“It lasted two years. Like all such arrangements, it was a half-life for the third party—which was me. Kurt was, in the end, far too melancholic and permanently stuck in his bad marriage. You know how it is with so many people. They believe there is no way out, even if life is hell. And I was wondering how I could get myself out of my terrible one-room life and this sad affair with a very bright, but very sad man.
“Then I met Jurgen at a vernissage in someone’s apartment up in Prenzlauer Berg. He wasn’t the best-looking man in history. Stocky, a big beard, a big appetite, and, oh my God, how he smoked. Three packs a day. But at the time, he was an important young playwright in the DDR. I’d read an article about him in Neues Deutschland and one of the literary magazines about this brilliant first play of his—Die Wahl—which, as the title indicated, was all about human choice. It was set in a munitions factory after an explosion that has killed several workers. And it turns out the manager—under pressure to fill quotas—had cut corners when it came to safety.
“Though it didn’t come out and say accusatory things directly, it was clear that Jurgen was pointing a big finger at state bureaucracy and the maniacal need to meet quotas in order to convince everyone that the Five-Year Plan was working. The thing was, the play worked brilliantly as a character study, also showing the way everyone attempted to abnegate responsibility for actions that resulted in the death of ten workers. That was the cleverness of the play. It played the proletarian card, yet also was a riveting study of individual versus collective choice. It made Jurgen, for a time, hugely regarded.
“Naturally I’d seen the play in its original Berlin production. Given how much attention he’d received—and how he had any woman he wanted—I was rather surprised that he would be interested in me.
“But, much to my amazement, he was. He also had a rather big apartment for Berlin—sixty square meters—in Prenzlauer Berg. Of course, he had no talent for housekeeping, and the place was rather squalid. But after my cell of a room, Jurgen’s apartment on Jablonski Strasse seemed like a villa. And he had all these interesting artist friends who lived nearby. So, suddenly, I was part of a community. These friends of his had almost created a state-within-the-state. Yes, we knew we were being frequently observed. Yes, we sometimes privately wondered who among us might be informing to the Stasi about our lives, because in any group you could be sure that several people had been turned. It was an accepted fact of life.
“Anyway, I loved this new life in Prenzlauer Berg, loved being part of this artistic group. There was only one problem. I never really loved Jurgen. Nor, truth be told, did he love me. He made a fuss about me at first. Then I moved in. We shared a bed. We had sex the nights of the week he wasn’t drunk. Beyond that, it was as if we were two people who had fallen into a life together that was strangely utilitarian but not unreasonable. One thing about our bohemian existence in Prenzlauer Berg: it was never boring.
“But then, out of nowhere, I was pregnant. It was an accident. My diaphragm had a tiny tear in it which I had never seen. ‘Must have been manufactured in Halle’ was Jurgen’s only comment about it. After making that bad joke, he just shrugged and said: ‘If you want to keep it, that’s fine, but it will be your responsibility entirely.’
“The thing was, in the GDR abortions were used all the time as an alternative form of birth control. They were very simple to obtain. I wrestled with this idea for no more than five minutes. I was pregnant. I had so little in my life. As sad and hurt as I was by Jurgen’s reaction—he called our baby ‘it’—I so wanted this child.
“‘I’m keeping the baby,’ I said.
“‘That’s your business,’ Jurgen said in response.
“As it turned out, he meant what he said. For the next nine months, he acted as if this pregnancy was an ancillary event in our lives. When I had morning sickness, when I had to go in for a test to see if I was suffering from jaundice, when I was so pregnant that getting up the four flights of stairs with our groceries was a major burden, when my waters broke and I had to be rushed to hospital, when the delivery was complicated and our son spent his first five days on a respirator and there were fears about his survival . . . during all these dramas and anxieties that accompanied the birth of our son, Jurgen was largely elsewhere. Yes, he was still in the apartment. Yes, he was still eating the meals he expected me to cook for him and wearing the clothes he expected me to wash and iron for him. And yes, one Saturday when I was three months pregnant, we went to the registry office on Unter den Linden and, with all our friends from Prenzlauer Berg present, were legally declared man and wife. Why did we go through this charade when there was no real love between us? I insisted on it, because it guaranteed me residence in the apartment we shared and also gave me certain maternal benefits that I would have otherwise been without had I remained single. Yes, I put on a happy face for the ceremony. Afterward, this wonderful sculptor named Judit—who lived near us and did brilliant abstract work that was never officially sanctioned—had a party for us in her apartment. Again I acted happy, even when Jurgen drank so much that he fell asleep on the sofa and began to snore wildly.
