Lübeck. This is a Germany I do not know. The hotel is on the Wakenitz, languid summer water, rowers, fishermen. It feels northerly here, Hanseatic, mercantile prosperity, Buddenbrooks, old houses, stepped gables, coats of arms, wealth. Everything seems almost Dutch; it is most pleasant. I climb up a tower, let the landscape and the citadel fall away beneath me. The city is a strange jagged shape lying in its own amniotic fluid. In the harbor are the large ferries to Sweden and Norway; to the north, Travemünde, the Baltic; the world is a bowl filled with light. I wander along the quiet streets, eat at the Schiffersgesellschaft: model ships, memories of sailors, ship owners, distant harbors. The Protestant work ethic, the accomplice of trade and capital—nothing that came later would look quite that virtuous and peaceful. The impoverished fishing folk have gone, what has remained are the merchants’ houses, the churches with the Hanseatic cog on their weathervanes. Through a closed church door I hear the swelling notes of an organ, and it all sounds like days gone by. Gesellschaft zur Beförderung Gemeinnütziger Tätigkeit, Haus der Kaufmannschaft. In the Heiligen-Geist-Hospital I gaze at the small cabins where the old people used to sleep, like dwarves in their dwarf beds, endless rows of compartments under one large roof of beams and joists that resembles the interior of an upturned ship. Stained-glass windows, benefactors’ coats of arms.
In the Lübecker Nachrichten it says that Kapitän Harmannus Otten Wildeboer, retired maritime pilot, has died; the first stork of the year has been born in Eekholt; the sale of seagulls’ eggs is forbidden because they contain too many toxins; the dollar has overtaken the Mark again; and in the Square of Heavenly Peace the students are dancing, but not for long. I buy a black-and-white postcard that shows the city burning, houses lying ruined in the streets, bells fallen from their towers. That was then. Times are different now. The republic built on that rubble has existed for forty years, and those forty years are also forty of my own years. I could have put together the commemorative issue of Stern in my sleep: Adenauer’s leathery face, Willy Brandt on his knees in Warsaw, Erhard with his cigar, Uwe Barschel asleep forever in the bathtub of his suicide, his pointless watch still on his wrist. The first student shot dead by the police, Ohnesorg; the successive waves of terror and counter-terror; the suicides of Baader and Meinhof; the construction of the Wall; the fields of rubble in the city where I now live. And all of those lesser nostalgias in between: the first puny little cars, the first wooden television sets displaying their fuzzy grey miracle, the millionth Gastarbeiter, so warmly welcomed with the gift of a motorbike.
And so the two histories intertwine, the history of those faces, captured forever, which will go on and on, and that other, smaller history, made up of the memories of the survivors, which will disappear along with them. Michael Jürgs writes in an article that the Germans of today are no better than the others, but just normal: normally good and normally bad. They no longer dream of reunification with the other part of the same country, he says, but are happy to see indications that the Wall was not built for eternity. As always, the Germans have been listening to the voices from abroad and they have heard a lot of things that they do not like. Jürgs (Stern, 24 May) suggests some answers. Yes, friends from France and colleagues from Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde, you are probably right to wonder about this nation of militarists developing into a majority of anti-militarists. But we would rather make you nervous that way than with tanks and cannons. And perhaps, English neighbors, you have still not grasped that we are not like the Teutons in your television series, and that Mrs. Thatcher has no say here, however frustrating that might be for her. The tone is self-assured, including Jürgs’ remark that the fatherland matters about as much as Mother’s Day. The guilt for the crimes “once committed in our name” has been accepted as “part of our history,” and is no longer repressed. And there is no longer a national fatherland of the Germans. So there is no longer any need for others to make the judgment of the past into the prejudice of the present. The whole article is clearly in support of Genscher’s politics, and a farewell to the Cold War: “Let us celebrate the future of this troublesome fatherland.”
