by Leo Maxim
His banishment to the provinces is enjoyable at first. Wolf arrives in Leipzig in the autumn of 1962, just before his twentieth birthday. It’s carnival time. He goes dancing almost every evening, and as a good-looking Berliner it isn’t hard for him to meet people, making his stay a very pleasurable one. There’s still a proper bourgeoisie in Leipzig. On Saturdays well-brought-up girls go to the tea dance at the Ring Café. Wolf wears pointed shoes with seven-centimetre heels, pinstripe trousers and tailored shirts. The women think he’s great and exotic. He meets one who takes him home, to a villa near the racetrack. There’s a black grand piano in the drawing room, and the girl’s father invites Wolf into the library, where smoking is permitted, for a chat. After that Wolf spends almost every weekend at the house, there are musicians and cocktail parties. The family has its own box at the opera, to which Wolf also has access, and eventually he stops feeling as if he’s in the GDR.
His work as a retoucher on the Leipziger Volkszeitung isn’t particularly demanding, and as a “Socialist assistant” he earns more than he did in Berlin. He also manages to find himself some private commissions, so that he suddenly has plenty of money. He takes taxis rather than trams and eats in restaurants. Wolf has his dancing shoes made to measure, and soon his shirts and trousers too. He likes the city, likes its easy-going elegance. It’s so unlike Berlin, where the bourgeoisie has either fled or gone into hiding, where the workers and officials from Saxony have taken over.
In the summer Wolf has himself signed off sick for three weeks and goes swimming. One day policemen are standing outside his door and want to take him away. It turns out that his mother and sister have taken a holiday at the same time. A neighbour in Berlin has noticed that the two women are away. The neighbour assumes they have fled to the West, whereupon the police call Wolf’s workplace to check if he’s still there. When he is missing too, a search is launched for the family, although this has to be quickly cancelled because Wolf is there and his mother and sister are demonstrably lying in the sun on the Baltic coast. This event brings him back to reality, particularly since he later receives another visit from the police, who immediately arrest him. This is because just before he left Berlin he and his friend Manfred threw a heavy wooden plank off the Flatow Tower in Potsdam. He was accused of damage to property, although this was withdrawn a short time later on grounds of insignificance.
All these stories involving the police have also attracted the attention of the army. Wolf receives his call-up papers, and has to report to Berlin immediately. At three o’clock in the morning he is standing along with 200 other young men in an empty car park outside the district military headquarters, which is based in a freshly assembled cardboard shed on Nordmarkstrasse. It is dark and cold, street lamps bathe the car park in pale light. They stand in the car park for hours. When dawn rises, a captain divides them into groups of five, and then they march to the station. Wolf is tired, he isn’t used to getting up early, certainly not as early as this. He thinks about his girlfriends, about the warm bed in his room in Leipzig. It’s only now that he understands that the fine life is over for the time being. The state has taken him in, to turn him into a Socialist. He feels cramped and confined. No more hide-and-seek from now on. He has been handed over to these men in uniform, to these yelling idiots who even seem to enjoy all this army nonsense. Wolf trots along behind the others, sees the familiar streets, the city waking up. He’s glad he’s not going to bump into anyone he knows from his other life at this time of day. Under his arm he carries a cardboard box, in which he will later send his clothes home. Later, when he is himself a man in uniform, one among many.
Wolf is brought to Sanitz, near Rostock, to an anti-aircraft regiment. The barracks have been newly built, the National People’s Army is still young and just beginning to grow. Some of the officers also served under the Nazis. The uniforms haven’t changed much in the meantime. Wolf thinks of Werner, of his time in the war, which isn’t actually all that long ago. The army doctor attests that Wolf’s knees are not entirely fit for service, which means that he is given an office job, which could be worse. In the regiment they’re looking for someone who can draw. Wolf volunteers, and is immediately asked to paint a mural for the new cinema. The commander wants a heroic soldier with a steel helmet and a machine gun, looking into the distance, confident of victory. Below the picture he wants the line, “We are defending our homeland.” Wolf does everything exactly as they want it, he is praised and given a position as a staff soldier. He is also trained as a projectionist, and put in charge of the library.
Beside the projectionist’s cabin there’s a little room with a lockable door. Here Wolf listens to records, reads books, is able to forget the world of the barracks a little and be on his own. Wolf notices that the army actually works exactly in the same way as the GDR as a whole. Here too there are little free spaces, niches that you can disappear into. Here too the principle of giving and taking is in operation. Wolf leads his regiment to victory in the great unit drawing competition, so he doesn’t have to take part in the exhausting manoeuvres. He paints brightly coloured partitions when a general pays a visit, and luckily nothing happens to him when it turns out that his new girlfriend has spent the night with him in the barracks. He enjoys this game, testing the boundaries. He doesn’t mind painting ludicrous propaganda pictures if it means they leave him in peace. He sees the others who don’t believe in the great cause, but who all join in. Wolf says it’s all about the facade, that the state didn’t really demand genuine belief. You didn’t have to bend the knee or sell yourself, you just had to go along with the big spectacle of Socialism.
