Before I go to bed, I take a quick look outside, but there is nothing to see. I am living in a cloud, Niflheim, the abode of mist, the camouflage clothing of Germanic mythology or, as Gottfried Benn puts it, “Always and eternally, ribbons of mist and veils of fog and a need for the bearskins of the ‘glorious old Germans,’ as they are called in the radio broadcasts [of the Nazi era]. From a place such as this, Taine would surely have postulated a geophysical explanation for the fact that our nation, deep in its very essence, has a strange relationship to clarity and form, or, one might say, to honesty.” As a counterbalance, I try to read some of Heine’s Harzreise, but I have just reached the point where the poet sits down at the foot of the Brocken with a shepherd, “ein freundlich blonder junger Mensch” for a “Déjeuner dînatoire” consisting of bread and cheese, while the little sheep snatch up the crumbs and the sweet calves leap around them, with their big, happy eyes. Such shepherds no longer exist and, besides, sleep is creeping up on me, but I put my Walkman on for a while and fortunately, or perhaps un-fortunately, find a D.D.R. station with the voice of an older man who is arguing, trying to persuade “ein junger Freund.” There is no doubt about it—these men are writers. You can recognize the type immediately. The man he is addressing is not present; the voice remains alone, an intelligent, lonely sound, disillusioned, mournful. The younger man has apparently written something about Anna Seghers’ betrayal of Walter Janka. He has expressed suspicions and mentioned the names of Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, and the voice wonders whether the young man really knows enough about all those things, if he knows about Seghers’ conversations with Ulbricht, if he knows about the pain and the moral conflicts. So, once again, this is about the rift between belief and conscience, and the man to whom the voice belongs knows what he is talking about because he too was imprisoned under the regime for several years (“so many years of my life were stolen from me”), and condemned by people who had themselves been in prison for many years of their lives, under a different regime, and now this young friend had attacked Seghers, but had gone on to argue, of all things, that the work of “anti-Semites such as Céline and Pound, Gottfried Benn with his fantasies of eugenics, of a warmonger like Ernst Jünger, who still has on his desk the perforated helmet of an English soldier he shot dead in the First World War” should finally be published in the D.D.R.
What is going to happen, I wonder in the fog of my drowsiness, to those who are faithful to the old doctrine, who have suffered so much through their practice of that doctrine and been pilloried as heretics and yet still have not lost their faith? Last week I read a lovely little book by Stefan Hermlin, Abendlicht, in which he writes about his youth and his father, his wealthy Jewish background (what the French refer to as the “haute juiverie,” a term that makes you wonder if they are talking about some extremely rare sort of bird)—liberal, musical and, above all, German, people with horses and paintings (later, in a museum in Oslo, he sees the Munchs and Redons that used to hang on the walls at home).
One day, as a schoolboy, in the summer of 1931, he stops on his way home to watch a couple of unemployed men who have no money to buy a newspaper and so are reading one in a shop window instead. He listens to their conversation and keeps returning to the same spot, until finally one of the workers speaks to him and, gently mocking his appearance (a dutiful schoolboy from a well-to-do family), suggests that he should join the Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands. The man hands him a piece of paper with pale letters that are hard to decipher: it is a badly printed membership form for that organization, the Communist Youth Association, which he duly signs. The sentence that follows might have been spoken by Saint Paul on the road to Damascus: “The street started spinning around me, slowly and steadily.” That one moment defines Hermlin’s life. He flees to Switzerland in the Nazi era, while his father stays behind and dies in Sachsenhausen. After the war, he chooses the D.D.R. and he remains a Communist, like the man whose voice I can hear without knowing who he is. I am in that hopeless moment of near-sleep, when everything is very faraway, but also very large; the voice is inside my head now and it feels as though the split personality of these people, with their high ideals and the Stalinist mould that has eaten away at them so viciously, is attempting to take up residence in my brain, to seep through the two tiny sponges of my Walkman, as they deliver increasing doses of their soporific drug. When it is finally over, I hear the name: Günther Rücker. Later, back in Berlin, I make enquiries: he is a filmmaker in his late sixties, who has made some wonderful things, and who wrote a very fine debut novel in 1984, Herr von Oe. I still have no idea who the young friend was.
