City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel

by Wolf, Christa

  But I am an old woman and I’d rather the people there were maybe not so industrious, I want to see them reflecting on how that catastrophe came about and the role they themselves played in it. People who dig down into themselves to try to leave a better, more humane country to their children.

  Can you promise me that that’s what I’d find?

  You see. I’m not coming back, Emma. Do you know what my dear gentleman is working on at the moment? He is collecting everyday observations. He asks me and everyone else he meets about their daily habits, and he reads as many German newspapers as he can get and clips out whatever he finds about the daily life of his former countrymen. So that he won’t be surprised again, if they ever decide to plunge back from harmless everyday life into madness.

  Oh, Emma, don’t be sad.

  So my friend Emma was sad: she felt like a stranger among her countrymen and women and longed for her friend L. She hadn’t told me anything about that, of course. She never let her darker moods show. The experiment to which she had dedicated her life had failed. A few months before she died, when we were leaving one of those disheartening assemblies where the critics of the present conditions were punished, she said with a smile that I will never forget: Our grandchildren will fight it out better than us. —And if they don’t? I said. —Hmm, she said with a shrug.

  Yes, well, Peter Gutman said. He was being forced to listen to more and more of what was going through my head. I know. But actually, you could start to see this whole story from another angle. —Like what? —As an opportunity, for one thing.

  YOU WERE THERE. YOU SURVIVED

  It didn’t destroy you. You can say what happened.

  Actually, I don’t know, I said to Peter Gutman—it was one of the rare afternoons when I found him in his office, where he seemed to be busy with various important papers. Who is this reporting “I” supposed to be? It’s not just how much I’ve forgotten. What is maybe more troubling is that I’m not sure who’s doing the remembering. One of the many I’s who have taken shifts in me decided to take up residence in me, replacing one another in sequence, slowly or quickly. From which one of these I’s is the memory instrument extracting the memories? Well, Peter Gutman said, we all live with that fear—don’t we?—the fear that we won’t recognize ourselves.

  Just take the postwar period, I said. The Führer was dead. An emptiness opened up and spread within you. You had a good pastor in the small town where your flight from the east had brought you, he was smart and appealing for you high school students, and he invited you to approach Christian belief in a new way under his guidance: as a religion of struggle. He banged the piano hard and said that was how you had to play and sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” that was what Luther meant by the joyous struggle to get through life as a Christian. You went to church on Sundays for a while, sat in the gallery, and listened to him preach, he was happy and brave and intelligent, and you thought: Why not? But then, after a few months, you had no choice but to go to him and tell him that you wouldn’t be coming anymore, there was too much in his religion that you couldn’t believe: the immaculate conception, the resurrection, life after death. That’s a shame, he said, but you should be patient, he too had found his belief late, you had no way of knowing yet what God had planned for you.

  I told this to Peter Gutman as proof that I was no longer susceptible to faith. The new faith must have found another way in. It snuck in through the head.

  Yes, Peter Gutman said. Do you think you’re the only one who ever believed that reason is all-powerful?

  I thought we were going to stay away from rhetorical questions … It was obvious, the old society whose ruling classes had caused the disaster had to be completely transformed. Obviously those who had been oppressed should now get their chance. And they did. The state supported the poor people, the families that up until then had brought forth factory workers and cleaning ladies; it made it possible for their sons and daughters to go to college; there was a new wind blowing in the universities, was that a bad thing?

  No, Peter Gutman said. Who said it was?

  * * *

  THE SECRET LIFE OF J. EDGAR HOOVER. Right at the start of the Clinton era—in which it turned out to be impossible to do what Clinton had promised and tried to do: end the discrimination against gays in the military—revelations were made public about J. Edgar Hoover, who for forty-eight years, until 1972, had been head of the American secret police, the FBI. We learned that he had led a sexual life that was far from “normal” and thus could be blackmailed: the relevant photos were in the Mafia’s hands, which led, among other things, to the FBI becoming central in escalating the Cold War, since it could not focus its attention on organized crime so instead focused on the American Communist Party. By 1956 that party had already dissolved, for all practical purposes, but Hoover still assigned fifteen hundred agents to what little remained of it when Robert Kennedy was attorney general, whereas the organized crime unit had to make do with a mere four agents, the newspaper reported. Mr. Hoover, not without a certain pride, once informed a shocked home secretary of the British Labour government as late as 1966 that he “possessed detailed and devastating material on every major U.S. politician, especially the Democrats, so his position was unassailable.” With the help of this material, he had set up a giant network of secret extortion and blackmail operations which continued into the early seventies and underlay his campaign against the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam movement. I now had a better understanding of the sighs of relief from some of my American friends after the Clinton election: Finally, a president who didn’t come out of the secret police.

