by Heinz Kohler
By then, I remember, it was November and we had something else to look for in the sky. The Soviet had fired a second satellite into orbit, this one weighing half a ton and carrying a dog, some 937 miles up. “Dedicated to 40th anniversary of the Soviet revolution,” Pravda said. It also reported on the fate of Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, one of the conquerors of Berlin. Having been removed earlier as Minister of Defense, the paper said, he now also lost his Party posts. Marshal Ivan S. Konyev, whose troops had entered Ziesar so long ago and who was now commander of Warsaw Pact forces, condemned Marshal Zhukov for “errors in military science” (notably, his lack of preparedness for the June 1941 attack), for showing undue pride by twisting historical facts concerning the victories of Stalingrad and Berlin, and for promoting a cult of personality in the Red Army.
“With the help of sycophants and flatterers,” said Marshal Konyev, “he was praised to the sky in lectures and reports, in articles, films, and pamphlets, and his person and role in the Great Patriotic War were overglorified.”
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As I said, flying seemed to be the perfect cure. My symptoms were gone by the time my military exemption came through and finishing graduate school became a breeze. By the time Eisenhower and Khrushchev had met and failed to end the Cold War in the fall of 1959, I had my Master of Arts degree in Economics. Before long, I was working on my Ph.D., writing a dissertation on East Germany’s Economic Integration into the Communist Bloc.
Flying stories continued to dominate the news. I could not escape them, given my daily research into Soviet sources at the time. In the spring of 1960, it seemed, the Soviets downed a U.S. plane flying at 55,000 feet near Sverdlovsk. The U.S. claimed the unarmed U-2 was a weather observation plane chartered by NASA and flown by Francis G. Powers, 30, a civilian employee of the Lockheed Corporation. Allegedly, the civilian had innocently strayed across the Turkish/Soviet border, something even I wouldn’t have done by mistake.
Khrushchev claimed the U.S plane had been on a mission of aggressive provocation aimed at wrecking the Paris summit conference scheduled for May. According to Pravda, Eisenhower wanted peace; the imperialists and militarists surrounding him did not. Then, when Khrushchev demanded and Eisenhower refused an apology for spying, the summit conference broke up. Prime Minister Macmillan, President de Gaulle, and President Eisenhower blamed Khrushchev, and the Cold War heated up. Before the next summer had passed, the Soviets shot down an RB-47 U.S. reconnaissance plane in the Barents Sea for violating Soviet territorial waters and a Soviet military tribunal sentenced Francis G. Powers to 10 years for spying.
By the time I received my Ph. D. in Economics, in the spring of 1961, the Soviets had orbited and recovered a man, Yuri Gagarin, in a 5-ton vehicle, called Vostok [East]. Pravda made fun of the U.S. mission that hurled Commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr., along a 115-mile suborbital path. By then, I had been in the U. S. for five and a half years and, suddenly, within the space of a month, it became unbearable. Something was unfinished; I simply had to visit Berlin.
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Helga had a big apartment all to herself in East Berlin. It was located in one of the brand-new complexes that looked like the postcards from Moscow: a wide boulevard, flanked by 7-story buildings, lots of balconies, pillars, and statues, and white-slab blandness all around. Interestingly, her street name had just been changed; from Stalin Allee to Karl-Marx-Allee. Important people lived in her block: engineers and teachers, party officials, military men. Helga had become important, too. She taught at the Conservatory and was in charge of the concerts being broadcast over the radio in East Berlin. She was so important, in fact, she owned a Trabant, commonly known as Trabi, which was the new East German car made of “Duroplast,” a fiber-reinforced plastic that could never rust.
It was easy to get to Helga. I took the city railway and waited for the Russian barracks. They were decorated with a big white sign. “Poslye Sputnika–Luna,” it said. “After Sputnik–the Moon.” That’s where I got off. There was a big poster at her front door as well, although it was almost two years old. “German Democratic Republic,” it said. “10 Years in Firm Alliance with the Soviet Union.”
I brought Helga flowers from the West; I had been warned they only sold wilted ones in the East. It was awkward to meet again; what had I been thinking? We went to the opera; she got us in for nothing. I offered to reciprocate by taking her to a play or the ballet on the other side of town, but Helga complained about western decadence.
“People in the West only think of themselves,” she said. “They only care about the latest clothes, TV sets, and cars. Who ever thinks of the public good?”
“That sounds like the Party line,” I said. “Those Wednesday night political sessions haven’t gotten to you, have they?” I asked.
That, of course, was the wrong thing to say. She lifted her left eyebrow in the way she had always done when she didn’t agree with someone.
“I’ve read the pamphlet lying on your desk,” I explained, “how did the author put it? ‘The West condones the private pursuit of false material wants; we in the East prefer the public provision of true material needs.’ Something like that.”
I filled her coffee cup and took another piece of cake.
“You see what I mean?” I asked. “I’d rather let people decide for themselves what’s good for them instead of having the Party decide on the grounds that it knows better.”
“That leads to Coca Cola signs and neon lights,” Helga said, picking up the plates.
“And indecent dress,” she added.
