Red Love

by Leo Maxim

  Vocational school wasn’t as I’d imagined it either. Our citizenship teacher Herr Thumm, a massive, bearded man who also taught sport, thought it was important to have a solid class perspective. It wasn’t enough for him that we should learn the nonsense he told us off by heart. He demanded declarations of faith, and if someone’s voice failed them he would have a hard time at school because Herr Thumm was also a Party secretary and none of my fellow students dared to contradict him. Herr Thumm quickly marked me out as an enemy, because I had once admitted to watching Western television for the sake of information. He involved me in discussions which he guided so skilfully that eventually I had no option but to reveal my true, traitorous thoughts. Then he would nod triumphantly like a policeman who has just caught a thief in flagrante. His eyes narrowed to little slits, and he told me he would cut me down to size sooner or later. “This size with a hat on,” he said, pointing at his fleshy thumbs. Even today I sometimes think of those conversations, and imagine I could still have them and throw my steely arguments right into his beardy face. In my imagination Herr Thumm is finally sitting there speechless, unable to escape my reasoning. In those days it was more often the case that I was left sitting there in silence, fighting back the tears. He managed to scare me. And I did become a little smaller.

  Anne advised me to do the Abitur at evening class. You could only do that if you already had a job. Apprentices were also accepted in unusual cases. The headmistress of Treptow technical college asked me how I planned to do both things at the same time. Vocational school and Abitur. “You won’t stand the pace,” she said. But I wanted at least to try. My apprenticeship lasted from seven till four. The Abitur classes ran from five till ten. Quite honestly, even today I don’t know how I managed to do that for three years. I wanted to get back to my old world at all costs. And I could only do that with the Abitur.

  On my first day at technical college, this was in the spring of 1987, the classroom was so full that there weren’t enough tables for everybody. The physics teacher told us not to worry because in a month at most everyone would have a desk of their own. And so indeed they did. Our numbers dwindled by the week, until only fifteen students remained. Our citizenship teacher was called Ecki, and he insisted that that was what we called him. Ecki had a beard, small, calm eyes, and wore sandals with thick woollen socks. In our first class he wrote a quotation from Heine on the board: “We need a united Germany, united both inside and out.” We spent a whole class talking about that sentence, which seemed so dangerous to me that I didn’t dare copy it into my notebook. Until that point I had never thought about whether there might ever be a reunification. That would have meant the GDR somehow disappearing, and I couldn’t imagine that. Ecki explained that in philosophy it was important to think the unthinkable, because otherwise you always remained stuck in the present. “So let’s be philosophers for a while and wonder what might come after the GDR.” We were electrified, because none of us had ever experienced a citizenship class like that. Ecki drew a table on the board. We were to tell him the pros and cons of the GDR that occurred to us in the course of a minute. Strangely, at that moment all I could think of were the pros, because we’d always learnt them off by heart. The others seemed to feel the same. The second column was left blank. “‘Seems to be a perfect country,” said Ecki and wrote in the cons column, “Students don’t dare to say what they think.” That was too much for us, and a long recital of shortcomings began. No freedom of opinion, no freedom of travel, too little fruit, no free elections, no decent jeans, no press freedom. As far as I remember those were the main points. We sat there, excited, faces glowing, it was the first time that we were able to say something in school that we really thought.

  The other teachers at the technical college were also unlike the teachers we’d had until then. It turned out that some of them were no longer allowed to teach at secondary schools and were therefore employed on a freelance basis. Our German teacher, Frau Bietz, brought in books by Bulgakov and read to us from them. Our Russian teacher regretted the fact that none of us wanted to speak Russian, but she sympathized, and left us alone in the classroom during tests so that we could copy things down from our cribs in peace. After two years there were only eight of us. The fewer of us there were, the tighter we were as a group. We met at the weekend and did our homework together. I gave private coaching in chemistry and German, and received support in maths and Russian in return. My fellow pupils were rather jolly characters. One of them worked as a janitor in a children’s home and wanted to study music. Another was a seamstress in a theatre and planned to become a textile designer. Each of us had fallen through the net of the GDR school system at some point, and each of us still had aspirations.

  Just before Christmas 1986 Gerhard asked me if I fancied going to France with him in the summer. He said he wanted to show all his grandchildren the places where he had fought in the Resistance, and as the oldest I would be the first. I was so amazed that I couldn’t think of anything to say at first. The idea of a sixteen-year-old being allowed to go on a trip to the West was about as likely as Erich Honecker with a punk hairdo. Gerhard said someone he knew in the Politburo would sort out the permit. In the meantime I should mug up on my French so that he didn’t need to feel ashamed of me. A month later I was summoned to police headquarters on Alexanderplatz. On the ground floor people stood in long queues to make their travel applications. Gerhard had told me to take the lift to the second floor because there was a special travel desk there. On the second floor the corridors were wood-panelled and there were no queues. The only person sitting in the waiting room was Frank Schöbel, a GDR singing star, who clearly had good connections as well. After a short wait I was called in and a friendly policewoman in a red uniform asked me to sign my passport. The policewoman asked me how long I planned to stay in France and which border crossing was going to be most convenient. It seemed to be the most normal thing in the world to want to spend your summer in France. Ten minutes later I was back in the lift, holding a blue passport and an exit visa. I should have been yelling with joy, but I felt somehow paralysed. It was all so unreal, this waiting room, this friendly policewoman. How could it suddenly be so easy to get over that stupid border? Gerhard had opened the Wall for me with a phone call.

