—a treble shot of Bacardi splashed into the dark waters of the cola.
“I know it’s pretty fucking teenager to drink a cuba libre,” she said. “The thing is, I like what alcohol does. But I don’t like the taste.”
I discovered that Sabine was from Hannover, and that she made sculptures in papier-mâché, and that her father was a Lutheran pastor with whom she no longer spoke, and that her mother had run off with a man who sold agricultural supplies and w
hom she found to be petit bourgeois and insufferable. She asked few questions about me, asking me simply where I was from (“Yes, I’ve heard of Manhattan”) and what I did (“Every American in Berlin is a writer”). But from the disinterested tone of her voice, she was simply engaging in basic niceties. This didn’t bother me, as she seemed happy to talk about herself in a manner that veered between self-loathing and ironic detachment. She drank two triple shot cuba libres and smoked six cigarettes in the forty-five minutes during which we propped up the bar. Then when the bartender made noises about wanting to close up, I turned to Sabine and said:
“You know, if you’d rather not invite me back, that’s okay.”
“Is this your way of saying you don’t want to spend the night with me?”
“Not at all. I was just saying that I didn’t want you to feel obliged about . . .”
“Are Americans always so fucked up about sex?”
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