Two weeks ago, I went to Falkplatz, a square that had recently been vacated by the D.D.R. border troops. Trees were to be planted in this saddest of all neighborhoods; everyone could bring something to plant, and the Prenzlauer Berg parks division and some other organizations were contributing a hundred trees. To coincide with the event, a demonstration of cyclists was riding to the square from Alexanderplatz, and as a “special treat” (Besonderes Bonbon) they would be allowed to cycle along the former Todesstreifen, or death strip, the empty space between the two lengths of Wall, a flat and bare piece of land, which made anyone running across it an easy target for the guards. The sun was shining, everyone was busy hacking into the ground, and even the member of the People’s Police was lugging around saplings with roots packed in hessian sacks. The atmosphere was friendly, someone was playing a flute, the color purple was present in abundance, and some of the cyclists had more hair individually than thirty soldiers combined. A boy in overalls tried for hours to scrape a PDS poster off a watchtower using a spade, not yet old enough to know that everything disappears by itself in time. The residents of the dilapidated buildings around the square sat on their balconies, sullen or apathetic, watching the idiots down there sweating away to turn the barren wasteland into a park. I am not very gifted botanically, but I thought that the many different varieties of trees were being planted awfully close together, yet the earth was fragrant and girls were digging small hollows with their hands for little plants with yellow flowers, and a young man cycled past with a handmade watchtower on the back of his bike. There was singing and laughter against the backdrop of that all-consuming Wall and the abandoned watchtowers and, with the once so deadly sand all around, I felt an intense pleasure, maybe it was simply happiness, as I stood on their side of the Wall and looked over at my world on the other side. I tried to imagine these two districts snuggling up together, but I could not. It was too much of a challenge. First the towers would have to go, and those walls, and that sand, and new things would have to come, things I could not yet see. I knew that something would fill that space, but I did not know how. I am not a town planner; my task is documentation.
Falkplatz, East Berlin, April 1990
And that is why I have now returned to that place, a different now, two weeks later, and why I got off at Schönhauser Allee and walked here down Kopenhagener Straße through a neighborhood that looks so much sadder in the rain, and made my way along the Wall to Falkplatz once again. But there is no one here, no flute and no voices; the P.D.S. poster is still on the tower, challenging the rain, and the young trees are there too, bare, stiff, awkward, limes and spruces and pines and chestnuts, and for a moment I think about how, in fifty or a hundred years’ time, I would like to shelter under the mighty crowns of this forest in waiting, and how I do not want the planters to be disappointed.
April 21, 1990
Falkplatz, East Berlin, April 1990
Death strip, Falkplatz, East Berlin, April 1990
1 Let love and truth triumph over lies and violence.
XII
Political speculative fiction—that is what it would have been if, a year ago, you had produced a novel in which a C.D.U. Ministerpräsident of the D.D.R. with a French name had flown to Moscow to talk to Gorbachev about the possibility of NATO membership for a united Germany. Imagine the Honecker of a year ago, with a copy of today’s newspaper in his hand, flicking on the television to see de Maizière descending the stairs of an aeroplane in Moscow. What kind of reality is it that is real, and yet absurd? I live in a city, I take the bus, I go to the Reichstag. The Brandenburger Tor has been stripped of its horses and chariot and is in scaffolding, a building emasculated. The surrounding square is wide and open; they are demolishing the Wall by night. People walk across the space, East German soldiers in boots, a child, windswept figures with the Charité in the background. I go to the other side, am permitted to walk straight through, and in a wooden hut I exchange West Marks for East Marks: three to one. You can change money illegally as well; wherever you look, there are grubby moneychangers with bundles of banknotes in their hands. You get a lot more money that way, but there is something unpleasant about it; the situation is bad enough as it is. You are ten minutes away from your own house, the weather here is the same, you can hear the same language around you, but suddenly the money in your pockets has miraculously multiplied, because not only is one of yours worth three of theirs, but soup costs 1.50, goulash 3.95, a pils is 1.20, and you can divide all of those amounts by three again and, feeling a little peculiar, head back outside and go to the bookshop, where you can buy a beautiful bilingual edition of poems by René Char for six Ostmark = two Westmark. It is not right, but that is how it is. You only have to pay in D-Marks (Westgeld) at the big hotels, and when you buy petrol you sometimes (but not often) have to show proof that you changed your money officially. There is a huge amount of fiddling, speculation, calculation going on. Everything tastes, smells, reeks of money. It beats and buzzes in the conversations, and drifts off into the realm of fear, insecurity: what is going to happen soon, after the second of July, and what will that mean for individual citizens?