I wonder whether that was really the case. Whether you really noticed when you’d crossed your own boundaries, when the alien belief slowly and unnoticeably seeped into you. Or whether in the end the others determined the rules of the game. Perhaps all those free spaces and possibilities were just an illusion that distracted you from the fact that you were joining in. I too always had the feeling of actually being true to myself, while at the same time I knew what I had to do to avoid getting into trouble. This combination of cheeky thoughts and good behaviour, of little lies and a big truth, is quickly learnt and hard to shake off again. It’s a survival strategy, a protection mechanism for people who can’t make up their minds.
Again and again Wolf breaks the rules as if trying to discover at any price the point at which the others will finally react. He doesn’t do it deliberately, it just happens to him, and he himself is usually surprised by his daring feats. He takes his girlfriend for a ride on his moped and is stopped for speeding, with no driver’s licence and no leave pass. Military police bring him back to barracks in handcuffs, and he is to be accused of desertion. It turns out that Wolf hasn’t sworn an oath to the flag. On the day of the swearing-in he had, as a precaution, rubbed stinging ointment on one of his eyes. His eye swelled up, and he was taken to a hospital in Rostock. As a result he avoided taking the oath, and no one could prosecute him for his crime. He was supposed to catch up on his oath-taking, but something had always intervened, so that after a year and a half Wolf left the army without ever swearing loyalty to the Republic. He skilfully dodged the issue without open refusal.
Wolf later entertained us handsomely with his army stories. I loved his adventure with the People’s Army. Again and again he would imitate the lieutenant colonel’s face when he found a pair of women’s knickers in Wolf’s bed. Again and again he told us how he had climbed over the barracks wall drunk at night. Every time he embellished the story a little more. I don’t know how much of those anecdotes was true, and Wolf himself probably didn’t know after a certain point. At any rate my father’s military service always sounded like enormous fun to me, with Wolf a kind of uncontrollable clown who always made the others look a bit sillier than they already were. Today, in fact, I think Wolf was probably more like a clever fish that dreams about the sea, and forgets that he’s still swimming in an aquarium.
I don’t think Wolf was a
n especially political person at the time. He wasn’t yet convinced that the system was wrong. He was more concerned with himself, with his needs, with his dignity. He didn’t like being told what to do. He was allergic to other people’s rules, he wanted to determine his own life. When he felt pressure from outside he grew stubborn. If someone got on his nerves he thumped him in the face. I always experienced him as a strong, independent person. As someone who insisted on his own independence. Of course that can quickly become political in a country in which the collective is in charge, in which the independent self is supposed to be done away with. But even the comrades probably understood how Wolf works. In his Stasi file it would later say he was critical, but not hostile. The freedoms he took seemed somehow normal even to me. Without him I’d probably never have become a Westerner.
After the army Wolf goes to study print and design. Most of the other students are women. Soon he finds his way back into his old, easy life. He has one woman he goes to the theatre with, one who cooks for him and one he goes to bed with. College isn’t particularly demanding, because most of what he’s taught there he can do already. At home he is spoilt by his mother and sister. For Sigrid he’s become a kind of substitute husband, for his little sister a father figure. When he is twenty-three, the two-and-a-half-room flat becomes too cramped for him, and he moves to the shop in Prenzlauer Berg. Even today that still rankles with Sigrid.
Wolf starts working as a freelance graphic designer, which isn’t easy because there’s a paper shortage in the GDR and it’s hard to get commissions. The little money that he has Wolf carries as a bundle of notes in his trouser pocket. Sometimes he has nothing left at the start of the month. He doesn’t eat much, and even a tram journey becomes a financial burden. This insecurity worries him, he’s nervous and his blood pressure goes through the roof. When he’s worked up he falls over, when he’s under stress he goes to sleep. He says this new freedom was lovely, but it also frightened him. Perhaps it all reminds him too much of the time after the war when the family had no money and nothing to eat. He lacks that underlying feeling of security, the absolute confidence that things will somehow keep going. I noticed that a lot later on. When he bought ten cans of potted meat and couldn’t explain why he’d done it. When he stored tons of coal in the cellar in case things changed. When the Wall came down and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen next, Wolf bought warm underwear for the whole family. He himself knew that it was nonsense, but he couldn’t help it.
Wolf and Anne, 1969
Eventually even all the affairs become too much for him. He decides to split up with them all and concentrate his energies. The evening he parts from the last of his women, he visits his friend Hansi. He already has another guest, a beautiful, pale woman with long, dark hair who doesn’t even notice Wolf at first, whose attention he has to struggle for, who has something shy and girlish about her, but also a resolute quality. She casts a spell on him, his good intentions are forgotten. When they walk through the snowy park and he takes her hand, it’s as if it couldn’t be otherwise.