“I remember two men in our crowd—they were both novelists who could no longer get published—having to help him home that night. I accompanied them as they literally struggled to keep Jurgen—who was, at this point, turning fat—belching and singing absurd songs and, at one point, shouting: ‘I’m too young to be sentenced to fatherhood!’ They blanched at such drunken awfulness, whispering to me: ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s just being stupid.’ But I knew there was more than a profound grain of truth in what he said. When they finally got him home and he pitched forward into bed, I remember curling up in this broken-down armchair we had and crying nonstop for about an hour. Why was I shedding tears? Because I realized that I was alone in the world, in this farce of a marriage, in this farce of a country that had to keep its citizens imprisoned and under constant surveillance because, at heart, it knew that it was a sham, a counterfeit version of a state. Even my father couldn’t be bothered to come up to see me getting married. He had a program he simply had to produce that day. I didn’t even put up a fight about it. I just accepted his disinterest, which had only increased since my mother’s death. Just as I accepted Jurgen’s disinterest. Just as I accepted my small limited life over there as nothing less than my due. That’s what really troubled me: the realization that my choices were all against happiness, against possibility. Yes, it’s true the horizons were hardly limitless in the GDR. But I knew people, friends, who had happy marriages, happy relationships. What did I choose? Indifference, apathy, aloofness—all for sixty square meters in Prenzlauer Berg.
“Judit became my savior. She all but got me through the pregnancy. She was a shoulder to cry on. She even confronted Jurgen on two occasions and forced him to do the shopping once a week or pick me up at the hospital after an examination. But on the night that Johannes arrived, my husband was down in Dresden at the opening night of a local production of his play. Judit, however, was at the hospital with me.
“The birth itself was complicated, and they gave me an anesthetic that made me so groggy I couldn’t recall the moment when my son actually arrived in the world. When I was cognizant of the world around me again, I panicked, for there was no child by my side. One of the nurses came in and informed me that during the delivery, the umbilical cord had wrapped itself around my son’s neck. That was the first time I learned what sex he was and that he was on a respirator. I insisted on being taken to see him. This was the middle of the night and Judit had already gone home. They brought me to this machine that looked like something out of a mad scientist movie, with this tiny creature sucked into its vortex, a tube down his throat and his nostrils, the machine heaving so loudly as it kept my baby ventilated, alive. When they insisted I return to my ward and get some sleep, I refused. The nurse on duty was a hugely officious type who essentially ordered me back. When I said I wasn’t going anywhere, she threatened me, telling me she c
ould have me reported for antisocial behavior. That’s when I began to scream at her that she could bring the fucking Stasi in here, but I would still not leave my baby alone.
“Fortunately, there was a young doctor—his family name was Mühl—who walked in just as this bitch of a nurse threatened to denounce me to the secret police. He immediately ordered the nurse into an adjoining room. Once they were there, I could hear her getting angry, informing the doctor that, though he was ‘hierarchically senior’ to her, this had been her ward for the past twenty years and no young medico was going to give her orders. The doctor turned out to be made of sterner stuff. He said that she’d behaved in a completely reprehensible way toward—and I always remember the language he used—‘a brave young woman who has given our Democratic Republic a new son.’ At that point I sensed that this doctor was very clever when it came to the sort of ideological attack language that intimidated people and allowed you to get your way. Because he then informed the nurse that she was being reactionary and bourgeois, and he would report her to her trade union for ‘authoritarian behavior.’ Immediately she acted contrite. The doctor returned to the ward and informed me that, from this moment on, a bed would be brought in so I could sleep next to my son, and that he thought he would pull through.
“Well, Johannes—that was the name I gave him—did pull through. Five days later we were home. Bless Judit. She herself had no children. But she’d found me a crib that belonged to one of her neighbors and an old baby carriage. While I was in the hospital she arranged for a bunch of her artist friends to come over and paint little stars and moons in the tiny alcove that was to be Johannes’s nursery.
“But when I came home with our son, Jurgen was still nowhere to be found. He only showed up three days later, unshaven, dirty, smelling of other women, looking like he’d been drinking for around a week. He also didn’t seem to have slept in a very long time—and perhaps that’s the reason his emotions were so raw. When he saw his son—and took him in his arms for the first time—he burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying for around half an hour. I decided not to say anything or do anything, as he was holding Johannes correctly. When he finally subsided, what did he do? He handed me the baby and kissed me on the head and told me he knew he had acted atrociously and would now change his ways. Then he went into our bedroom, left his sweat-soaked, booze- and lipstick-smudged clothes everywhere on the floor, crawled into our bed, and slept for the next twelve hours.
“When he awoke, it was five in the morning and I had been up already with Johannes for three hours, as he was suffering from colic. Jurgen insisted I go back to bed, especially as I had just finished feeding Johannes. He said he would stand watch with him for the rest of the night. I actually slept five hours straight—a new record since the birth of my son—and woke to find Jurgen passed out on the sofa and Johannes curled up in his arms. Seeing this father-son scene—and how peaceful Johannes was next to him—I couldn’t help but hope that Jurgen had come to his senses, that paternity would make him assume just a little responsibility, that we could find a way of becoming a couple, a family. Maybe I also hoped that the tears he shed when he first saw his son were a reflection of some sort of love he had for me but could never express. That’s the most dangerous dream you can have in a relationship that you know is fundamentally flawed—the belief that someone will come to love you and that you will come to love that person. Such thinking is catastrophic, because you are grasping at a hope which, in private, you really know is an illusion.
