Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  The father’s revenge was like something out of the Old Testament, a warning written in blood on the Prussian soil of a fortress courtyard, a lesson the future king would never forget: one dark November morning, the prince with the poet’s soul, whose heart was drawn to the light of France, was made to witness the beheading of his dearest friend, Hans von Katte.

  The story has been told a thousand times, but that makes it no less true, and it must have had the effect of electroshock treatment: that same eighteen-year-old prince with whom we sympathise on that sad morning would one day, when he became king, treat his second and third brothers in just the same way as his father had treated him. Following a defeat, the second brother, August Wilhelm, was lambasted as a coward in front of the entire general staff, and humiliatingly relieved of his command. He died a year later, dishonored, at Oranienburg. The third brother, Heinrich, in spite of his bravery and his skills as a general, was required to ask permission before every journey, which was usually denied. The result was a lifelong relationship that pulsed with conflicting emotions of attraction and repulsion, and an undertone of hatred, which shimmers through in the bitter letters and hovers around this monument, an echo of forgotten lives. The obelisk is not dedicated to the dead ruler, but to the second brother, the very man he disowned, and to other Prussian war heroes whose merits Heinrich felt the great king had not sufficiently acknowledged. The prince immortalized their names in bronze letters inside twenty-eight medallions.

  Fontane lists all of them, with their heroic deeds: von Hülsen, von Wedell, Leopold Fürst von Anhalt-Dessau, von Seydlitz, von Kleist, up to and including the other son, the fourth one, Ferdinand. But by an irony of history, the writer’s words now have to take the place of the bronze, because, during a very different war, the Korean War, all of the monuments in the D.D.R. were looted. The bronze letters with which Heinrich had intended to honor the neglected heroes of the Seven Years War were made to perpetuate Kim Il-Sung’s despicable regime, something that might have raised a bitter smile from the young author of the Anti-Machiavel.

  Schloss Rheinsberg

  Somewhat bewildered, the two travelers gaze at the empty medallions, at the humanless suits of armor and helmets symbolising the spoils of war, at the wreathed medallion of the maligned general whose German glory is lauded in French: “A l’éternelle mémoire d’Auguste Guillaume, Prince de Prusse, second fils du roi Frédéric Guillaume.”

  Across the silent water lies the castle where the lonely Hohenzollern spent his final years in a routine that ran like clockwork, as though he had himself become an integral part of time: reading, writing bad poetry, painting watercolors, taking dinner, supper, walking, conversing. First it was his brother who had thwarted his French dreams, now it was a revolution that he secretly admired, but which prevented him from going to live in the country where he felt so at home and where, during two extended visits, he had finally been able to celebrate his triumphs, in spite of his height of just one meter fifty, his squint and his pockmarked face. But if he could not go to France, then France would have to come to him, and so the bad poetry was written in French, and French actors were enticed to those distant, eastern provinces: Suin de Boutemars, Maria Louise Thérèse Toussaint (daughter of the exiled writer), a Demoiselle Aurore, who had to make do without a surname, and a Monsieur Blainville, who had to go without a first name.

  I try to imagine those hours in Rheinsberg, the voices, poses, roles, plays, but, of all the arts, acting is perhaps the most transitory. With their half names, these actors were hurled into a limited eternity as footnotes to a Prussian prince, who has himself been forgotten. No one kept a record of which plays were performed in the small theater, which was later destroyed. These second- and third-rate actors must have flitted around provincial eighteenth-century Rheinsberg like rare French birds of paradise, rarae aves; someone ought to write a play about them. Blainville was the prince’s favourite. Rumour has it that he committed suicide when the clique of courtiers conspired to make his lofty patron end their relationship, which may have extended beyond the merely professional, but no one can say for certain, because that too remains hidden in those distant, insinuating whispers that have also remained attached to other, better-preserved names: von Tauentzien, von Kaphengst, guarded, suggestive words that echo even now, valets, pages, standard bearers whose names are lost to the mists of time, members of a household that revolved like a small solar system around this little prince, a prince who, sabre raised, had once decided a battle by leading his much larger men through a river, who had been received by Catherine the Great with such respect, and who, in the final years of his brother’s reign, had conducted vital negotiations related to the division of Poland, always such a bone of contention for Germany and Russia.

