by Leo Maxim
*
For the children, the city is one enormous adventure playground. Even at the age of six Wolf moves around the area with his pals from dawn till dusk. They are a gang, and gangs stick together. They climb on piles of rubble, make dens in abandoned basements and balance on joists sticking out of the ruins. They catch ladybirds, put them in shoeboxes and run all over the city trying to find leaves for their ladybirds. The city is busy, the streets are full of people. War-wounded sit on the pavements playing music, locksmiths, carpenters, dairymen work in backyards.
Sometimes they head out to Marzahn, where unexploded ammunition is stored in a dump. They start fires, throw in machine-gun straps and run for cover. The noises of the flying bullets are so terrifying that some of them shit themselves with fear. The bigger boys break the detonators off the flak grenades and pour the black powder into bags. They go into ruins with intact chimneys. The explosive goes into the oven door, the fuses are shoelaces dipped in weed-killer. They light them and run like hell. And when the charge goes up behind them and the huge chimney falls to the ground like a toppled giant, they shout and dance with joy. The grown-ups never ask where they’ve been. They have their own life.
They only come home when they’re hungry, and for the first few years the hunger never goes away. Wolf’s mother Sigrid makes soup from turnip stalks, and Wolf and his little sister Rita nearly throw up when the stalks get stuck in their throats. They have a room and a kitchen, the toilet is half a flight of steps down. The room is damp and the tiled stove is usually cold, because there’s been no fuel in Berlin for ages. Most of the trees have been cut down, and the big, fat trees that no one dares fell have no lower branches. When the wind blows cold Wolf has to sit by the window and wait for a branch to fall from the crown of the tree. And if one does come down, other boys go after it too.
Every two weeks Sigrid goes foraging in Vehlefanz near Oranienburg. She digs in the fields for turnips and potatoes. Sigrid also always brings a big bundle of kindling with her, carrying it around on her back for hours on end, for fear that someone might steal it before she gets home. Werner, Sigrid’s husband, is still in France as a prisoner of war at this point. She has to bring up the children on her own. She sells the toys, the breakfast boards, the coffee cups to get hold of a bit of bread and margarine. Sometimes at night she weeps quietly to herself over life’s injustices.
In the middle of October 1947 a telegram arrives from Werner. He writes that he’s just been released from imprisonment, and that he will be home soon, probably around the eighteenth. Suddenly Sigrid starts whistling tunes when she gets up in the morning. She tells the children their Dad is coming home soon. Wolf is delighted, and at the same time he realizes that he doesn’t know what his father actually looks like, or how his voice sounds. When Werner went off to war in November 1944, Wolf was two years old. He has no memory of him, nothing. Wolf knows only that everything is going to be fine. His mother said so.
Sigrid buys flour and a few eggs on the black market. It takes up a good share of her monthly allowance, but she doesn’t care because she is absolutely determined to bake a cake for her husband’s homecoming. Days before he is due to arrive, they scrub the flat, wash the laundry. Sigrid irons the good tablecloth, a neighbour cuts the children’s hair. The evening before he is due to arrive, Sigrid puts a bunch of flowers and the cake on the tablecloth. Wolf is so excited that he can’t get to sleep. He thinks he’ll probably never have to worry about anything ever again once his Dad is home.
At eight o’clock in the morning Wolf hears voices from the kitchen. And then there he is, that tall, strange man. He strokes Wolf’s head, he has brought a piece of chocolate, and basically everything’s just as Wolf imagined. But after only a short time he realizes that Werner isn’t going to sort everything out after all. He’s irritable and terribly tired. Any confusion, any noise, any problem, however small, makes him lose his temper completely. He shouts, quivers with fury, then sits apathetically on his chair again for hours on end. Werner escaped death as a Wehrmacht NCO at the Front, was imprisoned in camps, where he saw his comrades die in their hundreds. He spent over a year toiling on a farm in western France. It took him weeks to get back to Berlin. To his family, to his old life, the one he dreamt of in prison, which gave him the strength to survive. And now at last he’s there—and he’s finished.
