A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘A friend of mine has greatly suffered from this increased capacity to permit travel,’ the Australian’s friend, the dickhead, said. He was called Uwe. He had started as soon as we sat down. ‘Do you know that some of us are given permission to travel? Me – no. Never. I do not know why. But my colleague Dr Müller, my colleague Professor Sütterlin, as we call him, my neighbour Braun, who works for the central government sporting agency – and so on – they have all started to travel. A week in Paris. A weekend in Madrid. A conference in Rome. A month residency in the Scottish countryside, in a house belonging to the old aristocracy. And then some of them do not come back. And others of them come back and they decide they do not want to return to their old lives.

  ‘Two years ago, if you had come into this bar, you would have seen a very different group here. Not a solitary boring dickhead, as my friend here calls me, sitting alone with his Schwarzbier, but a whole group of friends who have been coming here since they left the Gymnasium. There is my friend Ingo, and Dieter, Wolfgang, Thorsten and Thomas. And there is our friend Matthias. We have all been at the Gymnasium together, and we all have our jobs. And every evening when we meet we talk about what we have been doing since the last time we met. And every morning afterwards our friend Matthias writes a report on each of us for his friends in the large white building off the Stalinallee. You understand what I mean by his friends.

  ‘Now, Matthias has been doing this since he was at school. It is his hobby. He enjoys it. We all know that he does it, and since none of us has ever done anything or thought anything that could interest anybody, we are quite happy that he does it and that it makes him feel important. If there is anything that is significant in our lives about to happen, then perhaps we think about mentioning it only when Matthias is not in the room. Everybody understands and everybody is happy. Matthias does not have a very important job. He is the assistant in a little library in a small town in Brandenburg, I will not mention which one. And this gives him something to do, to write reports about all of us.

  ‘And you have to understand another thing. We are not in a democratic society, though we call ourselves that. We do not have a line of communication with our government through voting, as you do. It is helpful to have somebody in your circle who talks to officials every week. That probably does not occur to you. An informal colleague of the friends in the large white building just off the Stalinallee can be a nice thing to have. How do you think Herr Honecker will ever hear about what I have been up to? A friend of friends – he is a very nice conduit to authority. He tells them about all the hopes and dreams of our whole circle. Once a week he tells them this.

  ‘One day Ingo tells us that he has been approved to have a permit to travel, and will be going to Hamburg in the Federal Republic the next day. And he goes. This is quite a new thing, and we are often talking about who has the permission to leave the Democratic Republic in this new system of rewards. Him, him, her, not him, not her, but him. And soon the same thing happens to Thorsten, who in a month in Madrid meets a Spanish girl who teaches him how to speak Spanish, not like the Spanish as Thorsten has learnt it from books and Frau Tranchell at the Language Institute of the Humboldt University, Berlin, but how to speak Spanish when you are in bed and horizontal and with some pleasure. And Thorsten stays. And then in a month or two permissions are granted to one of the others, and then another. Some of them come back. Most of them come back after their trips. But the strange thing is this. When they come back, they do not appear at the bar in Kollwitzplatz. It is only by chance that we find out that they have returned, and when I go to call on them, they are quite friendly, and say that they will come down to meet with the gang some time, and they do not come.

  ‘The place and their friends do not work for them any more.

  ‘So the group becomes smaller and smaller. I am given permission to go abroad, too. I am the last of the group to make a trip like this. The last except Matthias, and for Matthias the permission will never come. He is a deputy librarian in a suburban public library. Some evenings we are only two, he and I, in this bar. Something terrible is troubling him. This is one night in February. I cannot bear this. Matthias is my friend, after all, and I ask him to share the problem that is weighing on his mind. And Matthias says, with great difficulty, and even with some tears, “Uwe. I have done a terrible thing. I do not know if you can forgive me. For years I have been writing reports about you – not just you, but every one of our friends. I have been classified as an informal colleague by the security services. Every week I have scuttled home and written a report about what you have said, adding a paragraph to a dozen reports on a dozen friends. And tonight I am going to do exactly the same thing about what we have talked about tonight.”

  ‘“I hope that you won’t tell them that you have admitted this,” I said.

  ‘“No, of course not,” Matthias said.

  ‘You could see that he was startled that this was my first reaction. “The truth is,” I went on, “we have all known this for years. Nobody was in any doubt that you were busy writing reports on all of us.”

  ‘“But what must you have thought of me?” Matthias said.

  ‘“It made no difference at all,” I said. This was not quite accurate, but it was true that it did not persuade anyone to stop meeting with Matthias, or to treat him differently.

  ‘“The fact is,” Matthias said, “that they are growing impatient with me. Two years ago, I could supply reports on eight people, just by sitting in this bar once or twice a week. But now—”

  ‘“Is it only me?” I said. Matthias nodded. He was filled with shame and inadequacy. It is true that the world judges an individual by his success in the world – by which I mean his success in forming connections and friendships. A man with many friends makes more friends. An ugly and boring man who has had one beautiful girlfriend will find it quite easy to find another beautiful girlfriend. This is a fact of existence, and I believe that the individuals in the security services are subject to it. They are not impressed by an individual who has, it now appears, only one friend. And, believe me, I do nothing interesting, and say nothing interesting. Matthias’s reports on me must be very disappointing.

