Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  March 18, 1989

  1 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (S.P.D.)—Social Democratic Party. See also Glossary.

  II

  Living somewhere else is different from travelling—I can tell by the way I look at things. My gaze does not constantly have to be focused. I still have enough time; I am staying in Berlin until the summer, and returning in the autumn. Just last week, I realized that I had actually forgotten to look at the exterior of my building. Some inner authority must have assumed that it would trickle into my consciousness of its own accord. When someone from the Netherlands asked me what sort of house I was living in, I realized that the Dutch concept of huis did not cover it, because my house here was inside another house, and it is that other house, the big one, that they call a Haus here in Germany. Haus is the name for these huge residential blocks with various layers of homes stacked up around square courtyards. They used to refer to such tenement buildings as Mietskasernen, rental barracks, but that does not feel right, if only because I hardly ever hear my neighbors. There is no caretaker, but there is a board on the street outside with our strange mix of names on it. The common areas are not kept particularly clean. There is a fine layer of dust on the balustrades that could possibly date back to before the war, because an ancient neighbor has told us that the house was already here back then. Everyone takes their own rubbish down to the courtyard, where the large plastic containers line up in silence: one for bottles, one for paper, the others for general rubbish. The system works perfectly. Twice a week, at half past seven in the morning, the bin men press all of our doorbells at the same time and there is always someone at home to open the main front door for them. The only neighbor I know is the old woman who lives downstairs. The others, most of them young people, say hello, and I say hello back. Out in the hallway there is a pram and there are two bikes in the courtyard, but I do not know who they belong to. Our homes all look out onto the central courtyard. When I arrived, the big chestnut tree out there was bare, but now it is growing fuller by the day, almost as if it wants to reach out and touch all of our windows. I am very fond of him, the tree, and I marvel at his vitality, at the power he must have deep within his wood. You cannot have a conversation with him, but I still speak to him now and then. I think he likes it. And he has towers too—that is what I call his flowers—those upright, white towers that always give me a good start to the morning.

  The doorbell rang at quarter to seven this morning, one of those fateful shrieks that penetrate into the very marrow of your dreams, merging with them, until stopped by a second jolt of electricity. In your other life, in the “real” world, you stand dazed at your own front door, faced with someone who has been awake for hours, who is uncontaminated by sleep and night-time visions. “Eilbote!” Whistling, the courier clatters back down the stairs. When have I ever received an express letter in the Netherlands at that time in the morning?

  The day has started for me as well now, and I realize that it is a good time to take a look at my house from the outside. I live in Goethestraße, which suits me well. Lime trees, a birch, around the corner a pedestrian area with lots of shops, Wilmersdorfer Straße, with Sesenheimer Straße around the other corner—not a bad location. This is my home now. A square nearby, with a church, and a market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, which is very good. I walk to Wilmersdorfer Straße and look up at the house of many houses. To identify my own part of it, I have to count from the ground up. What I notice now is the color. Solidified mud, desert sand, at any rate something involving earth; dry and jagged, it would hurt your hand if you rubbed it. I stand beside the kiosk where they sell frische Putenteile during the day, right across from Nana Nanu, with its artificial flowers and electric-blue nylon animals in the window. Yellow ones too, the color of egg yolks gone bad. These are not real animals; they do not occur in nature, but were dreamed up by an angry blind man. Then there is the Goethe-Apotheke, which has been here since 1900. Next comes Zum Wirtenbub, a gloomy bar I have never been inside. People play dice in there; I can hear them whenever the door is open. Across the way is the Video Galerie, which I have also never visited. Large helpings of Eros and Thanatos, breasts and machine guns. Lust and blood—it washes through me as I walk past. I read the titles and reassemble them into a cadavre exquis. Surrealism is never very far away, and that is certainly true in this place.

