by Uwe Tellkamp
An embrace here, an embrace there, outside a couple of demonstrators but they’re all singing and dancing, because it creates a good atmosphere, the head of the riot police mobile unit, with his office in the House of the Teacher doesn’t dare to order a large-scale operation to clear Alexanderplatz. –
(Emcee) ‘Now comes the “Awake” chorus from Richard Wagner’s Mastersingers.’
(General Secretary) ‘Today the German Democratic Republic is an outpost of peace and socialism in Europe.’
(Gorbachev) ‘Anyone who comes too late …’
(The people, in chorus) ‘Freedom!’
(Minister of Police) ‘Most of all I’d like to go and give these scoundrels a thrashing they won’t forget in a hurry … No one needs to tell me how to deal with class enemies.’
(The people, in chorus) ‘Freedom!’
(Minister of Security) ‘Well, once he, Comrade Gorbachev that is, has left, I’ll give the order to move in and that’ll be the end of humanism.’
Porous zones, the brain switches off awake fields, the alpha waves of sleep can be seen. But this little attachment, the thyroid gland, the control centre of metabolism, never sleeps, a grey concrete palace with reflective or painted-on windows below which the lymph creeps along the slimy lactiferous duct, infested with enemies –
… but then, all at once …
the clocks struck –
Gudrun said, ‘We step out of our roles.’ Niklas said, ‘Fidelio’s on at the Opera and at the prisoners’ chorus the people stand up and join in.’ Barbara said, ‘And Barsano’s sitting in the royal box, his mind elsewhere, and doesn’t join in.’ Anne, her face still beaten up, her wrists swollen from the blows with the truncheon, took a candle. Richard and Robert, who had saved up his leave for the last days before his discharge, checked whether the slogan ‘No violence’ was dry on the paper sashes they were going to wear. They went out into the street.
There were a lot of people out in the streets. All their faces showed the fear of the last few days, grief and unease, but also something new: they shone. Richard could see that these were no longer the dejected, slump-shouldered people of the previous years who slunk along, greeting and cautiously nodding to people but avoiding holding eye contact for too long, they had raised their heads, still breathing apprehensively, but already full of pride that this directness was possible, that they could walk upright and declare who they were, what they wanted and what they didn’t want, that they were walking with increasingly firm steps and felt the same elemental joy as children who have stood up and are learning to walk. The Schwedes and the Orrés had linked arms with the inhabitants of Wisteria House, Hauschild, the coal merchant, came out of Ulenburg, the house next door to Caravel, with his wife and many children (‘like organ pipes’, Barbara said), looking as if they’d lit their whole winter’s supply of candles, Herr Griesel with his wife and Glodde, the postman, who’d just come home from work, locked his Trabant, the saw fell silent in Rabe’s, the carpenter’s, workshop, he whistled to his apprentices, took a candle stub out of the pocket of his corduroy trousers.
For a moment they hesitated – down Ulmenleite to the church or along Rissleite towards Walther’s bakery? The queue outside the shop began to precipitate, grew thin, dispersed, the assistants looked out, crumpling the skirts of their aprons in their hands, ‘Bring some rolls,’ one man shouted, hands waved, cries of ‘Join us, we need every man’, and Frau Knabe, pushing her intimidated husband forward, added, ‘That’s right – and every woman.’ Ulrich threw his Party badge away. Barbara put off an appointment with Lajos Wiener, who wrote on the door of his salon, ‘Closed due to revolution’. Frau von Stern, with a lunch box slung round her neck, thumped the ground with her heavy, gnarled walking stick: ‘In case anyone tries to tread on my toes. Oh, that I’ve been spared to see this, after October the seventeenth.’ And for Richard the day, that October day of 1989, suddenly became serious and simple, full of energy that seemed to bring out the hairline cracks in the clouds behind the trees, he saw the potholes, the futile blobs of asphalt, the perfunctorily patched cover of the old roads, which were now about to break out, like a snake sloughing, and even though twilight was already falling there came through the fissures something of the overpowering freshness he’d felt as a boy when they were up to some prank, the sudden flash of one of those splendid ideas that infringed the norm but gilded his inner self with a nimbus of happiness and battlesong. ‘Hans,’ he said to his brother, who had come from Wolfsleite; ‘Richard,’ the toxicologist said, and that was all, even though they were their first words for a long time. Iris and Muriel rejected the candles Pastor Magenstock offered them, Fabian too, now a young man with his somewhat ludicrous hussar’s moustache, declined; they weren’t carrying candles, nor wearing Gorbachev badges, as so many were, they didn’t want better socialism, they wanted no socialism at all, and for their hopes they didn’t need a sermon, nor a candle chain. The Honichs too, as Richard had to admit, demonstrated courage, unrolling the GDR flag, the mocked and despised flag that here and there, as Richard was aware, had been disarmed by a circular cut; they joined the rest and were admitted, without anyone taking further notice of them.