  Now another king had come, one who no longer needed his advice, and so the years went by, filled with readings, dinners, obligatory visits and theatrical performances, and the princely sun slowly began to dim. Others would inherit the castle, which would fall into disrepair and, under a regime the eighteenth-century court could never have imagined, become an institute for diabetics, and get buried beneath new layers of history, which would seem so much more exciting, solely by dint of being new. And then everything would change all over again and, whether for nostalgia or profit, the past would be disinterred, the stucco touched up, the portraits, those that were still around, rehung, the Rococo gilding reapplied.

  It is time for the travelers to do what they came here for, but not before tumbling into the trap of a brilliant anachronism: to buy a ticket for the castle of the Prussian princes you have to visit Tucholsky, because the ticket office for the tour is at the Tucholsky Memorial, which is inside the castle. For a moment, they wonder what the sons of the soldier king would have thought of a resident Jewish writer whose words “Soldaten sind Mörder”2 triggered a legal case two centuries after their own time, but they are true members of the postmodern era of historic apathy and so they meekly line up in the deserted stairwell for the tour, together with a pale and awe-struck husband and wife who are dressed for tea with the prince.

  At three o’clock precisely (Prussian virtues), the guide appears, a friendly lady of indeterminate age, who speaks encouragingly to her four guests, as though they are about to climb a mountain. Over time, guides assume the characteristics of owners, and so it seems as though not only the castle, but also its former inhabitants and, in fact, all of that past time, now gone for good, have become her personal property. The princes and their entourage are gently reduced to the status of children, their peculiarities become entertainment, with a knowing wink at the guests (all adults together), who allow themselves to be dragged along, just a little too quickly, past what remains of that bygone splendor: the portrait of an exiled French marquise; the paintings of the princes’ neglected wives, whose lives will never be set down on paper; the charming young men in close-fitting uniforms; the painted marble that still looks cheap even after two centuries; the little study where he wrote his letters to the great philosopher; the many mirrors, which make the travelers’ own modern faces look strangely old-fashioned; the foolish frills and trills of the Rococo ornamentation; the new, gleaming gold around Pesne’s ceiling painting with its radiant, naked bodies whirling around in an allegory of light and dark, night and day; the library (merde, mon Prince, où sont les livres!?), where one of the travelers notes down the names of the great thinkers (Descartes, Tacitus, Lucretius, Buffon, Leibniz, Epicurus, Cicero, Molière) painted on the ceiling, and the awe-struck couple look at him as though he is mad—and all that time they can look out through curtainless windows at the water, the park, the wood and the obelisk in the distance. The vanguards of night are already clinging to the windows. Another hour and a half and everything will be dark, and then the princes will come, the counts, the adjutants and the old generals, the favourites, the actresses and the marquises, to recapture their lost territory. The red silk ropes designed to keep the visitors in their place will be removed,
and the memory will be banished of all those vulgar interlopers who paid money to secure access and pry into their bygone lives and steal the secrets that they hid so well.

  Schloss Rheinsberg

  The first stray notes of music quiver from the Spiegelsaal as the twentieth-century parvenus stumble dozily down the wooden stairs. They linger briefly over Tucholsky’s typewriter, but the contrast is too extreme; Tucholsky belongs to their own vicious, rebellious century and, for now, they are still enveloped in that other, earlier time when everything seemed so much more simple and yet was not.

  1997

  1 As the walker suffers on a sultry day, the burden of life often weighed heavily on your staff, oh pallid one. Your final hours too were a bitter cup, but now you have departed for God’s peace.