  The Politburo informed my vocational school about my impending trip to France. I was summoned to see the headmistress, who was quite upset, and granted me two weeks’ extra holiday. The best thing was the look on the face of Herr Thumm, the citizenship teacher, who no longer understood the world. Why was someone like me allowed to travel to the West? He tried not to show it, but it was clear that Herr Thumm, possibly for the first time in his life, doubted a decision by the Politburo.

  We set off early in July, in Gerhard’s light-brown Citroën Pallas GDA. The closer we get to the border in Marienborn, the emptier the autobahn gets. There’s a sign saying that this is the last exit in the GDR. We drive on, there are no more Eastern cars, even though we are in the East. At a walking pace we drive past the barbed-wire fences and anti-tank barriers, the soldiers with sub-machine guns and the chevaux de frise. Gerhard tunes the car radio to a classicalmusic station and hums along. He never usually does that. Perhaps he’s embarrassed for me to see how barricaded our country is. What became of a dream of Socialism.

  A border guard checks our passports, and then we’re allowed to drive on. I ask Gerhard if we’re in the West now, and he asks if I can’t smell it, because the air here is quite different from the air at home. He laughs. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him make a joke about the GDR.

  First of all we drive to see Aunt Hannah in Düsseldorf, the city where Anne was born. Hannah gives me fifty Western marks, and I walk around the streets a little, buy a pack of Camels and feel fantastic. The next day we travel on via Aachen to Brussels. I’m amazed that there are no checks at the border into Belgium. Gerhard tells me about how he escaped across the border with his parents near Aachen. I listen to what he says, b
ut I’m actually far too busy absorbing all the new things. The colours, the smells, the cars. In Brussels we eat mussels and chips, and Gerhard tells me he ate mussels with his parents back then as well.

  It’s only clear to me now that this trip was a historical forensic investigation. That it wasn’t about the West, it was about Gerhard’s story. It could be that he was a bit disappointed by me, because in those days I was much less interested in the past than in the present. I didn’t care that much about the Third Reich. I was in the West for the first time, and that was what mattered.

  Later, when we arrive in France, Gerhard turns into a different person. All of a sudden he is relaxed and witty. He talks nineteen to the dozen and seems strangely rejuvenated. He seems much happier there than in the GDR.

  I didn’t think much more about it at the time, but today I believe he felt really at home in France. In the country of his youth, surrounded by the old stories and adventures, by the time when the historical truth was still so simple. It was certainly no coincidence that he repeatedly lived abroad, that he always wanted to get away. Even though he convinced himself that the East German state was anti-fascist and historically superior, he also knew that there were people living in the GDR who had cheered Hitler on. And did he not find the uniformity of thought in the GDR somehow familiar? Didn’t he find it a bit strange when the FDJ marched along Stalinallee with flaming torches?

  In France, 1987

  The boundless hatred of Israel in East German propaganda can’t have left him cold either. In Gerhard’s Stasi file there’s a memo from June 1967 reporting on an event in East German television. At the time Gerhard presented a foreign-policy magazine programme called Objektiv, broadcast once a month. The Stasi note says: “An article was prepared for today’s Objektiv programme which was supposed to expose the background of the aggressive state of Israel as an outpost of global imperialism in the Arab world which is systematically developing its functions on behalf of the oil monopolies. Comrade Leo declared that it couldn’t be done like that. He refused to voice this article for the broadcast, saying it was anti-Semitic. As is well known, Gerhard Leo is of Jewish descent, and is even supposed to have relatives in Israel. The episode of Objektiv broadcast by DFF on 15.6.67 was cancelled, and instead extracts from the election rally were shown with Comrade Walter Ulbricht in Leipzig, in which Israel’s aggressive policy was mentioned. The cancellation of the Objektiv programme is a hitherto unique and incomparable event. Leo was immediately relieved of his function in television broadcasting.”

  Had this matter suddenly prompted him to stand up as a Jew again? He, who would have liked nothing better than to shed all that, had to side with Israel because no one else did. Because anti-Semitism bothered no one but him. He, the Jew, was punished because he couldn’t stand anti-Semitism. He’d probably repressed it all, but he certainly hadn’t forgotten it. I imagine his relationship with the GDR at this point as being something like a marriage of convenience. But his beloved lives in France.

  That beloved casts a spell over him in the weeks we spend driving through the land of his youth. We drink champagne with his Resistance comrades in Corrèze, and when Gerhard is tipsy he sings the old songs with them. He tells stories of beautiful women and drinking sprees, and when we are standing at Allassac station, where he was liberated by the partisans, tears run down his cheeks. All of a sudden he is so human, so vulnerable. And so happy. In a restaurant in the old port of Marseilles he orders oysters and white wine. He says I’ve learnt in school that capitalism is about to die out. Then he pauses and smiles. “You have to admit, it’s a beautiful death.” I don’t recognize my grandfather any more. At home I had the feeling he had a steel band around his chest. Here he sits in the sun grinning like a schoolboy.

