Red Love

by Leo Maxim

  Christine told me later that her father had worked for the Stasi. She said she’d been more afraid of him that night than she had been of the police. And still she was braver than I was. Much later we found out that the friend of my parents who gave us the church newspaper had also worked for the Stasi. It’s hard to grasp, hard to tease out good from bad.

  It’s all forgotten for the time being in the events that follow daily. All of a sudden people are willing to take risks. There are spontaneous demos, parties and trade unions are founded, appeals are made, signatures collected. The whole country is turned upside down. People are talking, openly and freely, for the first time. I remember one evening in the House of the Teacher on Alexanderplatz. Hundreds of teachers, pupils and parents sat together, discussing what had actually happened in the schools during all those years. They talked about the lies, about constraints, about the game we played with ourselves. A history teacher stands up and says tearfully that she wants to apologize to everyone she’s wronged. Then she collapses and has to be tended to by an emergency doctor. In the Deutsches Theater the actors line up on the stage and call in chorus for courage and change. In Bebelplatz SED propagandists are whistled down. The wave that has been building up over weeks and months breaks through all the dams, shoves fear and caution aside and swirls up the alluvial past from the depths. There is no certainty now, and no truth, our cherished beliefs and sacred tenets are crumbling to the ground. There isn’t even a big bang, everything is just silently dissolving, even the things we thought were made of concrete. It all happens so quickly that no one can really cope with the astonishment and the comprehension. Forty years are washed away within only a few days. And every time you think you’ve reached solid ground the next abyss opens up.

  Even today I’m impressed by the speed with which people became aware of their power and dignity, how alert their instincts were, how great their hunger for freedom and truth. Those great words had suddenly regained their meaning. You just had to look round to understand that. There was this pride in the eyes of the men and women who sat at the round tables and negotiated the future with the representatives of the bankrupt state, there was the bright voice of the fourteen-year-old girl who stood in the Church of the Redeemer and told about how she had distributed handwritten flyers with her little sister, there were the tears of the women who were released from the Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen, and there was that dead look on Erich Honecker’s face when he was voted out of the Politburo.

  On the evening of 9 November I watch the programme Tagesthemen with Christine, and the presenter Hajo Friedrichs says the gates of the Berlin Wall are wide open. We quickly get dressed and go down to the street, where there are other people who have also just been watching Tagesthemen. A man drives us to the border crossing at Heinrich Heine Strasse. There are a few hundred people standing by the barrier at the departure hall. The border guards say they haven’t heard anything about the Wall being opened. Then a policeman comes along and says we should go to the “House of Travel” on Alexanderplatz, because exit papers are being issued there. The people run off and jump in their cars. We travel with a married couple. The man’s hands are shaking with excitement, and I’m worried that he’s going to have an accident and we’ll miss the opening of the Wall. The “House of Travel” is locked and in darkness. It’s only now that we understand that the policeman was probably just trying to gain some time. How could we be so silly as to think that you would need exit papers in a situation like this?

  We drive to Checkpoint Charlie, and even from a distance it’s clear that the Wall is now open. People are cheering and shouting. A woman stands weeping beside us. She says she was twenty when the border was built. “Then it was just there, and now it’s just gone like that and my life is probably just over like that.” She weeps with fury and joy, and I wish I could weep too. But as always in situations like this, when I feel that one should really be overwhelmed, I can’t do it. All the emotions bounce off me, they don’t get to me. I stand there and look at everything as if I’m not even a part of it. Christine is the same, we hold hands, allow ourselves to be pushed towards the open gate and are incapable of saying anything. The border guards don’t even want to see our passports, they wave us through, we walk past the guards’ shacks, see the brightly lit death strip, and perhaps twenty metres away the Wall, where people sit waving. We cross the white line separating East from West. A man tries to hug me, but that’s too much for me. I have the feeling that my brain’s too slow to grasp it all. It’s like a film playing out in front of me. Christine cries, we hug, and I need a cigarette.

  That evening on Tagesschau Anne and Wolf see Politburo member Günter Schabowski reading out a declaration. It’s about a new regulation for travel to the West. Anne, practised in understanding Politburo announcements, grasps that it’s about GDR citizens who want to leave the country. Wolf suggests going to the Wall, but Anne is tired, and she doesn’t want to go to the West anyway. “What’s going to be going on at the Wall anyway?” she says, and Wolf allows himself to be persuaded to stay at home. At half past ten they go to bed. And when they wake up the next morning, the GDR has already almost disappeared.

  EPILOGUE

  THE MONDAY AFTER THE FALL of the Wall I went to a police station in Kreuzberg and applied for a Western passport. It was a precautionary measure. I wanted to have something in my hand just in case the Wall closed again. I presented my GDR identity card, and the officer in the police station got up from his chair, shook my hand and said he was glad that I was finally free as well. He called in a few colleagues, and they beamed too and shook my hand. It was embarrassing, I felt like a Bushman being greeted by white men in civilization. The passport would be sorted out straight away, because I was basically a West German by birth, and because of adverse circumstances it was only now that I was able to collect my passport. By adverse circumstances he meant the GDR. Half an hour later I was holding my passport, which was green and said in gold letters that I was now a real Westerner.