  Nowadays, of course, retired FBI and CIA agents talk on TV without a care in the world about how they kept émigrés under surveillance during the war—there are pictures of them sitting in cars outside Brecht’s house, for instance, looking exactly the way you’d imagined they would look and wearing the same hats that they wore in the movies. The dossiers assembled from their reports, with most of the names and whole paragraphs blacked out, are now handed over to scholars who request to see them. They could have been dangerous for the people under observation back then but by now they have lost their explosive charge.

  Another advantage of a government existing a long time, I thought: the archives of their secret police must be far more extensive than the famous kilometers of files from the Stasi, which had only forty years to be paranoid, while the FBI has had since World War One to promote and respond to what at times was a national hysteria. John Steinbeck had only to speak out for social justice, or Faulkner to support civil rights for the black population, to justify a dossier of his own with the authorities. Ernest Hemingway’s persecution mania, as one of the few artists among his mostly carefree peers to sense that he was under surveillance, appears in a different light, and Thomas Mann’s fears also find their confirmation in the files: He came under observation due to his “premature anti-Fascism.”

  * * *

  It’s all a question of upbringing, said Horst, your seminar group leader. That was back in 1950: you were leaving Professor W.’s pedagogy lecture and Horst said that all this talk of predisposition, genetic basis, and inheritance of given characteristics was all nonsense. Give me thirty newborns born on the same day in the same hospital, he said, and one home where I can raise them, cut off from outside influence, and I can guarantee there will be no difference between their characters, they will all act in exactly the same way out in the world. It was a gray autumn day, on the street in the university city of Jena, and what Horst was saying made you uncomfortable although you couldn’t refute it.

  Language. I was slowly starting to be able to reflect on the differences between English and German, even though I could still use English only in limited ways. I thought how much easier it was for me to say I am ashamed than Ich schäme mich—how much closer the German came to the roots of my feeling, despite the similar syntax and the same meaning. The German crept right up to
those roots, lapped at them, nourished them, but was also painful for them, the same way the English word pain could never signify the pain I was feeling, I could say it is painful quite calmly and casually, like a lie, I thought, while I break out in a sweat at the thought of having to say Es tut weh and thereby having to think about the cause of my pain. How could “conscience” ever replace our German word “Gewissen,” a word that practically carries with its bite, “Bisse”: the prick of bad conscience, or Gewissensbisse, when your conscience is wounded; or the unscrupulous amorality of a lack of conscience, Gewissenslosigkeit, there’s no way to fool yourself about that, I thought. And what good would it do me to translate repentance into regret, say I regret instead of ich bereue: He (or she) regrets what he (or she) has done. Ich bereue, was ich getan habe. Oder nicht getan habe—or not done. It only works in German. Maybe because it’s about German actions or inactions, I thought. The foreign language as shield, or hiding place.

  And then there was how I unexpectedly encountered the word “honest” in the store that sold Indian clothes on Second Street: after an excessively long process of shopping and trying on clothes with the only person working there, an older woman who spoke English with a thick Indian accent, I finally went to pay and was prepared to be asked to show my driver’s license again, which here in the United States is the ID you need when you want to pay with a check instead of cash, so I mentioned up front that I only had an international driver’s license, which was usually not accepted as totally valid, but I could also show various ID-like cards with the same name and identical address as my checks—every one of my checks had my name and address printed on it already, of course—and I immediately started to do so, which only plunged her into an utterly unresolvable conflict. I had had the experience many times already, of a saleswoman in this situation phoning some higher authority, describing in detail what a strange and unique customer she had in front of her here, and passing the buck to her superior, but this poor saleswoman owned the store. If I turned out to be one of the apparently numerous check-forgers that she was apparently worried about, it would come out of her own pocket. I saw the struggle she had to fight within herself, then saw her make an effort and take the check: You look honest, she said, resolutely, and I assured her, Yes, I am. And silently added to myself: At least when it comes to money.

  On my way back to the MS. VICTORIA I thought about how this word “honest” could fit the German word “ehrlich” (candid, straightforward), but also “redlich” (fair) and “aufrichtig” (genuine), and I might add to the series the English word “upright” or the beautiful word “sincere.” On the other hand, “to do one’s best” couldn’t really hold a candle to our “sich redliche Mühe geben,” could it. Don’t these English-speakers shoulder the burden of “doing their best” rather easily, which is simply impossible for our German “redliche Mühe” (honest toil)? Maybe it’s because our “Schuld,” linguistically speaking, seems to weigh more heavily than their “guilt” or “blame,” or at least so it seemed to me. And it couldn’t be a total coincidence, I thought, that it was a German poet who, at the end of his “drama of humanity” rife with guilt and disgrace, conceived the lines “He who strives on and lives to strive / Can earn redemption still.” And while I walked straight at the three raccoons, who were staring back at me as usual, I suppressed a slight feeling of dissatisfaction that this poet had neglected to give the hint he perhaps should have given: how that struggle should look, the one that would result in a normal person (not a “noble spirit”) enjoying the “redemption” in question.

