March 24, 1990
Elections, S-Bahnhof Alexanderplatz, East Berlin, March 1990
Marx, wall relief, East Berlin
XI
In 1810, Madame de Staël lamented the lack of Gothic buildings in Berlin, feeling that the city was not old enough: “. . . on n’y voit rien qui retrace les temps antérieurs.” That cannot be said now; over the past two hundred years, particularly the last fifty, so much history has been made in this place that the very air seems saturated with it. I am not only talking about what has been built, but also about what has disappeared: the power of empty spaces, the force of attraction exerted by vanished squares, ministries, Führerbunker, torture cellars, the no-man’s land around the Wall, the deadly sandbank between the two barriers that was called the Todesstreifen, the death strip—all of those places where people and memories have been sucked away. Berlin is the city of the negative space, the space where something is not, the bombed-out-of-existence, the closed-off, the mysteriously forbidden. The symbol of this is the bullet holes that you see so often, small indentations, places where stone or brick should be, but where they are conspicuous by their absence, just as people are absent from closed metro stations. You pass through those stations and find yourself in a realm of ghosts, a world where everyone has fled or died of the plague. The platforms are empty, eerily illuminated; even from inside the train you can sense the breathtaking silence that fills those spaces. You know that if you were to step off the train, you would instantly be transformed into an ancient man, someone with a newspaper from 1943 in his bag. “Old” buildings, like the Reichstag or the Pergamon Museum, look a little strange, as if they ran aground on a submerged rock back in some distant past, as if they have difficulty remembering their past or their function.
These thoughts come to me at Schloss Bellevue, as I am waiting for Richard von Weizsäcker to introduce his guest, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who is about to give a reading. I have found a place at the back of the room, so as to have a better view. This is not my country, so I recognize hardly anyone. It simply remains a rather large company of abstract ladies and gentlemen who somehow seem suited to the refurbished anonymity of the room. One man is wearing a few absurdly large sculpted rings, and that is as far as the extravagance goes. I see Stefan Heym, perched like a bad-tempered old heron in the front row. Only recently he spoke out about the West German Freibeuterstaat (pirate state) and now he is here, chatting away with the white-haired president. In this week’s Die Zeit, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff writes about von Weizsäcker, about his dignity, his authority. While Hildesheimer reads, I use the opportunity to drape a silver wig over the president’s head and give him the uniform of a privy chamberlain at the court of Sanssouci. His stateliness remains intact; it is the aristocracy of an earlier Germany, something from the age in which Hildesheimer’s story is set, the fake biography of an English aristocrat who goes to visit Goethe in Weimar. I listen to the invented dialogue, which, having read Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, seems entirely authentic, and at the same time I reflect upon the constancy of bodies. The president’s body looks solid, yet fragile; I have difficulty imagining that this is the same body his soul inhabited when, together, they found themselves outside Leningrad in 1943. Not that I know exactly what his soul is, but I think it must be what I see shining in those cool, bright eyes when I am standing beside him later. Constancy: I can find no better word for it. What I mean is the body as the bearer of memory, experience, the way it has lived in one single uninterrupted line, incorporating memories of the war, of his regiment, nineteen officers of which were put to death after the attempt on Hitler’s life, while the majority of soldiers in the regiment were killed in action, until here it stands, in a room that was destroyed back then, a glass of champagne in hand, smiling, talking, listening.
Only later do I realize that this meeting had another purpose and that a number of the faces I vaguely recognized belonged to politicians from the D.D.R., with whom informal discussions had taken place before the start of the reading. I do not see Modrow until I reach the exit; he is almost hidden among a jogging cohort of bodyguards. It feels as though a chill runs through the room, not because of the man, but because of the event. He is still Ministerpräsident, and I see it all as a rapid series of film-like images: the twelve men surrounding him, the awkward trot they seem to be forcing him into, his forlorn expression, as though he also feels that he is being made to run too quickly, the step I have to take to clear the exit, the three black, gleaming, elongated cars that are waiting a short distance away, the slamming of the heavy doors, the lights disappearing down the driveway, the lack of reality, the silence. This man will govern the D.D.R. for one more week, after which the same fate probably awaits him as Suarez in Spain, even though there is no king here to make Modrow a duke. Exit Modrow, but without the Elizabethan glamour of the true royal drama. He is present, and yet already gone, along with his Byzantine curiosity cabinet of politicians from all points of the compass and eight ministers without portfolio. And no, it was not a farce. This bizarre court with its rectangular round table spent five months squaring the circle, all that time wandering through the mud of history and carrying in its arms a real country, which, finally, at the request of the people, it deposited on the steps of the Bundesrepublik, with a piggybank beside it. Von Weizsäcker, Modrow: two parallel German lives that have barely anything to do with each other except for this one remarkable moment when their paths intersect. They have both made the long march through the institutions of their estranged twin states, and now the scriptwriter has written Modrow out of the next episode, but the show goes on.
The cars have disappeared into the distance and behind me in the hallway, I hear a voice asking, “Were they all Stasi?” and another voice answering, “No, there were six of our lot too. They’re working together these days.”