A journey through the D.D.R. I drive down a road I have driven along so often, on the way to the Netherlands, but now I am allowed to leave it, to head off into the countryside. Magdeburg, Halberstadt, a cathedral, another one, monasteries, dead aristocrats lying on top of their tombs, a world that was kept on ice, but which is now being defrosted. That can’t really be the case, can it? So why does it feel that way? A war, bombardments, restoration, and these churches stood here all that time. The English wife of one of the Ottonians lay here for centuries, hidden beneath an enigmatic smile that suggests she can hear something a long way off in the distance, but what? The sculptor designed her epitaph as a rebus, weaving together the letters of her titles and virtues, but still I can decipher her name. I read her, just as I can read the language of the pillars, of the images carved in the wood of the choir stalls, a language that told the same story everywhere, so that these churches somehow gave a semblance of unity to eternally divided Europe. This land was closed off, and it seemed as though these churches no longer existed, but to me it feels like they went elsewhere for all that time and have only just returned, as though they have reclaimed their place amidst these peculiar piles of socialist architecture: migratory birds returning to nestle among the dilapidated cardboard blocks; paradoxical forms, foreign bodies that belong here.
Magdeburg Cathedral, May 1990
I look at the medieval faces, the Holbein figures on the tall, upright tombstones, the sooty, corroded angels, the black cliff faces of the high buildings. Then I follow a group of children whose teacher is giving them a guided tour and I listen to his soft, melodious sentences as he tells stories about that former empire. It feels as though it is not only the stories, which are so old, that are being given back to the children, but also the German language that these stories are told in, a German that such children have not possessed for quite some time. It was simply not available. Another variant of language was in use, one in which other words had taken root and divergent forms of history had concealed themselves, absent without ever truly disappearing. Maybe that is what we are experiencing here: beneath all of the material copulation and gluttony that is taking place on the surface, a submerged, deferred Germany is giving itself back to itself, and no one knows quite what to do with it. But whatever occurs, it will happen in language, and that will not be the language that is used for “ordering socks from Taiwan” (Peter Sloterdijk), nor will it be the language of the Neues Deutschland editorials of two years ago, nor that shared, earlier variant that was valid from ’33 to ’45 and which was used for so many lies that a lot of words will never recover their former strength. Where words are missing, speech falters and fails, and forms of reticence, obfuscation, silence develop. Sprechen, versprechen: to speak, to promise. This German connection between speaking and promising does not exist in Dutch. We certainly know all abo
ut verspreken, but the Dutch word means only to say the wrong thing, to make a slip of the tongue, to put one’s foot in one’s mouth. The Germans are capable of doing that too, of course, but when we Dutch people verspreken, we never promise anything. That sense of “to promise” is what the philosopher Sloterdijk is talking about when he says that being German means having to reflect more carefully than any other nation about what you can promise yourself and the world.1
As I continue to traipse after the schoolchildren (they have now reached St Maurice, and the teacher says, “Have you seen this? The black saint?”), my thoughts stray somewhere I cannot follow: is a language, as well as being everything that is written or said in it, also everything that can be written or said in it? And if that is the case, what does it mean? Are some languages less capable of expressing evil than others? Are some languages better suited to lies? And, if so, how long does it take for a language to recover from its lies? Or, if the language itself is innocent and therefore just a victim, or just another victim, along with the people it has been used for lying to, how can we help her (language has to be feminine) to heal? And who should be the healer?