  A few weeks later I went to the East with my Western passport. That was a strange business, because I’d always dreamt of it, and now everything was different. The GDR was only apparently there, and any Easterner could now be a Westerner as well. There was also the fact that Westerners were starting to get on my nerves. They talked about the GDR as if it were a cholera zone. They said we’d been corrupted by dictatorship, that we had weak characters and were badly educated. I took that personally, which made me additionally insecure, because I actually didn’t want to have anything to do with the GDR. But suddenly there it was, this feeling that I hadn’t known before. This “we” that I’d found it so hard to say. I think I never felt so close to the GDR as I did after its downfall.

  For the initial period after the fall of the Wall Anne would ideally have liked to stay at home. She would have sat in her armchair on the veranda with a pot of tea and a book. As if nothing had happened, as if the world out there were just as unchanged as her comfortable study. But that wasn’t going to happen, she had to get out because my little brother was desperate to see the West. Wolf had backache and went to bed for a few days. So on the first weekend after the fall of the Wall Anne crossed the Oberbaum Bridge with my brother. They could hardly move, because the whole of the GDR seemed to be in West Berlin. An endless procession of people drifted through the streets, it was impossible to escape the crowds. Anne says it was one of the most terrible days of her life. She saw all those people, all those happy faces, and she sensed that something was coming to an end even though it hadn’t yet really got going. The reforms, the Third Way, it was all just a dream. After a few hundred metres into the West she noticed that she couldn’t speak. All that came out of her throat was a quiet croaking sound. It had left her speechless.

  Anne says she was worried at the time that the whole of her life’s meaning would disappear with the GDR. She couldn’t imagine being without this country, which had always been there. She felt as if she were on a revolving s
tage that turns around and suddenly creates a new world where the old one was a moment before. It all went so quickly. But then she was amazed that she wasn’t actually sad. That she didn’t even need to cry. It was more as if a burden had fallen from her. She no longer needed the GDR, that unhappy love of her youth. She had grown up.

  When she got her voice back, Anne became the spokeswoman for the “New Forum” in the district of Lichtenberg, and later the press spokeswoman for the faction Alliance ’90/The Greens in the East Berlin City Council Assembly. She found that interesting for a while, but then she wanted to stop talking for other people and start talking for herself at last. She didn’t know exactly what would happen next, but she enjoyed the openness, the new possibilities. She’d had enough of certainties. She got out the essays she’d written in the last years of the GDR. The essays became books and Anne became a noted historian. She dissected the country she had loved, and which had caused her such pain. She looked at it with the cool gaze of the academic. That gaze created distance, it made it easier for her to say goodbye. The GDR had become history for her.

  Wolf couldn’t enjoy the new freedom, it drove him up the wall. He couldn’t sleep, night after night, worrying about the future. His employers were liquidated, a policeman from Bielefeld who had inherited the house in Karlshorst wanted to throw them out of the flat, a community of heirs from West Berlin demanded the cottage in Basdorf back. When he lay awake at night, he saw himself living under a bridge, a homeless artist, a failure from the East. He missed the security that he had previously found so constricting. He missed the friction he got from rubbing up against the state. The West offered no edges, no resistance. He could do what he wanted now, there was no answer, no reaction. The new country was like a block of foam rubber, you could thump it, but it left no impression. Who was he supposed to make art for now? And above all, against whom?

  Post-Wall, his paintings become sadder and sadder, his figures kneel with their heads lowered. Or just lie there, bare-chested, under circling crows, the Brandenburg Gate casting long shadows in the distance. “Opening the Wall” is the caption to the drawing. He wrote a short text for an installation that was shown on Church Day in Potsdam in 1993: “Faith in progress is shattered, the literal future, the question of the rate of growth in association with the meaning of life and ecological disasters is producing a Titanic mentality. The fight for a place in the lifeboat is on. Fear of cold water.”

  He launched a project with Nil, his painter friend from Savignyplatz. In autumn 1990 a small black sign hung on the door of the Charlottenburg gallery. “Nil-West, Leo-East”, it said. It was an experiment. They both wanted to show that Easterners and Westerners could get something moving together. But it went bankrupt, because nothing moved at all. Wolf wanted to let something grow slowly and talk a lot. Nil wanted to run off straight away and stir up the whole art market. Wolf accused Nil of only being after money. Nil accused Wolf of being too quiet and circumspect. The two men who wanted to be avant-gardists froze into a cliché of East and West. After a few months Nil took the black sign down from the gallery door. It was over. And Wolf was disappointed by the West, just as he had previously been disappointed by the GDR. He wanted to do something new, just get running. But his creativity drowned in worries. He worked on job-creation projects, took courses paid for by the employment exchange. He was like a wolf from the zoo who suddenly has to cope in the wild. The zoo was shut.