Troublesome fatherland, troublesome neighbor. A country that is hard on itself weighs heavily on its neighbors. On an impulse, I decide to take a detour. I do not have to be in Kiel until late in the afternoon and, on the map above Schleswig-Holstein, I have seen that other border, the Danish one, with the town of Kruså beside it. In my very first book, Philip en de anderen,1 I chose Kruså as the setting for a fictional, embellished encounter, woven out of something that had actually taken place in 1953. That is how long it has been since I was last here. I do not recognize anything, except that same, breathless summer and the foreign language around me. Soldater slog til i Peking-forstad: other words, still the same. Thatchers E.F.-stil kan koste hende dyrt, Alfonsín går før tiden. Tijd, time, Zeit, tiden: what have our mouths done to those words?
It is quiet on the narrow road I have chosen. Blonde children on bicycles, empty houses, thatched roofs. I feel at home here and I wonder why it is that small countries are so appealing. Maybe it is that they have no great weight to place on the scales of the world, but equally no great weight to drag them towards a national fate that is bound up so inextricably with that of its inhabitants. As though that weight is now making itself felt, I turn my car around and drive back towards the north, which is now my south.
Bismarck, Kiel
My reading is at the main library in Kiel, a bright and airy space. There are about seventy students there, and we go out for a meal afterwards at Der Friesische Hof. They are friendly, northern, open. Why are they studying Dutch? Dutch people always ask that question, as if they are somehow skeptical of other people’s motives. Our language is our hang-up. But the students have their reasons: art history, history, the Golden Age, De Stijl, studying primary sources. Suddenly Holland expands a little; we are not always a secret society. Some of the students think it is a beautiful language, while others were simply looking for a suitable subsidiary subject, and the Netherlands is nearby. One is studying Dutch because a friend of his said it was unfair that so many more Dutch people learn German than the other way around, and he thinks his friend has a point. And he is enjoying the experience. He visits Groningen occasionally and he can talk to his friend now without having to resort to his own language—he likes that. What about the war? When they are in the Netherlands, the students see the monuments: “It’s something that our country did. There’s no getting around that.”
The wind is blowing in Kiel; the sea wind is up to no good. I visit a wonderful exhibition at the Kunsthalle the next morning: Der junge Lucebert, 110 paintings, etchings, gouaches, drawings by the COBRA poet and artist. There are a few things I have not seen before, but I know most of them, and I recognize even the pieces I do not know. I reread the words that are already engraved in my memory and have taken up permanent residence in my language. I look nostalgically at the photographs of the earlier, darker man, his eyes glinting then as they do now, walk past the colored animals, the crowned heads, past the earliest, so serious self-portrait from 1942, past all those tattered and vibrant people, the furious pathos of the faces he drew, his riddling moons, mythical creatures. I see how one single painter has taken command of all these differences, characters, forms, techniques, how some of the paintings laugh or mock and others are full of sadness, and I feel downhearted and elated at the same time. Burdens of the air, Thinking animals, Heavenly twins, The poet feeds poetry, In conversation with evil: the poet’s language has wrapped a cord around each of these images, but also around me, a slow, sparkling cord of imagination that remains wrapped, invisible, around me long after I have become a driver again, on the road back to Berlin. A handwritten poem appears in the front of the beautiful catalogue, “Berceuse,” the last three lines of which I shall never forget:
Dat je tiert en rond rent
met roestige kettingen dat was
van weleer dat is toch bekend
Het mo
et ons nu van het hart
je bent behendig in het verkeer
schoon insulair in de weer
Maar wat je ontkracht en verwart
niemand te zijn en nergens
en dan nog iemand te zijn en hier 2
June 10, 1989
1 Philip and the Others, translated by Adrienne Dixon (Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
2 Your raging and rampaging / in rusty chains is from / bygone days that much is plain
Now we have to get it off our chests / you are adept in your dealings / yet insular in your feelings