  We also go to see his friend Gilles Perrault, who is a famous writer in France and has a country house near Avignon, which even has a swimming pool. There are also other guests in the house, which is surrounded by vineyards. For example Régis Debray, a small, round man who tells us over dinner how he fought with Che Guevara in Bolivia. He also tells us about Tamara Bunke, a woman from the GDR who was with Che in those days. “A remarkable woman, a fighter,” he says. I don’t understand everything, because my French isn’t particularly good. But what I understand is that everybody in the house thinks the GDR is just brilliant. Gilles Perrault says I can be proud to live in such a revolutionary country, because only revolutions really liberate people. I don’t dare to contradict him, not least because I see how happy these words are making Gerhard. But I don’t get it. How can you sit in a villa like that and rave about the GDR? Or do you have to sit in a villa like this one to be able to? I don’t know what image these people have of the GDR, or whether they’ve ever even been there. Régis Debray confides a secret. He is working as a foreign-policy adviser to the French President François Mitterrand, and he says Mitterrand is a big fan of the GDR. “If the GDR didn’t exist, Germany would be far too big,” says Debray. And Gilles Perrault remembers a quote from the author François Mauriac, who once said he loved Germany so much that he was glad there were two of them. The men laugh and clink glasses, and I reflect that it’s a very pleasant business, being a revolutionary in the South of France.

  On our journey back to the revolutionary GDR I travel on alone from Düsseldorf by train. That means I can stop off in West Berlin. I want to see the Wall, which is the highlight of this trip. Seeing the Wall from the other side, just once. I spend the whole day walking along the border, I touch the cool concrete, which is colourfully painted on the Western side. I climb up viewing towers and look across. For hours. I see the neatly raked death strip, the border guards standing in their watchtowers looking through binoculars. The dome of the television tower gleams in the sunlight. Everything’s so close and yet so far away.

  Five or six times I take the S-Bahn back and forth between Lehrter Bahnhof and Friedrichstrasse. Friedrichstrasse station is in the East, but if you stay on the platform you can travel back to the West. I can’t get enough of that weird feeling of travelling to the East and coming straight back out again. It’s exciting and oppressive, confusing and cheering, brilliant and sad. I feel my heart beating faster every time the S-Bahn crosses the Spree Bridge, past the Reichstag, on which the huge black, red and gold flag flies. I’m not sure which journey I prefer. The one to the East, to the prison that is my home, or the one to the West, into alien freedom. I think what it would be like not to go back and simply stay in the West. I could do that now, no one would stop me. Perhaps I’d have to spend a few months in a children’s home until I reach adulthood. But I could do a Western Abitur and have a Western girlfriend. If I go back I’ll be stuck again. On the other hand, what am I going to do all on my own in the West? As a refugee I can’t go home, and my family wouldn’t be able to go anywhere either. And Gerhard would be really annoyed, and so would Anne and Wolf. Is it worth it? I don’t know.

  Just before midnight, a few minutes before my visa runs out, I go back to Friedrichstrasse station. There’s no turning back this time. I walk down the long, tiled corridors in which tramps from the West sit with their dogs. They drink from big schnapps bottles that they buy in the GDR Intershops at the station because alcohol is cheaper here than in the West. I push my passport under a pane of glass, a border guard looks at me intently. The stamp thuds on the paper and I go on to the metal door that only has a handle on the inside. The door slams behind me like a mousetrap. I’m home again.

  Of course it was the right decision, precisely because I’m home again. On the other hand I now knew that I wanted to go to the West as soon as I was old enough, to find a new home. It wasn’t just an idea, but a plan I firmly believed in.

  When I tell Anne and Wolf about it one evening after dinner, a sudden silence falls at our table. Perhaps they can sense how serious I am. That at some point I would be prepared to leave them. Anne says she herself would never go to the West, whatever happened in the East. But she understands me, she says, she ju
st doesn’t want me doing anything rash, because I still have time. Wolf talks about how he himself once stood by the barbed-wire fence in Teltow. It’s the first time he’s talked to me about it. He talks about his mother, whom he didn’t want to leave alone, and I don’t know whether that’s supposed to be a request not to go.

  I can’t talk to Gerhard about things like that. He probably didn’t even guess what that trip to France had sparked in me. He wanted to show me the sites of his struggle, and I was busy betraying his GDR. But what did he think I would do? Or couldn’t he imagine someone who had grown up in the East wanting eventually to go to the West?

  After my return, the GDR strikes me as even more wretched than before. For a few days I see the East the way Westerners have probably always seen it. It’s as if someone had suddenly taken the colour out of the world. Even the photographs of France that I hand in to be developed at the stationery shop in Karlshorst look somehow bleached on the East German paper. I find everything stupid and ugly, and I quite enjoy playing the part of the global traveller, letting the hicks back home feel a little of my contempt. The only problem is that it doesn’t get better. I can’t find my way out of the role I’m playing. I refuse to be normal again. Perhaps because it would feel like a setback, a defeat.