Conversations: words you pull out of the air and, just as you sometimes hear a few notes and immediately know which tune they are from, you can instantly place them within a greater whole, because they are key phrases: Stasi, one-to-one, Poland, this side, that side. An old man in a bar in Ost: “If they think they’re going to shaft us with one-to-two, blood’s going to flow. You mark my words. They’ve been buggering us about for so many years, but it’s not going to happen again, whatever happens with that de Maizière and all that mess. Honecker’s harmless in comparison. We’ll take to the streets, and I’m telling you, it won’t be with candles this time. You can be sure of that.”
In West, in Kantstraße: “I wish they’d just clear off, the bloody Poles. They’re all over the place, and they’re buying everything up, and you know it’s all cheaper for them because they don’t have to pay sales tax. You should see them! So much stuff, videos, radios, televisions, and then they go back home and they sell it there and make a packet, but all they do here is piss in doorways.”
“But it’s good for the shopkeepers.”
“Yes, I’m sure it is, but I can’t do anything, go anywhere. I have to queue for a bloody hour in my own local supermarket! That lot buy enough for an entire village. You should see them lugging it all back.”
In front of the Stasi building, on Normannenstraße. I stand there, gazing at it from across the street. It is quiet, the morning after Easter, and the building basks in the sun, large and evil. A passer-by on the other side of the street laughs and calls out, “They got something of yours in there too?” No, they do not have anything of mine. Because the street is so quiet, I can imagine how it was: betrayal in the form of sound, voices distorted by the telephone, accusations, whispers about the neighbor, the doctor, the pastor, the rattling of the telex, the quiet machine guns of the typewriters, the hum of the computers, the words of an observer echoing in a room. The Stasi had more people in its service than the army and it cast its net even into the most distant villages. Anyone could spy on anyone, every word could be taken in someone else’s mouth and carried until it arrived here, in this building, where it was transformed
into a file, into a report, into a weapon that would remain loaded even after everything had changed, a weapon that, because you had been used or allowed yourself to be used, could now be used against you. What did your father say? What did the teacher say? What did the student say? What did that colleague in your department say? Words, allegations, sentences, true or false, wrapping themselves around people, slowly pulling them into this building, fabricating meanings, determining positions. And where did she go next? How long does she usually stay there? Who does she meet? Hundreds and thousands of people were involved; if you heard all of the voices at the same time, it would sound like a hurricane, but that is the point: betrayal does not sound like that; it sounds like silence, a thousandfold silence, an eerie, chilling murmur of names and dates solidifying to form ever-expanding archives.
Dream exchange rate, East Germany, May 1990
I have seen so many faces this week: Böhme, Schnur, Hirsch, faces that are not guilty, maybe guilty, guilty, of manipulation, revenge, lies, maybe another file, a fine dust that gets into everything, the dust of doubt, betrayal, double betrayal. The photo of Schnur was the worst: the giant figure of Kohl standing on a balcony in Dresden or Leipzig while, down below, the people must be calling “Helmut! Helmut!” but the people cannot be seen in the photograph, and the mass of Kohl’s body is outlined against the sky, an implacable silhouette. A few meters behind him is Schnur, also seen from behind. He is standing some distance away from Kohl, the dutiful servant, and that is precisely what he looks like, caught in the act, hands clasped tightly behind his back. He knows that Kohl already knows and that soon everyone will know—the end, the disgrace. And what about Hirsch, and Böhme? Is it possible to have done something without being aware that you have done it? Might there be a file that says you are someone other than who you think you are? Or might something be found that you never imagined would ever be found? Or is it just doubt that is being sown to damage you, to destroy you? The smug face of the man from Bild saying to Hirsch, yes, but they could still find another file, couldn’t they? These are the conversations of a falsified world, the legacy of forty years of tainted thinking; it is in the language, the behavior, the memory, the files, a past that forces its way into the present, seeking a foundation for the future, a skeleton that has stepped out of the closet, one that can eat, smoke, drink, vote and is sitting beside you at the bar or in the Volkskammer.
I am the foreigner here, but I try to understand. I am at a council with millions of bishops; I listen to the debates, read the transcripts, the monetary theology, the political casuistry, the scholastic reasoning of article 23 versus 146. Whose doctrine is right? Who is the heretic? What punishment should there be for which sin? What is the canonical rate of exchange? Two-to-one means a dissatisfied nation, and a dissatisfied nation could turn nasty. One-to-one means unemployment, and unemployment means dissatisfaction. But some dissatisfaction is not as bad as general dissatisfaction, is it? The people want unity—is that a sin? I remember, a year ago, when it was unthinkable, that people you spoke to in West Berlin said they did not want to be united with “that lot over there.” Some of those same people are now arguing for a confederation, which would mean, for the umpteenth time in history, delaying or frustrating something that cannot be prevented or denied with impunity, a desire that flows like a river through the German past: the longing for a national, political unity of the kind that France and England have known since the Middle Ages, but which did not come about for Germany until 1871, and which was never entirely accepted by France. Even then, internal developments meant that German democracy did not function properly until 1918, and even after 1918 the power actually remained in the hands of a small but powerful minority of army men and industrialists who, after the humiliation of Versailles, were out to get revenge and to regain power. They certainly were not planning to give the people the democracy and unity they wanted, even if those same people had chosen their own leaders and there was a social-democratic majority in parliament.