But what weakens and confuses you / is being no one and nowhere / and yet someone and here
IV
Farewell for the summer. Berlin is warm, sensual, but I am leaving for that other, Mediterranean, summer and not returning until autumn. The atmosphere in the city is hedonistic; half-naked women lie around on the lush lawns behind Schloss Charlottenburg and in the park in Kreuzberg, as though anticipating an orgy. Twice I see one of those Germanic figures mounting a humble intellectual lying beneath her, removing his pince-nez and lavishing attention on his thin body, starting at the top and working her way down, not unlike a St Bernard tending to an avalanche victim. Large white breasts gleam in the sunlight, and the man struggles a little, kicks briefly, before sinking into this overwhelming tenderness. This is a matriarchy. The people lounging nearby pay no attention, smoke their joints, read their thick tomes, spill beer down their beards or talk to their dogs. The grass is green; the city draws a circle of noise around these enclaves. It is summer and the thick, sultry air makes the senses tingle. Surrounded by this heathen celebration, I try to remember my arrival in February—the white faces, the armor of clothing—but I cannot. This city surrenders breathlessly to the summer, as though the other seasons no longer count, serving only as an extended run-up to these moments that celebrate a freedom that is usually invisible. The Baroque statues on Schloss Charlottenburg look just as lustful in their graceful petrifaction; it is only when I look closely that I realize some of them have no face beneath their vault of hair, just a smooth oval with no eyes or mouth, like a painting by Malevich or de Chirico. They represent Rhetoric, or Mathematics, but that does not explain why they should have to make do without eyes. It gives them a modern look, in spite of all their eighteenth-century ostentation, which somehow makes them seem false, ominous, their soullessness clashing with their libidinous allure. These faces were not destroyed during some bout of iconoclasm; they were made that way, as elongated, empty spaces, blank coats of arms. I am unable to fathom why, but I realize that the explanation will have to wait until autumn, along with the Egyptian Museum that they are guarding with such vacant expressions.
Some Turkish families have found their own spots in the park. The girls are wearing headscarves and playing with the younger children; the women are sitting in their tents of many clothes, while the men hunker down on their haunches, smoking and talking. De facto, self-imposed apartheid. These families are not lying in the sun; they are sitting. There are two kinds of Elysian Fields here: one with people in various states of undress stretching out and submitting, surrendering to the sun; another with people leaning back or reclining, simply outside in the sunlight. These are two different things. The thoughts of the second group are not as apparent, but I can imagine what they might be. One group is the anachronism of the other, and the trees just stand there, indifferent.
I had said that I did not want to write any more about the border, but that was foolish. With such a challenging cordon, there is always something going on. This time, it is the Christians. I had read about them, but had not really been paying attention. Christians were on their way to Berlin, from every direction, even from the East, for the Evangelischer Kirchentag, a gathering of members of German Protestant churches. More than a hundred thousand churchgoers were attending this congress. There were violet-colored posters for the event all over the city, with a slogan encompassing two great indefinable concepts: God and Time. I am ashamed that I cannot remember exactly how it went, but it was something about our time in His hands or His time in our hands, at any rate something that is true if you believe it and false if you do not. It certainly changed the appearance of the city. Lots of people on the U-Bahn wearing crosses, some made of clay; lots of violet-colored scarves, as though Advent had briefly broken out in the middle of summer; and at the Gedächtniskirche, amidst all that worldly decay, a religious rock band suddenly appeared, with their ecstatic faces lifted up out of this world, a choir that alternated its focus between me (audience, passer-by) and the sky (Heaven). Plenty of bells ringing in that sky too, particularly early in the morning, including at the church around the corner from my house, which I never see anyone going into or coming out of.