  ‘But I do not see what I can do. As I explain to Matthias, I cannot turn myself into a dangerous criminal in order to raise his reputation. He quite understands that. He went away in a disconsolate mood. But tonight, it occurs to me, I can, after all, help him out. Would you mind very much if I introduced him to you? It would be quite harmless. Make sure he gets your names. By the time he writes his reports, I am sure you will be out of the country altogether. It would make him so happy.’

  The Australian historian was laughing. ‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to think I was being watched by those guys. I was never convinced they’d even opened a file on me.’

  ‘Why not?’ Ogden said. ‘An interesting experience. Let’s meet him.’

  A middle-aged man passed in an old tweed coat. The whiff of second-hand clothes was strong on him. His hand shook as he pointed. ‘There’s too many foreigners in here tonight,’ he said. ‘Berlin for the Berliner. I don’t want foreigners in my bar.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ the Australian said briskly. ‘Ich bin kein Ausländer. Ich bin Schutzmacht.’

  The man, who had been opening his mouth for further denunciations, closed it again. He looked old, frightened, drunk. He turned away.

  ‘That’s how you deal with them. Remind them that you’re not a foreigner, you’re a protecting power. They hate that. How long are you here in Berlin?’ the Australian said. ‘Watch out for strangers in mackintoshes following you.’

  ‘We’re going to Leipzig tomorrow,’ I said. Before we knew it, the Australian had decided that he would come too. He needed to go there some time for his research. It was tedious to travel on your own. We agreed on a train to catch. And soon a large, shambling fellow came in, with an untidy, patchy beard
and pink skin. His clothes gave off that smell of beer and mould. He greeted his friend Uwe briefly, without warmth. To us he paid the special attentiveness that consists of looking elsewhere, only flicking us a brief glance when Uwe introduced the three of us. I looked at him with interest and curiosity. He was, after all, a direct agent of government, of the politics I had a degree of admiration for. He was about to explore our lives. He was hoping to gather information about individuals. We did not live in this society. We were not subject to its borders. We were consenting to engage with its structures of power as a change from the structures of powers we normally lived within. That would be our holiday. For a moment, as he began his halting, unconvincing small-talk, politics appeared to me as an activity that had profoundly mistaken its own nature. It thought of itself as something that was done to people. In reality politics was much more like the situation as we conceived it. We were aware of the postures of power, more aware than the person who was concealing it. We were going along with it for the moment. We were giving it just as much information as would make it feel in tune with its existence as it conceived it. We were humouring it. They would find out about the hopes and dreams of two foreigners, visiting. And once the second beer arrived – it was good old-fashioned beer, well worth the journey into Prenzlauer Berg – I began to relax. I started to tell Matthias, with all the vividness I could muster, everything about the Spartacists: what we had done, what we wanted to do, the things we had smashed, the things we had written, the fun we’d had.

  We got back to the hotel as drunk as drunk could be. We had spent five marks and twenty-eight pfennigs. ‘That was fun,’ Ogden said, as we fell into the lift. ‘That was as much fun as – what time are we up in the morning? The train?’ But I was through the door and into the bathroom and two pints of water from the tap and then onto my bed. Someone was taking my shoes off – an incompetent fumbler. The bed underneath me was spinning, the whole room, too bright. Black.

  In

  the end

  I am in

  a room with those

  huge windows and who is

  it by my side no facing me

  talking my mother with tears in her eyes don’t worry my time’s up I’ve had my life it doesn’t matter and I’m crying too because above in the sky full of ships the crowds running past us on a hillside she is holding me the aliens say everyone must die tomorrow the ships in the sky great beige globes and my mother saying if I die it doesn’t matter and not understanding that everyone dies these crowds die all England dies she dies and I die and it happens tomorrow my legs running but won’t move won’t move and my mother crying her face big in mine and her arms around me embracing holding me down love and I can’t move I can’t run the death ray is coming I hear its hot scream

  I hear its hot scream

  I hear its hot

  scream I hear

  its hot

  scream

  The curtains were already drawn. The day was bright. In the bathroom the shower was running. I prised my eyes apart. In fact, I didn’t feel all that bad. I had followed Joaquin’s practice of making sure to drink as much water as I possibly could before going to bed drunk. Today we were leaving Berlin. We were going to Leipzig. Leipzig, where Bach came from. There was historical stuff there and the real DDR, not just over the Wall with the Potemkin façades for the benefit of the day-trippers. We were going with the Australian historian. I remembered it all now.

  ‘This is OK,’ Ogden said, when we were sitting in the Interhotel’s restaurant for breakfast. ‘I don’t think it’s any worse than Frau Dittberner’s breakfast.’