They rang doorbells. Some didn’t come, some curtains twitched and were lowered again, some dogs started to bark and weren’t silenced, and Trüpel from the record shop, hobbled – sorry, sorry – past with a conveniently broken leg and an inconvenient plaster cast on it. Malivor Marroquin’s fancy-dress shop remained closed, no warning signs out in the street, no photo of the more and more confident demonstrators was taken by the white-haired Chilean.
… but then, all at once …
the clocks struck:
and Copper Island tips under the weight of the people, who take up position on the starboard side, the red-and-white checked tablecloths slither down to where foam and sea are gyrating in a funnel, the briquettes with a too high water content disintegrate –
(Emcee, handing out medals from a shoe box) ‘There you are. Medals! For exemplary achievements in socialist competition! There you are. Plenty of everything. There’s no charge!’
the giants on the Kroch skyscraper in Leipzig let their hammers thunder on the bell, Philipp Londoner sits in silence in the darkened room, the workers in the cotton mill switch off the machines and join the processions of demonstrators, 100,000 people marching into the centre on this Monday, to the rose-wreathed university, to the Gewandhaus, shining like a crystal in the twilight, the people trying out their voice, refusing to be put off, weary of all the lies and barred doors and windows –
(Eschschloraque) ‘Mole, blind in the dark earth, morning noon and night, but without time, that was what made him afraid, without time. A ship with a mad captain and a mad crew, full of noise and rage between yesterday today tomorrow … a journey woven on the Big Wheel, which is still turning in the mist and we the kings at a board on which is marked in blood the rise and fall of empires, the eternal recurrence of what is eternally the same, and for a brief moment the suggestion of a sunbeam and lovers embraced by the executioner’s block of the beautiful new world, in which purity is an evil beauty and a black womb gives birth to a black womb’ –
‘We are the people’
(Eschschloraque) ‘Mole dreams the mole’s dream of sunlight and an open sky and digs and digs in the darkness, but he is not guided by his dream, only by his forepaws and following his nose, and he dreams he is the Lord of Creation, heaven earth stones created for him alone, Mole is the centre of the world and his burrowing race of blind diggers to whom the Mole-God promised immortality – but suddenly there are doubts, a voice: the Mole is just a mole and nothing else, created the Mole-God as his mirror, a shadow image made of sound and delusion’ –
‘We are the people’
(Eschschloraque) ‘And just as the river doesn’t flow upwards, Mole will ever remain a mole, will never leave the tunnel of darkness, never reach the light of the sun: that is his lot as a mole, the universe isn’t conce
rned about it and however much he suffers, struggles and thinks and feels, he won’t change anything, he will remain without time’ –
‘We are a people’
… but then, all at once …
the clocks struck
the clocks of the Socialist Union, the Kremlin clock stopped with the sound of a broken spring, the red star over Moscow still sending radio signals across the sea to the vassal islands, to the guards on the ridges between Bucharest and Prague and Warsaw and Berlin
(Pittiplatsch) ‘Ouch, my nose’
(Schnatterinchen) ‘Naknaknak’
the blood, that special juice, clots, Apoplex extinguishes Lenin’s lights, now the copper plate sticks up out of the sea like an ice floe, I’m the Whirligig, when wound, I keep everything going, round and round; thyreos, the shield, where ferns crawl and break the monolith, the concrete of Norman castle architecture, into whose rooms with their standard flower wallpaper, veneered furniture, standard ashtrays, standard officials’ desks fresh air now sweeps as the people break through; paper swirls up, paper, the old files treated as founding documents, a storm of papers, a riot of papers down the air well, from the galleries with foliage plants and plastic watering cans that, equipped with a surveillance camera, can be used anywhere in the Republic’s cemeteries, in the cellars the shredders gobble up paper, gulp the typing down into their voracious maws for as long as they still can, the citizens’ committees still have enough to do making sure their amazement, their revulsion is not misinterpreted as weakness: the seal is opened on the room in which the register of smells is kept, the sweat under the armpits of thousands who are persona non grata is taken on a piece of cloth, shrink-wrapped in cellophane, precisely mapped and kept for the dogs, paper crunches underfoot, little scraps of paper make breathing difficult, punch-reinforcement rings, white confetti from the cast-iron hole punches, crumbling files swell up, an indigestible mush from the entrails of the authorities, paper, paper –