Werner remains a stranger to Wolf for a long time. Sigrid had told him about an athletic, handsome, funny man. Someone who can do everything. The Werner that Wolf meets is gaunt, restless, nervous. One day after he comes back, Werner goes out to collect twigs so that they have fuel for the oven. A week later he registers at the labour exchange. He looks like someone who’s afraid of waking up. He gets up at six o’clock in the morning and dusts the room. His urge for order and cleanliness is frightening. The children get on his nerves. One evening when Wolf is whining because he doesn’t want to go to bed, Werner thrashes the living daylights out of him. The next morning Wolf can’t sit down, his bottom is covered with bruises. Werner goes on to beat him often, hitting him so hard that Wolf flies across the room. Sigrid doesn’t dare stop her husband. She thinks that’s how it has to be, she puts up with it. They’re glad when Werner isn’t there, when peace returns. Wolf says that over time Werner was at home more and more rarely. The family takes breakfast together. As a returning soldier, Werner gets an extra ration of butter and eggs. He carefully peels the eggs, cuts them into slices and eats them all himself. The children eat thin milk soup and watch.
Once Wolf is caught smashing the windows of a factory with his friends. The factory owner demands that the windows be paid for. Werner sits down at the table with Wolf and calculates what the damage will cost the family purse. In the end Werner says Wolf has to go, because there isn’t enough money left for everybody. Sigrid packs a little rucksack, they say goodbye, and then Wolf walks off, convinced that from now on he’ll have to get by on his own. He sees his parents standing by the door and doesn’t even cry. He thinks that’s just how things are. At the next street corner Werner catches up with his son and tells him that the lesson was intended to teach Wolf the seriousness of his crime. He is allowed back home.
I wonder if Werner understood what a terrible moral his pedagogical exercise left behind. How shocking it is for a six-year-old child to think that he might be banished from home by his father for a stupid prank. Werner probably expected Wolf to burst into tears and plead for forgiveness. But Wolf wasn’t like that. A few months later Werner does the same thing all over again. He locks Wolf in the basement because he can’t bear it when the siblings argue. Instead of complaining, Wolf wraps himself up in a bicycle cover and goes to sleep in the basement. It is a struggle between the two of them.
Werner becomes a teaching assistant in a vocational school in the Russian-occupied zone. It’s just by chance that a job happens to be available there. His wages are paid in Ostmarks, which is a problem, because they live in the West, where money from the East isn’t worth much. Once a week the children go shopping for food in the East with their mother. They drag the heavy bags back across the Bornholm Bridge into the West. Wolf hates that bridge because it’s so long. When he has to go and get milk on his own, he always pauses in the middle of the bridge. He spits on the empty railway tracks and imagines he’s an engine driver, powering a big, black steam locomotive through the city. It would be a very special train that didn’t need tracks, one on which you could bring the heavy milk jugs right up to the front door. In November 1949, they move to Schönhauser Allee in the East. It’s a practical decision, not a political one. At the time no one could have predicted that the different sectors were eventually to become different countries.
When schoolchildren are chosen to be sent to the countryside, Wolf is usually among them. He’s thinner and weaker than the others in his class. Once they are sent to Glowe on the Baltic coast. In the morning there’s a flag parade and five jam sandwiches. For lunch there’s soup with cod liver oil. They stay in a former
prisoner-of-war camp. There are huge sheds and barbed wire on the perimeter fence. Wolf thinks the camp is weird. He wants to put on weight as quickly as possible so that he doesn’t have to come here again.
At home Werner starts talking about Socialism, which will soon sweep all poverty away. Werner is now studying at the College of Education in the newly founded GDR, and is excited about the idea of a new society. He absorbs it all like a thirsty man, like someone who urgently needs something he can believe in again. Once Werner comes home from his training and explains that even the Socialist family needs new rules. From now on the children are to say not Papa and Mutti, but Werner and Sigrid. And they’re to swim naked in the lake, and the children are to join the Pioneers.
