by Leo Maxim
It’s now—I was seventeen—that this strange game begins. This game in which dream and reality mingle until I myself can’t disentangle them. Because I’m no longer just dreaming of the West, I’m acting as if I’m already a Westerner. A Westerner in the East. It starts with a Falk street map that I brought back from West Berlin. A few months after my return I’m giving an acquaintance from Munich a guided tour of East Berlin. I’m holding this colourful street map in my hand, and it strikes me that people are looking at me in a quite different way than usual. They clearly think I’m a Western tourist. It’s a great feeling. The way these Easterners look at me from the corner of their eyes, as if they’re watching curiously after me, makes me happy.
But I’m not sure it hasn’t got something to do with the real Westerner I’m with. So I ask two mates from vocational school if they fancy being Westerners for an afternoon. One of them still has a copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that an aunt brought him years ago. We all wear Western jeans, which makes things considerably easier. And then, street map and newspaper in hand, we stroll to the Brandenburg Gate and talk loudly about how the border looks completely different from the other side. And immediately they’re there again, those looks. We visit the French Cathedral and ask directions from locals. I speak West German all the time, meaning without Berlin dialect and slightly more loudly than usual. I also sometimes say “gelle?” at the end of sentences, because I’ve heard that in the West. In the Operncafé we ask if we can pay in Western marks. This is followed by some jostling among the waiters, because they all want to serve us. And in the end there’s a lot of disappointment because all we can find is a few Eastern marks, “from the compulsory money exchange,” as we tell them.
We take our game further and further. Once a week we have our Western day. We go to Sanssouci and the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, we climb the television tower and go to the Pergamon Museum. The things Westerners do in the East. Each of us has come up with a Western biography so that we don’t get muddled in our conversations with Easterners. My mother is a journalist with Stern, my father has a gallery in Charlottenburg. I’m currently doing my Abitur at a humanist Gymnasium in Steglitz. Intensive Latin course, no one in the East can speak it anyway. My family belong to the left-wing bourgeoisie. Flat in an old apartment with double doors, holidays in France, skiing in Austria.
We tell our Easterner acquaintances about our life in the West, about that elegant, relaxed society where everyone makes his own decisions about what he does. Our West is a country where the people are well dressed, drive comfortable cars, where everything smells like it does in Intershop. The complete opposite of grey squalor, the anti-GDR. Probably only a fake Westerner can rave about the West like that to an Easterner. We know the yearnings of the Easterners very well, they’re our own. The more stories we tell, the deeper we plunge into our dream world.
Chatting up East German women is no longer a problem for us. It never goes particularly far, however, because we have to be “back on the other side” by midnight. Once two women from Jena walk us to the so-called “Hall of Tears” at Friedrichstrasse station. And there really are tears. We join the exit queue, ask the women to go and make leaving easier, then creep secretly away. We feel a bit mean after that. We drop the game, and for the first time I think seriously about leaving the country.
At this time, in spring 1988, practically everyone I know is thinking more or less seriously about how to get out as quickly and elegantly as possible. There isn’t a party at which the subject doesn’t come up at some point. People talk about other people who have just managed it or are still trying. Two friends of mine want to marry Western men so that they can get out, others are waiting for their Western grandma’s seventieth birthday to try their luck. There are people who go and work for the Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic in East Berlin before having themselves quietly transferred to the West. Word has it that there are bedrooms for East German refugees in the West German Embassy in Prague. People who have an official exit application being processed tie white ribbons to their car aerials. They’re all disappearing, one after another. And the ones who stay behind feel like failures. “Der Doofe Rest”—the stupid leftovers—is what the GDR was called at the time. For the time being I’m happy to deal with the question of emigrating, of keeping that thought moving in my head. When I think about it I get a pleasant tingly feeling in my stomach.
It’s also the case that the East is getting really interesting again around about now. All of a sudden there are great bands I’ve never heard of, they only play music from the West in the clubs, and there are all kinds of wild parties. It all had to do with the end-times vibe that prevailed, at least in Prenzlauer Berg. People are partying as if it were the last time. People are living for the moment because the future isn’t going to bring anything anyway. I remember a fashion show in the old swimming pool on Oderberger Strasse. A group of designers put on a weird and beautiful show, followed by dancing in the empty swimming pool. An acquaintance of mine had good contacts with the West, so he always had a decent amount of hash in the house. He’s squatting in a huge flat on Marienburger Strasse, and there are parties there once a week. The Pink Floyd film The Wall is showing on a television screen, and we lie in front of it smoking and kissing. There are always a few diplomats’ kids from the Permanent Representation. Once the son of the British ambassador brings his parents along when we’re having a party on the roof. The ambassador is pretty impressed when he sees all the frenzied activity, because it doesn’t fit with his image of the GDR.