  How much easier it is, I thought, to come to terms with the temptations of youth than with the errors of your later years. All right then, at some point that has to make it into this book too: the jail story. Maybe I’ve told it too many times, my perspective on it has gone stale. What I see is a bare office in the Unter den Linden union building; today a large Western car company has its showroom there. Unfortunately I no longer have the election-worker ID that a functionary handed out to you election workers. Because you later destroyed it, as per instructions. Your task was to support the West Berlin SEW party, the Communists, in the elections. You were legal election workers, he insisted; there was an agreement with the West Berlin authorities, he told you. The materials you were supposed to hand out had stamps on them that proved they were legal. It went without saying that you were supposed to strike up conversations with the people receiving these materials, as much as you could, and try to convince them to vote for the Communists. These IDs with your names on them, he said, must by no means fall into the class enemy’s hands. No one asked why not, you didn’t either. It was the mid-1950s. Unter den Linden was still filled with construction ditches you had to walk across on planks in order to get to the Friedrichstrasse streetcar station. Lorchen, a young comrade, was assigned to go with you.

  I remember the short streetcar ride to the West—a direction you otherwise tended to avoid. Three or four stops. You paged through the propaganda material and found it terribly primitive. But that didn’t matter: it would never have crossed your mind to do what the other agitators did, namely throw the pamphlets in the nearest trash can, spend a few hours strolling around the Ku’damm, and take the streetcar back to the Democratic Sector. You had butterflies in your stomach, I still remember, but you couldn’t let anything show because you had to be a good model for Lorchen, the young comrade. You were twenty-six. I don’t remember the address you were assigned to or even the district—West Berlin was a different world for you. I can darkly see in my mind’s eye a treeless street with solidly middle-class, four-story apartment buildings on either side, whose occupants, the awareness glimmered even in you, might not be the most fruitful objects of your propaganda activities.

  At the instruction session, no one had thought to tell you the basic rule of illegal activity: never to hand out your fliers in a building from the ground floor up, but always from the top floor down. Emma told me this rule much later, roaring with laughter, when I told her about my failed efforts. You and Lorchen started on the bottom right. It was a dark-stained door, you rang the bell, and nobody opened the door, to your secret relief. So you pushed the materials intended for that apartment through the mail slot in the hall. And on it went, from bottom to top, since not a single apartment door in the building opened to you. Then, when you came downstairs and were back in the ground-floor hallway, a policeman wearing the West Berlin uniform was waiting there for you. I remember that your heart started pounding, but that you reassured yourself: He can’t do anything to us.

  He could take you in. You had to go with him to the station, to check your papers. I have forgotten if he ever even looked at your election-worker IDs. I remember perfectly the light that greeted you outside the front door of the apartment building: the light after a rain shower, when the sky is just clearing up and the sun casts an afternoon glow onto the streets and the buildings. And I remember perfectly the young boy, five or six years old, crouching by the gutter and sailing paper boats in the water there. How he looked up at you, grasped the situation lightning-fast, and shouted: Communists! Hang ’em all! And how you proudly said to him as you walked past: You’d have your work cut out for you.

  You calmed down after that. The next memory image shows me in a police station, one of the old-fashioned ones with wood-paneled walls and a kind of counter, behind which sat the sergeant on duty. He was an older man and not responsible for your case. He phoned a superior. Then he looked through your papers and actually found a page missing the stamp that made it legal—so now, unexpectedly, you were illegal. He showed you the page and explained the situation, very precisely, objectively, and without a sense of triumph. You felt furious at the comrades in the union headquarters who should have told you the plain truth, you were being sent to hand out propaganda after all. If only you’d known that some of your materials weren’t legal. You realized your situation was not exactly rosy and that you had to stay on your best behavior.

  They
told you to sit down on the obligatory wooden police bench against the wall. Lorchen was scared. I remember you tried to calm her down with sentences spoken under your breath. The sergeant felt the need to argue with you about the disadvantages of dictatorship and the advantages of the free democratic system. You tried your best to straighten out his false worldview. Finally he groaned and said: How can such a clever, well-educated woman be such an idiot? Your answers were short and to the point, proud, and unyielding. In the end, he told you to look at the map hanging on the wall above your bench: a big purple map of the Soviet Union with a series of small yellow rectangles on it, scattered irregularly around the country but gathered especially close together in a few areas, especially the northeast. You see those rectangles? the policeman on duty said. They’re work camps, camps for political prisoners. Every one. You felt sorry for him if he seriously thought you’d believe that. I still remember how he looked at you thoughtfully for a little while and then asked you what you would say if he could prove to you that he had been in one of those camps himself. Oh, so you’re one of those! A war criminal! You wouldn’t say another word to him.

  And you stuck to your resolution. In fact, you were someone who longed for harmonious interactions, you had to force yourself to be rude, but it was often unavoidable in the class struggle. So you kept silent until the young superior officer you were waiting for came, and a policewoman who called first Lorchen and then you into the side room.