  “So, what is it like now?” my friends ask me on the phone. That is a good question, but I do not have an answer. “It is,” I would like to answer. “It is. I am here.” I live in Berlin. It is not only different from the Netherlands; it is different from anywhere else. But I cannot quite express that difference, that otherness, in words yet. It has something to do with the people: they are much more my other people than Americans or Spaniards. I am still not sure how to act around them, and I cannot speak their language with confidence. I prefer just to walk in between them; after all, you do not really need to say very much. I sit on the U-Bahn and observe them. They are often Greeks, Turks, Yugoslavians, Colombians, Moroccans. I am more at ease with them, because they are not as powerful. Or maybe they simply feel closer.

  At times it feels claustrophobic. I never felt that way when I was just a visitor. The Wall, the border—you know you can just go over, get out. So it can’t be that. Yet even so. I notice it on Sundays. That is when I want to get out. There is plenty of green on the map, lots of Wald. So that is where you go, and you can get there in no time. You find that everyone else is there too. Anyone who is not driving or flying to West Germany remains inside the fence. I do not know if they feel the same way about it as I do. The city is not even that small in terms of square kilometers, but still.

  I often go to Lübars, which is like a real village. But it is an illusion, as if there were lots of countryside stretching out all around. Two village pubs, a water pump, a small church, a few graves. I walk out of the village along a path I have discovered. The first time, I came to a small river. I stood looking into the water, dark-colored, fast-flowing, swaying water plants, the thought of fish. That was when I noticed the sign. It said that the border ran down the middle of the stretch of water. The Wall might have been some distance away, but the other side, those dry reeds, that scattering of trees, that was the land of the Others. Now I saw the water differently. It was no more than a couple of meters wide, but in the middle of that moving, transparent element was the border. It is not something you should spend too much time thinking about, but I still did. East water, West water. Absolute nonsense, and yet that border is real. It is there. I carried on walking, up a hill. I had a good view of the Wall from up there. There were in fact two walls, with between them a kind of anti-tank ditch, loose sand, earth, soil. The strip of land rolled away into the distance. I walked on to where I would encounter the Wall itself; it was not made of bricks or concrete at that point, but of transparent steel mesh. A hundred meters beyond, in front of the other Wall, was a tower. A small car stood beside it. Then a window opened in the tower. I could see the silhouettes of two men. One of them pointed his binoculars at me and took a good look. A one-way process. He could see me perfectly, but I could not see him. What did he think he was going to see? Why was he looking? I stood there for a while, experiencing the strange sensation of allowing myself to be looked at. I wanted to know what the man was thinking, but I never would. I did not want to know what he thought about me, but what he thought about himself. There was no way of knowing. Was he looking out of a sense of duty, conviction, boredom? Did he believe in what he was doing? There was, as far as I could tell, no way that anything could ever occur between those two walls, not in that place, certainly nothing initiated by me. So what was the point of watching? Did he spend hours of unutterable boredom in the tower? Or was it pure conviction? Did heading off to that tower every morning give him a sense of job satisfaction? What I really wanted to do was go up into the tower and have a chat with him, but there was no chance of that happening.

  The Wall at Lübars, West Berlin, April 198
9

  Maybe I even had a proper look at him yesterday, without realizing that it was him.

  Yesterday was May Day, and I watched East German television in the evening, as I often do. This is a useful exercise in many things, but particularly semantics: how the same news is expressed in different words and therefore becomes different news. This was particularly obvious after the Russian elections. If twenty out of the one hundred party candidates are not elected, you can of course mention that fact, and if it is for the first time in history, then you can really make a point of it. That is what happened on the television on my side of the Wall. On the other side, they said that eighty party candidates, the vast majority, had been re-elected. The duality of the same factuality, the Janus face of one and the same fact, as one person keeps quiet about something while another person emphasizes something else, and does so in the same language, which can be understood and also heard on both sides of the Wall. That forces you to train your ear. The eye is a much more deceptive organ.