And on a November day Christian and Pancake stood outside the barracks, some of the guards at the checkpoint enviously watching them leave while others had already gone back to their duties. The flags along the barracks road, still the black-red-and-gold ones with the hammer, compasses and wreath of grain, the blue of the Free German Youth, flapped listlessly in the wind, as the new recruits reported for duty, uncertain and heads bowed at the fact that here, that now, given what was happening outside, they would no longer have their freedom and would have to wear the hated uniform of the National People’s Army. Pancake, in a worn leather outfit, his home-made reservist’s sash with the forbidden black-red-and-gold eagle, dog tag, insignia, reservist’s badge, a green tank and the ballpoint pen signatures of his comrades between his years of service in Roman numbers casually knotted over his shoulder, turned to Christian, who felt he looked ridiculous in the same get-up (how he had been imagining this day for years, especially since the ‘99 Balloons’ of Nena’s song that were traditionally released into the sky above every regiment when discharge candidates only had that many days left in the army), also anachronistic (as if anyone were still interested in that, as if anyone would actually have waited for them, the young men who were now leaving the army, waving the brown tracksuits they’d been given as trophies, bawling and drunk when they fell upon the stations and bars, but getting quieter and quieter the closer they came to the various places where they belonged, where people had other things to worry about and would brush off with a ‘So there you are’ their stories, which had to remain untold in a nucleus of explosive silence); Pancake turned to him, jerked his thumb at his mates, who had turned up on motorbikes and revved up now and then or let in the clutch to make their bikes leap forward; Pancake said, ‘So long.’
‘So long,’ Christian said.
– Seeking: purity,
Meno wrote,
paper, with writing on and blank, with photos printed on, with the fine and heavy lines of a drawing woven in, paper confirming, pacifying, emphasizing, read between the lines, exultant, cautious, shady, opaque, official, revoking; paper for the TRUTH, the printed mirror, NEUES DEUTSCHLAND, JUNGE WELT, PRAVDA, newspapers washed down the drain, greaseproof paper for sandwiches, cigarettes form raging whirlpools, tickets for CSKA Moscow Sparta Prague Dynamo Dresden Lokomotive Leipzig HFC Chemie football matches, for speedway races and swimming pools, receipts mix with insulating paper; announcements, ukases, books, writing pads trundle along towards the propellers of a turbine in which they are mashed and pulped, scraps of paper trailing down like moss from the propeller blades, paper slush, fibrous sludge being wound into gigantic ropes that are chopped up by the slicers, mowing machines in constant scything movement that clip off the ends of the paper strudel like a string of spaghetti dough; newspapers that are flushed into the water, there are the buckets of the excavator dredgers, the leaking flanges over a field of vegetables that is being fertilized with chopped-up paper, there are the gutters on the archives sinking in patient impassivity under the weight of paper, the pressure sinters the spring folders, layers forms, makes files damp, arranges moist marriages between printer’s ink and wood pulp and acid, wing nuts are tightened, drops form, like beads of sweat on the brows of men arm-wrestling, swell, one layer of moisture curves over another, a calibration mark is passed, suddenly it starts to run down an incline, two drops amalgamate with the sound of a chest expander held by too-weak arms snapping back, make two out of one, pus-white rivulets look for a way to the pipe openings, which point to pipe entrances, which point to pipe exits, mouth spews into mouth, and out of the gutters pours the extract, a liquid as precious as blood and sperm, from the papers of the archives –
… but then, all at once …
the clocks struck, struck 9 November, ‘Germany, our Fatherland’, their chimes knocking on the Brandenburg Gate:
List of characters
Characters have been listed by first name with the exception of those primarily known either by their surname or by a nickname.