  ‘I don’t know why you would think it was likely to be worse than Frau Dittberner’s breakfast. This is a big international hotel,’ I said, but the breakfast was undeniably worse. The salami was a brilliant shade of pink; the bread had been sliced yesterday; the smoked salmon, laid out reverently and with a minatory serving boy standing by unsmiling to make sure you didn’t take more than your fair share, tasted of exactly nothing. The hard-boiled eggs had been sitting in hot water for too long. Each carried a ring of deep grey around the yolk, like Victorian mourning paper with an edging of black. But it was important not to comment on trivial differences like these. ‘I bet you know exactly what breakfast in big international hotels is like.’

  ‘Because of Phil, you mean,’ Ogden said. ‘A few. I don’t go on all his trips. I tried to get him to take me to Venezuela with his select committee. But the rules had been changed and it wasn’t allowed.’

  ‘How long are you going to stick with him?’

  ‘Might not be up to me,’ Ogden said. Then he went on, in pompous tones, ‘It’s the wishes of the electorate that have to be taken into account.’

  ‘What’s Phil’s majority?’

  ‘Twenty-four thousand seven hundred and twenty-seven,’ Ogden said.

  ‘So twenty-four thousand seven hundred and twenty-seven people would have to change the habits of a lifetime to throw him out. I would call that a safe seat.’

  ‘Nothing’s safe in this world,’ Ogden said. He leant back in his chair, his eyes professionally hooded and knowledgeable; he lit his first cigarette of the day. ‘And it’s twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-four, the figure. They’d go off and vote for someone else. Twelve thousand fewer for him is twelve thousand more for someone else.’

  ‘Twelve thousand – oh, I see. So then what are you going to do?’

  ‘Well, I’d consider my position,’ Ogden said. ‘I see everything that Phil’s done, and the select committee is great, but it’s not actually achieving anything.’

  ‘It’s not power,’ I said.

  ‘No. There’s some interesting people in the leader’s office. I think I might make my case there.’

  ‘You’d work for Kinnock?’

  ‘You don’t have to believe everything your boss says in public.’ Ogden stubbed out his cigarette rhythmically, making his point with it. ‘And they don’t say exactly the same behind closed doors. Believe me, he’s an interesting sort of mind.’

  ‘But Kinnock – after what he’s done. You might as well cut your differences and take up a job working for Thatcher. There’s no ideological divide between them.’

  ‘Bollocks. Anyway, it won’t happen. They’re still suspicious of people who come from where Phil’s come from. I mean ideologically. So I guess it’s going to be a job in a non-profit for two years and then …’

  Ogden made a huge gesture with his hands, as if describing a round sexy woman, the explosion of an atomic bomb over the table with its uneaten breakfast. I started to place the detritus in the miniature rubbish bin at the centre of the table.

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘I mean a safe seat. Somewhere in the north ideally. I want to stand up and get my voice heard. You can see that. Not just getting a third of what I suggest to Phil read out by him. On the select committee he has questions written for him by the clerks on the committee and then I write some for him. And of course he’s got his own. So they come first and mine sometimes get asked but maybe not. It’s frustrating. I want to get my own words out in my own voice. The only way to do that is to become an MP. And when the socialist government’s in place – next election’s 1991, the one after that 1995 – I’m going to get listened to. Believe you me, I’m going to get listened to. Bag carrier, junior minister, Cabinet minister, I’m not going to stop until I’m chancellor.’

  ‘What’s your deadline?’

  ‘2003,’ Ogden said, and then, again, made that explosion gesture, his fingers spread wide, his hands moving apart to a noise in his mouth. It was a gesture new in Ogden’s repertoire. It must have been borrowed from an important and impressive figure in his life. Perhaps Phil – Dr Philip Cawston MP, the ex-steel worker and, under the counter, the Militant activist. Or perhaps someone still more impressive, somebody who as yet was hardly aware of Ogden’s
existence. I had that impression. Ogden was going to become who he would become. His plans had been dwelt on, evolved, shared with few. I was privileged.

  ‘Of course, things might change,’ I said. ‘Circumstances might not be the same in 2003.’

  ‘What do you mean? Revolution, you mean? Do you know? I think there’s never going to be a revolution in this country. England, I mean. I think it’s just going to have to be done through the usual methods. Parliament, constituencies, elections. They won’t notice a revolution’s happened until it’s there. We’re going to bring it to them so nicely wrapped that everyone will welcome it. A bomb buried in flowers.’

  That was not quite what I had meant. In my head were the last remnants of my dream. I still had the feeling that at any moment large forces could assemble in the sky and order change, or an ending for everything we had known. Ogden had not learnt the same lesson I had learnt. For him, still, politics consisted of what politicians choose to do to the people. Their agreement must be extracted, or the appearance of an agreement. Then the politician is free to do what he wants to them. For me political life is a matter of objecting from the floor, of making the individual voice heard. Had I made a great mistake? When Ogden had spoken from the floor that time the army major came, I’d admired him because I thought he wanted to make his unimportant voice heard. He wanted to encourage all the other unimportant voices to be heard, too. It did not occur to me that Ogden had spoken at such length because he wanted to take the place of the major. He wanted to speak from the stage, to tell the rest of us what to do. There, in the East Berlin breakfast room in 1987, I heard Ogden’s career path laid out for the first time. He modestly restricted himself. He was going to be chancellor by 2003.