I had planned my summer farewell for the Sunday afternoon, and as usual I had allowed about an hour for the formalities at the border, not suspecting that I would wash out of the city like a piece of debris on a gigantic Christian wave until I hit the dyke of the checkpoints. For one crazy moment, I imagined that the East German border guards might open the gates on this occasion, in order to deal with this flash flood. But no. It was business as usual, and so I found myself in the biggest cluster of cars I had seen for years, thick, endless, a viscous mass, moving forward, meter by meter, and splitting into ten slow streams somewhere around the guard posts, each stream with its own distant exit. People got out and started pushing their cars, and I joined them, which was quite an effort with my old Buick. As we pushed, we took a look at one another. The atmosphere was cheerful. I did not know if it was because of their recent days of devotion, but the Christians all seemed to be filled with charity. Young people dressed in violet had installed loudspeakers on their patched-up old cars. There was lots of shouting and laughter, a mobile party of the people that moved more and more slowly as it drew closer to the uniformed guards, who acted as though this was all perfectly normal and asked the same questions they always did. Children? No children. A quick look into the car. No, no children. As on any other day, no one would be able to leave paradise on earth without permission.
Then the two hundred kilometers to the West, the endless procession of church buses and cars all doing their best to drive at exactly a hundred kilometers an hour, with the same congestion at the exit. Hours behind schedule, I could forget my plans to drive back to the Netherlands that day. I decided to stay overnight in Salzgitter and drive on through the Harz Mountains the next morning.
Salzgitter, salt grating. German places can be deceptive—when you actually get up close to a town, you sometimes find that there is more than one of it. The Gästehaus I am looking for is in Salzgitter-Leben-stedt. “Salt Grating-Life Town” looks like America, one of those places you see on a long journey down the freeway. Nothing to remind you of the past. Low-rise buildings, petrol stations, billboards, a pizzeria. Somehow I stumble upon my guesthouse. It is practically deserted and their restaurant is closed on Sundays, but there should be somewhere to eat in the new district behind the hospital. This Germany is different from Berlin. I step through the door of the bar like the stranger in a western. A single question hovers above the seven heads in the bar: “What’s he doing here?” Taking a seat in the far corner, I try to make myself invisible. Slowly, the conversation gets going again. I do not know their names, so I just make some up for them, and within half an hour or so I realize that this is a daily repeat performance of the same old thing. Heinz: casually dressed in an echo of Italian fashion, in a silk-look blouson, white socks and loafers, flashy haircut above a face that is in the fast lane to old age even if the driver has not yet noticed. Hannelore: lonely, corner of the bar, encountered old age in the mirror some time ago. Still beautiful, but fragile. A teacher, an executive secretary, teetering on the brink of forty, golden hair in a bun. Lise: firmly ensconced in her sixties, jug of beer in one hand, fag in the other, turning pleasure into work. Minds her own business. The chorus: drunken Ulrich and silver-haired Antonio. Anton
io, the worldly-wise Italian, has been here for years, so he is allowed to be part of the gang. Ulrich, fat, scruffy, does not stand a chance with Hannelore, so instead seeks vicarious pleasure in the flashy haircut’s love for the golden bun. But Heinz has to go home now; the little woman’s waiting.
Don’t forget the dog, says Ulrich. You’ve still got to take the dog out for a walk.
Bloody dog, replies Heinz.
Yeah, bloody thing, agrees the landlord.
Stay and have another one, says Antonio.
It’s on me, says Ulrich, because when Heinz leaves, boredom sets in.
Just one more, then.
One or two or three . . .
Hannelore goes to the toilet and, when she comes back, she walks into Heinz’s arms. Resistance, but not real resistance. Heinz tries to kiss her, but makes contact with her neck. Ulrich gets another beer in for Heinz. Hannelore struggles out of his clutches and sits down chastely at the corner of the bar again, tidies her bun. She likes Heinz, but there are limits. Feigning reluctance, the landlord slides the glass over the bar. Heinz reaches out to grab it, but misses.
Have I paid yet?
No. This one’s on Ulrich.
You shouldn’t have done that, Ulrich, says Antonio. Heinz has to go home.
Roads to Berlin Page 6