  *

  Werner, 1985

  Werner went on living the way he’d always lived. He spent the summer in a cabin that he’d built in 1970 in the grounds of the Sports Association on Lake Zeesen. A simple wooden cabin, four metres by four, without water or electricity. “My paradise,” Werner had written under a colour drawing that he made in 1992. He’s sitting outside the cabin at a laid table in the warm evening light. A woman is coming out of the door carrying a tray and smiling at him. The drawing hangs in his bedroom in Berlin, beside the portrait of his daughter Karola and a photograph of Hildegard, his second, late wife.

  Werner used to lie on the banks of Lake Zeesen with Grandma Sigrid when they met in the late Twenties. They swam there and played fistball with the others. Werner sometimes looked at the smooth, sparkling water. And he wished everything would stay like that for ever. At least that’s how he describes it in a poem about the lake, written “during a sleepless night in December 1989”. The poem ends with the lines, “You handsome, sole, true friend, we have never lost one another. Whatever else may happen, you are my lucky charm.”

  I don’t know why Werner couldn’t sleep on that night in December 1989. Whether he was thinking about his life. Or whether he was worried about the future. That poem about Lake Zeesen sounds like the assessment of a man who has understood at the end of his life how futile everything was. The second verse says: “All the things I believed, and afterwards was stripped of all hope. But you, old man, never let me down, you were there when I needed you, you never fled.”

  Werner died on 30 December 2008. It’s strange that this grandfather, whom I’d only just discovered, is gone for ever. I was at the funeral, I threw sand on his urn and felt nothing. A cemetery musician played ‘The Song of the Little Trumpeter’. I learnt the song in school. It ends with the words: “Sleep well, little trumpeter, merry blood of the Red Guard.”

  Gerhard now has a French speech therapist, because he understands French words better than German ones since he had his stroke. The doctors say Gerhard’s brain can only respond to words that are connected with an important emotional experience. Perhaps France really did become his home at some stage. At least the country was his vanishing point when the GDR was over, when his language was still there but he no longer knew what he was supposed to say. He travelled around France giving readings for weeks at a time. The book about his time in the Resistance had just been published in French, and he probably preferred talking about that time than about what was happening at home. German unity was a bugbear for Gerhard. All of a sudden it was back, the Greater Germany. And his little anti-fascist GDR was lost for ever. He once told me how much he liked the fact that the French saw everything with the same sceptical eye as he did. In France he felt freed from his fears, his disappointment.

  In the years that followed I think the GDR slowly faded from his thoughts. When I asked him about it, it was as if he had to spend a long time looking for it. Once, as a joke, I wished him a Happy Birthday of the Republic on 7 October, and he had no idea what I was talking about. He even lost the names of important comrades, people he had known himself. Instead he retreated more and more into his youth, his days with the partisans. He went to schools again and talked about his struggle against the fascists, he appeared as an eyewitness at rallies and conferences. Again and again he travelled around the sites of his struggle, accompanied by camera crews. It was as if his whole life had shrunk to the few years that had probably always been the most important for him.

  I recently visited him in Friedrichshagen. His French speech therapist was there, and he was learning words just as he had done in the children’s hospital in Paris. He was very alert and concentrated, and sometimes he laughed. Perhaps he was remembering the beautiful doctor, his first love. That woman who had made him a Frenchman.

  I often visit Basdorf now, the little house with the big garden. A few years ago I drove by to see what became of my childhood paradise. The garden was completely overgrown, but the house looked the same as ever. I called one of the heirs from West Berlin who got the property back after the fall of the Wall, because it had belonged to them before the Wall was built. The man said on the phone that he didn’t know what to do with the shack. He meant our house. I asked him if he would lease the property to me, and two weeks later I had the key. I opened the door, and there on the veranda was the table that Wolf had built when I was four. The checked curtains still hung in the nursery. Even the smell was the same.

  Now, at the weekends, we often cycle along the road that runs through the beech wood to Lak
e Liepnitz. There are no big animals there now, the wall and the signs have gone. You can visit the houses in the forest where the members of the Politburo once lived. They are simple houses with grey facades. On the peninsula in Lake Liepnitz, where Erich Honecker had his swimming spot, there’s now a field for sunbathing. We play there with the children in the sun, jump off the jetty into the water, where the soldiers once stood with their submachine guns. Now and again I tell the children what it was like back then, and they tell me I’ve told them that hundreds of times. Then I feel as if I’ve prematurely aged. As if my life is already behind me.

  Those weekends in Basdorf are lovely, but they’re confusing, too. Everything in this country has changed, but the house, the table in the veranda and the checked curtains remain. It’s like a museum of childhood, like a piece of the GDR that has outlived everything. Even the birch tree behind the house, the one I used to climb, hasn’t changed. Perhaps it’s because we’ve both grown.

  Also Available from Pushkin Press