In the evening, Sigrid has to go with Werner to lectures on the origins of Communism. She doesn’t understand a word of what’s said there, but she goes along so that Werner doesn’t get cross. On the First of May the family demonstrates on Unter den Linden. A woman puts a carnation in the buttonhole of Wolf’s jacket, Werner
wears his dark suit and Sigrid a floral dress. They walk past the ruins, through the Tiergarten, where no trees stand. They sing songs about the united front of the working class, about the rise of the proletariat, who have finally lost their chains. Wolf wonders where the chains went. He has a book about a pirate captain who attacks ships and frees the enslaved oarsmen. The slaves wore chains too, and were glad to get rid of them. It seems to be a good thing.
In the summer of 1951 there is a World’s Fair in Berlin. The young people of the world are invited to bombed-out, post-war Germany. Wolf drives through the city on a truck along with the other children. They sing songs, and in the evening they go to a stand and pinch food parcels, which include a piece of salami. Wolf has never had salami before. He takes it home, cuts it into thin slices and eats it all himself.
One weekend Wolf goes with Werner to an exhibition about the first Five-Year Plan of the GDR. At the way in there’s a blue plastic badge with a Five on it for the children. Werner explains that in five years’ time people in the GDR won’t have money any more, because everyone in the shop will just take what he needs. Werner points to the plans and tables hanging on the exhibition walls. They are proof of the superiority of Socialism. Wolf can’t imagine how that’s supposed to work. But five years is a long time for a nine-year-old. It’s possible that Socialism will get that far, who knows. And anyway, they now have so much to eat that no one needs to go hungry.
It’s less fun in the Pioneers. There are constant appeals and processions. Agitators come and say things that nobody really understands. Wolf and his sister are the only ones on their street who wear the white shirt and the blue scarf. The other children tease them for it. In November 1951 Werner moves out of the house. He tells the children that he and Sigrid don’t love each other any more, so from now on they’re going to live apart. Sigrid stands by the ironing board and cries. Wolf is allowed to call her Mutti again, doesn’t have to swim naked and doesn’t have to go to the Pioneers. Because Werner took the sofa bed away, in the evening they set up a little camp of mattresses in the sitting room. Wolf lies next to his mother. As he falls asleep he feels her warmth, hears her breath. It’s a lovely feeling.
6
Thugs
AFTER SCHOOL WOLF and his mates go to West Berlin, often smuggling themselves into the border cinemas to watch cowboy films, and steal chocolate and sweets. The West is gaudy and exciting. It smells of coffee and chewing gum. The American soldiers, who sometimes give them little presents, are as cool as the cowboys in the films. No comparison with the East German police who guard the border crossings in their ill-fitting uniforms. Every day they go back and forth, from one world into the other. They see the neon signs and the red banners, gleaming Daimler coupés and Russian military vehicles, women in sheer stockings and apron dresses. They listen to rock ’n ’roll and workers’ songs. Wolf says every child knew at the time which the superior system was. The East strikes him as increasingly helpless, increasingly pitiful. On 17 June 1953 he takes the tram past Alexanderplatz. He sees the Russian tanks, hears the shots from Keibelstrasse, where the big prison stands. He goes home and thinks that the GDR might be over soon. In a few days the uprising has been defeated, and everything goes on as if nothing had happened.