“What about mental hospitals filled with dissidents?” I asked. “Isn’t that indecent? And more so than ballet in the nude?”
She stood by the kitchen sink and said nothing.
“Never mind,” I said.
I put my arms around her waist, from behind, but she freed herself. Nothing felt right.
“Well,” I said, “I better go and do my work. May I see you on the weekend?”
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On the weekend, my parents had a surprise. A letter arrived from Uncle Herbert who proved to us once and for all that he had gone mad. Had been flown out as a refugee by the Americans, he said, to Cologne, way back in '53. Had been to a birthday party in Kiel, he said, one for Grand Admiral Dönitz. Now we know for sure, he said, sabotage cost us the victory.
“Haven’t seen him for ten years and haven’t heard from him in eight,” my father said. “I don’t ever want to hear from that asshole again.”
“You two certainly have fought each other long enough,” I said, but I wasn’t interested in Uncle Herbert. I was thinking of Helga and I didn’t want to battle with her too.
I went to my old shelf of unread books to pick one for the ride to her apartment. I searched for an old one because I didn’t care to be arrested for smuggling in subversive western thought. Frédéric Bastiat, Paris, 1845, looked safe enough.
At the station, I gave my last coins to the lady from the Salvation Army. Smuggling in western currency still was a crime as well. I opened Bastiat in the middle:
On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis. It staggers the imagination to try to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow, if its inhabitants are to be preserved from the horrors of famine, insurrection, and pillage. And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment without being disturbed for a single instant by the idea of so frightful a prospect…
Yes. And I was frightened by the thought of losing my last chance of linking up with Helga. She was as beautiful as ever and she was still living by herself, I had noted. It was a sign, I thought. The sun was setting; the train crossed the Spree River. I returned to Bastiat:
We put our faith in that inner light which Providence has placed in the hearts of all men, and to which has been entrusted the preservation and the unlimited improvement of our species, a light
we term self-interest, which is so illuminating, so constant, and so penetrating, when it is left free of every hindrance. Where would you be, inhabitants of Paris, if some cabinet minister decided to substitute for that power contrivances of his own invention, however superior we might suppose them to be: if he proposed to subject this prodigious mechanism to his supreme direction to take control of all of it into his own hands, to determine by whom, where, how, and under what conditions everything should be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed?
“In East Berlin, that’s where you’d be,” I said to myself.
I thought of the wilted flowers in the East, of all shoes being the same size, of bathing suits finally arriving in the stores in winter, of everything breaking in no time and there being no spare parts for anything. I thought of the Trabi and its silly two-stroke engine that could accelerate from 0 to 60 in 21 seconds if you were lucky. And I thought of the barrels standing in East Berlin’s food stores, filled with egg yolks and egg whites, labeled “Imported from the People’s Republic of China,” and destined to poison everybody with salmonella–just because nobody seemed able to get enough fresh eggs out of East Germany’s collective farms.
“Government employees who get their pay no matter what they do,” I thought, “will never be as enterprising and reliable as private owners in the West.”
I also questioned my talent for picking a piece of literature that was safe enough for my trip to the East. Bastiat was getting more subversive by the minute:
Although there may be much suffering within your walls, although misery, despair, and perhaps starvation, cause more tears to flow than your warmhearted charity can wipe away, it is probable, I dare say it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of the government would infinitely multiply this suffering and spread among all of you the ills that now affect only a small number of your fellow citizens.
“Spoken in 1845, like a true prophet,” I thought. “West Berlin’s prosperity versus East Berlin’s drabness exactly proves his point.”
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I decided not to talk about ideology with Helga, not on that night. I felt anxious about us. I raced up the stairs to her apartment, taking two steps at a time. The elevator wasn’t working, nothing unusual for East Berlin. But Helga saw the book when I took off my coat and asked about it. So I told her what I had read and thought. I shouldn’t have; she would have none of it.
“Bastiat is outmoded,” she said. “He may have been right in 1845. Modern central planners use science, as well as reason.”
I decided to raise my left eyebrow.
“Planners have electric calculators now,” she explained. “They are quite capable of managing the whole economy as if it were one single factory.”
She handed me a mug with coffee.
“And central planners,” she added, “can give people what is truly good for them and preserve them from the blind, selfish forces within themselves.”
Where was the Helga I had known at Ziesar and Burg and even earlier in Berlin? What had they done with her? I heard nothing but the Party line, and I didn’t like our conversation at all.
“My God,” I said softly, “you are positively intoxicated by this cult of reason over here.”
I wanted to hug her and shake her at the same time. So I hugged her and gave her a kiss.
“Why don’t you come with me tonight and live with me?” I asked. “Forever!”
Her dark brown eyes turned soft and wet. A single tear flowed down her cheek.
“I’d be a traitor,” she said, taking my hands. “They’ve educated me, they’ve offered me the position with the State Orchestra, they’ve given me this place. How can I leave now?”
“Easily,” I said. “It takes one ticket for 30 pfennigs.”
“I owe it to them,” she said.
“And to my career,” she added and stood up, raising a hand as if she wanted to ward off further discussion.
“Now there you are wrong,” I said. “The very planners whom you now defend will ruin your career.”