7
Traces
AS A CHILD I IDENTIFIED PEOPLE according to their cars. I didn’t know my parents’ friends by name, but I knew if they drove a white Wartburg Tourist or a Lada 1500. Most of them drove Trabants, so they were hard to tell apart. Sometimes I remembered the colour or particular fittings, but in fact Trabant drivers weren’t particularly interesting. A blue Skoda with added foglights and a fake leather cover on the steering wheel, on the other hand, made a huge impression on me. As did a red Moskwitsch with a fluffy duck on the rear-view mirror. But my absolute number one was a light-brown Citroën Pallas GSA. It belonged to Gerhard. This car was like a Ferrari in the GDR. My greatest joy was when my grandparents came to visit and I was allowed to sit in the Citroën while the rest of the family had a cup of coffee. I would sit behind the wheel for hours, imagining I was Erich Honecker’s chauffeur. No idea how I hit on that one, perhaps it was because the car was so unbelievably luxurious and could only be really worthy of a head of state. Sometimes Gerhard sat next to me and we played pilots. I was the captain, which was why I was allowed to turn on the engine and move the lever that made the car glide soundlessly upwards. My Communist grandfather could not have given me a stronger argument for the superiority of capitalism.
In the Citroën era, which was only briefly interrupted by a Peugeot phase, my grandparents were living in Paris. Gerhard was working there as a correspondent for Neues Deutschland. I only ever saw him at Christmas and in the summer holidays, when he brought us boxes of Lego, jeans and velvet jumpers. Gerhard was the Western grandpa, who could fulfil almost all desires. Wolf always got presents too, which is why I couldn’t understand why he thought Gerhard was so stupid. There were a lot of arguments about Gerhard in our house. Wolf said he was a Stalinist, and when I asked what that was, Anne dismissed the question and changed the subject. I sensed that something wasn’t right, but I didn’t understand what the actual problem was. Sometimes I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen, and when I walked in they fell silent. When I asked what they were arguing about, Anne said it was about politics. At the time I thought politics must be a pretty stupid thing if it put everybody in a bad mood. Eventually Wolf stopped even coming when we visited my grandparents. I saw less and less of Gerhard too. When we met he seemed absent and remote. We stopped playing pilots or Erich Honecker’s chauffeur. There were fewer presents as well. That was the time when I lost my grandfather.
I only knew my other grandfather from Wolf’s stories. When Wolf was twenty, he broke off all contact with his father. There were no letters, no signs of life, nothing. I knew his name was Werner, that he often beat Wolf, and that he liked other women more than Grandma Sigrid.
When Wolf talked about Werner, he was sad and slightly helpless, which was why I was always glad when we were able to talk about something else again. Werner was a weird, shadowy figure as far as I was concerned. An evil stranger. That was also why I wasn’t particularly keen to meet him. Werner wasn’t one of us, and there was no reason to change that.
It was only after the fall of the Wall that Wolf thought it was time to talk to Werner again. Perhaps it was because everything was in a state of confusion anyway. All of life was starting over again, it was the end of final decisions, and even an ostracized father got another chance. I was quite excited when we climbed to Werner’s flat in Pankow one winter afternoon. Standing in the doorway was an old man who looked strangely familiar to me. Werner has the same eyes as my father. Amused, quick eyes that dart back and forth and register everything. When we went into the sitting room, Werner told Wolf to turn out the light in the corridor. I couldn’t help laughing. That damned sentence had accompanied me throughout the whole of my childhood. Wolf had always told us to turn the light out when we left a room. Because electricity is expensive, and because there’s nothing worse than wasting money. Now my father himself had become a child again, obediently turning out the light in the corridor. Werner showed us his workshop. Everything looked exactly as it did in Wolf’s studio. The tools were neatly lined up, the paper was in the right-hand corner of the desk. I reflected that you probably never escape your father, however far you might push him away. I understood that I’d known Werner for ages. That he’s in my father and perhaps also in me. That you don’t decide who your father is.
My two grandfathers never met. I don’t know if they’d have had anything to say to each other if they had met. Still, they built the same state, they were in the same Party, perhaps they even believed in the same things at some point. And yet they would probably have remained strange to one another because their careers were so different, because fate had guided them in very different directions very early on.
When Gerhard is born in Berlin on 8 June 1923, the family sends out cards on handmade paper with their son’s initials embossed in gold. Gerhard has two older sisters who frame the son and heir like angels in the childhood photographs. The sisters wear ruched dress
es and have enormous silk slides in their hair, and Gerhard is also wrapped in a white dress that makes his delicate face look even gentler. At this time Gerhard’s father Wilhelm and a partner run a big international law firm on the Kurfürstendamm. They have a nanny, a housekeeper and a chauffeur. Frieda, Gerhard’s mother, is in charge of the household. She is from the Hamburg seagoing family Barents, who trace themselves back to the Dutch seafarer Willem Barents, who in the sixteenth century discovered the route to the North Pole that was later named after him. They’re very proud of that in our family even today, which might have something to do with the fact that we’ve all got a lousy sense of direction. I constantly get lost even in my own part of town, and my mother would probably starve to death if she was left out in the city park. Perhaps our gift for orientation was used up to such an extent 500 years ago that there’s nothing left for us.