But eventually even these parties lose their charm. They’re an opportunity to forget the rest for a few hours. But when the rush passes, the rest is still there. And the more excessive the parties, the bigger the comedown. At one of these parties I meet an actress who’s married an Austrian and has two passports because the GDR allows dual nationality if you marry an Austrian. She lives in East Berlin and can travel to the West whenever she likes. That strikes me as the perfect way of combining Western freedom and familiar security. Also, Gerhard’s sister lives in Vienna, and I’m pretty sure they could find a distant cousin who’d be willing to marry me. The actress advises me to go to the lawyer Lothar de Maizière, who had also acted as intermediary in her wedding. A week later, in March 1989, I’m sitting in a lawyer’s office on Chausseestrasse in front of the desk of a man who a year later would be the first freely elected Prime Minister of the GDR. De Maizière stands at the window and listens to my plan. Then he asks, “Is it about love or a passport?” I’m not prepared for a question like that, and hem and haw. De Maizière says the whole thing will take at least two years, and the question is whether my problem might not solve itself in some other way. I don’t understand what he means. De Maizière sits down behind his desk, smiles and says that dual nationality assumes the existence of two countries. In the case of Austria you probably didn’t need to worry, but there were other states whose future wasn’t quite so certain. “Save your marriage for a woman you really love, that’s my advice,” he says, and sends me away.
22
Feelings of Spring
IN OCTOBER 1986 Wolf goes to the South Seas. That is, he actually only goes to the City Library and borrows a few books. He wants to get as far away as possible, and the South Seas are the furthest place he can think of. It’s supposed to be a fantasy trip, an adventure in his head. On this journey he wants to paint pictures and later perhaps have an exhibition. A display of longing, a little provocation, a bit of fun. For months he travels around, immerses himself in this other world, wraps himself up in stories. He dreams of bright blue water, of white lagoons, carved wooden boats and bare-bosomed women with flowers in their hair. His paintings show a South Sea that is probably much more beautiful than the real one could ever be. Wolf draws maps with travel routes, writes a log in which he records his most important experiences. His whole style changes, even the Sandman stories for television are suddenly playing out under palm trees. Wolf p
aints postcards showing strange plants and bright patterns. The cards even end up in the shops, under the title “Polynesia”. At the same time Wolf also makes another grey postcard. Anne and he are sitting on the sofa, there’s a little potted palm in front of them and the blind over the window is down.
Wolf says this game with the state and with himself actually got more and more interesting in the last years of the GDR. There were no clear rules any more, boundaries were blurred. Spaces and possibilities arose, and sometimes disappeared again. No one could tell what was still allowed and what was forbidden. You had to try things out. Wolf talks about an art weekend in the little town of Coswig near Dresden. A painter colleague from Berlin had hired the Culture House in Coswig on some pretext or other. And all of a sudden hundreds of people arrived from all over the country. For two days they make music, dance, paint, party. The police are too busy, the Stasi don’t know a thing. A few months later there’s a huge summer party on a farm in the Uckermark. The whole place is full of tents, there are barbecues and skinny-dipping, and bands play in the evening. There’s a cabaret evening with Wolfgang Krause Zwieback, a fantastic word artist who isn’t allowed to perform in the GDR, but that evening nobody’s interested. The police turn up the next day and their names are all taken down, but there are no consequences. Wolf says they sometimes felt that all that was left was the facade of the state, with nothing behind it.
But then one day there’s a man at the door of the flat in Karlshorst, saying that Wolf has to make his mind up which side he’s on. The man requests an interview, but Wolf doesn’t want to talk to the Stasi. When the upstairs neighbour comes downstairs, the man forces his way into the flat because he doesn’t want to be seen. Wolf grabs him by the jacket and throws him down the stairs. And a short time later a white Wartburg is standing outside our house with four men in it watching us in silence. When the Wartburg drives away it’s followed immediately by a grey Lada with four different men sitting in it. I had an astronomy kit at the time and watched the men with my telescope. The ones in the Lada are quite fat. They sit there for hours, all crammed together. They’re plainly not allowed to get out. A few days later Wolf stops finding this game at all funny. The fear that had disappeared is back.
At the same time, in March 1988, a decision is made in the Artists’ Association to give Wolf Leo a passport and allow him to travel to West Berlin for three days a year. It isn’t entirely clear whether there’s a connection between the Stasi car outside the front door and the passport in his pocket. Do they want Wolf to stay in the West? Wolf doesn’t care, he enjoys his days in West Berlin and he meets a painter there who calls himself Nil Ausländer and has a gallery on Savignyplatz. Nil is a rough-and-ready type, who deliberately acts proletarian. His gallery is hung with portraits of Jewish relatives who have never really existed. Wolf likes the idea of just inventing a new family. The two men take to each other, and Nil suggests that Wolf have an exhibition at his gallery. At first that sounds like a rather utopian idea. But the following year, when Wolf gets a new three-day visa for West Berlin, he decides just to do it. On 14 May 1989 he drives our light-brown Trabant 601 to the border crossing at Heinrich Heine Strasse. The car is crammed full of paintings and three-dimensional figures. On the roof-rack there’s three-metre cardboard figure, the dancer, who is being allowed into the West for the first time. The GDR border guards are surprised by the unannounced art transport, but they let him through. Just like that. Nil is waiting on the other side of the border in his red VW Polo. They drive to Charlottenburg in convoy. When they stop at a junction the passers-by gaze in surprise after the cardboard car with the cardboard dancer.