Every other Sunday Wolf’s mother dresses him and his sister up smartly, and then the children head off to Stalinallee. Werner lives there, on the first Socialist street of the Republic. They walk past the Stalin Monument, larger than life on its patch of green. Stalin wears a military jacket and the same severe expression as Werner when he’s explaining something important. The way to Werner’s flat passes through a huge stairwell covered with marble slabs. There is a lift and a refuse chute. It’s a palace. But a palace in which workers and peasants now live, says Werner. He himself is a school headmaster, but that’s not important. What is important, says Werner, is that you feel like a worker. Wolf doesn’t like these Sunday visits. It’s like citizenship classes. Werner asks how things are going with the Pioneers, and they don’t dare say that they stopped going ages ago. He reads to them from newspaper articles that he finds instructive. They are about production figures, about successful housing projects. He can’t explain why there are no jeans in the East. Then he refers to the wider political situation, to the West, which is obstructing the young Republic whenever it can. When Werner speaks about the workers’ paradise, Wolf thinks about the old women who stand outside the coal shop opposite their house every day, waiting for a few briquettes to fall off the truck. He thinks about the shops in West Berlin where there is a surplus of everything. The reality he knows and the things Werner tells him don’t really match up.
Later Wolf stops going to Stalinallee. He can’t bear those lectures any more. In a former air-raid shelter on Storkower Strasse he has set up a party room with other young people. They dance rock ’n ’roll and comb their hair back with soapy water. He practises his dance steps on the handle of the sitting-room door. He meets his first girls, there is snogging and also a bit of fumbling. On special occasions Wolf wears a red velvet jacket with gold buttons and tight, black trousers that mustn’t be more than fifteen centimetres across the hem. Now he’s a rocker, a thug, the kind of guy who won’t be fobbed off with bullshit. When they dance openly at a fair in the Plänterwald, the police come. Dancing openly is forbidden in the GDR. Girls and boys are separated, pushed onto trucks and dropped in a forest near Oranienburg. They walk back to Berlin in the rain at night, humiliated, put in their place. A few months later they set up in an abandoned summer house in Blankenburg. They listen to Elvis and Bill Haley and dance in the dark until they drop. Here again, the police sometimes come by, confiscate their tapes, note their names and ID numbers. Wolf says they really just wanted to have some fun, but the stupid state always immediately did something political. Anyone who wears jeans and slip-on shoes is a class enemy. Anyone who stands on the street corner with a transistor radio is threatened by helpers of the People’s Police. Listening to Western radio and forming groups is forbidden. If you comb your hair into a DA, you have to stand spread-eagled against the wall while your ID is checked. Wolf says it was eventually just about the principle. Whether you were for or against. “They were always showing you that you didn’t belong. They turned you into the enemy.”
Wolf assumed that role. He probably didn’t see himself as an enemy, but more as someone who didn’t go along with everything. That balance between conformity and resistance, between courage and betrayal, is hard to explain. Even those words are probably too big to describe the little movements that were generally at issue. It was a grey area of possibilities, in which you could go in one direction or another, in which there was no right way and no wrong one, but at best the feeling of having found a bearable compromise. Anyone living in that grey area had to keep reacting afresh, had to constantly reconsider everything. He wasn’t a traitor or a hero, he could only try to be as true to himself as possible.
A few weeks later the new fast train line to Pankow is opened. The train no longer passes via Gesundbrunnen, my father’s old home, because the Wall is there now. The new line is a symbol, a sign from the Socialist capital. There is a photograph of the first fast train coming into the station, decorated with flowers, and Wolf brushes out part of the train so that all that is seen is part of the engine, which looks rather strange. This time the Stasi aren’t as nice, they question my father for hours, wanting to know who was behind it. He can’t explain how this new error was made. He himself is quite baffled, because he doesn’t know what actually possessed him. It’s something between an accident and a provocation. The Stasi men see his bafflement, but they also see that he isn’t an idiot. They shake their heads and say that the door to prison is now wide open. Hostile propaganda, the vilification of senior representatives of the state, it doesn’t get much worse than that. But something keeps them from punishing him severely. Perhaps they see that he isn’t actually an enemy, just someone who’s seeing how far he can go. Or else they think he’s interesting and they have other plans for him. This might explain the many attempts they will later make to recruit him. At any rate, Wolf is let off lightly. He is sent to Leipzig as a “Socialist assistant”.