The children are laughing about something. Their high-pitched peals ring up to the vaulted ceiling and, shocked at the sound, they start shushing themselves, and yet, because they are here and I am here and their laughter is now part of my thoughts, it seems as though they are saying, “You need a healer? We can do that.” At the same time, it occurs to me (as you suddenly find yourself able to express something that you have actually known for a long time) how peculiar it is that we are born into a language, as though, for the arbitrary span of our lives, we are immersed in a river. But the river never remains the same, and you play a part in changing that water yourself. After you, the river is never the same. For me, that river is Ruusbroec, Hadewijch, the words spoken by the judge against Oldenbarnevelt, Vondel, as well as more modern figures like Max Blokzijl, and beneath and behind all those written, articulated words, the endless murmuring of generation after gener-ation, the mass of words and sentences constantly accumulating around us. For the schoolchildren now stroking the devils and animals of the choir stalls, it is the words that Luther translated from the Greek on the Wartburg, but also the Germanic echoes of the Nibelungenlied, the surging waves of Hölderlin and the forgotten words that Handke gave back when he described the landscapes of his youth in Die Wiederholung; it is the cries of the Thirty Years War, but also Himmler’s protocols and Goebbels’ roars, or Gottfried Benn’s response to Klaus Mann and his later remorse, which he captured in words. It is a living, never-ending intermingling of spoken and written words, the conversation that a nation has with itself: language, who may perhaps even be able to purify herself once the pressure of the systems that abuse her is removed, just as lungs can cleanse themselves when you give up smoking, even after many years.
I am on my way to the Harz. Friends in Berlin laughed suspiciously when I listed my destinations: the Hexentanzplatz, the Rosstrappe, the Brocken, the Barbarossahöhle, the Wartburg, the Germany of those lonely pilgrimages in search of the Holy Grail, the dragon’s blood, the witches’ screeches, the legends, the nostalgic memory. Why is it that the witches from Macbeth and the ancient twilight of the Druids and Celtic heroes do not elicit the same ironic shiver as Richard Wagner’s “Wallala weiala weia” or the shrieking females in Goethe’s Faust? The answer can only be that this world died a gentle death with the anemic English Pre-Raphaelite movement, while here it has made a comeback and has merged with symbols of death and destruction. After all, Kniebolo (the childish code name that Jünger came up with for Hitler, as though it might somehow render him harmless, like some sort of Pinocchio) also relished the Nie-wieder-Erwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch; language as the anaesthetic of thought, an escape from the rational world.
I am rewarded, as though the set designer is looking kindly upon me. I have not even reached Thale, the location of the Hexentanzplatz—the witches’ dance floor—when the white mist starts swirling around my car. I see a sign for a Schwebebahn, a suspension railway, and although the idea of taking a floating train seems like a suitably magical approach, I would prefer to walk the last part: a little fear never does any harm. What I think is mist turns out to be clouds; sometimes they are there, sometimes they disappear. The trees are dripping. There is not a soul in sight. But commerce has already had its wicked way with the legend: when I finally reach the top, I find a parking area for coaches, a restaurant with an amusing painting of a witch above the entrance, a Bratwurst stand, all of it empty, deserted. I walk around this tainted legend and then, at the far end of the site, I find it, the actual site of the Walpurgisnacht ball. I climb the slippery rocks and stop at a rusty railing that would have caused a few landing problems for the witches. Some of the genius of this place still remains; the abyss before me is deep, with ragged fir trees growing against bare rock faces, shreds of mist, mystery. Now that all of that commercial nonsense is behind me, it really is quite beautiful.