  On that first of May, there were all kinds of things to see on both sides of the Wall. On my side, there was the violence of the Chaoten, as they call the anarchists here. Perhaps the situation they created was chaotic, but the Chaoten themselves are not. They make straight for their goal, which is violence. Lots of violence, intended as violence, put into practice as violence. Against the police, against shops, against cars. Waves of attacks, people in disguise, invisible and therefore non-existent, faces behind black cloth. Hate. Leather, boots, smoke, fire, injuries.

  On the other side, there was peace. What I saw were the edited highlights of a procession that had gone on for over five hours. Honecker on a podium, for five hours. Sometimes with a sunhat, sometimes without. Around him, the government, the military. In front of him, children, artists, workers, a black dance troupe, firemen, Vietnamese, Cubans, factory delegations. Could I really believe my eyes? Happiness, singing, children in their parents’ arms, proud fathers, a beaming head of state.

  In themselves, images cannot be semantic; it is only when you start to say something about them, when you attach meanings to those images, that the semantics commence. But then you have to address the issue of the images that are not seen. What kind of images might they be? A meeting of the Central Committee where the theme for discussion is how to handle the democratizing tendencies that are making gradual inroads in the D.D.R.? What attitude to take to the memoir written by Markus Wolf, the former head of the secret service? Or how to handle something as innocent as five demonstrators, each holding a candle, who are demanding the right to be allowed to travel to the West?

  More images followed later that evening, from other, identical processions in all parts of the Democratic Republic. Stages, leaders, rosettes, marches. Within five hours the Wall will be gone, say some people on my side of the Wall, pointing at the images of Hungarians using shears to cut through their own iron fences. But what will happen if that happens? Suddenly there would be a very large and powerful country in the middle of Europe, where many people thought it would never be seen again, and no one knows what kind of country it might be.

  The Wall is a cliché, I am well aware of that. But it is a cliché made of concrete. I can see it from the air when I manage to get away for a few days: a caesura in the landscape, foolish and unreal when seen from above. A scar, as so many must have said before me, but that is what it looks like. And what does it look like inside the people? I ask a German friend whether the people in the two countries feel some sort of Heimweh, homesickness, nostalgia, for one another. What is reunion? An illusion, a desire, a possibility? Not a possibility, he says, because there is no desire and no nostalgia. It is just an illusion for the other Europeans, who are afraid of a united Germany. Things will not come to that. People want it in the East, but the people in the West will never want it. The hostile attitude to the Polish and Russian Germans who are now coming to the West in large numbers only goes to prove that. The Germans in the West do not like them; they do not even see most of them as Germans. They are poor and backward and they do not fit in with this modern, Western, rich Germany. The Germany you are talking about, he says, existed for less than a hundred years, only after Bismarck. We do not have the slightest sense of nostalgia for it. And we do not want to pay for it either.

  But, says our Hungarian friend, the Germany we’re talking about existed for a long time before it actually became a state, didn’t it? It existed as a language, as a community. What you’re saying now implies that you as West Germans are making the East Germans the actual losers of the war. They still have to do penance, while you’re wallowing in prosperity. And besides, can you really imagine the Wall still standing in ten years’ time?

  But the German has his answer ready: “If the Wall comes down, we’ll have twelve million Germans heading this way. We’ll be begging Honecker to keep it standing.”

  The Dutchman and the Hungarian pause for a moment. Then one of them asks, “And what about the shared European homeland? Is the D.D.R. just supposed to lie there in the middle of it like a locked room? If the D.D.R. opens up, isn’t that a huge opportunity for West Germany too? You could help out the East with some kind of Marshall Plan, couldn’t you? Bring their antiquated industry up to date? Supply machinery? Just think of the market that would open up for you . . .”

  The German has an answer to that too: the West German taxpayer has no intention of spending a single Pfennig on his long-lost brothers. I am not quoting this conversation because I found it so illuminating or even politically astute. If this discussion—and thousands of conversations like this are taking place—has any value, it lies in the fact that it is taking place in the shadow of the Wall. That concrete construction is not merely a thing; it is also a metaphor for a refusal whose reciprocal nature we have perhaps not always adequately grasped. Behind the Wall live the Others, and they are very different, so different that they had best stay where they are, if only because undoing that separation places such outrageous demands on the imagination. Berlin one city again? The capital city of whatever construct might result? A peculiar alliance, a contrived federation, a dream union? How would that work? Then it does indeed become inconceivable, as unfeasible as an eternal status quo, synthesis as chimaera, a nightmare vision for both those within and those without.