There is ample material to study about the appalling intellectual confusion of those days, the metaphysical dreams that Spengler, Jünger, Hitler, disguised as secular ideas, the cynical calculation of the von Papens, the Hugenbergs, the Thyssens and their unholy alliance with the National Socialists, which began in 1929 and culminated in 1933 with Hitler coming to power after, or rather because, he had lost two million votes to the Left. In his book The Origins of Modern Germany, Geoffrey Barraclough calls this a conspiracy against the German people, and those who keep repeating that the Germans voted for Hitler (even using this as an argument against democracy) would be well advised to take another look at the figures. In 1924, under a million people voted for the National Socialists; in 1928, it was even fewer; in 1930, after the Wall Street crash and the collapse of German industry, it was 6.4 million; in July 1932, 13.7 million (there were over six million unemployed people at the time); and in November 1932, that figure fell to 11.7 million.
Social-democratic and Communist votes remained relatively constant over this period, a rising line of 10.5 million in 1924 to 13.1 million in 1932. The Catholic Zentrumspartei also remained stable at just over four million. The other middle-class parties fell from 13.2 to 4.2 million but, all told, there were over twenty-two million Germans who did not vote for Hitler at the last free elections in 1932.
We know what came after that, and we also know what came after that for the country we still call the D.D.R., but the problem is that this knowledge can be used by both sides in the debate about unification, for and against. One remarkable fact is that the economic argument is always cited as something sinful or scandalous, as though it were completely independent of all the other considerations. In that sense, the West German desire could be seen exclusively as a longing for a new colony, while the desire of the East Germans is most akin to the final days of a pregnancy, but with the opposite aim: to get inside as quickly as possible, via a reverse Caesarean if necessary, and to connect directly to the sacred supplies of placenta and amniotic fluid in the larger body. This second view has its naturalistic imagery in its favour, but perhaps “natural” is not a category that can be applied when das Volk is involved, because fundamentally the thinkers do not trust the people, or maybe they even fear the people—that is another possibility. So those who favour immediate unification (article 23) are accused of D-Mark nationalism, while members of the cautious minority who are backing article 146 (Dieses Grundgesetz verliert seine Gültigkeit an dem Tage, an dem eine Verfassung in Kraft tritt, die von dem deutschen Volke in freier Entscheidung beschlossen worden ist: “This Constitution loses its validity on the day when a constitution that has been freely decided by the German people enters into force”) are labelled as constitutional patriots. That immediately makes the others non-patriots and, in these wars of words, it sometimes even seems as though all the ghosts of the past would be summoned if the quick route of article 23 were chosen. The word “Auschwitz” regularly puts in an appearance, and even if this is done with the noblest of intentions, it still seems like blasphemy to me, because that past is untouchable and what people intend to say by bringing it up cannot be proved.
Perhaps it would be better, as Grass and Habermas are advocating, to allow all Germans to speak out about the alternative of a single, shared state or a federation of the two existing republics. After all, the D.D.R. is still economically crippled and dependent, with a different social structure and historical burden, and, with a population of sixteen million, it would be in the minority in a joint Bundestag, which would mean too few representatives to protect the citizens of their former republic from all kinds of unpleasantness. But if this path were chosen, at least it would be with eyes wide open. The minority would have a chance to justify its position, and the document providing that justification would always remain on the table: see, we could have done it this way instead. But the people are singing faster than their thinkers; they have already sung their former leaders into ignominious oblivion, and they
have come to like the sound of their own song. And who knows those singers well enough to claim that it is not in fact their song?
It is raining and the sun is shining at the same time; there is a funfair on in hell. I am standing in the right place to watch the fake, brassy sunlight glinting off the blind, reflective windows of the Stasi building. It is odd that it has taken me so long, but I have only just noticed that this building has no doors at the front; the whole wall, covered with words of anger, is tiled to above head height with speckled, dung-colored stone; the four floors with their faceless windows begin above that, as though the architect took a perverse pleasure in expressing the function of this building in his design: the dehumanization, the disaster, the place of the skull. You cannot imagine anyone ever drinking a glass of water in this building, and yet of course they drank water here, just as they stepped off the tram on Jacques Duclosstraße, which then traveled on to Lenin Allee and Ho Chi Minhstraße, just as they walked past the newspaper kiosk with its embroidery designs “für die D.D.R.-Frau,” past the purple display windows of the shop selling household appliances, past Reni’s Getränkeladen, the Tierfreund with the live parakeets in the window, just as they heard the voices from the Hans Zoschke-Stadion, and then entered through a side door somewhere and went to work, normally, just like everyone else. They looked out through the window, knowing that the people walking by could not see them; they took out folders and put them away, made notes in files, listened to recordings, drank coffee; and in the evening they went home and took Wolfgang the dog for a walk and tested their children on their homework. Liebe und Wahrheit sollen siegen über Lüge + Gewalt1 (Václav Havel) is written on the walls, words that were not there back then.
Roads to Berlin Page 17