In the evening, at the exhibition opening, the Charlottenburg bourgeoisie jostle their way past the art clutching glasses of red wine. Nil solemnly announces that this is the first private exhibition of an artist from the GDR in the West. The Charlottenburgers find it all new and exciting, and lots of them are keen to buy something. But Wolf doesn’t know if he is actually able to sell anything. He doesn’t want to do anything wrong, so he decides to pass. Nil finds that silly but amusing.
Later in the night there’s a party on a factory floor in Kreuzberg. A man offers Wolf a joint—he doesn’t know what it is and keels over after a few drags. At about three in the morning he drags himself groggily to the border crossing at Heinrich Heine Strasse. But everything’s already in darkness there. Wolf knocks on a door and shouts. It takes a while before a border guard opens up and lets him back into the East.
Increasingly often Anne visits the Jewish community, where she feels at ease. She’s started finding the Party more sympathetic as well. Sometimes she goes to residents’ association meetings in Karlshorst, where she meets pensioners who are also sitting at home and just want to chat for a while. For the first time she isn’t afraid of these meetings. The Party is now a lot of friendly old men who want to help her out of her coat. It’s as if the system has lost its power over her. The arm of the state doesn’t reach all the way into her glazed veranda. Anne reads a piece by a woman poet, describing her withdrawal into herself. She compares that retreat to hibernation: “Outwardly dead, inwardly alive, the heart beats better. It is waiting for spring.”
Anne thinks she can already sense the spring. She feels as if the whole country is getting mellower and more relaxed. There’s a new travel law making it easier to visit relatives in the West. Anne travels to Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Vienna, Jerusalem. She writes freelance articles that are no longer simply cobbled together. One of those articles appears in September 1988 in the arts magazine Sonntag. It’s about the relationship between the founders of the GDR and their children. She describes the journey of the anti-fascist fighters who became the government after the war, without taking a break. “How could they bury their rancour when they emerged from the camps in 1945 and assumed responsibility for the people? How many of them could trust someone who hadn’t shared their fate? Was their relationship with us, their children’s generation, not that of strict fathers who only had our best interests at heart? Didn’t they want, too often, to decide for us what those interests were?” These are questions that had been barely asked in public until now. Because they get to the nub, because they are directed at the old men who still bear responsibility.
Anne, 1988
But it could also be that for Anne this article is above all a conversation with her own father. A conversation that she can’t have with him herself, because Gerhard won’t allow it. Anne tries again and again to put something in motion, to get her father to open up. But these attempts normally end in discord. In October 1988 Anne and Wolf are together for the first time in a while, visiting Anne’s parents. The mood is friendly but reserved, as they don’t want to argue. But eventually it kicks off anyway. Gerhard says he thinks what’s happening in the Soviet Union is a good thing, that glasnost and perestroika would be a good thing for the GDR as well. Then Wolf asks what glasnost and perestroika would be like in the family. The old conflicts rise up again. Wolf says that what Gorbachev wants to introduce in Moscow is something that he himself had demanded twenty years ago. And Gerhard had seen him as the enemy. In the end they sit facing one another in silence again. There seems to be no common way.
But Anne can’t free herself from her father now either. Her relation with him is like a rope that connects her to her old life, that stops her being quite herself. Gerhard is the last remaining scrap of her dependence, and she herself will later say that it was only the downfall of the GDR that finally freed her from her childhood. On the other hand a different rope pulls her a few months later. She leaves the Party. The letter that she wrote to her Party group leader is in one of her files, wrapped in clear plastic like an important document. She writes: “I can no longer bear this attitude of denying reality that our leaders are assuming. The repression of reality has led to a paralysis of social life. A state of affairs like that is not just regrettable but also dangerous. Remaining in this completely ossified organization, which has long c
eased to give signs of life, strikes me as pointless.”
More and more people are disappearing to the West. That’s how I get my first flat, which belonged to a girlfriend, a dancer in the Komische Oper, who didn’t come back from a guest performance in West Berlin. In the summer the West German embassies in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw fill with refugees. At the same time something happens in the GDR. A force comes into being, unnoticeable at first, but growing with every passing week. It’s like a big wave building up slowly and dragging along everything that isn’t firmly anchored down. There isn’t much to see on the surface, but there’s a powerful pull in the depths. I remember an evening in August 1989 in the Church of the Redeemer in Lichtenberg, where I went with Anne. There are people there who call themselves civil-rights campaigners. They have strange haircuts and beards and a language that makes a strong impression on me because it’s so honest and true. They say clearly and publicly what motivates them. That’s completely new to me. I’m used to hearing something in skilful references, half-sentences, nuances, sensing hidden messages. It’s often like that in the theatre. A little sentence, a key word, can inspire the audience because they themselves have finished the thought that had just been started, completed it silently in their heads and then shouting it out in delight. That art of hidden criticism, of disguised defiance, no longer seems to be necessary. The civil-rights campaigners in the Church of the Redeemer say the important thing now is to fight for fundamental freedoms, not to let ourselves be treated like children any more. The time for begging and pleading was over, now it was up to us as confident citizens to demand our rights.