  I am going to the other side. I say “other side” without thinking about it, but then I hear the phrase myself and it sets me thinking. “Other side.” As if the Wall is a river. A natural phenomenon, not a human creation. Going to the other side is usually easy. Not this time. I take the S-Bahn from Bahnhof Zoo to Friedrichstraße, where the checkpoint is. Canopy, iron, long trains, subdued lighting and—I cannot help myself—always a touch of Graham Greene and John le Carré. Down the stairs, the shuffling and shambling of my contemporaries. Then you enter the concourse. I know my way; I have to turn right towards Andere Staaten, other states. There are five channels today, narrow passages, and we are pushed through them as if through a sieve. It is not modern, but awkward, clumsy, makeshift, as though no one had reckoned on it lasting this long. The crowd I am in: Poles, lots of old people. I am not tall, but they do not even come up to my shoulders. They are old and small and lugging large suitcases and boxes. It all happens infinitely slowly; we have to go around a corner and filter into the channel. I am on the inside of the curve; the outside is moving more quickly. Even the queue jumpers, the old hands, the obvious Westerners are now stuck. At the point I have reached, where the procession turns ninety degrees, everything appears to have come to a standstill. I still cannot see the way through, but I know what it looks like. The lonely official sitting in his wooden box. The color is beige, a very pale beige. He sits up above; you have to hand over your documents at neck height; the old people reach up over their heads. He sits there, looks at your picture, looks at you. His cap hangs behind him on a hook, a strange round thing, a green decoration on the wall. You hand over five Marks for your one-day visa and receive a piece of paper. After tha
t, it all goes very quickly. You shoot out of the channel on the other side, change the obligatory amount (25 DM), and suddenly you are outside. You are there. There. And you find that the world is there too. Trams, cars, Trabants. They roar and let out a stink. I stroll to Unter den Linden. Nothing special. People, shops, footsteps. Not much traffic; work is over for the day. I am on my way to the theater; all is right with the world. The Brandenburger Tor, which I usually see from the other side, shimmers in the distance. I know that the statue on the top has turned around, even though I cannot see it. All I can see are the open spaces between the columns, and they look the same from here or from there. It is just that “there” has become “here” because it is where I am now.

  The play, by Thomas Bernhard, is called Der Theatermacher. I have already read it. The showman Bruscon and his browbeaten family have recently arrived in some provincial dump, a place so unimaginably mortifying for a man of his stature that he refuses to remember the name: Butzbach, Utzbach, something like that. A dirty, run-down room in the local inn; outside, the squealing of hungry pigs. His play The Wheel of History is to be performed there, with himself in the leading role. His coughing wife and his unsightly, talentless children will play the other parts. Thomas Bernhard is all about destiny, submission, humiliation, cursing, megalomania, hideous sycophancy, endlessly harping on details, in this case the emergency exit sign, which the actor insists must not be illuminated during the final minutes of the play. All of this comes in waves of rhetoric, repetitions that wash ashore again and again, until the melancholy, agonising tedium presses into your very bones and the inescapable destiny of everyday life twists into your brain like a screw, as in the work of Willem Frederik Hermans. Only then are you allowed to leave, defeated. The inn is on fire, the play does not go ahead, but you have just seen your play. Outside, there is the squealing of people and pigs, the statue of Stalin has fallen from the wheel of history and is lying on the boards, stiff and foolish, and the theatrical family can travel on to another place of horror. No catharsis, no on-stage purification, no form of solution whatsoever, and yet still there is that strange effect on the viewer: all the filth that has flushed through you somehow feels cleansing.