Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  A play by Bernhard is a straitjacket that you allow yourself to be strapped into, knowing that, if it is a good performance, the straps will become tighter and tighter and you will feel them for some time to come. In this play, the author—at least in the version I read—hits out at Austria again, ritually jeering, mocking, hating, as in all of his work. But for this performance, the director has come up with another idea: the criticism of Austria has become criticism of his own regime, a subtle but effective shift of complaints and allusions to the place where we are now. This transforms the pathos of Bernhard, his Austrian self-hatred, into something more like political cabaret with comments on proletarian culture, on state actors, on Nazis, on the system. It is no coincidence that it is Stalin who is left lying on the ground at the end. I had read about this, about how extraordinary it was that this could happen in the D.D.R., and of course that is true, but you cannot tell by the sound of the laughter whether it is coming from East German throats or West German ones. A peculiar duplication: in the Western laughter there is astonishment, and also a kind of joy about the Eastern laughter, the fact that it is allowed, but that lends the laughter a certain ambiguity, even if only because of the awareness of the piquancy of the situation. The acting is marvelous. The leading man, Kurt Böwe, draws the audience into his dreadful megalomania, his sadism, his failure. Because my points of reference are in the past, I cannot help but think of the Dutch actor Ko van Dijk, and how wonderfully, wildly, wretchedly he too would have played this part.

  The theater itself is a restored chocolate box: statues, paintings, cream-colored, elegant. Who is from the East and who from the West? You only have to look at the shoes, says my Hungarian friend. But West Germans sometimes wear those ghastly grey or beige shoes too. No, you have to look at the seams of the clothes, an expert on Germany from West Berlin once explained to me, but I think that is taking things too far. It is enough for me that I can sometimes see the difference and sometimes not, and that maybe I do not want to see it at all. That is their game—let them enjoy it. During the interval, powerful cocktails are poured at the bar; mine comes with such a large splash of Cuban rum that I float back into the auditorium.

  I know that I need to be out of the country before midnight, so I eat at a restaurant next to the station. Waiters with white bow ties, practically attired in evening dress, candles, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian wine, no beer, an extensive menu, once again very elegant. Outside, the dark canopy of the station, the channels, the uniform, the penetrating gaze that moves from photograph to face, the near-empty S-Bahn, that tiny distance that is so very huge.

  I go to see a play in West Berlin, too: Die Zeit und das Zimmer by Botho Strauss: Time and the Room. As usual, the time itself cannot be seen, at least not at first, and in the semi-darkness before the performance the room appears to be just a room. Fairly empty, pretty bare: the room as space. Three windows. In front of one of the windows, two chairs placed at angles to each other. In those chairs, two men sit smoking. They cannot see each other unless they turn their heads ninety degrees. In the dim light, the audience peers at the small program with its small font, and because I, as my own audience of one, have a particular way of looking at things, I find lots to like in it, as well as some things I already know. Borges on time, Augustine on time. Time then, that is what this is about. Bergson, Plotinus, Karl Jung, Lewis Carroll, Ballard, God and the whole world are quoted to make it clear that this is all about time. That initial lower-case letter is insufficient. I feel that Time here calls for a capital letter, as in German. It needs to be big, to indicate a concept, not just any old, random, tiny time, but Time, the enigmatic element in which all times reside, time of once, time of then—worn out, mouldering, forgotten—and time of one fine day, time of later—empty, new, elusive. Time measured and immeasurable, the sorry minutes and seconds of our measuring scale and the vast, expansive light years of the Milky Way, the quasars and the velvet eternity beyond. In that context, the anecdotal essence of every play is crushed. I know now that someone wants me to see something in the sacred aura of his higher purpose, but I do not see it and I do not need to see it. What I see is already strange, captivating, exciting enough. Preposterous scenes, arias of insanity, operas, fights, riddles, despair. Libgart Schwarz as Marie Steuber, the woman the two seated men were discussing as though she were a casual passer-by observed from a window, has now come into their lives. She is followed by a suite of other sudden, equally random figures who enter into short-lived chemical affinities, a pandemonium of relationships, woven together and then fraying apart, furious and passionate scenes, mysteries, hysterical laughter, the gaps in the relationships between people, lucky finds, and flashes of what was once called boulevard theater. I readily accept that the philosophical notion of Time was Strauss’s motivation here; after all, anyone who thinks for longer than half an hour always encounters time, or Time. What I saw in the two hours I sat there (the measurement was unavoidable) was a reflection of the world, familiar and unfamiliar, which I found difficult to shake off afterwards. These too were actors who led you around the brink of delirium.