  2 Soldiers are murderers

  RETURN TO BERLIN

  It was in May, and it was in Los Angeles. The president of Loyola Marymount University, the Reverend Thomas P. O’Malley of the Society of Jesus, had invited me to the ceremonial unveiling of a section of the Berlin Wall, a gift to the university from the city of Berlin. Various people were going to speak, including the consul general of Germany, Hans-Alard von Rohr. It was a sunny day, the heat from the nearby desert tempered by the ocean. I felt a little strange as I drove there along the endless freeways. Merely the word “freeway,” with all its associations, made the thought of the Wall and the memories it evokes seem grotesque. The two cities are part of my own personal history: I have lived in both Berlin and Los Angeles, and it says something about the mysterious make-up of our brains that two such incompatible concepts can coexist within the limited space of our skulls, although perhaps not without an element of hostility.

  It was a peculiar ceremony. How could it not be? The rector magnificus was a cheerful, round Irishman, who looked as though he enjoyed a drop or two, and who had not, as is customary nowadays, disguised himself as a civilian, and so he still looked as priests did in my youth, which at least meant you immediately knew you were dealing with a man of God. The consul general had all the stature that his name and title implied, and an additional fifty centimeters on top of that; it was not hard to imagine him in a movie. There was also a rather endearing woman from the American Customs Service, who glowed as she told us about all the bureaucratic hurdles she had had to overcome to get this painted piece of concrete into the port and, of course, a Dutch professor from the Department of Political Science, who had come up with the whole scheme. The historic object itself stood there like a little orphan girl without an orphanage, shy and perhaps a little unhappy. It was doing its best, but it no longer represented any real threat. There was a declaration of love on it to someone called Kristin, which was surrounded by the kind of painting you can see in every gallery throughout the first, second and third worlds nowadays: cheerful, childish colors in a design that was not entirely without structure. The students, standing in a large circle around the Wall and wearing clothes in the same color palette as the art, listened attentively to the sacrosanct stream of words flowing over the green lawn: Oppression and Freedom, Conflict and History, platonic ideas dressed in capital letters, their Sunday best, abstractions that, in this context, appeared to have as much connection to that block of concrete as the two sparrows that briefly perched on it, with all the innocence of creatures that are their own eternal repetition and live outside of human history. I felt those young minds around me trying with all their might to think something, but I doubted that they would succeed.

  And what about me? When I closed my eyes, the weather changed. It became winter, because it was winter when I saw that Wall for the first time, the winter of 1963. Now, in order to picture that day again, I had to imagine that the consul and the rector and the students were not there. I had to deny the existence of the green leaves on the tree above us. I had to make it become icy cold, summon up the biting snow of Central Europe and, using only the power of my mind, seamlessly reinsert the lonely concrete between other broken fragments. Only then would I once again be standing before a Wall, only then would I be twenty-nine again, cold again, frozen into place within history as history, and not in this curious, ironic, postmodern offshoot which—and here is the irony—is just as much a part of history, one of Hegel’s blank pages. You could almost die laughing.