“Still, I did have this hope. For around four weeks, Jurgen started to show signs of finally wanting to be a father and a husband. He even cut down the drinking and tried to lose a little weight and actually began to pick up after himself. He seemed to relish, for a while, taking his son for walks in his carriage and playing house with us and making love with me again. I can’t say that sex with Jurgen was ever very satisfactory. He was fast; he didn’t understand tenderness or sensuality. Even when he wasn’t drinking heavily, he smelled. But I knew this all from the first night I ever spent with him. Yet I still decided to stay put. Why is it that we so often refuse to trust our instincts—and instead talk ourselves into situations we know are defective, impossible?
“But when you have a new child in your life—a child you simply adore more than anyone you have ever known, a child who has become the best thing ever to happen to you, and without whom you know life simply has no purpose—you can put up with all the defects and shortcomings of his father. Or, at least, that’s what I felt. Just as, during those four weeks of good feelings between us—I also felt that we had turned a corner, that we were becoming a family.
“Then a film that Jurgen had been writing for the state film company, DEFA, was suddenly halted two weeks before shooting was due to begin.
“The script was very brilliant and completely subversive—about a socialist writer who is imprisoned in the final months of the Nazi period and is so badly beaten by two SS guards that he goes into a coma and wakes up seven years later to find himself in a new country called the GDR. And he comes to find the socialist paradise of which he once dreamed a rather flawed one.
“I remember reading the script for the first time shortly before Johannes was born and telling Jurgen that I couldn’t imagine DEFA approving it for production. But this was a moment in 1981 when there was a hint of liberalism by the regime, and they seemed to be encouraging writers and directors to be a little critical of life as we lived it in our ‘humanistic system.’ So Jurgen was very confident the film would happen. They had a director and actors chosen, and locations scouted, when, suddenly, someone in the Ministry of Propaganda got hold of the script and the head of DEFA was called in and formally carpeted for even thinking that such a piece of ‘virulently anti-DDR propaganda’ could ever be made. The minister then turned the whole thing over to the Stasi. Jurgen suddenly disappeared for six days. I was frantic, thinking he’d had an accident or had gone on another bender. Out of nowhere, he showed up at dawn one morning—telling me that he had been held incommunicado in what he was certain was Hohenschönhausen, the famous Stasi prison. But he couldn’t be that certain of its location. As he explained to me, when they came for him, they put him into the back of a van, which had a small cell contained within it, and drove him around for several hours in an attempt to disorient him. We both knew about this Stasi strategy for confusing the people they arrested. Jurgen said that they kept him locked up in that van for hours, arriving at some prison well after nightfall. Beyond that he wouldn’t talk too much about what happened over the next few days, except to say he was interrogated twice daily—always during daylight hours, as ‘befits a “humanistic” police state’—and then he was kept alone in a cell with nothing to read, no paper and pen to write with, no stimulation whatsoever. When I asked him what they demanded of him during the interrogations, he became very tight-lipped, refusing to say anything. Everyone knew that the only way the Stasi would let you out so early is if you denounced somebody. When Jurgen informed me that I must never tell anybody that he was picked up by the Stasi—and did so in a manner that hinted he now regretted even mentioning this to me—I knew that he had been forced into naming names, even if there were no names to name. In fact he became so vehement, so paranoid about any word getting out whatsoever regarding his detention, that I had to promise him repeatedly I would stay silent about his arrest. Which, of course, I did.
“After this, two things happened. The first was that, over the next year, Jurgen discovered that he had gone from being the hottest young playwright in the GDR to someone who couldn’t get his work put on anywhere. He approached several theaters about commissions they had promised him in the wake of the success of Die Wahl. Not one of them would now go near him. Nor would any television or radio drama producers, with the result that Jurgen had his professional identity—the writing that maintained his fragile equilibrium—taken away from him. At first he went all inward, not talking to anybody for days. Then, right after s
ome tiny theater company refused him a commission, he disappeared again and didn’t return for two weeks, showing up in the same bloated, disheveled, catastrophic state as when he had disappeared before. When I demanded to know where he was, his response was: ‘Everywhere.’ And he recounted fourteen days of simply drifting around the country, sometimes crashing on the floors of a friend’s apartment, sometimes sleeping in cheap hotels, sometimes sleeping on trains, sometimes not knowing where he was, sometimes thinking about throwing himself in front of the next oncoming train. But then, so he told me, he had an epiphany while standing on the platform in Frankfurt an der Oder, right on the Polish border. He was going to write his own epic Ring Cycle on the history of the GDR. It was going to have a cast of one hundred and would play out over five nights at a length of around four hours per night. For the better part of an hour he described, in incessant detail, just how all the parts would weave together. He was on creative fire and spoke with such passion, such ferocious commitment, that I felt as if he was in a trance. Every time he could corner me over the next week, he would continue going on about the masterpiece, the East German epic that was assembling itself in his head. As this monologue became more and more of a rant, I really began to fear for his sanity.
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