“And how is that?” she asked.
“Alright, I’ll spell things out,” I said, “but if it sounds like one of my lectures, I apologize ahead of time.”
She smiled and sat down beside me on the couch.
“Central planners who want to get things done,” I said, “done their own way, have to free themselves from constant criticism and griping. So they surround themselves with a loyal army and party. They create a secret police that forces others to submit to the planners’ choices. Or they build a propaganda machine to induce everyone to accept a common creed and make these choices their own.”
“So?” Helga asked.
“Before long,” I continued, “the rule of fear and propaganda spreads to all areas of life, just as it does here, from purely economic matters of what is produced and who works where to questions of education and travel, of religion and family life, and certainly of art. And that’ll be the end of your dream of a creative artistic career.”
“Come with me,” I said.
Helga said nothing.
I looked at her beautiful hair and the softness or her body, and I had thoughts I didn’t like. Too much time had intervened, I thought, too many seasons, too many years had passed. Both of us remembered but dimly the flame of passion that had once brightened our lives. Something was forever lost; some door had closed forever.
“Let’s talk more tomorrow,” I said, but I felt the resistance of an alien spirit and the presence of an invisible wall that had grown up between us.
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A few months later, they built another wall in Berlin, a 97-mile wall around the western sectors, 13 feet high, made of concrete and barbed wire. With watch towers, machine guns, and bright lights. With trip wires and land mines and roving packs of dogs. They called it the “antifascist protective barrier.”
Helga was on the other side.
Thierry Noir, Wikimedia Commons
The Berlin Wall
46. A Perfect Flight
[May 1991]
Back to the beginning. Why did my plane crash? Was it the birds or was it me, perhaps, not paying attention and thinking about other things? You wanted details, all the details, about everything I did and thought. So let me try to reconstruct that fateful day.
Truth be told, it did start with a distraction. While picking up my morning mail on the way to the airport, I noticed the date on the big calendar at the Montague post office: May 23, 1991. And then I remembered. Precisely 30 years had passed since the day I had visited Helga in East Berlin! And I thought of Berlin because of the letter I was then holding in my hand. It had come from my Aunt Martel and proved that she was as alert as she had ever been, even at age 92. This time, she had sent me an article about mass graves they had discovered in Sachsenhausen after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soon after the end of World War II, the article said, the place had become a concentration camp once again, first run by the Soviets, then the Stasi, the East German secret police. In fact, Sachsenhausen had been East Germany’s biggest Stasi camp, holding 60,000 prisoners at one time or other. Some 12,000 of them had died from cold, hunger, disease, and cruelty.
But I didn’t want to think about that or all the other terrible things that had happened a long time ago. This was the USA, not Germany. And it was a beautiful morning, made for flying–with cool crisp air and blue skies, they said, all along the East Coast from Maine to Florida.
“So you’re going to Key West,” Charlie said as he pumped the blue gasoline into my tanks. “That’s a long trip, hope you won’t fall asleep from boredom.”
“Don’t you worry, Charlie,” I said, “I won’t be bored. I’ll keep myself busy by mentally reviewing my flight manuals. By the time I get there, I’ll be the sharpest pilot on the East Coast.”
“Good for you,” Charlie said, “but you know what they say about flying: Hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”
“You seem to have had one of
those moments yourself,” I said, pointing to one of his airplanes sitting on its nose near the access road to the fire station, right next to the sign that stated “No Taxiway.” The plane’s tail was pointing straight up at the sky.
“Don’t remind me,” Charlie said. “Jeff was taking a woman for a scenic ride last weekend. Just as the plane lifted off, a wasp landed on the woman’s nose. She went ballistic and screamed and kicked and tried to kill the thing and pushed forward on the yoke. You can guess the rest: The plane descended onto the runway, the propeller dug into the ground and got bent all out of shape, Jeff aborted the take-off, the left wing hit the hay wagon at the end of the runway, and the whole thing ended up in my celery field.”
“No one was hurt, though,” Charlie added, “unlike last year when the cows got out and Steven ran into one while trying to land at night. You know what the FAA report said? ‘Pilot error: In-flight collision with a cow,’ it said. Pretty funny, eh?”
He laughed uproariously, just like Mr. Albrecht always had way back in Ziesar.
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By then I was busy with my preflight inspection. I removed the cowling from the engine, checked the oil quantity, the brake fluid, and the air intakes, found no leaks around the cylinders, fastened the cowling, and did my walk-around. The propeller was in good shape, no nicks and scratches or cracks as far as I could see. I took the tow bar off the front wheel and stashed it with the baggage, checking the battery through the baggage door at the same time. The newly waxed wings glistened in the sun, the flaps were okay, the ailerons moved freely and so did the elevator. The vertical stabilizer looked fine. So did the antennas and all the lights. The tanks were filled to the brim. A first lesson raced through my head: The fuel tank cap seals better be in perfect shape. If they are too tight, air can’t enter the tank as the gasoline is used, a vacuum is created, and the wing can collapse. If they are too loose, fuel can be siphoned overboard. Neither one was a pleasant event, but there was no problem here; the seals were fine.