Morning, more mist. I hear the sound of birds flying past; they must be operating on automatic pilot. The morning newspaper is singing about two to one, one to one, the state arts subsidy is no more, and at breakfast some gentlemen from the East and the West are busy either tearing apart a sand-mining company or setting one up. The men from the West are dressed in leather, the men from the East are in Nikita Khrushchev suits—something else that will soon disappear. I go down the same mountain path as yesterday, but this time I reach the river and cross the Devil’s Bridge (what better name for a bridge in this place?). Down at that level, the fog has dispersed. I lean out over the swirling water and watch as a white-throated dipper disappears into the rounded form of its nest, which is glued to the rock face, and then reappears and flies off, low over the water, a small propeller without a body. The path rises and falls, the leaves of the chestnut trees are curled or unfurled, depending on how high or low I am. The walk to the next village is twelve kilometers, but I do not meet a soul. Somewhere, someone has carved Goethe into his own granite; there is no avoiding him: Der Geist aus dem wir handeln ist das höchste. Zum 200sten Geburtstag, Kulturbund Thale.2 It is midday by the time I arrive in Treseburg, muddy and soaked through. After lunch, I ask if there is a bus that goes back to Thale, but I am informed that it does not leave until late in the afternoon, and a taxi costs forty-three Marks, which works out to fifteen. When I say I’ll take a taxi, the boss says he will drive me himself. On the way, he gives me a lesson in socialism for company owners: the penalties for making more money, the harassment from state officials, the countless forms you have to fill in just to paint a windowsill, the fines for putting in extra effort, all the things that are supposed to be in the past now, “but, honestly, I’ll have to see it for myself first, because the same people are still in the same jobs.” I keep hearing this refrain in the days that follow, no matter who I speak to: owners or staff, teachers or students, waiters or customers waiting in the long queue for the restaurant. The feeling of resentment is huge. People do not know where they stand, if their company is going to close down, if their child will be able to study, if their qualifications are still valid in the West, what Grandma’s savings are worth, if they will be able to keep their job, if the Party-appointed leader of the government enterprise will still be its owner tomorrow. Politicians from East and West are rowing against this tide of uncertainty, with faces and statements full of confidence; they are talking about three years, five years of hardship at the most, and about the golden future that will follow. But four thousand people a week are still leaving for the other Germany.
May 5, 1990
1 Wer auf deutsch etwas versprechen will, muss sich über das Was und das Wie seines Redens in der Zukunft radikalere Gedanken machen als irgendwer irgendwo sonst.
2 The spirit that guides us is the highest. On the occasion of his 200th birthday, Thale Cultural Association.
XIII
Quedlinburg, Stolberg, the Germany of picture postcards. A lick of paint and then the coach parties can come. Some places were built for tourism centuries ago—timbers in the walls, crests above the doors, money in the tills. Anyone who lives in these places must be perm-anently scarred: they become scenery, bit-part actors, their bartered souls wandering through thousands of anonymous photographs in albums in Tokyo, Saint Louis, Düsseldorf, a population nourished by the
nostalgia of other people. This is how we imagine history; this is how the past should behave. I drive in and back out again, impressed yet resentful. This is other people’s idea of the picturesque, a museum of the living, unbearable.