  Once again, the other side, the Janus face of the world, the there and the here. Television, this side. A program about Franz Schönhuber, founder of the Republikaner.1 Every country has to have its ultra-right-wing party, so why not the Germans? That is how the argument goes. But what if lots of the police turn out to belong to that party? “Wir sind eine Polizistenpartei,” says the leader himself, and immediately it starts to sound different. “We are a police party.” Seventy-eight percent of the police force feels let down by politicians. Sixty-four percent believes that the sentences handed out by German judges are too mild. In short, the police are angry, not keen on foreigners, underpaid and unhappy, and they vote en masse for the far right. Film recordings show them advancing on a masked enemy who is dressed in black and throwing stones: “They show more understanding for the Chaoten than for us.” Then more pictures: rooms full of police gathered around their new hero, the only one who understands. And concerned police unions, who cannot risk losing the twenty thousand Republikaner from their ranks. Then, still on this side, Beijing, Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping dropping a piece of meat from his chopsticks, tens of thousands of students calling for democracy. And on the other side: also Beijing, but no one is dropping any food, and no one is asking for democracy. Speeches, anthems, grand words, just like at home, where Honecker is welcoming Mengistu. The Ethiopian leader has a dream of a woman with him and is wearing a cornflower-blue kind of uniform without insignia. But as his endless anthem is played, he grinds his teeth; you can see him doing it, small, persistent oscillations beneath the black skin. A helmeted officer stands in front of him, sabre drawn, and shouts a long German salutation before walking away, kicking his booted feet towards the sun. Did Mengistu know then that an attempted coup was taking place at home and that the country’s two most senior military officers were dead?

  May 27, 1989

  1 See Glossary.

  III

  Someone makes a joke: West Berlin, more than one million free people in a cage. It does not always feel that way but, oddly enough, it does when you drive out of it, although what I am driving into then is definitely not my freedom. I have to go to Kiel for a reading and have decided to go by car. The Berlin–Hamburg route is one of the three options, and I have not driven that way before. On some sections of the road, which you are never permitted to leave, at any point, not under any circumstances (it is strange how quickly you accept such an alien concept), you are only about seventy kilometers from the Baltic. And, although I cannot quite explain why, that lends a sense of adventure to the proceedings.

  There are two kinds of pathos involved in this journey: the pathos of politics and the pathos of weather. Pathos is a weighty word, but today it needs to be said. The weather is wallowing in itself, lavishing lush excess upon itself, having dived into summer in one breathless, senseless swoop. Everything is full, fat; the trees are rounded an
d plump, the hawthorn is blooming, the breeze is balmy—there is no doubt about it, this is an exemplary summer, the kind that you mention in the future when you are describing how summer should be.

  A lot of people in China must feel the same way right now, I think. The images I see on television remind me of May ’68, but hugely magnified. Crowds that look like a forest, cars full of flags, the excitement in the voices that hits you even through the mask of a foreign language, the gleaming eyes, the experience against which your entire life is measured, no matter what comes after. In those rare moments, when the articulation of a single idea takes precedence over all other considerations, life suddenly seems to weigh no more than an ounce, because everything else has become so heavy. Every morning I listen to the commentary and interviews on the B.B.C. World Service, and find myself standing in the Square of Heavenly Peace, which, for a few days, has become the town square of the entire world.

  There will always be something of the foolish virgin about me (those poor, unwise souls in the parable who have no oil left in their lamps at the crucial moment), and so I want to look at the faces of the guards of the other republic and see what they are thinking. I want to know whether any of that excitement, which should, after all, be their concern as well, is actually filtering through to them. But if it is, you cannot tell from their faces.

  I have resolved never to write about this border again, but I have to do it one last time. Together with the dark gate from Macau to China at night, this is the most challenging border I know, one that expresses the very notion of border, to the extent that you cannot believe that those foolish crows can just fly straight over the top of it.

  You notice the railings converging, see that you are being channeled somewhere. Suddenly you are inside, yet you have just come out of somewhere else. A forest of lights. The area is bare and wide, but the route you must take is marked out, narrow, severe. There are not many cars around. The weather lends everything a friendly glow, but the forms remain as strict as ever. Do I have children with me? I do not have children with me. Do I have a telephone in my car? I do not. Will I take off my sunglasses and turn to look at the guard? I will, and it is a match. I am me. I am allowed through to the next guard post. Each person processed requires a certain amount of time and no one else has been waved through, so I drive the next section alone, across the concrete. Several watchtowers. More of those tall lights—it must be beautiful here at night. Speed limit thirty, then twenty kilometers per hour. You become your own deceleration, reining in all those invisible horses in your engine. Perhaps you are no longer moving; maybe you are on a conveyor belt that is taking you forward. To my right, a long tube runs from the first guardhouse to the second. That is where my papers are now, travelling onwards, along with me, slow and invisible. I can see a gleaming pulley turning the belt on which my passport must be. Second check, all very friendly. Nothing in those expressions but work. And that is what it is, of course. A job. They are young boys. They are polite but firm, and they are just as strange to me as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then there is a third check, and sometimes a fourth. All that time, you are moving steadily along, like the tortoise Achilles could never catch up with. A sign: “Zero per cent alcohol in the D.D.R.!” Slowly, you flow out, then in. Still thirty, then forty. And then you are in that other country, the same country. I see that summer holds sway here too, see the yellow banks of broom hugging the road. Land is innocent; it knows nothing. Purple lupines, distant views slipping by, rural scenes. Later, farms, villages, church towers. Cars and tractors driving along the other, more distant roads that you sometimes see. I can see them, but I am not allowed to go there. And, of course, that creates a desire. All I want to do is make a right turn and go and sit in one of those villages in the shade of a lime tree.