  But I was not in the mood for laughter. What had I thought about it back then, at the time? I thought it sounded like the kind of situation that might have existed in Greek antiquity, or indeed any other an-tiquity: a city divided in two by a wall. Wrapped in legends and stories, an almost obsolete proverb, a comedy by Tirso de Molina, found in a corner of the library of Salamanca, an adaptation of Molière, an opera by Salieri, and later, of course, a couple of hours of highbrow video froth, an anecdote with symbols popping up all over like mushrooms, cultural heritage. But the kind of antiquities we usually encounter are no more than a few thousand years old, as old as we ourselves have grown throughout the interlocking series of civilizations to which we still belong. Perhaps that is why, in spite of the nuclear arsenal that is as much a part of the world as the ozone layer, an air of antiquity clings desperately to everything we do, an archaic atmosphere that no journeys to Mars or Jupiter will ever dispel. And that is how it looked: all you had to do was stand in front of that Wall and squeeze your eyes half-shut, and you could see the clumsy bustling of medieval foot soldiers guarding a city wall in the Land of the Others. The same species that is able to cover thousands of kilometers in a day, that can visit planets at home and split atoms like a piece of old rope, can also build a wall, two or three meters high, a wall that can never be crossed. An Egyptian or a Babylonian would not have been able to climb over it either, a person from the Middle Ages would have had to surrender his weapons at the gate, an Athenian might have drowned in the River Spree, while this Dutchman banged his head on the Wall and woke up decades later, on the other side of the earth, to see a priest and a diplomat removing a cloth from a piece of concrete with childish drawings on it, a remnant that must always remain there as a reminder of something that is not easy to sum up, and never will be summed up, if only because history has a head like Janus’, looking in two directions, at the past and, paradoxically, at the future. I believe it was Schlegel who said that historians are prophets who face backwards; that is both true and untrue. Through some inimitable alchemical manoeuvre, yesterday’s future has transformed the threat and force inherent in that chunk of concrete into an innocuous sight for tourists; this monument is pulling the wool over my eyes even as I stand there in front of it. My fear, or my fury, or my abhorrence, has become invalid. I have to summon up images of men and guns, of watchtowers and searchlights, in order to feel any sense of the reality, images that the other bystanders do not have in their inner archives. And yet, I was always an outsider as far as that Wall was concerned, so how would the insiders fare in this place? How could you bear the denial of your past in a monument that was intended to perpetuate it? How would you feel about this minimisation of something that was always so much more than the concrete of which it was made, a symbol, on permanent display, which for you was not just a symbol, but a daily reality that dominated your life, in many cases, until death?

  Berlin, 1997

  Potsdamer Platz, 1997

  Two weeks ago, back in Berlin, I had the opportunity to think about this again. I wanted to pay another visit to the Hotel Esplanade, because I have sentimental memories of the place, but I could not find it. I came up out of the S-Bahn on Potsdamer Platz and found myself in pandemonium. I was standing on what seemed to be a temporary bridge, which shook from the weight of the heavy lorries, and I did not know where to look first. Far below, swarms of laborers were working away on the foundations of the Tower of Babel or maybe even a giant tunnel to Moscow; anything was possible here. I looked at the chaos of yellow and white helmets, leaned over the railing, saw men down there in profundis installing reinforced concrete, and gazed back up at the forest of cranes, their lights waving, transportin
g black slabs of marble through the air and slowly lowering them, all to the accompaniment of the ancient sound of iron on stone. I attempted to follow the labyrinthine movements of the hundreds of people beneath me and wondered who was choreographing this movement, how all of those men knew so precisely what they had to do, how anyone could find the way through all those pipes, cables, tubes. These men were driving all kinds of things into the soil, but it felt more as though a gigantic city was in the process of rising up out of the earth, as though a city wanted to exist here and was creating a path for itself using natural force. I felt a sense of euphoria at all that activity, but also, I will admit, something more like a shiver of disquiet, because of the implications, because of the power that was in evidence here, which seemed such a contrast to Germany’s recent lamentations, as though that had all been some kind of masquerade, a theatrical gimmick to lull the rest of the world to sleep. If what I was witnessing here was not some kind of phantasm, a Potemkin village, then it must simply be exactly what my eyes could see: a vision of future power. Here, with the thunderous force of the pile driver, a page was being turned. No fewer than three pasts were being buried in this place; history was being dug into the soil of this magical landscape of orgiastic labor at the rate of a million images per second: trams, fashions, armies, bunkers, barriers, walls, the People’s Police, all of them disappearing beneath the foundations of the temples to the new powers. Once again, I was standing in this square in the midst of something that meant a lot more than what could actually be seen at that moment. Somewhere in a corner were a few miserable pieces of Wall, like scenery pushed aside after a failed performance. What had it been? An operetta? Wagner in modern dress? A play by Heiner Müller? Or just reality after all, its lingering shadow trying to connect with the other lonely piece that I had seen in California in May?