There is a whistling of wind in the trees, but otherwise the silence is dense, dense enough to make you imagine all kinds of things, but before I can picture anything that might make me shiver, memory intervenes once again: an actor wearing a peculiar green pyjama-like outfit, dancing on a small stage. It was a few months ago and I had read that someone was performing a one-man version of Faust somewhere in East Berlin, both parts, in a tiny theater that was aptly called “Unter dem Dach,” Under the Roof. Both parts of Faust, I thought, how was that even possible? It would take ten hours, and yet I was intrigued. There were twenty of us and, as usual, I must have been the oldest person there. The others were serious young people who wanted to wrap themselves up in Goethe for an evening. The actor was in his forties and was dressed in the aforementioned garment, which was clearly handmade and gave him the freedom of movement he required. As he was playing several roles, he had rather a lot of leaping around to do. And, of course, the winds had to blow, the choruses had to be spoken, the witches had to screech evilly, and so he had cunningly hidden a cassette recorder behind a curtain, but he had to keep going over to switch it on (after all, the machine could hardly come to him) and he concealed this repeated movement with a fascinating variety of dance steps. It was terrible and wonderful, all at the same time. He had mastered his lines and kept up his performance for hours, but sometimes he tried to shout along with himself on the cassette recorder and that did not work: a failed twinning of natural and mechanical voices. By the interval, I had had my fill and wanted to leave the attic, but some fiendish spirit had locked the cloakroom. However, it turned out fine, because the man in the green pyjamas, with all of his histrionic posturing, managed yet again to draw me into his Faustian world of darkness, the search for light, the lewdness and the lust for knowledge; he was his own devil and his own doctor, his own Gretchen and his own witches. All by himself, he had enchanted me and now, here in this gloomy place in the forest, I thought of him again, a man who had surrendered himself to Goethe and wound his lines around me and sent me home, bewitched, after the earnest youngsters and I had called him back three times for one more round of thunderous applause. I walked slowly back past the Knödelbüffet and the Selbstbedienungsgaststätte. Witches, dumplings, Goethe: without irony, it is no longer possible to endure the world. It is not the writer who is postmodern, but the world.
From deep in the valley, I had seen a hotel and that was where I wanted to go now. The clouds turned into ordinary rain and then the road began to climb again, and finally I ended up at the same height, but on the other side of the gorge. In the cloud of mist surrounding the hotel, I could make out two Western cars and two Trabants, so I knew there must still be vacancies. The young man at the reception desk decided that I should pay in West Marks; an accent costs money here. The room had a balcony that must have looked out over the valley, but the door was locked. A shabby orange rag hung at the window, there was no shower or toilet in the room, and any complaints were to be made
to the collective. The reading lamp did not work—call the collective! The communal shower was grimy, and there were splotches of paint all over the rest of the bathroom, not important in themselves, but because of what they signified. Tap, mirror, curtain, hallway all expressed the same sentiment: to hell with you, we are long gone, and we were never really here even when we were present.
Rosstrappe, this is where Brunhilde once fled from Bodo the knight, her horse taking an almighty leap and flying across the gorge; you can still see the mark left by its hoof. I can even go and stand inside it. So I clamber up to it along a muddy path, and on the way I meet another hotel guest, who says that it’s “mystisch” up there. His glasses are gleaming in the rain. I think he might be a little mystical himself, but when I am standing in the spot where Bodo plunged into the abyss, the weight of German Romanticism descends, and the unspoiled landscape down there calls something, languishing or pining, as a white-masked bird I have never seen before comes and sits on the inaccessible rock in front of me, singing its heart out without expecting anything in return, and some inconceivable mountaineer has planted a cross up there atop a dragon’s tooth, the mist wrapping around it like a cloak. I see a path zigzagging down to a river that I can hear but not see. Chinese hills, Japanese trees, the German landscape as an oriental wash drawing. As I descend, the birds grow louder, throwing themselves into the depths and hovering there, writing letters in the air and perching on more distant rocks to continue delivering their orations. I try to understand what they are saying, but one sounds like a Chinese person discussing tasty food, while another seems to be translating Hildegard of Bingen into the language of the birds, so I am never going to work it out. As evening falls, I climb back up again, to a hotel and dining room with ficus and ferns and burghers tucking into boar meat, mountain air, contentment.
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