ADELING, ‘THEO LINGEN’: head waiter, Felsenburg restaurant
ALICE HOFFMANN: from Ecuador, Sandor’s wife; Christian’s ‘aunt’
ALTBERG, GEORG, ‘THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN’: writer of older generation
ALOIS LANGE: former ship’s doctor, lives in the same house as Meno
ANNE HOFFMANN, NÉE ROHDE: nurse, Richard’s wife; Christian’s mother
ARBOGAST, BARON LUDWIG VON: scientist, has his own institute
ARTHUR HOFFMANN: clockmaker, estranged husband of Emmy; Christian’s paternal grandfather
ASZA BURMEISTER: furnace tapper in carbide factory
BARBARA ROHDE, ‘ENOEFF’: Ulrich’s wife, dressmaker; Christian’s aunt
BARSANO, MAX: General Secretary of District Party
BURRE, JAN, ‘NUTELLA’: conscript
CHRISTIAN HOFFMANN: senior high-school student, later conscript
CLARENS: psychiatrist at medical academy
‘COSTA’, LARS DIERITZ: conscript
DÄNE, LOTHAR: music critic
DANIEL FISCHER: Josta’s son by her divorced husband
DIETZSCH: sculptor, lives in the same house as Hans Hoffmann
DREYSSIGER: junior doctor in surgery
EMMY HOFFMANN: Christian’s paternal grandmother, Arthur’s estranged wife
ERIK ORRÉ: actor, lives in the same house as the Tietzes
ESCHSCHLORAQUE, EDUARD: writer, dramatist, Stalinist
EZZO TIETZE: son of Niklas and Gudrun
FABIAN HOFFMANN: son of Hans and Iris; Christian’s cousin
FALK TRUSCHLER: classmate of Christian
FIEBIG, CLÄRE: widow, inhabitant of ‘Tower’ district
GLODDE, MIKE: local postman, engaged to the Griesels’ daughter
GRIESEL, DR: engineer, keeps the house register where Christian’s family live
GUDRUN TIETZE: actress, wife of Niklas; Christian’s ‘aunt’
HANS HOFFMANN: toxicologist, husband of Iris; Christian’s uncle
HANSI NEUBERT: Regine’s son
HEIKE FIEBER: classmate of Christian, artist
HONICH, PEDRO AND BABETT: work in Party organizations, live in the same house as Meno
IRIS HOFFMANN: wife of Hans; Christian’s aunt
INA ROHDE: daughter of Ulrich and Barbara; Christian’s cousin
JENS ANSORGE: classmate of Christian
JOFFE: lawyer, communist
JOSTA FISCHER: Richard Hoffmann’s mistress, secretary in hospital administration
JUDITH SCHEVOLA: young novelist; Meno is her editor
KARLFRIEDE SINNER-PRIEST: ‘Mrs Privy-Councillor’, official in Book Ministry
KAMINSKI, RENÉ AND TIMO: twin sons of important Party member, live in same house as Meno
‘KING’ SIEWERT, RON: Free German Youth secretary at carbide factory
KITTWITZ, DR ROLAND: scientist in Abogast’s institute
KNABE, FRAU: dentist, lives in the same house as Hans Hoffmann and family
KRAUSEWITZ, HERR AND FRAU: live in the same house as Hans Hoffmann and family
KURT ROHDE: Christian’s maternal grandfather
LIBUSSA LANGE: wife of Alois, Czech
LONDONER, JOCHEN: writer on social/political topics, Meno’s ex-father-in-law
LUCIE FISCHER: Josta’s daughter by Richard
LÜHRER: novelist
‘MADAME EGLANTINE’, STEFANIE WROBEL: editor at Dresdner Edition
MAGENSTOCK: pastor of the church in the ‘Tower’ district
MALTHAKUS: owner of stamp and picture postcard shop
MARISA: Philipp Londoner’s partner, Chilean, communist
MARROQUIN, MALIVOR: Chilean, owner of fancy-dress shop, photographer
MENO ROHDE: zoologist, writer and editor at Dresdner Edition; Christian’s uncle
MÜLLER, PROFESSOR: head of surgery
MURIEL HOFFMANN: daughter of Hans and Iris; Christian’s cousin
‘MUSCA’, THILO EBERT: conscript, lance corporal
NIKLAS TIETZE: GP, husband of Gudrun; Christian’s ‘uncle’ (Richard’s cousin)