  There is not much traffic. Plenty of time to think. Even the few cars that are around reveal the difference between the two countries, the same country. The Trabant is a silly little vehicle, almost endearing. The others, driving their emblematic Mercedes, Audis, B.M.W.s, must feel so superior. But something is missing here: the hysterical, aggressive rushing and pushing of the West German Autobahn. It is as if all of their national frustrations are played out there. When you are trying to overtake and you see one of those pointless racing drivers looming in your rearview mirror, you know that within two seconds that grim shadow will be pecking at your bumper, flashing his big headlights; given the chance, he would like just to drive straight through you. Murder seems to be constantly on their minds. They disappear over the horizon only seconds after passing you, doing 180, 200, maybe more. They have been bottling something up for their entire lives and now they are burning off that frustration. It feels as though the entire country is permanently furious. But there is none of that on this side. A hundred is not much, and I would feel happier at 120, but within half an hour you are used to it. At least I can look out at Brother Falcon and Sister Buzzard, at the pink blossom of the chestnut trees, at the sensual script of the wind in the corn.

  I think about the article I read that morning in Der Tagesspiegel: “Glasnost in der D.D.R. der 90er Jahre?” Will the D.D.R. always continue to limp along behind the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland? The D.D.R.’s view is that the Russians needed glasnost to mobilize the population because the economy had fallen woefully behind, an argument that does not apply to the D.D.R. itself, because in that respect they are the mirror image of those other Germans, top of the class. Recently the Aspen Institute in Berlin held a seminar with representatives from the S.E.D think tank, the Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften. It was also attended by Americans, British, West Germans, academics and politicians. The event was intended to pave the way for democratization in the 1990s and was described in Der Tagesspiegel as a “contribution from the D.D.R. to the discussion of glasnost and perestroika in Eastern Europe.” A couple of quotes: “Socialism needs democracy like we need air to breathe,” and “Socialism without democracy or without comprehensive implementation of human rights would be inadequate socialism, or no socialism at all.” It was going to take a long time, but the development of a greater sense of personal responsibility and a climate of “criticism and self-criticism” was essential.

  But how is that supposed to happen with the Wall still in place? wonders this Dutch citizen, as he drives from one barrier to the next, as though merely contemplating such notions might make all that metal melt away. Words by themselves cannot melt anything; their truth will have to make itself felt in other ways. Perhaps this is the point: it is as inconceivable that it will never happen as that it might happen immediately. However, it is, in fact, the immediate nature of all those proposals that must matter so much to the people involved. So many Russian soldiers are being withdrawn from Eastern Europe. I watch them on T.V. as they go, soldiers hanging out of train carriages, laughing, arms filled with flowers, their tanks on low, flat wagons, their guns suddenly pointing foolishly into the air. What will happen to all of those men? By the end of the century there will be nineteen million unemployed in the Soviet Union. What is to be done with them? And what are they to do with themselves, once the semblance of activity offered by an army in peacetime has been removed?

  Words need to be tapped like a tuning fork. Does it sound the same? Is it really the same? The S.E.D. is based on a “democracy” that politically secures the socialist ownership of the means of production. According to the article in Der Tagesspiegel, this should be seen in the light of the “Grundsatz der Stabilität,” the principle of stability, along the most sensitive border in the world, the one I am now crossing. According to this principle, the division of Germany is essential to maintain this stability. The Wall is far more than a mere symbol of this requirement; it is an integral part of the need for stability. As becomes evident several times a year, this Wall can also signify death. So how does it work? “Anyone crossing the border in the proper manner has nothing to fear.” In 1988, twelve million journeys were made from the D.D.R. to the West and West Berlin,
and six million journeys in the opposite direction. Why would anyone choose to cross the border in an “improper” manner? Could it perhaps have been someone who simply wanted to leave, but had not received permission to do so?

  I am allowed to leave, that is a fact, just as it is a fact that I will be allowed back in when I return. I pass the guard posts, zigzag over the concrete, inch from barrier to barrier, have no children with me, show my face, and am once again back with the other others. Suddenly the Mercedes begin to race again, as if they have been given a shot of adrenaline. The first Mercedes devours an Audi that was just wolfing down a B.M.W.—the remains are still dangling from its jaws. So this is freedom: exhaust fumes biting into the gentle trees, I am home again. There are five kinds of condoms at the Raststätte, ten sorts of trashy magazines, drinks in twelve varieties, but, thank God, there is also that unique, breathtaking summer. I take a side road through the countryside to Lübeck. Woods, lakes, peace. War never happened, the earth was never polluted. I lie in a wood beneath tall beeches and listen to two cuckoos calling out long stories to each other about eggs and other birds’ nests.