But Nature could not care less. There is very little industry here, the fruit trees are in blossom, and the landscape rolls and arches into view. It is all pleasant enough, but charming is not my territory, and certainly not when it goes on for too long. I would rather have a chunk of desert or a slightly seedy metropolis; I have never imagined paradise as perfectly raked and tidy. Many of the roads are still cobbled, which at least prevents that gentle, soporific rocking. The landscapes in the other part of the Harz, over the border, have already been tamed for good. All of the locals appear to be pensioners, and before long it will be the same here too: unification as homogenisation. Leaden clouds, the occasional shower, bright spells that make the green look garish: this weather is setting the tone for my destination, the Kyffhäuser, a landscape of mountains, where, according to legend, the restless spirit of Emperor Barbarossa lies in a cave somewhere, waiting for German Unity. It no longer matters that this legend was originally not about him, but about his grandson Frederick II (known as “stupor mundi,” the wonder of the world). Of course, Barbarossa was a better fit for the nationalists who were striving for unity at the beginning of the previous century; he was, after all, the last leader under whom the Reich had apparently still meant something. He had, admittedly, gone to Venice in 1177 to kiss the feet of Pope Alexander III (nations have long memories, and the popes of Rome would pay for that kiss during the Reformation; nothing is ever lost, not only in the material world, but also in history: every atom of insult and humiliation is accounted for and remains in existence somewhere), but still he had strung the republics of Italy in a long line after his name while, at the same time, working from his Swabian and Burgundian territories to rally the German princes to his crown by means of a cunning game of give and take.
In his essay “De toekomst van gisteren,” Yesterday’s Future, Mulisch sees this Hohenstaufen as a link in a chain (Hermann—Barbarossa—Bismarck—Hitler), but that is projecting the nineteenth century onto the twelfth, a process that works the other way round too. If the Staufen emperor had succeeded—like the Capets and Plantagenets, his French and English contemporaries—in establishing his empire as a lasting entity, the history of Germany, and therefore the history of Europe, would have been different. If . . . would . . .—as ever, those weak-minded words do not prove anything, but still . . . After Barbarossa’s death, his legacy foundered, and ever since then a fragmentation bomb has been lying beneath German history; it is enough to make any country neurotic. Germany was incapable of becoming a healthy or organic entity under Bismarck, not only because the ridiculous fragmentation that followed the Thirty Years War had become institutionalized (even with only six million Germans left out of an original twenty million!) but also because, as the Markgrafen, Kurfürsten, dukes and royal offspring had modeled themselves on the Sun King, the bourgeoisie did not get a look-in and the revolution ultimately remained a piece of news from abroad. If you wanted to be blunt, it could be said that the constipation of all those centuries is only finally being processed now. That is why the unity of the present can occur without fanaticism or dynastic fantasies: it is simply the right moment for it. The Hohenstaufen in his cave would understand that better than anyone; he was after all a political realist of the highest order. Carlyle, of course, puts it far more elegantly, in the kind of English that evaporates when you try to transfer it to this century: “No king so furnished out with apparatus and arena, with personal faculty to rule and scene to do it in, has appeared elsewhere.”
I go to visit the great emperor in his grotto. A strange cave system was discovered under this mountain in the second half of the last century, which lent even more luster to the legend. He must be down there somewhere, with his beard, still red, wrapped around the table nine times, among his dreaming horses and his sleeping guards. Some say every hundred years, some say every thousand years, a raven wakes him and tells him if German Unity has finally dawned; according to another version of the legend, a dwarf who lives down there with him is sent up to the surface every hundred years to see if the dread ravens of German division are still flying above the mountain.
The leaflet I receive at the ticket desk (a legend with a ticket desk—it is only to be expected) remains blissfully buried in dialectical times. It waffles on about the ruling class of exploiters who abused the legend for their own aims and about German imperialism and militarism and the upper bourgeoisie and all those other despicable types who are unworthy of legend. I am rather enjoying it, but then there is a sudden panic, because it turns out that the previous group of visitors is already some way inside the cave and if I want to see it today, this is my last chance. The lady at the ticket desk purposefully locks up her till and leads me by the hand into an endless tunnel. Her Kollegin should still be nearby, she is sure we can catch up with her, but the tunnel grows longer and longer, and as I hurry after the cashier in the dim light and see our scampering shadows on the wall, I think that this is the kind of moment when someone should be filming you, as you run along deep beneath the ground, following a woman you do not know, in search of her colleague and the ghost of a thousand-year-old emperor.
Pause, shout, echo, echo, no answer. The tunnel opens out into a cathedral-sized cave; it smells of sulphur and I can see pools of deathly still, reflective water on the left and right. “You just wait here,” my female Virgil says, rather mysteriously. “I’ll go back and phone her.”
And so I wait there, all alone, as her footsteps disappear into the darkness. If Redbeard ever wishes to put in an appearance, now would be the time. Snow White is welcome to join us. Jagged, vicious limestone sculptures stab down at me from the vaulted roof, the stone is stained by strange substances, and even though I can see the bottom of the water, it does not reveal its depth. I softly say something to myself and the cathedral mumbles a response. Then Virgil returns with her lamp and leads me onwards, to a group of damned souls who are listening to the high, clear sound of a young woman chirping and babbling about Barbarossa and his dog and his table, and also about the early bourgeois revolution, because her psalm still smacks of doctrine. I realize that the others can hear that doctrine too and that we all know she cannot hear it herself, but we forgive her because she is young and we are deep under the ground, where the living have no business being.
Only a few kilometers separate this place and the monument that the nationalists (not the innocent liberals of the beginning of the last century, but the hungry Prussians who came later) erected to Frederick I Barbarossa, and of course that monstrosity sits on the highest point, where the castle used to stand, and of course, immediately above the old emperor, brooding on his throne, they installed a statue of Wilhelm I on a horse, flanked by the god of war and a woman with voluptuous bronze breasts, but the avian symbolism around him comes from the Aztec pyramids. I actually wish they would consign the whole pile of nonsense to the legions of toppled statues who are morosely making their way through Eastern Europe in search of a final resting place. Only Barbarossa should be allowed to remain seated, liberated from the monument above him, where you can climb Escheresque steps to reach the dome and look out over the landscape like a raven. He would still sit there alone, brooding, at the mercy of the wind, pondering the alchemical arithmetic that turns four plus two into one and without his Wilhelmine Über-Ich, who had vanished, complete with horse and helmet, into the darkness of the posthumous world.
My pilgrimage is not yet at an end. Erfurt, the Dom with its painted golden unicorn resting its goat legs in the virgin’s lap and with those other, dancing, foolish virgins outside, swaying in stone with their dangerous smiles; the Wartburg, where in 1817 the Burschenschaften, the student fraternities, gathered in nostalgically restored rooms to dream of restoration. I am led in a surge of visitors past bad-tempered attenda
nts, past saccharine bad taste and former greatness, past von Schwind’s murals, whose pallid nostalgia for days gone by cannot outdo one single medieval love casket, past the Cranachs and the Dürers and the manuscripts and the first editions and the tiny room where Luther translated the Bible from Greek and threw his inkpot at the Devil. Every time I tarry, I feel the resentment of the attendants as they rattle their wretched keys. No one will come between the guardians of this world and their highest goal: to shut up shop twenty minutes before closing time. And no Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat can do anything to change that.
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Kyffhäuser Monument
Weimar. I have been here before, last winter. I should identify the city with Goethe, but instead it is brown coal. That is, of course, nonsense, because one will remain while the other will fade, and yet the smell of that coal is unforgettable. Ultimately, I am sure that whenever I smell brown coal anywhere, I will be reminded of Goethe. It is a smell that you encounter wherever you go in the D.D.R. Some days it comes wafting over from East Berlin and into my house in the West, but nowhere did it seem as strong as during those days in Weimar, and I do not know whether it was a result of the climatic conditions of those winter days or something else, but I remember waking up in the middle of the night in my hotel feeling like I was suffocating, as if someone had left the gas on somewhere. I staggered over to the window and opened it, but that just made things worse. Even my saliva tasted of it; I had gas in my mouth. The following day, I saw heaps of coal lying in the streets all over the city, just tipped out, the way a milkman might deposit a bottle of milk at the front door. I had taken up residence at Goethe’s Hotel Elephant, a hotel that now shared only the name, the rest of it consisting of a new development: overpriced, anemic rooms, a restaurant that was a haven for Party bigwigs, a failed attempt at grandeur. The city seemed melancholy, like an impoverished aristocrat who had withdrawn for the season and was eking out her reserves and her memories. Some tourists were wandering around, looking for a café, as I was, but you had to queue, and when you finally got to the front, you discovered that it closed at seven.
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